And finally, there is a children’s book that addresses the latter, in amazing detail!

There are very few good (or even bad) children’s books about evolution, and far fewer about human evolution. And when a children’s book touches on human evolution, it is usually just about Neanderthals.

When We Became Humans: The Story of Our Evolution by Michael Bright with illustrations by Hannah Bailey is a very good book on human evolution. The book is over 60 pages long in large format, and my copy is cloth bound. The production quality of the book is outstanding. (That is generally the case with this publisher.)

I am am impressed with this title, and I strongly recommend it for anyone looking for a book for a kid of a certain age to read, or a younger kid to get read to.

What is that certain age? I’m thinking 10 plus or minus 2, depending on the kid. The publishers say 8-11. So somewhere around there. A 10 year old who absorbs the material in this book will do OK on an intro college human evolution midterm that focuses on the fossil and archaeological record. Or at least, the child will be able to effectively challenge the professor in a grade grubbing situation.

When We Became Humans: The Story of Our Evolution covers primate evolution, key moments in hominin history, bipedalism, early tools, brain evolution, the origin of fire (nice to see my research embodied as fact in an actual children’s book!), Homo erectus and Neanderthals, modern humans, foragers, early agriculture, holicene history, language, art, early burial, and other things such as hobbits.

There are only four places where I would take issue with the facts as presented here. The root hypothesis for the human-chimp split is left out, I would discuss early tools differently, the author embraces the scavenging hypothesis too kindly, and the great global diversity and overall craziness of the agricultural transition is glossed in favor (mostly) of the old Fertile Crescent story, which is not wrong, just limited. Given that this book presnets roughly 165 facts or perspectives, me disagreeing with this small number is rather remarkable.

The art is great, the typefaces well chosen, the layout is artful and foregrounds the aforementioned are and the facts.

You can preorder this book now; it will be out mid July.

Here is the public summary of the work in question:

It has been suggested that Neandertals, as well as modern humans, may have painted caves. Hoffmann et al. used uranium-thorium dating of carbonate crusts to show that cave paintings from three different sites in Spain must be older than 64,000 years. These paintings are the oldest dated cave paintings in the world. Importantly, they predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years, which suggests that they must be of Neandertal origin. The cave art comprises mainly red and black paintings and includes representations of various animals, linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints. Thus, Neandertals possessed a much richer symbolic behavior than previously assumed.

This is from a paper by Hoffmann, Standish, Garcia-Diez, and a gazillion other authors (14 total) called “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art” in the current issue of Science.

The “art” in question is in three caves in Spain, La Pasiega (Cantabria), Maltravieso (Extremadura), and Doña Trinidad (or Ardales; Andalucía).

At La Pasiega, the rock art comprises mainly red and black paintings, including groups of animals, linear signs, claviform signs, dots, and possible anthropomorphs. Maltravieso was episodically used by hominin groups during the past 180 ka; it contains an important set of red hand stencils, which form part of a larger body of art that includes both geometric designs (e.g., dots and triangles) and painted and engraved figures. Ongoing excavations have shown that Ardales was occupied in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Its walls feature an impressive number (>1000) of paintings and engravings in a vast array of forms, including hand stencils and prints; numerous dots, discs, lines, and other geometric shapes; and figurative representations of animals, including horses, deer, and birds.

Uranium-Thorium dating was used to estimate the age of the pigment used to make the art in several cases. The short version is that the stuff painted on the walls is likely to be at least ca 65 thousand years old, which the authors note is 20 thousand years older than the earliest modern humans in Europe.

What is art?

1) Of all the expressive output of humans today, we will happily argue over what is art, and what it means.

2) Humans or their close relatives engaging in expressive behavior tens of thousands of years ago do not escape that fascinating nexus of questions.

See Iain Davidson’s work for a much more detailed discussion of “art” (paintings and engravings) prior to the recent era. For example, this.

What is a human vs. a Neanderthal?

An argument has been made that the two groups are roughly equivalent. The argument has also been made that they are nothing like the same. I would make this argument: The range of variation in important traits across all Homo sapiens sapiens and the range of variation in important traits across all archaic Homo sapiens (to which Neanderthals belong) are each large, and there is some overlap in morphology. But, the behavioral variation does not track morphological variation in the human lineage very well at all until we get to very recent times (when agriculture seems to cause a reduction in brain size and an increase in various disease syndromes). Therefore, to me, it is possible to argue that the morphological non-overlap does not signify a behavioral non-overlap. Or, maybe it does.

Putting this a slightly different way, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have almost always been more certain of what they are talking about with respect to Neanderthals and the Neanderthal-human difference than they’ve had a right to be. Nothing about this finding changes that.

Also, modern humans predate Neanderthals generally. Therefore, it is still possible that modern humans made this art, because they existed then. It is, however, probably difficult to make the argument that they lived in this part of Spain then. But not impossible.

How does typical Neanderthal or Human behavior emerge?

Elephants and apes can make art. Bonobos can communicate somewhat linguistically. It is possible to induce sorta-kinda- human behavior in other animals that are not that closely related to us, if they are predisposed and the proper context for this development is set up.

The following is therefor almost certainly true. Imagine a group of humans that live very far from the nearest Neanderthal, across a great desert you can’t cross, or a sea. Correspondingly, there is a Neanderthal group on the other side of that divide, with no contact with humans. Of course, both came from a common population of ancient times, but assume that these two hypothetical groups were separated from each other in the very earliest days of that phylogenetic (family tree) split.

