by Lesley Drayton,  Local History Archive Curator

The rock chips flew on Friday night as a group of spectators at the Museum were treated to a fascinating discussion and demonstration of flintknapping by Bob Patten, a world-renowned maker of stone tools who specializes in replicating the fluted Folsom point. This Museum After-Hours event was designed to help whet people’s appetites for the grand opening of the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area on Saturday, where Bob also gave a flintknapping demonstration.

I was very excited to meet Bob Patten. He’s a rock star (pun intended) when it comes to Clovis and Folsom archaeology, and I knew I’d like him after reading the words of caution on the back cover of his book Old Tools- New Eyes: A Primal Primer of Flintknapping: “Warning! Material contained in this book has been known to cause some individuals to become obsessive devotees of the art of flintknapping. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.”

Well, proceed we did. Bob laid out a drop cloth to catch all the debitage (the little bits of rock chips and flakes that fly off when knapping a tool) and donned a pair of “prehistoric spats,” which were small leather coverings for his ankles and shoes to keep sharp pieces of flint and chert from settling into his socks.

Flintknapping has a great audible quality. Each blow of the hammer stone brings a sharp shattering sound, and then the retouching with the antlers gives out a series of satisfying crunches. We were hearing a slice of what life sounded like at Folsom campsites 12,000 years ago.

Bob’s flintknapping demonstration illustrated the incredible amount of practice, planning, and skill Folsom people would have needed to craft tools and not just survive, but thrive in this high plains environment. His demonstration also got me thinking about everyday life for Paleoindians at the Lindenmeier site. I could imagine the distant past and the sound of flintknapping blending with the murmur of conversation, mixing together across gusts of Northern Colorado wind.

Bob Patten talks about the intricacies of flintknapping

Bob Patten talks about different types of stone used to make tools

Tools of the flintknapping trade

Hammer stone in hand, Bob prepares to strike a flake off a chert core

The bumper sticker on Bob's car says it all!

by Treloar Bower, Curator of Education

I wrote in a post earlier this week that experimental archaeology is one way we continue to learn about Paleoindians without performing excavations at Lindenmeier.  Many archaeologists experiment with flint knapping, which is an amazing art in which tools are formed from stone by removing large flakes and small chips. Many archaeologists flint knap to gain insight into how Paleoindians manufactured their stone tools. Sometimes the best way to learn is to do it yourself. 

One of the best flintknappers in the world is Bob Patten, who will be at the Fort Collins Museum on Friday, June 5, at 5 pm to demonstrate some of his flintknapping skills. 

Bob is one of only a handful of people who has perfected a technique to recreate a Folsom projectile point, a type of spearhead that has long channels known as flutes removed from each face of the point. The pieces that come off of the flute are called channel flakes. The vast majority of channel flakes recovered from tool making “workshops” of archaeological sites are broken into three pieces. For many archaeologists, if a flintknapper recreates a fluted Folsom point without leaving channel flakes broken in three pieces, well, then, it’s probably not the method that was employed at so many of the workshops excavated so far. The cool thing about Bob’s technique? He makes a three piece channel flake! 

Come check him out and while you’re at it, pick up his books from the Museum Store: Old Tools – New Eyes and Peoples of the Flute.

Ultimately, everything is metaphor, whether we relate a taste to a strawberry or a color to a sound.  I use the word synesthesis broadly to describe the mechanism in memory that makes this possible.  The more I read, the more I am discovering that the structure is relatively the same in most individuals, but the perceptual history of every individual shapes the content of this structure differently.

There is some research that shows identical twins when together take different paths, however separated identical twins take similar paths.  You can find this in the work of Steven Pinker.

What is known is multiple sensory cues are better than individual sensory cues.  A visual cue will have a synergistic effect in memory when accompanied by other sensory cues including what I call the “cognitive sense”.  This being the case, the classroom is a terrible environment for learning and it is generally better to be immersed and learning in an environment with as many real sensory cues as possible right from the start.  This is why immersion is regarded as the best way to learn language although there are some caveats.

Steven Pinker has found that restricting language does limit people in their thinking, however in a generation the children build complete grammars with the language they are given and even coin new words as their experience dictates.  Language is a living, evolving thing within and across generations and cannot be contained in a 1984 fashion.  Nor is it wise to attempt to freeze a language you are studying, because it is a moving target.  Spelling guides, pronunciation keys, dictionaries, thesauruses, quotations, encyclopedias, news was never meant to police your thinking, but to equip you to think more broadly than your current abilities.  You weren’t meant to follow these books, you were meant to read to lead.  The books were meant to follow you.

