Last week, federal agents swooped in on 23 of the 24 people indicted on charges of stealing archaeological artifacts from public land and Indian reservations in the Southwest. But after a 60-year-old physician committed suicide over the weekend, Utah senators are saying the raid was overkill.
The arrests were made following a two-year operation codenamed “Cerberus Action,” after the multi-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the underworld. The case involves 256 Native American artifacts including woven baskets, pots, sandals, and an ax, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation values at $335,685. Defendants were charged with violations of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), which prohibit the excavation and sale of artifacts from
Tag Archives: Archaeology
New theory on Earth’s Magnetic Field: Theory interesting, reporting botched
This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth’s magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is not true: The earth’s magnetic field is caused by ocean currents. The earth’s magnetic field’s long term variations, like reversals in field orientation, are caused by ocean current changes. The Earth’s magnetic field causes oceanic current changes or the currents are the sole cause of secular variation. The cause of the earth’s magnetic field is not, as previously thought, the molten dynamo thingie inside the earth.
Let me explain.
Continue reading New theory on Earth’s Magnetic Field: Theory interesting, reporting botched
Oldest Evidence of Leprosy Found in India
It is funny how people play with history. If we talk about an important “first” that is viewed in a positive light … the origin of beer for instance … the slightest evidence will be used by the people of a given region to claim primacy. Also, since Africa almost always gets the shaft in this regard, all else being equal, an early African occurrence of something good will be assumed as not definitive, but vague evidence of the non-African first occurrence will be taken more seriously. Seriously.
Now, we have an important finding with the opposite effect: Whence did Leprosy first come? For some time, the main contenders have been South Asia and East Africa for (although that is based on a fairly weak argument). Now there is evidence of the earliest Leprosy being form South Asia. That in and of itself is interesting and the paper just out moments ago in PLoS is important. But what I fund funny (not in the “ha ha” funny way exactly) is that despite the recent shoring up of the Asian Origin model for Leprosy, the concususion seems to be that all that is lacking to support the African Origin for this desease … being treated here as though it was a leper … is, well, actual evidence. And in the absence of evidence, we’ll just pick the African Origin.
But never mind that. I’ll jump back on my high horse regarding the Anti-African Bias later. For now, let’s look at the evidence being reported in this new paper.
Leprosy is caused by Mycobacterium leprae and is one of those diseases that paleopathologists really love because it produces traces visible on bone. Leprosy is found in armadillos and can be induced in some rodents and primates, and occurs naturally (or so it is thought) in Cercocebus atys, so there are reasonable animal models (for the bone traces) and it has been around long enough that it is probably safe to say that we more or less know it when we see it. (N.B.: The paper at hand does not recognize the Mangabey connection, which is either a lack on the part of the authors or on my part, so let’s leave this connection as subject to revision.) You know of leprosy because of its significant social stigma and all the cultural trappings that go a long with that unnecessary and ethically questionable approach to this disease. Likely, that social stigma relates to the appearance of leprosy in the written record, where previously it was well documented and accepted by historians back to about 2,600 years ago. The present find seems to allow the interpretation of writing in the Sanskrit Atharva Veda as being about leprosy instead of some other disease.
It had previously been reported that Mycobacterium originated in Africa during the Late Pleistocene and spreading elsewhere after 40,000 b.p. At the same time, it was suggested that the same genetic analysis evinced a Late Holocene origin of the disease in. The present paper reports the observation of leprosy in skeletal material from around 2000 B.C. in Rajasthan, India, at the site of Balathal. Balathal was a large agrarian settlement peripheral to the Harappan (Indus) Civilization.
From a press release for this paper:
The presence of leprosy in India toward the end of this period indicates that M. leprae existed in South Asia at least 4000 years ago. This suggests that there may be some validity to Pinhasi and colleagues hypothesis that the disease spread between Africa and Asia during a period of incipient urbanization, increasing population density, and regular inter-continental trade networks. Dr. Robbins is currently attempting to recover ancient DNA from the skeleton to determine if the strain of M. leprae infecting the individual from Balathal is similar to strains common in Africa, Asia and Europe today. If it is successful, this work could shed additional light on the origin and transmission routes of this disease.
The presence of leprosy at Balathal 4000 years ago also supports translations of the Eber’s papyrus in Egypt and a Sanskrit text in India (the Atharva Veda) that refer to the disease as early as 1550 B.C. The Atharva Veda is a set of Sanskrit hymns devoted to describing health problems, their causes and treatments available in ancient India. Translations of leprosy have been questioned because it is difficult to perform a differential diagnosis on descriptions in such ancient texts particularly since diagnosis was not why the conditions were being described. The evidence from Balathal indicates that it is possible that the authors were describing leprosy as the disease was present in the subcontinent in prehistoric times.
It is possible that there are alternative interpretations of the bone evidence used to infer leprosy, but future DNA study may rule those alternatives out. At the moment, however, it is a reasonable interpretation given the fairly blatant way in which leprosy is manifest in human bones.
Possible Cleopatra Tomb?
A tomb in Egypt, on the sea coast, is being investigated by Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass, who claims it is the final resting place of Cleopatra and her main squeeze, Mark Antony. One of the pieces of evidence used to make this claim is a mask with a cleft chin, just like Richard Burton’s.
It seems that most non-Egyptian archaeologists are claiming that this is incredibly unlikely. Most of the actual relevant evidence that would address the likelihood has not been examined by anyone, so I won’t take this disbelief any more seriously that I’m taking the claim.
Details can be found here in what is actually a pretty funny news report.