Gilbert Tostevin of the University of Minnesota has done interesting work that might indicate that when two groups of humansish creatures encounter each other, they may imitate observed products of technology without getting the same chain of physical operations that lead to that outcome. So when you see the physical evidence of making a certain kind of stone tool differ on two different sites where humans and Neanderthals overlapped or encountered each other, you may be seeing one group imitating the other group’s products, but inventing their own process to achieve that product. That is about as cool as paleolithic archaeology gets. I mention this because it is an example of the thought experiment I’m dragging you through.

Now, move the two up to now distant hypothetical groups of humans and neanderthals near each other so that, at the edges of each group, they can interact for a thousand years. Assume most of the interaction is friendly, but they never mate (just to make this simpler). There is zero chance in the world that they groups will not meld culturally (if at the same time they differentiate culturally as well). Neanderthaly things will be found among the nearby humans, and humany things will be found among the Neanderthals. They will, culturally, contaminate each other.

Over time, this contamination will spread across both groups, so in five or ten thousand years (if not much sooner) there may well remain major differences between them, but there will be things that are found pan-Homo, across both groups. Like, they will all adopt hand shaking as a greeting, or kissing as a way of showing affection, or a particular kind of sharp stick. Or the putting of expressions on walls using pigment.

The world in which modern humans lived 65,000 years ago (plus or minus a few thousand years, so we can get them, maybe, to Australia) is huge. It runs from the southern tip of Africa across the African continent in all directions, to somewhere in the Middle east, across southern Asia to southeast Asia, and into Australia. The only reason modern humans did not simply exist all the way across Europe is probably because there were already Neanderthals there. Considering that huge arid regions that exist now across Africa and Asia were probably wetter at that time (plus or minus) it is possible that the total land area across the Old World occupied by modern humans grew to a near-maximum point then, and has not increased in total amount since then, or nearly so, outside of the sparsely occupied tundra and taiga.

Then there were the Neanderthals, in a shrinking zone in Central and Western Europe. They had also been in the Middle East, and sort of in North Africa. (Our best evidence of Neanderthals in North Africa may be an atavistic Neanderthal behavior found among the humans there in ancient remains, interestingly). But the whole cool thing about Spain (where the art in question is found) is that Spain is where the Neanderthals made a sort of last stand, that is where the last ones lived before they ceased to be as a palaeontological entity.

When you look at textbook maps of humans vs Neanderthals, there are almost always two biases, or mistakes. One is to avoid filling in the vast regions where humans must have lived even if evidence is lacking in the form of bony remains (much of Africa, for example). The other is maximizing Neanderthal range to include all of it, at its maximum, in every map, as though it was never smaller than that maximum. Rarely do you see a map that tries to show the vastness of modern human distribution in relation to a realistic distribution on Neanderthals near the end of their existence.

So I did a quick sketch demonstrating the assumption that around the time of the paper in question plus or minus ten thousand years or so, modern humans had traversed Asia, at least the warm parts, are were either in Australia or nearly so, while at the same time, Neanderthals were shrinking from their former distribution which maxed out (east-west wise) at Spain through West Asia.

I call this a “reverse bias” map because it is intended to wind back the usual biases mentioned above using only a small bias in the opposite direction, or possibly no bias at all.

Given this, while it is quite possible that Neanderthals were making this early we’ll-call-it-art, it is probably just as likely that what they were doing was a modern human thing that had been picked up by them, and then traversed the remaining geographical range of their species.

One other thing

I am not entirely convinced that I personally understand the exact physical relationship between the samples taken and the art observed well enough to argue that there are no problems with it. Also, I’ve not evaluated the U-Th dates directly. The material needed to do that is in the supplementary material, and I’m having trouble with my Science subscription, and don’t have time to dig in to this right now. Others will, I’m sure, and eventually this will be refuted, accepted, argued about, confirmed or not or whatever. As per usual.

The Near Consensus on North American Prehistory

The Clovis Culture is a Native American phenomenon that occurred between about 12 and 10 thousand years ago (most likely between 11,500 and 11,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years before present).

The key feature of Clovis is the rather extraordinary “Clovis Point.” There is another, similar looking, point that goes with the Folsom Culture, which is about as old as the Clovis culture, but a bit younger, and there are a couple of other less common named forms. We refer to them all as “fluted points.”

Unlike some other so-called “projectile points” (many of which are knives or spearheads, many perhaps not even mounted in use) fluted points are rarely found in large numbers anywhere, but are represented over a very large region; They are found across the United Sates and Canada, and as far south as Venezuela.

There is almost no evidence suggesting that any humans existed in North America prior to Clovis times, and this has been known for years. Therefore, “Clovis culture” or more broadly, “Paleoindian” culture has long been thought to represent the first humans to come to North America. Since Native Americans physically resemble East Asians (an observation supported and refined by genetic analysis) it has always been assumed that Native Americans came from Asia as Paleoindians, or developed the Paleoindian culture right after arriving in North America. The dates of Clovis sites cluster into such a tight time frame that it makes sense to assume that these folks arrived on an unoccupied continent, spread quickly over a large area, and subsequently differentiated into diverse groups.

The idea of earlier, pre-Clovis, occupation has long been considered by the occasional daring archaeologist, and even the famous African archaeologist, Louis Leakey, suggested that certain finds in the vicinity of modern day San Diego represented much older human occupation. However, North American archaeologists remained firm on the idea that there is no pre-Clovis, and argued strongly and vociferously against the idea. Indeed, any archaeologist who wished to argue for pre-Clovis risked something close to professional censure, others were so sure about Clovis first.