Memory is infinitely flexible.  We are continually living a life where our mental data is accumulating and where we encounter crisis, climax and resolution or some variation mentally and we make the mental leap or stand on the cliff edge unable to evolve and cornered by our past.

Physics, Chemistry, Chronology, Geology, Psychology, Biology, Mathematics are the foundation stones of our sensory perception and our symbol systems and every one of these symbol systems evolves as we accomplish a phase change in any one due to an accumulation of exceptions until the system on which the symbols are based breaks down.  We call these phase change points “zero” and “infinity”, but zero and infinity are only place holders on a continuum be it linear, geometric, exponential or hyperbolic that has yet to show a limit of any kind.  All they mark are phase changes.

As Goedel demonstrated mathematically no system is complete, therefore no symbol system is complete.  There will always be phenomena that have yet to be represented and cannot be represented by the present system.  This is true for any language as well.  Listen to the phenomenal aural vocabulary of our youth as they imitate the sounds of their environment such as instruments and devices that our previous generation never heard.  Can we capture those “sound effects” with our current alphabet or icons?  I listen to children and youths communicating without uttering a single word in any language.  They communicate in the sounds and visual action of their home entertainment systems!  Anime is creating a world of children who speak a language their parents cannot fathom unless they are watching what their children watch.

And don’t be surprised to find children are no less intelligent than we were.  They don’t need the literacy we had to function in their environment quite effectively.  Measures of literacy and numeracy are irrelevant justifications for perpetuating an obsolete educational system.  The problem isn’t your children, it’s your educators.  Your children will define what communication will be in the future and we have to learn their lingua, not teach them ours.  Educators refusing to make the leap are, as Elliot said, “hollow men”.  Our children’s communication tools and cognitive abilities are in many ways superior to the cognitive tricks we use to think literally and mathematically with alphabets and numbers.  And that is all they are, a bag of tricks hammered into us for over twelve years.  Our literacy and numeracy tools are like stone axes and bone knives compared to what our children are using now.  Children can compose in video, audio, events, graphics, text, gesture and digits faster than we ever could read, rite and rithmatic with our pencils.  What makes our technology so exceptional or even worth preserving?  Are you still using a stone axe?

Welcome to the world of Marshall McLuhan.  Make the leap and learn the new media.  Let your children get on with computing.

The next time your child gets poor results on a literacy or numeracy test, tell the teachers to get their shit together and teach new media or find another job.

Love your children not your herd teachers.

This post is a follow-up- or perhaps a continuation- of the post titled The Four Year Old Archaeologist. In this post I discuss how I have been teaching my son about lithic technology- stone tools- and how to make his own. For more on teaching primitive skills to young children, see the Wilderness Kids pages on the Desert Explorer website. Also see our Primitive Skills pages for explanations and introductions to some of the skills.

My son Nicolai and I make it a point to practice some form of primitive skills at least once a week.   We build countless fires, have recently spent time tracking many coyotes, identify useful plants wherever we go, throw sticks and spears, and now have begun flintknapping together.

I introduced Nicolai to stone tools- ancient ones and those I had fashioned- when he was about two years old.  I showed him points, explained how they were made, and what they were used for.  On our frequent trips to the desert I would pick up any lithics I found- a scraper, part of a point, a core, and lots of debitage (the smaller pieces left behind during the tool making process)- and let him hold them.  We even visited and camped near a quarry sight where I explained the process of curation of raw material and how stone found in one location can be carried to other locations hundreds of miles away.  Finally,  I carefully explained the processes  involved in making each piece of debitage or stone tool he was holding, giving him an overview of the flintknapping process as follows.

The Process of Making a Tool

First you find a cobble- a suitable looking piece of the raw material.  You remove the cortex (the weathered exterior surface) from the cobble by striking it with another cobble called a hammerstone, of a different material.  The best hammerstones are river cobbles; elongated, rounded, with smooth surfaces.  You find an appropriate looking surface on the piece of raw material, called the platform, and strike away.  The idea is to remove long flakes from the core that can be used to make points, scrapers, blades, or numerous other stone tools using more refined techniques and other flintknapping tools such as a deer antler pressure flaker.