Ancient Documents On Line
The World Digital Library has released the first in a new set of ancient documents. I’m very excited that this includes quite a bit of Sumerian material, because that is what I’ve been reading lately.
Four Stone Hearth: The Blog Carnival …
… is here, at Quiche Moraine. Please go and visit this blog carnival, then visit all the sites pointed to by the blog carnival, read them, submit them all to social networking sites, enter them in blogspheric contests, and so on and so forth. Because that’s how we do things in The Blogosphere .
I’ll check back with you later.
Scotland Police Totally Screw The Pooch
Police officers in northern Scotland have been accused of vandalising a Bronze Age site through ignorance after they removed bones and textiles from the 4,000-year-old burial chamber, apparently because they thought they were investigating a crime scene.
The burial chamber, or cist, was discovered intact, in a field near Oykel Bridge in Sutherland. The area is rich in Bronze Age remains, but this find was of huge importance to archaeologists. Unlike the vast chambered cairns of the earlier Neolithic period, burials from the metal-working people of the Bronze Age are modest affairs with artefacts such as pottery most commonly found.
“Who you two? I five … “
And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It’s like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight Zone. Close enough to know there is a similarity, yet different enough to be a bit freaky.
This is from the work of Mark Pagel, of Reading (England) and his team. And it isn’t quite as simple as I’ve characterized it above. As Pagel told me in a recent interview, “… when I say ‘I’ or ‘two’ are very old, I mean that they derive from cognate (homologous) sounds . Every speaker of every Indo European language uses a homologous form of ‘two’ such as ‘dos,’ ‘due,’ ‘dou,’ ‘do,’ etc. It is an amazing thought because there are billions of Indo European speakers and hundreds of thousands of ‘language-years’ of speaking across all the unique branches of the phylogeny of these languages. In all that time ‘two’ has remained cognate. Cognate does not mean identical … it is a bit like my hand being homologous but not identical to that of a gorilla.”
Pagel acknowledges that may linguists are ‘upset’ with the assertion that there are numerous cognates that share a common ancestor …. which is also a cognate … that must be over 10,000 years old. But he indicates that this dislike for the proposed reconstruction is more of a misunderstanding of this concept of homology than anything else.
Two chimps walked into a bar …
… and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped by accident.
That would be the way it would happen if two chimps walked into a bar. Or imagine two chimps, and each finds a nice juicy bit of fruit out in the forest. And instead of eating the fruit, because they are not hungry, they carry it around for a while (this would never happen, but pretend) and then accidentally run into each other. What would happen? Same thing. Event though neither chimp actually needed the fruit and each chimp had its own fruit, the dominant chimp (between the two) would end up with both pieces of fruit.
This is why chimps could not possibly cooperate in any effort to scour the forest for various edible items, bring them all back to a central place, share and then cooperatively process the food items, and ultimately produce a meal that is eaten by all of the chimps on an as needed basis. Humans do that but chimps can’t. Explain this and you explain one of the major features of human evolution…
Continue reading Two chimps walked into a bar …
Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
Continue reading Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
How to build Stonehenge
First I thought: “… noooo..” Then, I thought: “hmmmmmm.”
For the love of ancient chocolate
A fresh look at ornate 1000-year-old vases from New Mexico’s canyons has unearthed a surprise: They were used as mugs to drink chocolate. The findings are the first record of the food in North America, long before its introduction in colonial times. They also reveal that chocolate was an expensive delicacy enjoyed by few during elaborate rituals.
Unhealthy Diet in Ancient Near East
This is an old story being resurrected wiht new data:
<div style="text-align: left;"> <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news151078460.html">Biblical diet 'unhealthy'</a>
A new study into the diet of ancient Israel has revealed that far from being 'the land of milk and honey', its inhabitants suffered from the lack of a balanced diet.
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The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas
One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason why it is interesting. In addition, the Younger Dryas was a pretty big deal … a climate change or something like a climate change that caused massive changes all around the earth, and fairly recently. But the cause of the Younger Dryas is at present unknown, although a series of explanations have been advanced, each as convincing as the next depending on one’s point of view. The Younger Dryas itself is interesting, and the story of how scientists have studied it and the changing explanations emerging from that research is just as interesting.
The latest science is beginning to suggest that it is all even more interesting and exciting (and scary) than previously thought.
New Primate Research
I have had a lot of students of whom I’m very proud because of their accomplishments both in research and generally. One of these students is Mark Foster, who is one of a very small number of undergraduates to engage in significant research at some of the key East African chimpanzee research sites. Unfortunately for me, I can’t take a lot of credit for Mark’s excellent research, because I played a much smaller role in working with him than did others, but I am still very happy with his successes.
I’ve got a peer reviewed paper by Mark that I’ll be reviewing soon. In the mean time, have a look at this piece from Nature News
Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Jane Goodall Institute Center for Primate Studies have now collated ten years of behavioural data on three male chimpanzee in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Chimpanzees within the park have been routinely weighed by park staff, allowing Mark Foster and his team from the institute to work out which tactics chimpanzees of dramatically different sizes used both before and after they became alpha males….
The findings … are the first to suggest that physically smaller males make up for their reduced physical characteristics by using grooming to make allies who will aid them when their time comes to try and achieve alpha-male status, says Foster….
“It’s kind of like when I was a teenager and the football team’s quarterback lost the school’s popularity poll to a wimpy, unassuming fellow who was also quick-witted. The latter fellow was able to make friends through his sense of humour and charisma, and in turn achieved a kind of alpha status over the brutish quarterback,” he says.