For a very long time it has been at first quietly, and later less quietly, recognized that there are some problems with the Clovis-First hypotheses. First, even though one might expect the early dates for Clovis, if it represented a sudden and rapid colonization of a world with no humans, to be difficult to interpret, it became apparent that the earliest Clovis is in the far East of the continent, with later clovis being farther west. Recent interpretations of the data have suggested that this may not be true, but those interpretations are tenuous. Oddly, pretty solid dating evidence showing east coast Clovis to be earlier was always rejected as unimportant, while a much less clear argument that Clovis out west is early has been quickly and not very critically accepted, presumably because it fits the underlying assumptions of a sudden colonization from Asia.

Fluted points are way more common in the East, east of the Mississippi, in various Mississippi drainage valleys, and along the East Coast. They are relatively sparse in the west, say, on the west side of the Rocky Mountains, and they are very rare in Alaska. So, the distribution of fluted points is exactly the opposite of what one might expect with a simple model of Asians arriving in North America, suddenly becoming Clovis, then spreading from there.

Of the fluted points found in North America, the oldest style, Clovis, is mainly an Eastern phenomenon, with later styles, such as Folsom, are more in the West. If the so-called spatio-temporal boundaries of these styles is correct, and Clovis is older than Folsem, then it is very hard to argue that Clovis is a primary phenomenon that came out of Asia as the first thing people did in North America.

These observations together with the absence of Paleoindian culture in Asia strongly suggests that the actual history of people in North America prior to about 10,000 years ago was a little more complex than the usual textbook version. Indeed, Clovis would make a lot more sense if there was a pre-Clovis culture that did some or much of the initial spreading, followed quickly by the rise of a Clovis Culture among those people, perhaps in the east, which then spread across the continents very quickly. That would have simply been an early example of a phenomenon we see again and again in New World prehistory, where a material phenomenon of some kind, a type of projectile point, or a symbolic image, or something, spreads in what seems like an instant across a vast area.

Beginning mainly in the 1980s, a number of archaeological sites were discovered and presented as pre-Clovis. These are dated using various means. They occur across the US in Pennsylvania, Souoth Carolina, Oregon, Florida, Alaska, and elsewhere. They are also found in South America in Brazil, Chile, and Columbia. Most, perhaps all, of these sites — there are about 16 of them — are very strongly and forcefully argued to be real, and have varying degrees of evidence on them.

Most of the sites date to either just a thousand or two years, or sometime, just centuries, before Clovis and would easily fit into a pre-Clovis model as suggested above. This would go with the idea that somehow, humans arrived in North America, spread out, then popped out Clovis Culture soon after. Some of the sites are much earlier, but as far as I know, all the earliest sites have very questionable artifacts or dating that is not very secure.

I am not certain, but I think most of the North American archaeologists who so forcefully argued against pre-Clovis of any form have either moved off that position, stopped talking, or died off. Now, I believe, most North American archaeologists accept that there is a distinct possibility that there is what I would call a “near-Pre-Clovis.” But, since there are just over one dozen sites across two continents, one must be reserved in assuming this. Such a small number of sites could represent a small number of aberrant if well meaning interpretations of sites that have something wrong with them. I personally have excavated many, many archaeological sites, and I have seen things that can’t be explained. Personally, I think some of the late pre-Clovis sites are good. But, I would not be surprised if an all knowing alien with a time machine landed nearby and proved that I was wrong.

The CM Mastodon Site: Humans in the New World at 130,000 years?

The Cerutti Mastodon site is in San Diego County, California. The site was excavating in the early 1990s by a team from the San Diego Museum of Natural History. If you ever get a chance to visit that museum, do so. It is one of the many museums of Balboa Park, which also includes the famous San Diego Zoo.

The finds at this site include a juvenile Mastodon, Mammut Americanum, as well as dire wolf, horse, ground sloth, camel, and mammoth.

The site is dated using Uranium-thorium dating on the mastodon bone, to 130,000 +/- 9,400 years b.p.

A recent analysis of the site, just published in the journal Nature, claims that the bones show evidence of human modification, and that some stones also found on the site show evidence of having been used to modify the bones.

The modification suggested is the smashing of bone to extract marrow, and possibly, to make some flakes or otherwise modify the bone to make tools.

The authors of the paper suggest that there are, as commonly agreed by North American archaeologists, four criteria that a site must meet to be considered a candidate for early pre-Clovis human evidence:

1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context;

2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating;

3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and

4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context

They argue that all of these are met. From the abstract:

The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion. The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial. Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum. 230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7?±?9.4 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production. Systematic proboscidean bone reduction, evident at the CM site, fits within a broader pattern of Palaeolithic bone percussion technology in Africa, Eurasia, and North America. The CM site is, to our knowledge, the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas.

That the site is in a good geological context is apparently beyond question, as far as I know. The “refitting” referred to is where bits and pieces of one thing that was broken apart can be glued back together, showing that since the breaking event not much has moved around, which helps to argue that the site is not too messed up by geological processes. The dating seems good. Everything seems good.

Yay, an early site showing humans in North America way before we ever thought!

But wait, not so fast …

Why this site could be real, and other comments on the early Americas

Archaeologists have a conceptual problem with discontinuity. They don’t believe in it.

Say you are working in a previously unstudied part of the world (there are none, but pretend). You find a site with some pottery on it, and date the site to 1,000 years ago. In the same area, you find several sites, of various dates, from 1,000 years ago to 4,000 years ago, but they are all sites with chipped stone tools on them and no pottery. But then, you finally find another pottery bearing site. The pottery looks different, and the site was fairly deep down, so when you get your dates back from the lab and they are about 4,000 years old, you are not surprised.

And, now, you know that pottery using people lived here from 4,000 years ago to 1,000 years ago, right?

