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.

There are two chronologies proposed for the early occupation of Europe, for the time before these branches are clearly visible. The “long chronology” has human relatives in Europe perhaps as far back as two million years, and the “short chronology” has these human relatives at around a half million years ago or later.

The truth is probably this:

There could be occasional and not permanent (in an archaeological sense) of Mediterranean region occupation, off and on, perhaps a million years ago but north of the great mountain range known locally as the Pyrenees or the Alps, and perhaps east of the Rhine, only the short chronology is overwhelmingly evident. Even here, there is a longer and a shorter part to the short chronology. Over the longer term, perhaps as far back as 700,000 years ago, there is human occupation represent by late Early Stone Age (or what the Europeans call Lower Paleolithic) artifacts, in the form of Acheulean hand axes and such. After around 350,000 years ago, there is a greater number of sites across a larger area and, likely, longer term occupation. But even this is not necessarily a fully established continental or regional occupation. The continuation and intensification of the previous 1.5 million years of climate shifts — the coming and going of “ice ages” — forced these folks to contract their ranges, perhaps going locally extinct at times, often likely replaced by new groups coming in fresh from Africa.

But there is Untermassfeld and a few other sites suggesting a more geographically expansive and earlier chronology.

Untermassfeld is a an archaeological site in Schmalkalden-Meiningen district, Thuringia, Germany. The site was purported to include Lower Paleolithic (Early Stone Age) Oldowan (or Mode I) technology in association with animal remains dated to just over one million years ago. Hammer stone marks and cut marks were also reported for some of the bones, which if believed confirms a direct human involvement with the bone remains. This was reported by researchers Landeck and Garcia Garriga in the Journal of Human Evolution as “The oldest hominin butchery in European mid-latitudes at the Jaramillo site of Untermassfeld (Thuringia, Germany).” The abstract of that paper reads:

The late Early Pleistocene site of Untermassfeld, dated to the Jaramillo subchron (ca. 1.07 millions of years ago), is well known for its rich Epivillafranchian fauna. It has also recently yielded stone artefacts attesting hominin occupation. Now, we report here, for the first time, evidence of hominin butchery such as cut marks and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. This probable subsistence behaviour was detected in a small faunal subsample recovered from levels with Mode 1 stone tools. The butchered faunal assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying in fluvial riverbanks (Lower Fluviatile Sands) and channel erosion sediments (Upper Fluviatile Sands). The frequent occurrence of butchery traces on bones of large-sized herd animals (i.e., Bison) may imply a greater need for meat in seasonal habitats characterised by a depletion of nutritive plants in winter. Early access to carcasses, before their consumption by carnivores, provided hominins with sufficient quantities of meat. This access was acquired with a Mode 1 lithic industry, to ensure food procurement and survival at high latitudes in Europe. Stone tools and faunal remains with signs of anthropic intervention recovered at Untermassfeld are evidence of the oldest hominin settlement at continental mid-latitudes (50° N).

There are other papers on this site as well, making parallel claims.

Such a phenomenon, a site that is an island unto itself, with evidence not matching anything nearby, sitting by itself in time and space, is always suspect, always provisional, until more is known about the site itself, and the region, and the overall suggested human activity and occupation. Or, until it is shown to be in some way bogus. We appear to be going through the latter transition now. A non-peer reviewed paper was just published making the following claim:

Here we evaluate these claims and demonstrate that these studies are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials studied and in the interpretation of faunal remains and lithics as testifying to a hominin presence at the site. In actual fact any reference to the Untermassfeld site as an archaeological one is unwarranted. Furthermore, it is not the only European Early Pleistocene site where inferred evidence for hominin presence is problematic. The strength of the spatiotemporal patterns of hominin presence and absence depend on the quality of the data points we work with, and data base maintenance, including critical evaluation of new sites, is crucial to advance our knowledge of the expansions and contractions of hominin ranges during the Pleistocene.

There is no question that Untermassfeld is an important paleontological site. In fact, it is possibly the most important site in the region for that time period. This is one of the largest assemblages of bones and has revealed several previously unknown species since work started there in the late 1970s.

Here’s the thing. The human evidence, which consists of hundreds of modified animal bone fragments and human altered stone tools, reported by a team of researchers and presented in papers such as the one cited above, were studied by a team that seems to have never visited the site other than as tourists. The new, as yet unreviewed paper, suggests that these researchers may have accessed Untermassfeld surreptitiously (to obtain at least one photograph they used in publications). Otherwise they were not involved in the site directly.

The moment I learned that, an alarm went off in my head. Several different alarms, actually. Was this academic poaching? A team of researchers doing work on material they had not been granted permission to see? Was it researchers liberating material that has been held by the only instition that has officially worked on this site, for several years, that should have been published year ago? Is this some sort of academic rivalry that is developing into a fight over the provenience of bones? Again? (I’ve seen all this before in Southern Africa and elsewhere).