Beyond the technical description of how a tool was made, I include in my explanations things like why we found the piece where we did- deposited in the bed of a wash by moving water for example.  I also explain my thoughts on why the people who made the piece chose that location to use it- maybe they chose a wooded hillside that had a good view of a pocket of water below, and waited for deer to come and drink there.  I talk about why the toolmaker may have left the tool- it may have been stuck in a wounded animal that they could not catch that later died in the area.  Or it may have broken during use, striking a rock or the bone of a target, and was then discarded. If it was a flake tool or a scraper, it may have been more of an expedient tool, made, used and discarded in place.

Now when Nicolai finds a flake he tells me about it.  He can explain the flintknapping process, and has a solid grasp of how the various tools were used. Now we are beginning to discuss the process in more depth, differentiating between the different flake types- primary, secondary and tertiary flakes- and investigating the actual reduction process which takes place during tool manufacture.

Making Our Own Stone Tools

At home in our back yard primitive camp Nicolai has watched me work away at large pieces of obsidian, making smaller pieces with a hammerstone.  He has watched closely as I use antler billets and tines to make my blanks into usable tools- blades, scrapers and points.  Now he has begun making his own.

Nicolai arranging his core and getting ready to strike off a flake. He is very serious about the process. Note the safety glasses.

I know that he always pays very close attention when I explain or demonstrate something to him, and when I answer his questions. This is natural for children, and as old as the process of toolmaking itself- the child sitting with the parent or other elder learning the lifeways of his people.  From the very first time Nicolai picked up a core and hammerstone I could tell by his technique that he understood all I told him and had watched me carefully.  From the way he sits, how he looks for the proper platform, how he holds a core in a piece of leather tightly against his leg, to the way he holds and strikes with the hammerstone, he is on his way to becoming at least a functional flintknapper, if not one who shows skill beyond the average level. It may not be long before he is critiquing my stone tools and teaching me new techniques.

For more information on flintknapping and recommended titles on the process, visit the Lithic Technology page on the Desert Explorer website.

I open this post with one of Haeckel’s Artist’s Conceptions as to what Homo erectus was originally thought to have looked like. it will be important to remember this as we move on.

Also, I want to mention is passing, before we begin discussing “Erect Man” in earnest, some other players in this Evolutionary game of human ascension, notably Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis (the recently found Homo “SP” is a human by most accounts). Here below is the cream of the crop concerning the fossils of antecessor:

“Forerunner Man,” Homo antecessor, refers to a series of fossils discovered near Atapuerca, Spain, in 1994 and 1995. Over 80 fragments have been found which supposedly came from 6 individuals. In the digs at Gran Dolina were also found stone tools and animal bones. Here below is another photo of the finds:

The evidence is not very much to go on.  The dates given for Forerunner Man are in the vicinity of about 800,000 years ago. I want to just mention this very controversial species designation here for the sake of completeness. This source summarizes the problems involved with classifying antecessor, and for that matter, we should add, the same applies to heidelbergensis:

“The species Homo antecessor is another very controversial species designation. The species was designated by J.L. Arsuaga et al. to the remains of several individuals found at the Gran Dolina site, Spain. The discovery was significant because the remains have been securely dated at over 780 ,000 years. This makes the material the earliest known European specimens. The find breathed new life into the argument for the validity of H. heidelbergensis, as well as creating a whole new species: H. antecessor.The most complete specimen is Hominid 3, which is also the type specimen for antecessor. This is unusual because Hominid 3 is a 10-year old, and therefore has not fully developed its skeletal characteristics. The specimen was chosen because it highlighted all the features that the researchers were attempting to describe as typic of the species. However, these features are all variable (even within the small sample from Gran Dolina itself!), and none are autapomorphic. Few researchers accept the antecessor taxon, instead considering the material heidelbergensis. H. antecessor may become a chronospecies (as many argue heidelbergensis is itself), but it has a very weak claim as a direct human ancestor or as a distinct taxon from heidelbergensis or erectus” (ibid. my emphasis).

We will then jump straight to Heidelberg’s Man, after a few shots of the antecessor as reconstructed from its paltry remains:

Very human in appearance seems Homo antecessor, at least from the reconstructions. In many ways certain samples of Homo antecessor are more human-like than those of erectus, and these two alleged human ancestors were indeed said to be contemporaries (see our charts posted earlier…).