Wrong. It is possible that people showed up here with pottery, and left, leaving behind non-pottery using people, then came back later. Or, people moved here with pottery, or invented or were introduced to pottery, 4,000 years ago, then stopped using it for some reason, then pottery made a return, somehow, more recently. The problem is, most archaeologists will not accept that once something happens, it can unhappen, even though we actually do know of places in the world where pottery was brought there with the first people, then forgotten about or rejected for some reason, later.

So, here’s the idea. During warm periods, like the interglacial of roughly the age of the CM site, and the present, hominins tend to spread. Even the ones that like warmer regions, maybe not even humans, spread around during warm periods, and spread north. So, naturally, some of them get to the New World somehow, and these are them. They don’t even have to be chipped stone tool using humans. They could be bone breakers. They could be bigfoot! They could be anything.

Now, this may seem like a crazy idea, and it almost certainly is. But, the rejection of occupation as early as 130,000 years ago because we have no evidence of anything half that old requires that the new world can be occupied in only one way: something or someone shows up, then they never leave. This is in direct conflict with the known migrations of large mammals, many of which migrated either to the New World from the Old World, or the other way round, several times over that last 5 or more million years, and most of which do not exist in the place they migrated to now.

Why the Old World makes the CM site highly unlikely

I know an archaeologist who once said this. She said, teaching her class, that the discovery of a house structure at about 5,000 years ago (by the way, it might have been the house structure I discovered, which for a time was the oldest one in North America) tells us that by 5,000 years ago, Native Americans had a concept of building a house, like a wigwam, and the technology to do so. I once read an archaeological monograph that suggested that the presence in some 3,000 year old pottery of impressions of woven material show that by that time Native Americans could weave cloth. One textbook refers to the earliest fire in North America (several thousands of years back) indicating that we now knew that by that time, at least, Native Americans had fire and thus could possibly cook their food.

I’ve read and heard North American archaeologists say things like this over and over again. These statements assume that the first proto-Native American people to come to the new world, say as just-pre-Clovis people, must have arrived naked and technology free!

People in the Old World had chipped stone technology, whereby stones were used to break stones in a very systematic (and not too easy to learn) way to produce, ultimately, tools. Our ancestors had this technology before the genus Homo existed. In fact, it may be the case that our ancestors were stone tool chipping bipedal apes for as long before the rise of the genus Homo as after (this remains to be pinned down). Modern humans have existed on this planet for only a fraction of the time that hominins were making chipped stone tools. Until the abrupt and dramatic near perfect elimination of chipped stone technology in recent centuries, chipped stone tool technology was as much a part of human behavior and culture as walking on two legs was.

We know this because of all that Old World archaeology that has been done. Despite the limited understanding of world prehistory by many North American archaeologists, the truth is that a human (even a non-fully modern human) presence in the New World would have chipped stone tools with it.

If a creature was at the CM site with a culture that lacked chipped stone tools, but that used hammer and anvil stones to break up bone, it was an ape, not a hominin. It was Gigantopithecus, or something. Bigfoot! CM is potentially believable as a site if it occurred in a larger time horizon with definitive human evidence. In other words, a bunch of chomped up elephant bones down the way from clear unambiguous human occupation on a landscape with many sites of that date might be acceptable as a human site, but not this. Not just pounded bones with no other cultural manifestations.

Now, I want to add new rules to the ones listed above.

5) The artifacts have to include evidence of proper chipped stone tool technology, as this is a ubiquitous trait of Homo and proto-Homo

6) Among the chipped stone, there must be both flakes and pieces that are flaked, because many natural processes will produce one or the other (usually flaked pieces) without human engagement.

7) The flakes must exhibit many cases of clear striking platforms, the part where the flake is hit to make it fly off the parent rock, and those striking platforms must be mostly below 90 degrees angle, because that is the experimentally established difference between “natural” flakes (including those made by cars running over rocks and rocks falling off cliffs, etc.) and human made proper flakes.

8) If flaked bone is invoked as an artifact type, the flakes must be numerous and have the same low angle of percussion, and there must as noted above, also be stone flakes.

This is the underlying fact that must be understood by people considering the CM site as human. Humans bust up bones, but busted up bones in the absence of any other evidence of human activity does not constitute unquestionable artifactual nature. Ever.

Just to make sure that I was still up to date on bone breakage taphonomy, the study of how to interpret bone breakage, I asked Professor Martha Tappen of the University of Minnesota, a bone taphonomist, for her opinion about the site. She told me, “I would say that the breaks appear to be consistent with human breakage, but quite possibly other causes, too, such as backhoes and perhaps other scenarios involving trampling. Other evidence is needed to support the idea that people reached the new world at this early time.”

What really happened at CM

I spent a certain amount of time living among the elephants of the African Rain Forest. Well, OK, I wan’t actually “living among them” but I was living there doing archaeology and other things, and they were there too. In fact, I studied elephant movement and trial making, and in so doing, observed a lot of places where elephants tromp around.

Some of the elephants we observed in the Ituri (along with the afore mentioned Professor Tappen) which had been killed over the years by Efe hunters (they are the traditional elephant hunters of the region), died on or near regular elephant trails. Once an elephant is all butchered up or scavenged, I assume the living elephants walk around the remains, though in some areas they have been known to play around with the bones of the dead. But eventually, the bones get incorporated with the undergrowth and the sediment, and get trampled by the elephants. The elephants also trample rocks. I saw locations where the elephants walked a lot, including trails and one location where they had dug a cave to obtain sediment that they would eat, where there was so much elephant trampling of stone that most of the stone looked human modified.