Or, is it possible that the new unreviewed paper has uncovered either some sort of misconduct or, as many seem to be suggesting, not misconducted research (as it were) but misguided research, whereby legitimate conclusions have been based on evidence that does not actually exist. (Which would make the conclusions non-legit, of course).

The new paper notes that the team suggesting human activity here, Landeck and Garcia Garriga, had written of the bones that they were ‘assembled during “archaeological rescue operations at the Untermassfeld site in the late 70s and early 80s”.’ Yet, apparently, no such rescue operations or collection occurred, according to everyone else. They further suggest that of these several hundred bones and stones, most are simply not from this site.

One bone with an interesting and complex history, studied by Landeck and Garcia Garriga, can be traced to Untermassfeld, and it was known to have been stolen from the site in late May or early June 2009 (during the Pentecost weekend). The bone had been pried from a concretion of bone, leaving part of it in situ, thus confirming its origin. Apparently this sort of vandalism, including removing material, has occurred at his site numerous times between 2002 and 2012.

In 2014, two parcels were delivered to the museum that contained material from this site, origin of the packages unknown. They contained bone and rock that an unsigned letter claimed to be from the site. Part of the bone that had been pried from the excavation in 2009 was among them. Parts of the same bone are still missing.

The origin and history of the lithic material (stone tools, or supposed stone tools) is even less clear.

The authors conclude that the majority of the material used to link human ancestors and 1 million year plus site is of dubious origin at best.

But, there are some bones and stones that are linked to the site and that can be studied to test the idea that human ancestors lived here, and butchered up animals. The authors of the new paper examine this material and find it unconvincing.

That paper states:

In summary, the studies claiming an early hominin presence at Untermassfeld are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials said to have been studied and in terms of (absence of) information on where the material is deposited. At least one of the faunal remains does come from the site, but the provenance of the lithics is completely unknown. The sample of faunal remains and lithics that we were able to study does not show any traces of hominin interference, and does not testify to a hominin presence at the site: we have no idea where the rest of the assemblage allegedly studied by Garcia Garriga and colleagues is stored and hence what it looks like, but based on the published finds that we were able to evaluate, Untermassfeld is not an archaeological site. As mentioned above, the Untermassfeld project has from the very beginning taken into consideration a possible presence of traces of hominin activities [42, 43], but more than three decades of fieldwork at the site, with 90 months of excavations there, as well as subsequent laboratory analyses by a wide range of specialists, so far did not yield any indication of a hominin presence in the fossil bearing deposits, not in terms of lithic artefacts, nor in hominin modifications of faunal remains. To clean up the record of the Early Pleistocene occupation of Europe, Untermassfeld should not be considered an archaeological site.

So, does this destroy any hope of a significant European “early chronology.” No. There are other bits and pieces of evidence that suggest … hold on a second, the new unreviewed paper has something to say about that too. Without going into detail (as the paper does) this evidence is weak as well.

… solid evidence for a hominin presence in the Early Pleistocene is indeed rare, suggestive of an intermittent presence, with the earliest sites located at most 40 degree North – as is the case across much of Eurasia, from northern Spain (Atapuerca), toDmanisi in the Georgia all the way to the Nihewan Basin in northern China [87]. In the very final part of the Early Pleistocene hominins, at around 800-900 ka, may have expanded their range temporarily northward, following the European coastal areas, when conditions permitted. It is only much later, around 600 ka, that the record changes significantly, with an increase in site numbers all over western Europe, suggestive of changes in the character of hominin presence in this part of the world. These archaeological changes occur around the time period of the emergence of the Neanderthal lineage, which can be seen as independent – palaeontological- evidence for continuity of hominin occupation from that time period onward, minimally at the scale of Europe. Neanderthal populations expanded their range eastward, into the central parts of Europe from the middle part of the Middle Pleistocene, ~350 ka, onward, incorporating more challenging continental environments, an expansion that has been related to the development of new cultural and possibly biological
adaptations.

This is not the last word on this issue, as you may have already suspected.

According to a write-up in Nature,

Expressions of concern published on each of the three papers note that the location of the Untermassfeld material “was not stated accurately in the publication”, and that the authors have been unable to adequately clarify where it is now. Landeck and Garcia Garriga declined to comment to Nature on the specific details of the notes but said that they plan to publish a response.

Sarah Elton, … an editor at the Journal of Human Evolution, says that an investigation into the accusations is ongoing….

New finds of fossils and stone tools from the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, push back the origins of our species by one hundred thousand years and show that by about 300 thousand years ago important changes in our biology and behaviour had taken place across most of Africa.