Shortening Man’s initial appearance on Earth to 750 or 800 thousand years gives us a more reasonable amount of time to deal with, although we should neither begin to trust the dating methods that give us these numbers, nor accept these reconstructions of the slight material as accurate, quite yet.

Homo heidelbergensis, as we said, is another somewhat controversial designation. This “species” was discovered in Germany in 1907 in Mauer. Other finds have been discovered in Greece, Ethiopia, France, England, and Zambia. With the exception of a cranium found in Ethiopia, and actually even footprints in Italy, none of these has been dated older than 300,000 years ago. Footprints but no skulls in Italia. Maybe there was an “Ape Escape” and the African crossed the Mediterranean for vacation. Think also about the possibilities of how one can come to establish the age of such a mark on the ground.

Let’s do a little detail. The cranium found by villagers in Petralona, Greece is impressive, especially reconstructed and polished, and also apparently human. Here it is:

I doubt the age is as old as is claimed for several reasons, notably in that the teeth appear well-preserved and modernly human in size and structure. For comparison, let’s have a view of the oldest-dated specimen of erectus. This is Bodo, found in Ethiopia in 1976:

This skull is another assemblage of fragments, and at first glance holds more features in common with the Australopithecines than erectus, let alone modern humans. It was also found with baboon and other ape specimens, further suggesting that it could be an ape of some kind. Immediately below is the more human-like Kabwe skull next to Bodo. Notice how the Kabwe specimen to the right resembles the Greek skull much more than  Bodo:

The two “intermediate” species Homo heidelbergensis and Homo antecessor are composite species, by all evidence. There is too much variation from one individual to the next to form a distinct species, and like some of our earlier samples, fossils seem to be lumped together arbitrarily. Were we to guess, we could hypothesize that all the members of this species properly belong elsewhere, either as human, or as ape. But no evidence exists that they form a distinct species. The samples are too few, the similarities, not enough.

Homo erectus as the term is used to describe the fossls it does, indicates a creature that may be either human or ape depending on which particular fragments and/or features you are looking at. Conversely, the cave men we have discovered and have named Neanderthal Man (Homo neanderthalis), and the French cave painters known as Cro-Magnon, we will see later on, are completely human remains.

Erect Man, or Upright Man was initially discovered by Eugene Dubois, a diehard Evolutionist who set out on a determined path to find the missing link. His finds in Java, which brought forth the famed “Java Man,” consisted of a partial skull cap and an apparently human femur. Later in the same vicinity other scraps and skulls caps were found. One famous skull cap has now disappeared, and apparently been reclassified nevertheless; the femur, belonging to the cap or not, is seemingly indistinguishable from that of a human being.

These Erect Man creatures supposedly existed around the same general time as did antecessor and heidelbergensis, from as far as over 1 million years ago, to 300,000 years ago. Recent claims in fact are that Java Man was still alive 30,000 years ago, and was “contemporary with  modern humans.”

We have extant remains, it is claimed, from at least 20 individuals. Some of these remains are also adopted across classifications, and so some remains labeled as Erect Man are claimed as evidence for homo ergaster (KNMER-3733, e.g.) and Homo antecessor as well.  Some samples unique to erectus have been found in South Africa, Algeria, and as we have said, Java. Also, not to be outdone, the Leakeys have found themselves a specimen of this type in Tanzania, and I would like to present their evidence to you for “Chellean Man.” I tell you, that Olduvai Gorge has been worth more money than any diamond mine, especially to the Leakeys. Anyway, as  a bonus, following that photograph I will present you the rest of the fossils from outside of China, all of them except the insignificant fragments, and supposedly indicative of Erect Man. First the Leakey Chellean Man “discovery”:

Wow! That speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Immediately below is the ever-important type specimen for Java Man (model):

and here some more “fossils”:

White and grey, above, is man-made. Notice also fissures/cracks and misaligned seams in the rest of the reconstructed cranium.

The proof for Homo erectus from outside of Asia is speculative at best. Considering the problems with the classification of these remains, and so the lack of scientific consensus about them, and given the evidence before us that we have to go on, it appears Evolution has tried to build a skyscraper based on not even just one single solid brick, but rather a bunch of brick pieces and assorted rubble; it’s not just the foundation’s instability that is disconcerting, it is the lack of honesty and self-criticism—and this wasting of scientific energy while we still have no genuine alternative to gasoline and abide with our feeble batteries—that is particularly unsavory.