CM site has several animals, including some large ones. Something about this site attracted animals that then died, but at one point were alive. This is a very common phenomenon in paleontology, and is not fully understood. It is very likely that the broken up bones and the seemingly modified stones look the way they do because huge multi-ton animals stepped on them repeatedly.

But what if …

I don’t want to rule out CM out of hand. I don’t want to do this because Archaeology is full of stuff that was ruled out by orthodoxy then later found out to be important or real, but data was lost because of the narrow mindedness of the narrow minded. I believe it is appropriate and necessary to reserve a part of our dogma for possibilities, evidence for things that we are pretty sure are not real but that have just enough credibility, just enough of a question, to allow for a later surprise. I would love to see more large mammal sites of the late Pleistocene excavated carefully to see what they look like. A program of exploration for and investigation of sites during and near the Last Glacial Maximum in the Western US is a good idea, and should yield some very interesting paleontological results. If there was some kind of a hominin running around then — which is very unlikely and indeed almost impossible to imagine — but if there was one, it would eventually be bumped into. Meanwhile, think of all the cool extinct animal stuff we would get to learn no matter what the human prehistoric story turns out to be!

How the dead are treated is the bread and butter for a lot of archaeology. Death is important, and (usually) it is an unambiguous event. Explaining death is often found to be an important, often formalized or ritualized feature of a culture. For example, among the Efe Pygmies and Lese Villagers I worked with for many years, it was generally thought that a death caused by anything other than an obvious act of violence or accident (and thus, the vast majority of deaths) was caused by some sort of intentional bad magic. In other words, all “natural” deaths are homicides. The response to a death in that culture is typically to determine guilt. Ideally, the perpetrator is identified as a hypothetical individual who carried out magic from a very far away and uncertain location, or at least, that is what I observed and that is how people seemed to regard the process. That way everyone can walk away from the death without having to start a feud with a known neighbor.

Abigail Tucker, writing in the Smithsonian, talks about “The Great New England Vampire Panic” in Connecticut, a mainly 19th century phenomenon which involved special treatment of individuals we think may have died of tuberculosis. Tucker talks about the Brown Family, which had suffered a number of deaths.

As Lena was on her deathbed, her brother was, after a brief remission, taking a turn for the worse. Edwin had returned to Exeter from the Colorado resorts “in a dying condition,” according to one account. “If the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be realized, friend Eddie would speedily be restored to perfect health,” another newspaper wrote.

But some neighbors, likely fearful for their own health, weren’t content with prayers. Several approached George Brown, the children’s father, and offered an alternative take on the recent tragedies: Perhaps an unseen diabolical force was preying on his family. It could be that one of the three Brown women wasn’t dead after all, instead secretly feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” as the Providence Journal later summarized. If the offending corpse—the Journal uses the term “vampire” in some stories but the locals seemed not to—was discovered and destroyed, then Edwin would recover. The neighbors asked to exhume the bodies, in order to check for fresh blood in their hearts.

…On the morning of March 17, 1892, a party of men dug up the bodies, as the family doctor and a Journal correspondent looked on. …

After nearly a decade, Lena’s sister and mother were barely more than bones. Lena, though, had been dead only a few months, and it was wintertime. “The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” the correspondent later wrote. “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.” During this impromptu autopsy, the doctor again emphasized that Lena’s lungs “showed diffuse tuberculous germs.”

Undeterred, the villagers burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock, feeding Edwin the ashes. He died less than two months later.

That was in 1892.

As a general rule, a rule that is broken enough to make it interesting, a given people at a given time have a way they normally treat their dead. The ingredients of the typical mortuary practice for a culture might include whether or not the corpse is buried, burned, left out to become a skeleton, “entombed” above ground or in a crypt, put in a coffin or not, buried with a shroud or not, if buried, buried in a particular position, buried in a particular orientation, buried with specific objects, etc. When you see a pattern of mortuary practice in a graveyard, and one or a few of the burials are different, there may be something interesting going on. I had the pleasure of supervising a PhD thesis by my friend and colleague Emily Weglian looking at burial traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Supervising a thesis is a great way to learn numerous esoteric details. One of the issues that came up for Emily was how to interpret burials that were backwards in an oriented cemetery. In parts of Europe it was the practice to bury the dead with the head facing west so when the individual later reanimated and stood, they would be facing Jerusalem, or in the direction one might walk if one was going to walk to Jerusalem (there are a lot of versions of this, I oversimplify here). Individuals who had a life (or a death) that marked them as different, which might mean unholy, criminal, etc., might be posthumously dissed by burring them in the opposite direction, which would not necessarily stop their zombified form from walking (or tunneling underground) to Jerusalem, but it would certainly annoy them when they found out they were going in the wrong direction. But, another possibility was raised for certain corpses buried at 180 degrees; they may have been the pastor of the flock, who would obviously face his own people and presumably know enough to turn around before heading to the Holy Land when the time came for everyone to do that.