In order to understand the significance of this research, and it is indeed very significant, you need to have a detailed history of archaeological research in Europe, the Near East, and Africa. But since there isn’t time for that I’ll give you the following bullet points. Each of these bullet points reflects the general understanding of prehistory at a certain point in time, in order from oldest to newest.

In the 70s and before, we thought this:

As humans evolved they went through stages where the morphology would change, usually involving an enlargement of the brain, along with the behavior, usually indicated by changes in stone tools. So, Homo erectus used acheulean tools (hand axes), Neanderthals used Mousterian tools (Levallois technology) with prepared platforms, and modern humans (“Cro Magnon”) used upper paleolithic technology and they had nice art too. The transition from Neanderthal times to Modern Human times happened 40,000 years ago.

Also in the 1980s and continuing into the early 1990s, African archaeologists realized something. Well, they realized two things. Most of us realized that at a certain point of time, which Sally McBreardy and Allison Brooks estimated to be about 250,000 years ago or a bit earlier, a “middle paleolithic” world with a lot of handaxes and some other bifaces (Sangoan-Lupemban technologies, that sort of thing) gave way to a “Middle Stone Age” technology. This MSA technology was essentially the same as but somewhat more advanced than what the Europeans called “Middle Plaeolithic” based on the Levallois technique, a prepared platform technology.

The second thing we all knew about but not every body liked was an idea by Peter Beaumont, which is that a certain technology had emerged earlier than the Acheulean-MSA transition of 250K, which was called Fauersmith. This was a … wait for it … prepared platform technology of sorts.

Classically, the handaxe based technology of the early stone age was replaced with the prepared platform technology. This meant throwing the handaxes one last time and moving on to blades and points made with the levallois technique. But in the Fauersmith, an industry found mainly in the Cape Province of South Africa and nearby areas (I think I’ve seen it in Namibia), uses … wait for it … prepared platform technology to make handaxes! This industry is thought to be just older than the MSA, so just older than 250K, going back maybe to 350K, or maybe 400K or even 500K, no one is sure.

The Africanists also realized that the Europeans were pretty messed up in their thinking. The species/subspecies link to technology never went away in Africa. While such a thing is never expected to be perfect, it seemed to hold there. The reason the Europeans were confused is this: When it comes to new species and new technologies, Africa is the donor and Eurasia the occasional recipient.

I liken it to figuring out the chronology and technology of trade beads, those little glass beads, still in use, that were carried by Dutch and English (and other) ships around the world mainly in the early 17th century, to trade with the locals and buy things like, say, Manhattan Island. If you look at the trade beads found here and there on colonial sites around the world, and I’ve personally done this, you can figure out a chronology of style and design of those beads that we assume reflects realty in the two or three places they were consistently made. But only by going to the factory neighborhoods in the Netherlands and Italy, and South Asia, can you actually figure out what was going on.

Putting it another way, trying to describe human evolution, substantively, by observing only Europe and West Asia and ignoring Africa is like, oh hell, I don’t know what the heck, why would you ever do that?

Anyway, here’s what many of us have been thinking all along, following the insights of folks like Peter Beaumont and Alison Brooks. Once upon a time there were these Homo erectus doods, and they have some moderate game in the brain department but were definitely not humans. They may have lacked some serious human mind tricks, though they were capable of making and using fire, and their handaxes were very nice, when they wanted them to be. They were also very tough and strong and probably somewhat dangerous. Oddly, the most common cause of death, when we can estimate cause of death, is that they ate something that killed them. So, there is some kind of deficit or something behind that.

Then, some time after about a half million years ago, a subset of these guys, and I know where they lived because I have sat on the exact rock chairs they themselves sat on while making their tools, added something to their hand ax technology. They had probably added other things to their culture, and/or their brains, and this hand ax technology thing merely reflected this, but it also opened the opportunity for developing this technology further, and that may have been actually contributory to the subsequent evolutionary process. Anyway, they added this thing where instead of just whacking a flake off a big rock, with the intention of then flaking that big flake into a handaxe, they would make a few smaller specially and carefully done flakes on the big rock, literally a giant piece of bedrock in some cases, that made the prot-handaxe flake they were about to produce more predictable (and, actually, larger in many cases, I think).

The prepared platform. It made making hand axes better. But, taken to the next step, which seems to have happened in this region probably before the Great Transition in 250K, it actually allowed the production of stone tool doohickies never before seen, never before possible. this eventually developed into the full on prepared platform technique that eventually became common all across Africa, Europe and West Asia.

Now, let me tell you a little story you won’t hear, likely, from somewhere else. I was once visiting my friend Peter Beaumont, and he showed me a skull, that was unfortunately unprovenienced, i.e., no one could be sure of where it came from, that looks a lot like the Jebe Irhoud skull and others of that general form and age range. He did have it dated using a technique that, without knowing more about the context of the skull (it has been collected in antiquity by a farmer, supposedly, in the region) could not be fully reliable, but the date was somewhere between 300K and 400K, closer to the latter, if I recall correctly.