Do I digress? No matter, here below I present the most famous model, what we are usually shown when given an example of the non-Chinese variant of Erect Man. I should add ahead of time that this “skull” no longer exists, having, I am told, disappeared during World War II. This picture below is a pretty reconstruction:

Found in China, one particularly famous subspecies of Homo erectus is known as Peking Man. Around 14 partial craniums of creatures of this type were unearthed, along with several jaws and numerous teeth, from the area around Peking, or Beijing, during the late 1920s through the late 1930s.  On what is his fame based? Well, here is a collage of the most important fossil evidence of Peking Man, which also has seen some of its evidence disappear:

In general, Creationists and Evolutionists alike debate amongst themselves as to the merits of  Erect Man, as they do several other links in this imaginary chain. They usually treat all the erectus variants as one. Some Creationists, for example, consider this Homo erectus material as evidence of only apes while others consider it proof of human beings; some Evolutionists consider them transitional, others as ancient apes, still others as the first humans. Our opinion here, which is being informed by nothing more than the objective evidence available to us, must be that Homo erectus is too fragmented to tell us much of anything. The mitigating factors such as coexistent remains of juvenile chimps, adult monkeys, adolescent apes, other crushed skulls, eroded skulls, animal bones, and the like, plus the paltry number of extant specimens, all deter us from objectively accepting this as a creature with both human and ape traits. We cannot see it as a hybrid of any kind, what little there is to see. It does not help matters that in many cases even the best scientists and experts in the field can barely make out what these fossils represent.

I wish to explain another reason for this rejection, which is my discontent also with criteria like the brow-ridge line or cranium shape as indicative of primitive structure, and this on two grounds. On the first, I believe that the erosion of a skull over time is particularly vulnerable at the forehead, that is, that region just above the brow line. Because of the way the skull would naturally sit, this forehead-region would be most exposed to the elements and wear and tear. In contrast, the brow is itself much thicker, and less prone to erode over time. This might account for several human skulls appearing not quite so human. In the second case, I reject these skull-related claims because various degrees of this brow ridge, variations in cranium shape and size, and degree and strength of jaw protrusion, among other “distinguishing characteristics,” exist and are observable today. Look at the next person you see, and wonder if his or her skull would look like yours.

In example, here below, some rather contemporary human skulls, first from Bhutan (top), then from the massacres at and around Cambodia, and finally, (bottom) from Thailand:

What i am trying to call attention to here is the variation of skull structure for more-or-less contemporary individuals from the same region. Notice the differences in degree of brow protrusion, not merely from one photo to the next, but especially those part of the same photo. You will see in every case differences in overall size, cranial shape, dentition, forehead slope, eye socket size and position, mandible size, breadth of the nasal bone, and of course supra-orbital differences, a.k.a. differences of brow ridge line. Skulls from remote regions, say the comparison of German and Eskimo skulls, today, would show even greater difference in structure.

Keep this in mind as we go forward, because if we reject the evidence for this Erect Man, we will nevertheless, as we will see, have to make a different evaluation when we get to the Neanderthals, our next subject. Neanderthals, by all evidence (which is much better than for erectus), and despite what scientific consensus still claims, are full-blown humans.

Let us look at the by-now usual Artist’s Conceptions as to what this Erect Man was supposed to have looked like. We here at truthopia support the Arts even if we don’t always agree with their message:

This two-part photo above compares a Malaysian native, a type with strong jaw and brow still existent today, with erectus fossils. Truly, we ask, what would our excavators and archaeologists and Leakey Theorists believe they have found, had others not already found paintings and writings about these skulls below, from Peru and Egypt:

Can we discount, even, human-imposed irregularities?

Next time, the Neanderthals. Maybe then we can finally start feeling more at home in the world.

]]> http://somethingknew.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/do-you-know-bonobos-0220/ Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:42:25 +0000 artofmymind http://somethingknew.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/do-you-know-bonobos-0220/

You should, they are our closest ape relative. They are only  found in the wild in the Democratic Republic of Congo and are not usually in zoos due to their highly sexual behavior (it’s true!).The following video is a tad long, but I promise that it will be worth it

News of Neandertal tools from an Early Upper Palaeolithic site called Beedings, north east of Pulborough in West Sussex, United Kingdom is emerging. So far the BBC News is the only major news source running this, but smaller local news papers such as the West Sussex Gazette have also published news on this subject.