So, what about Polish Vampires? I’m going to keep this simple because a) the research is available in an open access journal so you can read it yourself and b) there is an excellent blog post on the research by Katy Meyers (see links below). From the Abstract of the paper:

Apotropaic observances-traditional practices intended to prevent evil-were not uncommon in post-medieval Poland, and included specific treatment of the dead for those considered at risk for becoming vampires. Excavations at the Drawsko 1 cemetery (17th–18th c. AD) have revealed multiple examples (n = 6) of such deviant burials amidst hundreds of normative interments. While historic records describe the many potential reasons why some were more susceptible to vampirism than others, no study has attempted to discern differences in social identity between individuals within standard and deviant burials using biogeochemical analyses of human skeletal remains. The hypothesis that the individuals selected for apotropaic burial rites were non-local immigrants whose geographic origins differed from the local community was tested using radiogenic strontium isotope ratios from archaeological dental enamel. 87Sr/86Sr ratios ( = 0.7112±0.0006, 1?) from the permanent molars of 60 individuals reflect a predominantly local population, with all individuals interred as potential vampires exhibiting local strontium isotope ratios. These data indicate that those targeted for apotropaic practices were not migrants to the region, but instead, represented local individuals whose social identity or manner of death marked them with suspicion in some other way. Cholera epidemics that swept across much of Eastern Europe during the 17th century may provide one alternate explanation as to the reason behind these apotropaic mortuary customs, as the first person to die from an infectious disease outbreak was presumed more likely to return from the dead as a vampire.

Katy’s post summarizes the results, but also critiques the media attention to this project, which as usual includes some abysmal reporting. She summarizes:

1. Death by cholera is just an alternative hypothesis, not necessarily the truth. The authors mention that it is an alternative many times, they never say (unlike popular news) that cholera is definitely the cause.
2. If cholera was the reason, you would be performing the apotropaic rites on the first couple individuals who died from the disease, so this doesn’t mean ALL died from cholera, but perhaps some did.
3. They were not real life vampires, they were only vulnerable to being turned into vampires by evil spirits. REAL VAMPIRES DON’T EXIST. These were people who died under unfortunate conditions and were thought to be vulnerable to evil spirits in the afterlife.

Just so you know, non-normative treatment of the dead is pretty common. If a body is buried at a funny angle or has some other minor variation, it may not mean much. But if a body is nailed to the ground with several spikes like a burial known in Celakovice, you’ve got to figure something is going on. Unusual treatments like this are not found in the thousands or (probably) even the hundreds, but they are found widely. Also, it isn’t all about vampires. Vampire concern is only one problem. It seems that some individuals are being punished after death by receiving a non-normative mortuary treatment (perhaps they committed suicide or carried out some other act viewed as worthy of eternal damnation). That’s a very different situation than treatment arising from fear of reanimation or posthumous shenanigans.

And, as subtly indicated above, these beliefs are not confined to far away ancient cultures. There are people alive today that are the first generation offspring of those who lived in Griswold, Connecticut, the town with the TB vampirism. Griswald itself is and always has been very small, but the surrounding area is the birthplace of John McCain,Eugen O’Neil, Nathan Hale, Watergate Lawyer L. Patrick Gray, and as far as I know most of these individuals and other notables from the region are not vampires.

Here is your followup reading:

Gregoricka LA, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, Polcyn M (2014) Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland. PLoS ONE 9(11): e113564. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0113564

Where do vampires come from? by Katy Meyers.

Interested in some Anthropologically Inspired fiction? Have a look at Sungudogo by Greg Laden.

Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.

As I had mentioned, I had the “hallway extension” room. Let me explain.

To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead down the hallway were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the left side past the bathroom was a kitchen. Then, at the end of the hall, the hallway took a left and went up a step, and continued on for about 15 feet until it met a door that was always locked and that we were told that we should not attempt to open.

That l-shaped part of the hallway — the hallway extension — was fairly wide, and a second door had been fitted at the beginning of it, where the step went up, so it formed a long narrow bedroom with a small twin bed on one side and no other furniture.

That was my room.

The first night I stayed there, I was sitting in my room messing with my luggage or something when the light went out. I assumed the bulb had blown. I looked around for a new bulb but did not find one. So that night, after we went out to dinner and came back, I simply kept the door ajar to let in some light from the hallway while I set up the bed and prepared for my evening retirement.

The next day I forgot about the light having burned out, and nothing interesting happened, but the morning after that, we were staying in the apartment later than usual and while I was sitting there getting stuff ready to go out, the light mysteriously turned on. Right after the light turned on, I heard footsteps on the other side of the door that was not to be opened. I went over and looked through the keyhole and through the keyhole I could vaguely see the form of a 19th century looking chap in a uniform of the style that would have been worn by a Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, kilt and all.

“I’ll have to check this out in more detail” I thought, as an explanation for the strange behavior of my bedroom light started to form in my mind.

Indeed, later that night, after a day in the field doing archaeology, I went to my room intentionally at a certain time, and turned on the light and waited. Soon enough, I heard footsteps on the other side of the door that was not to be opened, and in a moment, the light went off. And away walked the footsteps.

The next day, after getting back from the field a bit early, I went round to the entrance of the McGregor Museum’s public galleries, talked my way past the ticket taker, and hopped up the stairs along one of the old Infirmary’s wings. At the top of the stairs was an open door into a larger room, and in the room were glass cases of manikins of men in various uniforms that dated to the time of The Siege. Near the back of the room was a gatling gun, and behind the gun, a locked door. Next to the door was a light switch.

I walked over to the light switch and turned it off. The lights in the museum room went off. I got on my hand and knees and looked through the old keyhole of the door, and could see nothing. But I reached up to the light switch and flipped it on, and suddenly through the keyhole I could see my room, with my bed, and all my junk on the bed. “Hmm,” I muttered,”Really should keep that neater since I’m kinda on public display here.”

As I stood to leave, I turned to the people who had been looking at the kilted manikin and said “You know, this place is really haunted!”

“I know!” each of them said, eyes wide, in unison with each other.

So, getting back to the original ghost story… Oh, wait, look at the time. It is getting late, not really any time to discuss this now. Hey, come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you how I captured the Ghost of the Old Scary Infirmary…..

… To Be Continued …

Interested in some Anthropologically Inspired fiction? Have a look at Sungudogo by Greg Laden.