Now, go out in that thought experiment landscape and imagine looking for both artifacts and diagnostic skull bits, so you can put the story together of a few different hominins over time, one evolving into the other, and their material culture, especially their stone tool technology.

You will figure out the boundaries in time and space of the technologies long before you verify the species or subspecies by the remains of their actual heads. the reason for that should be obvious, but if it isn’t, just go around the city and look at all the litter you find. Look carefully at all the litter. Call me as soon as one of the pieces of litter is a human head. Actually, call 911 first, then me.

This new find is a head butting, perhaps, against the early time range for this species, previously expected from the Fauersmith theory.

I fully expect the key points in the article to be ignored and for Sub Saharan Africa to be broken off from the rest of Africa so that this find can be European/West Asian in stead of Africa, but to address that I’ll quickly tell you this; The Sahara may not have even existed then, so there may not have been a Sub Saharan Africa. Just an Africa. Where modern humans arose.

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!

There are two books you may want to check out because, for the moment (Tuesday, March 7th is the moment), they are deeply discounted at Amazon:

Kindle version for two bucks: The End of Nature

Kindle version for three bucks: The First Americans

I also want to note that Shawn Otto’s book, “The War on Science,” is now available as an audio book: The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It.

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.

A while ago I asked on my Facebook page whether anyone had seen the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. As one might expect, a couple of people, who possibly thought I was joking, noted that the Dead Sea scrolls were part of the Bible, and all that stuff was implausible stories handed down by ignorant Bronze Age shepherds over the generations, etc., etc., etc.

My first reaction to that, as an anthropologist, was this: “Hey, Imma let you say that now, but if you diss any of my people like that I’ll kick your ass. Metaphorically, of course.”  In other words, I do find it rather condescending when western occidento-hetero-caucasoido-normative types take it on themselves to make blanket statements that some other group of people of which they know nothing are stupid. I understand the whole being annoyed at the Bible thing. I mean, it is probably the most annoying book ever written. But this is where modern-day “New Atheists” can be thoughtless when unpracticed in their philosophy and its application.

But it was only a Facebook comment.

My second thought was this: I never read the sports section of the newspaper, but a few years ago when I came across a large fragment of a 30-year-old sports page from the local paper, hidden inside a wall, I read every word of it. Wouldn’t you? And the Dead Sea Scrolls are two thousand years old, and about a topic that is pretty much as interesting to me as hockey scores and basketball.

In the end, I went to see the exhibit. Twice. And I assure you, the part about the stupid Bronze Age shepherds is not only overwhelmingly outdone by other aspects of the scrolls, but in fact is rather inaccurate. The keepers of the scrolls were more like Moonies than shepherds, except when they were also tour guides. Also, it wasn’t the Bronze Age.

So a while back I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs site in southwestern Minnesota. That’s also a religious exhibit of sorts, if we assume (and we probably should) that the symbols pecked and carved into two-billion-year-old red quartzite played a role in various Native American cultural practices having to do with spirits, gods, afterlife, and so on. Jeffers has thunderbirds, lightning symbols, warriors doing battle with shamans, turtles, magic turtles, hands, bison (probably the extinct kind), atlatls, and more. The guides, polite and well informed caucasionormatives, describe various hypotheses about the symbols and who made them and why, play down the violent parts — maybe that one of the guy with the spear in his chest bleeding all over the place is all about the transition from boyhood to manhood? — and try to link the religious nature of the site to the presumed religiosity (or, at least, spirituality!?!) of the visitors. The prayer we make now at this site is enhanced by the thousands of years of others coming here to pray. And so on.

And both subjects have their holocaustic contexts. The Dead Sea Scrolls were probably kept by a Jewish religious sect, or at the very least, were part of a Jewish Renaissance following an exodus of sorts, and were a big deal in a Jewish world increasingly controlled and colonized by repressive and violent outsiders known today as heroes of Western Civilization. And the next two thousand years is, as they say, bloody history.

Jeffers is much older and diffuse in its cultural associations but was a sacred site to the Dakota (and others) at a time when the practice was to do war with the Indians, kill a lot of them, cut off some of their body parts to sell later in town as curios, or deflesh their bones, varnish them, keep them on display in your office, and to do all the killing in a way that maximized your votes, if you happen to be a politician. And, just to put this in perspective, I think we as a civilization came to abhor the Jewish Holocaust at the time it was revealed, in the mid 1940s. In contrast, most of the native body parts harvested during the Dakota Uprising (centered geographically near Jeffers) were returned decades later, between 1971 and 1990, and by force of law, not because of a sense of shame or propriety. Some still sit on mantles or in boxes in closets.

