News: Ancient American Dogs

Although even the most conservative archeologists now concede that humans populated the Americas 13,000 or more years ago (with the smart money on "more" and even "way more"), genetic evidence seems to indicate that they did so without dogs, until about 10,000 years ago.

This is based on mitochondrial DNA. Expect refinements and a pushback when someone does a nuclear DNA study. Because that's how it works.

They also found a greater-than-expected amount of genetic diversity in ancient American dogs; the historical "Indian dog" being a recognizable and fairly uniform breed that led researchers to expect a fairly uniform origin. It's a poor scientific study that holds no surprises! (At least in a field like this one, in which the knowledge gaps are so huge.)

As is so often true, this study is limited to North America and ignores Central and South America. Given the distinctive breeds ancient Mexicans produced, and the degree to which focusing on North American human populations distorted our picture of the process of populating the "New World" for so long, I think a study that includes the entire Western Hemisphere cannot be undertaken too soon.

From the point of view of the person wanting to write fiction set in the Pleistocene, the presence or absence of dogs matters a lot. I left dogs out of 11,000 Years Lost, despite a private opinion that Clovis people probably had them, specifically so that I wouldn't have to show them being eaten. Had I included them, the shape of the society would have been significantly altered. Dogs are beasts of burden, food sources, hunting partners, and a major economic factor, which modern Americans have the luxury of considering primarily in the light of their qualities as companions. We can afford to be sentimental about them. Clovis and pre-Clovis people would not have.

Which does not mean they wouldn't have been affected by the cuteness of puppies. But if you want a model of Pleistocene dog/people interaction, you might do well to consider the attitudes of farming families to their livestock, rather than your own feelings about Snoopy and Moon-Moon.

News: Hybrid Humans

Those of you who read the anthropology news know that somebody, somewhere, has a blockbuster romance series coming.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred. (According to Archeology Briefs)

We all know what that means: Interspecies romance! Angst! Family conflict! Deeply hidden supernatural genes!

So, what'd'you think? Harlequin Pleistocene? It's a niche market, but it could be pure gold!

How Sabertoothed Cats Yawned!

How a Smilodon Saber-toothed Cat Closed Its Gaping Maw

Not mentioned is the peculiar arrangement of the incisors, which jut considerably farther forward of the fangs than on other species, the better to grip and chew prey without snagging it on the fangs.

Megafauna are so cool.

Idea Garage Sale: Peopling the Americas

As anybody who got here from my Pleistocene Expansion page knows, I have an attachment to the theory that the Americas were first populated by Asian boat people more than 13,000 years ago. Maybe a few thousand years more.

The way I figure it, they may or may not have descendants living today, but they did not look particularly like modern American Indians, being only a few generations removed from a population split that happened in southeast Asia in which some people went south toward Indonesia and Australia and some went north toward, ultimately, Beringia and the Western Hemisphere. They developed a maritime culture in Beringia, to exploit the teeming resources of the Arctic waters, and ranged far and wide, with Japan at the far end of their cultural area on the west and Canada at the far end in the east. They did not cross on purpose in one big trek, but at some point toward the end of the Ice Age, as Beringia shrank into the system of islands and peninsulas we know today, the western and eastern population extremes began exploiting Japan and Canada more and more. The western people became what we today call the Jomona culture and the eastern people explored the coasts of the Americas all the way around before expanding into the interior, where someone invented the Clovis point - possibly influenced, or after mixing populations with, a much smaller maritime people whose ancestors exploited the ice sheet from southwestern Europe to New England in the same way the Asian Boat People exploited Beringia.

You see my problem here. This story isn't a novel; it's a sprawling epic history whose documents, if they survive at all, lie under the Bering Strait and North Pacific Ocean, on the Continental Shelves and crumbling coasts of western America. Little of the archeology of this saga will be done in my lifetime. In order to make a saleable book, I'd have to invent and extrapolate even more wildly than I did in 11,000 Years Lost, and either telescope events or make a lifelong commitment to a family saga.

Given how obsessive I am about settings, in order to be satisfied with my own work, I'd also have to live in Alaska and travel to Siberia (which has been a byword of inaccessibility for most of my life) and along the coast of Canada and the lower 48 regularly, including extended camping/kayak trips. Because of the way I work, I wouldn't have any idea who the characters were or what the plot was until I'd done at least one such research trip, talked to four or five archeologists, and probably participated in at least one dig. Digs in this part of the world make Gault's floodplain and cyclonic weather look paradisial, and in the timeline where I live, I can barely make it to Gault three times a year due to other commitments and the perennial Health Crap. I would kind of like to be the kind of person who went on Arctic digs and kayaked around Canada; but I'm not, and if I ever even had a shot at being that person, I missed it.

Maybe this is what I would have written instead of 11,000 Years Lost if Dad had evaded his tour in 'Nam by not re-enlisting and we'd stayed in Alaska; but if he hadn't re-upped we wouldn't have stayed in Alaska. I'd be an Iowan today and proud of it. 11,000 Years Lost would be set in the Mississippi Valley and Esther (who wouldn't have been Hispanic or named Esther) would have gotten to see giant beavers.