Team leader Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East has restarted excavations at the Beedings site. Beedings was first excavated in 1900, over one hundred years ago. Then, over 2,300 stone tools were uncovered as foundations were being dug for what is now the Beedings Castle (which is apparently for sale). Last year Roger Jacobi of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project published an analysis of these tools in a paper titled, “A Collection of Early Upper Palaeolithic Artefacts from Beedings, near Pulborough, West Sussex.” From what I can tell, the publishing journal, unfortunately, doesn’t have a working system for people to access the article.

Jacobi understood the tools showed strong resemblances to other tools from northern Europe dating to between 35,000 and 42,000 years ago, putting this site right in the Late Paleolithic. This meant either an early colonization date of Britain by anatomically modern humans or an occupation by technologically advanced and late surviving Neandertals.

The diversity and type of the tools from Beedings is more extensive than any other found in the region. They are mostly all long refined blades or cores where these blades were knapped from. Such tools come from technologically advanced cultures, with an understanding of where to find the raw material, and how to finely knap them.

Because of this advanced tool kit, Pope considers the Neandertals of this area were thriving and far from struggling to survive — which has been proposed by many as one of the reasons why Neandertals went bye-bye. Pope comments,

“Unlike earlier, more typical Neandertal tools these were made with long, straight blades – blades which were then turned into a variety of bone and hide processing implements, as well as lethal spear points…

…We also discovered older, more typical Neanderthal tools, deeper in the fissure. Clearly, Neanderthal hunters were drawn to the hill over a long period time…

The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology – not a people on the edge of extinction.”

Barney Sloane, Head of Historic Environment Commissions at English Heritage added, supporting Pope and Jacobi,

“The tools at Beedings could equally be the signature of pioneer populations of modern humans, or traces of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy the region.

This study offers a rare chance to answer some crucial questions about just how technologically advanced Neanderthals were, and how they compare with our own species.”

How does Pope know for sure that these tools are made by Neandertals? We know there were probably eight major incursions into Britain by humans, and the British people of today are essentially new arrivals – products only of the last influx 12,000 years, indicating the other seven migrations failed… In other words those inhabitants went bye-bye too. Stone tools from a quarry at Lynford, near Norwich indicate Neandertals occupied Britain some 60,000 years ago.

So the hype spun by Pope, and the BBC, you know the enthusiasm that the tools from Beddings prove Neandertals were sophisticated and in ‘ complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials,’ isn’t entirely novel. Neandertals had to be in command of the landscape and materials to cross either the North Sea or the English Channel from mainland Europe and enter Britan. Furthermore they had to have been in command of fashioning functional tools to take down large mammals, like mammoths and woolly rhinoceros — two prey species associated with Neandertal sites in the United Kingdom, which they survived off of for thousands of years.

This reminds me of this other hyped up Neandertal finding which I wrote about in February. Then, the press was going crazy over how some isotope analysis (creative methodology but not a very enlightening result) proved Neandertals were mobile. Again, hardly a novel concept… but I’m wondering why everyone still considers Neandertals as clueless cavemen? We’re far past that understanding. We know their tool set has been ‘advanced,’ they migrated all over Eurasia and the Middle East and had bodies and brains much like ours — if not larger. Given the wealth of archaeological and morphological evidence, it is time to stop spinning this pop-culture representation of Neandertals as dumb bipedal apes.

One last thing, you maybe interested in this 2 minute news video where Matthew Pope simply explains hypes up the tools to the BBC News.

I’ve been meaning to blog about the really awesome news that Afarensis first broke on the blogosphere for a couple days now. The news he shared is of an upcoming Journal of Archaeological Science paper authored by R. Lee Lyman, Todd VanPool and Michael O’Brien, all of the University of Missouri Anthropology Department, evaluating the selection and optimization of projectile points.

I’ve tracked down the paper. It is currently more or less an accepted draft and titled, “Variation in North American dart points and arrow points when one, or both, are present.” Yesterday, Afarensis supplemented his news coverage with a little questionnaire he asked one of the authors, Dr. Lyman specifically. Dr. Lyman answered the questions and provided a little bit more information than the initial press release provided.