I recommend a visit to both. But don’t be a dick about it. Your ancestors have already pretty much taken care of that.

Here’s the Ms. Jesus papyrus fragment, in the news recently because it has been “dated” (not really) and is probably old (plausibly). (Image modified by me from Harvard Magazine). I’ve included the translation because it makes me LOL.

So that is what it is like to engage in the process of doing archaeology. Then a car pulls up.

The guy gets out of his car and comes over and asks, “Whatcha doing?” and somebody tells him.

“We’re digging an archaeological site, we’re archaeologists!” an enthusiastic less experienced member of the crew pipes up, walking over to the fence to engage with this member of the public, as we are supposed to do. “It’s an historic site from the early 19th century. There used to be a farm here. We’re tracing out the foundation of the house, and over there, we think we’ve uncovered the place where the farmers butchered their …”

“What?”

“It’s in my trunk, let me get it.”

The archaeologist is left standing at the fence. Sniggers can be heard by some of the more experienced crew members, and glances are passed around like some neat, newly uncovered object might be. There is a reason the least experienced person on the crew was the only one to jaunt over to the fence when the guy showed up.

Returning from his car, holding a huge very smooth ovate river cobble, nearly perfect in symmetry, probably quartzite, “This thing,” hefting it over the fence into the waiting arms of the young archaeologist. “I brought it to the museum but they told me it was just a rock. Obviously they don’t know their rocks! I’ve been running back hoe on construction for years. I know this is not just a rock.”

For some reason, smooth rocks and people who know things have an affinity.

The conversation goes on for a half hour. We learn this guy has been carrying around his rock for over two years, showing it to people now and then. He has a number of theories about what it is, but his preference is to link the rock to Celtic mariners who crossed the Atlantic in olden times and wandered across the continent teaching the hapless Indians how to build stone chambers in which to conduct ceremonies. Despite the fact that this rock is clearly very important, representing a trans-Atlantic connection that only enlightened people accept as true reality, he leaves the rock with the young field worker who promises to bring it to the museum and put in a proper storage drawer where it can be studied by future Archaeologists.

So that was one hour the entire crew can never get back, one hour of failed and eventually forsaken attempts to dissuade the guy of his silly misconceptions, one hour of not thinking about the archaeological site, and also, for reasons of security, one hour during which one or two of the diggers found something interesting but kept quiet about it lest the discovery be drawn into the useless and distracting conversation, or worse, prompt Mr. Backhoe to return over the weekend with his big yellow machine to see what he might find.

That’s what climate science denialists do.

At the moment, and this is probably almost always true, there are some very interesting things going on in climate science. Some of the current issues have to do with the effects of anthropogenic global warming on severe weather. Here’s a brief overview of what is going on.

• We know warming increases evaporation and thus potentially causes drought.
• We know warming increases water vapor in the air, which further increases warming (but how much is a matter of debate) and increases the potential for severe rainfall.
• We know sea surface temperatures are elevated, so when major tropical storms form, they have the potential to be bigger.
• We know sea levels have gone up and continue to do so, which means that storm surges from various kinds of storms are greater than they otherwise might be.

These effects have something to do with the Drought in California, some major flooding and rainfall events of recent years, and the severity of a handful of major tropical storms including Katrina, Haiyan/Yolanda, and Sandy.

• For some time science has predicted changes in atmospheric circulation caused by warming that would likely alter major weather patterns. In recent years, this seems to have been observed. So-called “Weather Whiplash” is a phenomenon where the weather in a region goes extreme for a bit longer than it should, then shifts to a different extreme. Drought and flood, heat and cold, that sort of thing. We don’t know but strongly suspect “Weather Whiplash” is caused by global warming’s effects on major air circulation patterns. This is a hot area of research right now, and it is fascinating.

• We argue about the likely effects of global warming on specific kinds of storms, from temperate tornadoes to tropical hurricanes. Numerous analyses of data and models of climate change have suggested that there may be more of these storms in the future, other studies ‘conclude’ that we can’t be sure, and very few studies show that storms will decrease. The most methodologically questionable studies are the ones that predict decreases in storm overall, though there are a few good studies that suggest that certain tropical regions will experience fewer major cyclones.

That is a rough outline running from greater to lesser certainty. Down there in the lower certainty range there is some interesting science going on. One thing that makes the science especially interesting is the unhappy tension between what climate scientists ideally would like to do and the urgency of understanding what will happen with severe weather in the future. On one hand, climate scientists would like to get a couple of decades of excellent data to supplement older, not as excellent data, to see how climate systems responding to warming reshape our weather patterns. On the other hand, we would ideally like to know now not only if we have to worry about increasingly severe weather, but we’d like to know what kinds of severe weather will occur, when, and where.