Footnotes will be found at the end of the last post in the series.

Years later, I saw the exhibit again, but this time with every single object faked (reasonably well), at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. The Luxor assumed (correctly) that there would be great demand for this exhibit, so they made two, and patrons were duly shuttled into one or the other, alternately, as each group exited the Luxor Experience, which was a very fancy carnival ride in which paying customers relived a fictionalized version of an Indian Jones like search for the ultimate treasure in a lost underground Mayan world heavily influenced by Egyptian mythology. Or something.

Anyway, today is the anniversary of Carter’s discovery of the tomb, and we are very close to the anniversary of our visit to the exhibit (though I don’t recall the exact date, it was probably the weekend before the opening and a few days after Thanksgiving).

In Carter’s words:

“Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway were removed, until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn [Lord Carnarvon’s daughter] and Callender [an assistant] standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things.’ Then widening the hole a little further, so that we both could see, we inserted an electric torch.

…

“My first care was to locate the wooden lintel above the door: then very carefully I chipped away the plaster and picked out the small stones which formed the uppermost layer of the filling. The temptation to stop and peer inside at every moment was irresistible, and when, after about ten minutes’ work, I had made a hole large enough to enable me to do so, I inserted an electric torch. An astonishing sight its light revealed, for there, within a yard of the doorway, stretching as far as one could see and blocking the entrance to the chamber, stood what to all appearances was a solid wall of gold. For the moment there was no clue as to its meaning, so as quickly as I dared I set to work to widen the hole…

…

With the removal of a very few stones the mystery of the golden wall was solved. We were at the entrance of the actual burial-chamber of the king, and that which barred our way was the side of an immense gilt shrine built to cover and protect the sarcophagus. It was visible now from the Antechamber by the light of the standard lamps, and as stone after stone was removed, and its gilded surface came gradually into view, we could, as though by electric current, feel the tingle of excitement which thrilled the spectators behind the barrier…

…

It was, beyond any question, the sepulchral chamber in which we stood, for there, towering above us, was one of the great gilt shrines beneath which kings were laid. So enormous was this structure (17 feet by 11 feet, and 9 feet high, we found afterwards) that it filled within a little the entire area of the chamber, a space of some two feet only separating it from the walls on all four sides, while its roof, with cornice top and torus moulding, reached almost to the ceiling. From top to bottom it was overlaid with gold, and upon its sides there were inlaid panels of brilliant blue faience, in which were represented, repeated over and over, the magic symbols which would ensure its strength and safety. Around the shrine, resting upon the ground, there were a number of funerary emblems, and, at the north end, the seven magic oars the king would need to ferry himself across the waters of the underworld. The walls of the chamber, unlike those of the Antechamber, were decorated with brightly painted scenes and inscriptions, brilliant in their colours, but evidently somewhat hastily executed. ”

Art Deco is a bit out of fashion these days, but it is worth noting that it (and parallel style and design motifs) were heavily influenced by the opening of the tomb. So, not only was there a plethora of mummy movies, signs in front of auto mechanics that said “Toot and come in!” and so on, but there was also an influx of ancient Egyptian elements in modern design. There were other ancient civilization influences as well… perhaps this is best thought of as an overall, generalized “archaeologial” influence.

I quickly note that there are several dates related to the tomb-opening event. Earlier in November (on the 4th), the steps to the tomb was discovered after a very long survey by Carter. Carter had cordoned off a large area to survey, square by square, systematically. The tomb was in one of the last squares to be inspected, which happened to be very near his base camp, which was a simple manifestation of what is now known as “Carter’s Rule” (the most important discoveries in an archaeological expedition happen near or on the last day). Then, the tomb was explored and the outer parts entered later in November then “officially opened” on the 29th of November, with the inner chamber opened the following February. So pick your anniversary.

Since we are on the subject of mummies and Egypt and stuff, I have a few reading recommendations.

One of the best novels ever set in ancient Egypt is The Egyptian: A Novel, by Mika Waltari (translated into English). You will enjoy the book more if I tell you now: It is supposed to be funny. All that stuff that seems “a little funny” is meant to.

I happen to be a big fan of Anne Rice’s “The Mummy or Ramses the Damned” … I fear a lot of people who don’t like Anne Rice will assume they won’t like this, to their own loss. It’s good.

The Egyptologist: A Novel by Arthur Phillips is a recent novel that runs parallel in time to Carter’s exploration and involves Carter and Tut’s tomb as an interesting element, though it is not the focus of the book. I enjoyed this book a great deal in part because at the end, I had no idea WTF had just happened. If you want books firmly grounded in reality with no question, at the end, about what was real and what was delusional, don’t read this one.

Source of quote:

Carter, Howard, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. 1923. Hoving, Thomas, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story (1978).

In order to understand why a “pre-Clovis” site is interesting, one needs to understand the peculiar nature of American archaeology and its conceptions of prehistory.

For the first couple of hundred years of mainly immigrants in North America thinking about archaeology, it was always assumed that Native Americans were either recent arrivals in their native lands, or had been there since the beginning of time, depending on one’s conception of how the world works. Early in the 20th century, however, unambiguously human-made artifacts were found in direct association with the remains of animals that were believed to have gone extinct at the end of the last Ice Age. Over the next several decades, additional such remains were found, some of these early archaeological manifestations were better defined, and radiocarbon dating was invented. So for the period of time not longer than the lifespan of almost all North American archaeologists that every lived, there was justifiable academic resistance to evidence of very early occupation, and I think people just got used to this. Just as zoologists, either because they are very rational or because they are very irrational, automatically resist claims of big-foot like creatures, because all such claims turn out to be hoaxes or misunderstandings, North American archaeologists have come to the point where they, rationally or irrationally, resist claims of early occupation. And the Clovis became the line in the sand that one must not cross without suffering the ire of the establishment.