To give you a quick digest, Lyman, VanPool, and O’Brien analyzed over 1,000 projectile points from three archaeological sites; Verkamp Shelter in Missouri, Gatecliff Shelter in Nevada, and Mummy Cave in Wyoming. The collection of points span at least 3,200 years of time and all include the date the bow and arrow were introduced and used in these regions. Upon the introduction of the bow and arrow about 1,7000 years ago, Lyman et al. were able to see that people experimented to find the optimum point. They did that by synthesizing cladistic analysis, which O’Brien specializes in and concluded that there was

“initial burst[s] of variation in projectile points… and that prehistoric [people] experimentally sought arrow points that worked effectively. Following that initial burst, less-effective projectile models were discarded, causing archaeologists to see a reduction in variation.”

So these people tested many different projectile points. The ones that were functionally more effective were the designs that were selected and further optimized, kinda like punctuated equilibrium. Diversity was lost once the best points were identified. Sounds right in line with other models of cultural selection, such as the 60,000 year old tool kits Sibudu Cave that also showed those people experimented with tool design to accomplish a variety of tasks.

I believe I have a good understanding of the archaeological record and I think it is really safe to say that humans have always experimented with tools, selecting ones that were functionally superior to tools that weren’t. That is optimization, to make the best or most effective use of a tool.

You can see for yourself, some of the first examples of stone tools are classified as Oldowan type. They first appear in the record about 2.5 million years ago, also known as the Lower Paleolithic. They were very simple. About 1.5 million years ago, a new type, Achulean tools appear. They are much more refined and optimized for special tasks compared to Oldowan tools.

Following Achulean stone tools, the Levallois, Aurignacian, and Magdalenian techniques succeeded into the Upper Paleolithic becoming more specialized with time than its predecessor. I’ve posted examples of each typology in chronological order, from Oldowan tools to specialized Solutrean blades, for you to see how tools have been refined over time. Optimization of tools did not end with the Neolitihic revolution. In fact, tools have been constantly revised to fit the new tasks that came about as humans began to adopt sedentary lifestyles over nomadic ones.

So I’m really disappointed, shocked even, to read from Martin, an archaeologist… someone who is supposed to specialize in studying material culture, commenting on this topic and writing that cultural selection is irrational, arbitrary, and does not optimize. He cites face painting as an example about how cultural selection is full of ‘null mutations.’ Based off of his choice of comparisons, I don’t think he understands the difference between functional and symbolic traits in cultural memes. And this is alarming.

A very recent paper, authored by two biologists from Stanford, evaluated the differences in the rates of change between functional and symbolic traits in Oceanic canoe design. I recommended Martin read up on it, if he hasn’t already, because in the paper Ehrlich and Rogers clearly distinguish the difference between symbolic and functional traits… Something that Martin did not with his example. Symbolic ones, as Martin pointed out, are highly variable — but functional traits, ones that affect the survivability of the user are rapidly revised and selected.

Adding to his foolish comparison, Martin also stated that once upon a time pre-scientific humans existed. While trained scientists haven’t been around until relatively recently, people have always been experimenters. The inquisitive nature of humans has been a fundamental aspect of our evolution, both biological and cultural. Furthering this idea, he writes that, ‘he is convinced that both people in the lo-tech past and people of the present are largely ignorant non-optimisers who mainly do things with no adaptive significance.’ Without ’scientific,’ adaptive minded optimizing humans, we would not have had cave art, fire, agriculture and animal domestication… we’d be still eating tubers out of the ground.

I really hope people see beyond Martin’s comparison. Let me remind you that he’s comparing apples to oranges, literally. Symbolic things, like face painting, trinkets on a fishing pole, adornment on a canoe, offer little functionality. Projectile points are functional elements, that directly correlate to a successful hunt and survivability. The are selected in different operant realms. Also, this is not the first time example of Martin’s asininity… in the past he’s spun this mindless mantra and wondered if genetic evidence is relevant in the peopling of the Americas.