That’s interesting. Going back to the analogy of digging an archaeological site, this is like digging a site that is of a familiar type, finding mostly what you expect, but knowing you are adding important data to the overall growing body of information about Early Bronze Age Peloponnesian urban settlement, or New England 19th century farmsteads. But while you are excavating the site you find a stain deep in one corner of a test pit you thought you were about to be done with, and there’s an unexpected artifact in the stain. So you open up a larger area and find a homestead that is not on the map and is not supposed to be there, and as you excavate more and more of it you discover it is loaded with exotic unexpected artifacts and represents human activity that was not known to have occurred at this place and at this time. This would be the most fun you can have with your pants on, kneeling, in the field of archaeology.

And then some guy comes along with his stupid rock and takes you away from it all for an inordinate amount of time. But in climate studies, it is not some guy. It is dozens of denialists, who do appear to be at lest somewhat organized, showing up and doing everything they can think of to interfere with your work. When the scientists get together to discuss the very interesting and important uncertainties, to evaluate very recent work, to share thoughts about the interpretation of newly run models or newly analyzed data sets or newly observed phenomena, they have to spend a certain amount of that time dealing with the denialists. They may even have to spend a certain amount of time talking with lawyers. When they talk to the public or to policy makers they have to spend a certain amount of time, sometimes quite a bit of time, debunking denialist myths and explaining the basic science that should have been accepted as premise a long time ago.

Now imagine once again that you are an archeologist and you and your team have finished work on a major project. You’ve put together a symposium to be part of a major international meeting, at which 9 different papers will be read and discussed addressing various aspects of your findings. You go to the conference. But 2 out of 10 of the people in the room are this guy’s friends. They will insist on asking questions about the Celts and the Giants that once roamed the Earth, and Aliens that mated with earthlings in antiquity to form a race of Lizard People. And they are not polite. Only 2 of 10 in the room come to the conference with these ideas, but they are highly disruptive and control much of the conversation at the symposium, at the bar afterwards, at the airport waiting lounges where people going to and from the conference accidentally run into each other, on the twitter stream spewing from the conference venue.

This is why climate science denialists are so annoying. They are sucking a measurable amount of energy and resources from the process of doing the science and understanding the climate system. Another analogy would be this: Every department of natural resources spending 10% of its budget mitigating against negative effects on Bigfoot, and every news report of anything having to do with parks, hunting, bird conservation, etc. having a Bigfoot spokesperson to address bigfoot issues. When you take climate denialist fueled false balance and re-describe it in any other area of public policy or scientific endeavor, that’s what you get. Bigfoot or something like Bigfoot. Cold Fusion experts always included in any discussion of the Large Hadron Collider, Alien Hunters having equal time after every episode of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos 2014, and so on.

There is plenty of uncertainty at the cutting edge of climate science. There is very little uncertainty at the core. This is because it is centuries old science and the scientists pretty much know what they are doing. Engaging in the false debate is a waste of time and effort, and that, I personally suspect, is the main objective of the denialists. They want to slow down progress, though they may have various different reasons to do so. None of those reasons are valid. They are not Galileo, though they want everyone to think they are. One wonders if they believe that of themselves.

That would be extra annoying.

Photograph of Eliot Park Neighborhood Archaeology Project by Jen Barnett.

Photograph of round rock: zphaze via Compfight cc

I had just arrived at the research camp in the Ituri Forest, then Zaire and now the Congo, after a rather long and harrowing journey that took me from Boston to New York to London to Lagos to Kinshasa to Kisingani to Isiro, all by plane, then over 250 kilometers of increasingly less road-like road, to the world’s most “remote” research site to be found among human settlements anywhere on the planet. Jack’s research involved looking at what happened to Efe Pygmy “camps” after they were abandoned. The Efe hunter-gatherers were known to move camp an average of once every two weeks or so. An archaeologist would want to know what happens to a camp once it is abandoned because many of the ancient sites we excavate are exactly that, abandoned settlements. Jack had been tracking Efe movement and camp abandonment patterns for one year, and the expectation was that I would continue his data collection for another year, as he and his wife returned to Montana to write up their results.

“Oh, excuse, me have you moved yet? No? OK, see you tomorrow.”

When we arrived at the camp, which was located very near the Lese villages … the Lese are the farming people who with an overlapping culture and economy with the Efe … there were a lot of people there. This was a camp with several adult couples and a number of kids of all ages from baby up to nearly teenage. Since this was Jack and Helen’s last visit, they brought gifts to give to the people who had helped them out for the previous year. Project regulations and ethics required that any gifts be irrelevant to diet or economics, not usable as tools of poaching, not likely to change people’s status, and be likely to be used up or worn out quickly. So, everybody got plastic green sunglasses, the really cheap kind you buy by the dozen at a party store to use as favors.