Or at least, that is how things were in, say, 1980. And since that time there have been enough credible pre-clovis finds that you don’t have to be made of scaly skin and very firmly tenured to make more such claims.

In the meantime, American archaeologists had come to the realization, for better or worse, true or less true, that the prehistory of Native Americans was written, as it were, in a particular kind of stone tool: The projectile point. It became dogma that a Native American ‘culture’ (and/or time-period and/or ‘horizon’ or any other medium to large scale manifestation) was represented by a ‘type’ of projectile point. The Normanskill People of the Hudson Valley left behind Normanskill points, and lived near and interacted with the Brewerton Side Noched people just to their west. And so on. Names of projectile point types were the very same names as the presumed ancient culture groups. Naming things is powerful, and in this case, projectile points are powerful talismans for North American archaeologists.

So, by the mid-20th century, it was understood that the earliest of these projectile point cultures, one of those found in association with extinct Pleistocene mammals, was the Clovis Culture, and that there was nothing before this. Clovis points were found across a large range of North America, and quite frankly, where they were not found they were often assumed to exist, so absence of evidence was evidence of anticipation, rather than a lack of actual Clovis people. Whenever they were dated, they were about the same age (just over 10 thousand years ago). Since nothing could have existed before them, and they were everywhere all at once, it was reasonable to assume that the Clovis people had been the first to enter the New World, and that once they arrived on this empty continent (empty but for the Pleistocene animals soon to become exinct) they simply spread out and became … everwhere.

It is probably true that the single best counter-argument against this is the simple fact that at least a half dozen times subsequently large areas of North America were suddenly ‘occupied’ by a novel projectile point type, representing movements of people over large distances or movement of the idea of that particular projectile point, or some combination thereof, in a non-empty continent. Also, when it comes down to it, Clovis is not acutaly everywhere.

One interesting fact that is almost universally ignored when it comes to Clovis is that the earliest dates are in the east, in particular, in the northeastern US and adjoining regions of Canada. The standard dogma is that the humans that ‘peopled’ the new world came from Asia across the Bering Sea. Clovis, it turns out, is represented in Alaska by somewhat aberrant and late-dated sites, and it is rare. There is hardly any Clovis west of the Rockies. The obvious fact that the “Clovis” manefestation (people, ideas, whatever) started in the East and moved west (but not even all the way west) has larely been ignored because it totally defies the common knowledge that it started in Alaska and moved south and east. Because it must have. Because it is the oldest and people came across the landbridge form Asia. And so on.

Over time, however, more and more pre-clovis sites have been found, and it could be said that the “pre-clovis” consists of one or more archaeological sites that either have no “projectile points” or that have points that do not jive well with the standard terminology. Also, and this is my impression from looking at materials and not so much from careful analysis, the pre-clovis consists of technologies that are generally more “Old World” looking than most New World prehistoric lithic assemblages. But, here we are digressing because this is a review of one pre-clovis point, not all of them.

And for the most part the article we are looking at today speaks for itself. The abstract:

Compelling archaeological evidence of an occupation older than Clovis (~12.8 to 13.1 thousand years ago) in North America is present at only a few sites, and the stone tool assemblages from these sites are small and varied. The Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, contains an assemblage of 15,528 artifacts that define the Buttermilk Creek Complex, which stratigraphically underlies a Clovis assemblage and dates between ~13.2 and 15.5 thousand years ago. The Buttermilk Creek Complex confirms the emerging view that people occupied the Americas before Clovis and provides a large artifact assemblage to explore Clovis origins.

The site is dates with using 49 optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates on quartz sand grains. This method measures the time since the grains were last exposed to light. These days, OSL and similar dating techniques are reasonably well refined and reliable, but confirmation from other dating approaches is still important in establishing age. In this case, stone tool assemblages with characteristics that are reasonably useful in dating sites just on the basis of what the artifacts look like are found above the layer in question. Those materials appear to be stratigraphically “in order,” the oldest dating to just younger than the pre-Clovis material, and don’t appear to be messed up as one might expect if the site was disturbed recently or in antiquity.

And here’s a sample of the artifacts found on the site:

Figure 4 from the original paper showing Buttermilk Creek Complex artifacts: (a) lanceolate point preform, (b) chopper/adze, (c) discoidal flake core, (d) radially broken flake with notch, (e) graver, (f) flake tool with retouch on a radially broken edge, (g and h) flake tools with marginal edge retouch, (i) polished hematite, (j) bifacially retouched flake, (k) radially/bend broken flake, (l) radially broken biface, (m and n) blade midsections, (o to s) bladelets.

We eagerly await reports from further research in the area!

Waters, M., Forman, S., Jennings, T., Nordt, L., Driese, S., Feinberg, J., Keene, J., Halligan, J., Lindquist, A., Pierson, J., Hallmark, C., Collins, M., & Wiederhold, J. (2011). The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas Science, 331 (6024), 1599-1603 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201855

I knew Lew a little, having spent some time with him while I was in graduate school, and having met him at the occassional conference (he was famous for NOT going to conferences very often by the time the 1980s rolled around).

Lew was a dick, a very smart guy, and probably had as much influence on archaeology as any other individual. Those who have taken classes from me know that I’ve got a few stories to tell about him. But not now.

RIP Lew Binford. May your bones be dug up some day by someone with a strong grounding in Middle Range Theory.