LYMAN, R., VANPOOL, T., OBRIEN, M. (2008). Variation in north american dart points and arrow points when one, or both, are present. Journal of Archaeological Science DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2008.05.008

This object appear to be a stone tool found amongst a beach pebble rubble at the site of the Museum of the Aleutians in Margaret Bay in 1998, date and origin unknown. According to Rick Knecht, former Museum of the Aleutians Director, “What you have there(sic) is what we call a flake knife- which is just a flake of stone produced during the manufacture of stone tools, which was then retouched- or sharpened for use as an expedient cutting tool- then tossed afterward. It is probably the most common artifact on Unalaska so I think you can keep it with a clean conscience. It is made of basalt and judging by where you found it- was probably made around 3,000 years ago. Common- but still cool. Odds are very good that other tools made and used by the person who dropped it are contained somewhere in the very building you designed. History has an interesting symmetry to it.”

From the nature.com article:
Spanish palaeontologists have dug up the remains of a 1.2-million-year-old humanlike inhabitant of Western Europe. The fossil find shows that members of our genus, Homo , colonized this region far earlier than many experts had thought.

The primitive hominin — represented by just a fragment of jawbone bearing a handful of wobbly-looking teeth — lived in what is now the Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain, an area already known as a treasure trove of early human remains.

The new fossil, uncovered by an experienced team of palaeoanthropologists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, is by far the oldest human bone ever found in the region. The previous oldest fossils have been perhaps 800,000 years old, leading some anthropologists to believe that primitive humans did not reach Western Europe until around half a million years ago.

Now it seems that the earliest inhabitants of modern-day Spain lived there much longer ago. And like many of today’s Spaniards, it seems they were enthusiastic meat-eaters — Carbonell and his team also uncovered primitive stone tools and animal bones bearing signs of butchery. They report the find in this week’s Nature.

Read the rest of the article here.

Last night I caught some of the new History Channel show, “Journey to 10,000 BC.” I really didn’t know about in advance to tell y’all. Had I known before hand I woulda surely made an announcement. But no worries, if there’s anything I know about channels like Discovery and History, is that they replay these sorts of episodes so much. Actually, if you’re interested in catching it, it will show again on Saturday, March 15 at 8 p.m.

Anyways about the show, I’m thinking History Channel put this out to coincide with the movie 10,000 B.C., which not surprisingly isn’t that accurate of a movie. Not like I expected it to be remotely realistic, but still I kinda hoped that it would be somewhat informative because it is about as much education most people will get about prehistory in their entire life. Anyways, “Journey to 10,000 BC” wasn’t much better. It had horrible cut scenes and exclusively focused on life in North America about 13,000 years ago. A lot of other very important things were happening elsewhere, such as the emergence of Neolithic revolution, i.e. the Natufian culture that shoulda been also included.

Even though I subscribe to the Siberian origin of native Americans, I did appreciate how Dennis Stanford made a cameo and explained his hypothesis that the Clovis archaeology could have originated from sea-faring Soluteran people from Europe. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, some of the first archaeological evidence in the Americas are associated with a type of stone tools found in Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovis typology is significantly different from Siberian archaeology, see Siberian tools around that time were largely modified ivory points with a blade inset. Clovis tools were much different. Clovis tools are highly refined thin, fluted projectile points created using bifacial percussion flaking.

Dennis Stanford publicized his hypothesis in 2004, along with colleague Bruce Bradely, in this paper, “The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World.” Like I indicated earlier, Stanford suggests that 13,000 years ago or so Europeans made boats and crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. With lower sea levels then, this was more feasible than nowadays… and by then people were crossing large bodies of water all over the world, i.e. Polynesia and the Pacific. The problem with Stanford’s hypothesis is that there’s no evidence of boats in the America’s from that time period, nor is there a genetic European signature in Native American populations. Stanford says that the reason why boats haven’t been found is that sea levels have risen since then and obliterated any trace of boats… convenient. Anyways, his idea is a bit out there, and not substantiated much. It is really possible that the reason why Clovis typology is unique is that arose in the Americas independently.

I also appreciated the discussion the show gave to climate change and glaciation events in North America. This sorta information isn’t readily inserted into shows like these, and help viewers visualize large scale environmental changes. But, I really couldn’t get over the cheesy cut scenes where a prehistoric woman with remarkable Vogue-like complexion was taken down by a smilodon, and early people crossing massive waves in unconvincing boats canoes. So it is totally up to you to watch, I neither recommend it nor thoroughly think it is a waste of time. If you don’t know much about the peopling of the Americas, this show maybe a great introduction to some lines of evidence.

Bradley, B., Stanford, D. (2004). The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World. World Archaeology, 36(4), 459-478. DOI: 10.1080/0043824042000303656