It was a party, a good time, lots of conversation, some weeping over the fact that the much beloved Jack and Helen would be moving back to the States, lots of fun with the green sunglasses, lots of data collected. Then, we left, and the next day we returned to map in the locations of the small dome shaped leaf-covered huts and other structures, fire hearths, stick chairs, drying racks, midden piles, trampled central-use areas, and so on and so forth. This is what the abandoned camp of a people known in the literature, and generally to outsiders, as “nomads” looked like. There was lots of stuff there, but all of it was made from materials available on the spot, transformed from wild growing plants to architecture and kitchen furniture, but eventually thrown out or left behind. Everything else was carried by the Efe, in one trip, to the next camp they would build from natural materials. Or almost everything.

And the forest had it’s seasonal cycle as well. During the dry season, which lasted several weeks around November and December, certain animals were easier to hunt because the streams they hid in, or that would impair hunter’s movement through the forest, were very low. Staring in late June and running into August, the famous African Killer Honey Bees (the wild version of our own domesticated honey bee) produced copious honey in nests about 100 feet up in the forest canopy. The Efe men were very dedicated to harvesting this honey.

If you think about that information for a bit you’ll notice possible conflict. For example, the Efe are drawn to the deep forest for Honey Season, but this overlaps with the mid-year harvest and planting. The November harvest and planting overlapped and conflicted with the dry season hunting. You might guess that men and women would have different opinions about where to reside during these periods of conflicts. The women would never stay overnight in a farm village during harvest; they moved each day by foot from the Efe camp to the gardens and back. But as it became more desirable to camp farther and farther into the forest, that commute became longer and longer. We say (usually tongue in cheek) that Western couples fight over certain things, like money or how to raise the kids or what channel to watch on TV. Efe couples argue over where to put the camp in relation to the horticultural villages vs. the deep forest.

I ended up never continuing Jack and Helen’s data collection project. That I would spend a year doing Part II of another graduate student’s thesis was an idea cooked up by our shared advisor, but neither Jack nor I saw the benefit in doing that. He had enough data, I had other things to do. So, instead, I studied the larger scale structure of Efe nomadism, of their movements across the landscape and their use of forest resources.

I discovered that each Efe group possessed (and that is a carefully chosen word) rights to a trail, usually one single trail but sometimes something a bit more complicated, that ran from the villages out into the forest. Along this trail, at intervals of almost exactly 1.5 kilometers, was a potential camp site. Of these camp sites, a handful were used again and again as the Efe moved through their seasonal cycle. Some of the other camps were used only occasionally. This was interesting, because it meant that even though the efe might move over 20 times a year, the part of their movement in the deep forest had them return to the same exact four or five camps again and again for years. They would also repeatedly use the same camps near the villages, but since village farmers often moved their swidden gardens, wiping out grown-over sections of the forest in one area and abandoning a garden elsewhere, the Efe “village camps” … the camps used during planting and harvest seasons … were often destroyed or otherwise became inconvenient.

And now we come to the interesting anthropological lesson that emerges when we look at other cultures, in this case, the Efe and Lese. In books and articles about the Pygmies of the Central African rain forest, the Pygmies (including the Efe as well as other groups with different names) are often called “nomads.” Nomads, we all know, are people who move a lot. The term also invokes, for many, a certain amount of randomness, or at least, uncertainty in where one might be moving next. There is indeed uncertainty, of a sort, among the Efe as to when they are going to move and where to. But this is simply because one does not need to decide when or where until it is time to do so. There is a constant negotiation happening between members of a particular group as to when to move, and which camp to move to. If there is a big enough difference between different families in a camp, they can easily move to two different locations for a while, or one group can stay and others leave. But these differences never lead to the men going one place while the women go elsewhere, even though the biggest conflict is usually between men and women. The point is, their movement is not random, but well considered and systematic, yet in at the scale of days or weeks in advance, not very predictable at any level of detail.

Yet, at the same time, the Efe are the opposite of nomadic. Consider their Lese village farmer neighbors. They live in permanent villages. But, over time, the Lese use up garden space and firewood in the vicinity of their village. Also, a mini-epidemic of disease in a given village will cause people to not want to live there any more. So, over the course of a person’s life, say a person who lives to 70 years old, one might move seven or eight times from one village to another just in service to the agricultural cycle.

But wait, there’s more. Among the villagers, men and women, when they are married, move to one parent’s village or another for a while, then try to start their own village, and that sometimes does not work out, so they move again. So, around the age of marriage, a person may move three or four times in two or three years. A young man might spend two or three years working at a plantation far from their village, or spend some time in the army. A woman and her children might move to near a chief’s village if her husband is caught doing something wrong and forced into indentured service for a few months. Every now and then the government comes along and moves any village that is too far out in the forest closer to the road so it is easier to tax them. Then later, the government disappears (remember, this is a remote area) and everyone moves back. If grandma gets really sick part of the family might move far away to a mission hospital, because the family is required to supply food and labor to support grandma’s stay in what amounts to a hospice. And so on and so forth.

Betweeen all of these factors, Lese farmers might move 20 times in their life.

Let’s view “nomadism” among the Efe hunter gatherers and the Lese villagers from a slightly different perspective. Let’s ask the question: How many different places have you slept a total of 100 nights or more? That eliminates short forays, fishing trips, very short marriages, etc. Or, putting it a slightly different way, let’s look at the list of places one lives ranked by how many nights one has slept there in a lifetime. Nomads, given our usual conception of them, should have a very long list with a small number of nights at each place, while settled people should have a list with a short number of localities each associated with hundreds or thousands of nights, even if there is a tail of several places with a small number of nights each down hear the bottom of the list.

If we look at the “nomadic” hunter gatherers of the Ituri Forest, the Efe, their list will have five or six places that account for 80% or more of their nights, if we adjust for the frequently destroyed camps in or near the gardens. The Lese farmers, on the other hand, will have over a dozen localities with a several hundred nights in each. By that reckoning, the Lese are more nomadic over a lifetime, even if the Efe are constantly moving.

Minnesotans who go away for college and whose families have a cabin (maybe a series of cabins over time) up north and who spend part of their lives moving opportunistically from apartment to apartment in South Minneapolis are pretty nomadic too. I myself moved once before the age of 16, then about every six months for the next 15 years, chasing relationships, jobs, schools, and doing field work.

Finally, let’s look at nomadism in one more way. If you move every several years, occasionally more often such as around the time of marriage, then at any given time the landscape you know is the landscape you live in, and the memories of details of the landscape of your childhood or other times gone by both fades and becomes obsolete. But if you move constantly, but over the same exact landscape all the time like the Efe do, then your knowledge of every bit of the landscape is detailed an intense and constantly updated and renewed. The Efe know every root that ever tripped them and every rocky pile that ever harbored a small forest animal procurable for dinner and every mature fruit tree and every patch of tasty forest yams in the place they live. The other part of my research, looking at Efe diet, came to this conclusion: There is a fair amount of food in the rain forest, but the only way to find any of it is to know in advance where it is located. Otherwise, the costs in time and energy to discover it excede its caloric value.

The Efe are not nomadic. They are, rather, constant inspectors of their rather large home, centered on their traditionally used trail, consisting of a half dozen venues to sleep and live.

More stuff about the Congo

A while back I wrote a Novella, as a fundraising effort for the Secular Student Alliance, set in the eastern Congo. A cleaned up version of it is available here: Sungudogo

You can read the harrowing real life story of a season of field research in the same region, in a series of blog posts, by clicking HERE (then click through to the next blog post, and the next, and the next, until you’ve read them all!).

And, THIS LINK will get you to a selection of other stories set in the region.

Jack’s research was written up here:

Ethnoarchaeology Among the Efe Pygmies, Zaire: Spatial Organization of Campsites, by J. W. Fisher, Jr. and H. C. Strickland. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 78:473–484.

From the book’s publisher:

“ … Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. The presence of these early New World people was established by distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin?

The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.… “

This flies in the face of everything everybody thinks, except for those of us who have been thinking that something like this may have happened all along. I’ve always thought this was possible, if not probable, for two reasons: 1) Clovis looks more like Europe than it looks like anything else, even though I don’t see any immediate comparison (contra Stanford and Bradley who do). I also don’t need an immediate comparison. I don’t need an archaeological culture that looks just like Clovis to be in Europe, since the time period during which such a culture would have existed was during lowest sea level stands. An entire sub-continent worth of land is now inundated by the sea, and if Clovis is truly coastal it would be truly invisible in Europe. Why did Clovis go from coastal to inland in the North Atlantic in the New World and not the old world? Stupid question. People do stuff like that all the time.

The second reason is even more compelling and is the first thing I noticed. Despite intransigent denialim by North American archaeologist, Clovis appears in the east first, then moves west, and does not really cross the Rockies. No amount of pretending it is found first in the west (where it hardly exists) and moved east (against the tide of C14 dates) will change those facts.

One might suggest that this causes a problem because Native Americans are from Asia and Clovis can’t therefore be from Europe. It might help to know that in most places in North America, where Clovis occurs, it is followed by nothingness or at best notmuchingness. There is very little continuity from Clovis to later cultures, not enough to require that the same people stuck around everywhere. I regard Clovis as one intrusion in to a mostly empty continetn, not the first, not the last, probably preceded by relative but not complete emptiness in most places in North America, and followed, probably, but periods of population decline probably owing to climate change. But that’s just me; I don’t accept that the past is simple no matter how complex the present is. Rather, I think the complexity of human land use and migration is probably one of those general rules that applies across time and space at archaeological scales.