So not only do I not know how the Peopling the Americas fiction should play out; I can't even imagine a realistic scenario in which I could be the person who wrote it.

But somebody should, don't you think?

Mammoth Bone!

So last Friday I drove out to San Marcos to help the Gault School relocate its lab. They lost their funding and space with UT Austin and got taken up by Texas State last year, but it's taken this long to get the office and lab space organized. Basically they're in an office/warehouse behind the campus police, but it's a nicer space than the trailer they used to have out at TARL, more room and big ceilings and some really good old-fashioned warehouse casement windows. It's farther from the site, but it's a lot closer to me and I'm hoping I can get to the lab even in months when health crap makes digging unwise.

So I showed up and I admired the ginormous plush mammoth that Nancy picked up for the lab at the Waco Mammoth Site, (which I totally need to get out to and see about getting 11,000 Years Lost into their gift shop) and I helped unload furniture and boxes and more furniture, playing "light as a feather, stiff as a board" with enormous heavy tables that had to be walked across a narrow ramp from the truck to the loading dock to the back of the space; and then the truck went back for the second load and I sat around mostly listening to Clark and Nancy gossip about archeology and the people involved and then the truck came back and we unloaded more furniture.

And at one point Clark and Nancy gave me a bag full of goodies they'd saved for me from the 2010 Archaeology in the Classroom Workshop, which contained the usual things - some magazines, some handouts, some brochures - and a ziploc bag with a mammoth bone in it!

The Corpus Christi Geological Society's Bones in Schools program had donated sample bones for each bag, from a quarry in Nueces County. These bones, obviously, are not scientifically valuable in the sense of needing to be curated for museums or future study. They are broken, crumbling, unsuitable for extracting DNA for cloning, and so on. But as concrete focal points to arrest the attention of students and turn them into megafauna geeks they rock. And I, as a megafauna geek, am thrilled to own it. I need to make (i.e. get my sewing student to make) a bag for it that can be unwrapped from around it in such a way that it's cushioned when traveling and doesn't have to be handled to display it to a class, so if I ever get another school visit (sigh) I can take it along without losing more of it.

The card that came with gave the age of the bone, but didn't say which bone it was, and Clark and Nancy were annoyed to find that none of the unpacked reference works they had included a full-body diagram enabling them to ID every bone in a mammoth. The unbroken end consists of a series of broad, flat scallops that make us think it's an active joint, and the best bet is that it's part of the foot assembly. Nancy photocopied it to ask Cinda the paleontologist and she'll get back to me on it eventually. Before my next school visit, almost certainly.

The pay for this job sucks most of the time, but some of the perks rock.

News! Footprints on the Ceiling

A picnicking family in Africa discovered fossil hyena footprints on the ceiling of a cave. The article, oddly, does not address the most urgent question: How did a hyena walk on the ceiling?!
Ancient Animal Tracks found near Nahoon's Bat Cave

Also, woolly mammoth blood reconstituted and found to contain genetic anti-freeze.

And some extremely interesting observational work with albatrosses in Hawai'i keeps coming against human desires for the scientists to observe what ought to happen according to whatever agenda the human has. Why is it so hard for laymen to accept that scientists are observing reality to develop and test notions of how it works, not trying to force a moral judgement onto it? The love that daren't squawk its name.

Miscellaneous News

The Clovis Comet theory has been disproved - no it hasn't - is reasonable - no it isn't - explains a lot - doesn't make any sense. There's only one thing to do with a theory like that: get more data in order to revise it some more! An astronomer suggests that, while a single cometary impact is unlikely, the one that broke up to create the Taurid system could have showered us with lots of little bits of comet, which answers some objections, but not others. Such is science.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?

If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt

Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic

Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.

Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!

And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa

Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.

News! Humans on Flores a Million Years Ago

Well, that's what the tools say. On the one hand, they've been disturbed; on the other hand, they were disturbed before the volcano put new rock on top of them. Note also the lack of correlation between human presence and animal extinction. This story gets better and better every time somebody puts a trowel in the ground.

Hobbit Island's Deeper History

And if you're wondering how those tools differ from rocks - go to a lab with lots of lithics and talk to the flintknapping guy. It takes practice, but natural breaks and worked surfaces are distinguishable, and a lot of experimental work has been done in this area - because flintknapping is fun and doesn't take a lot of specialist equipment, so you don't even need grant money to experiment.

Also, it appears that our brains function via the scientific method? That's counterintuitive, given how hard it is for people to grasp how the scientific method works in real life. Or maybe that's a result of poor science education? Or maybe the reporter is distorting what his interview subjects said? (They do that, you know.) "Less Effort to Register Predictable Images."

Headlines! Hobbits descended from Habilis!

Well, maybe. I thought I was reasonably alert to , but this idea has been going around for awhile. A recent article in the UK newspaper The Guardian takes its sweet time (don't journalist classes teach the writing of leads anymore?) getting to the point, and when I did a search for more I kept getting year-old links, so maybe everybody knew about this but me; but H. Floresiensis, probably the coolest fossil ever found anywhere, resembles H. Habilis and australopithecine fossils that have not been found outside of Africa more than it does H. erectus, heidelbergensis, and other species that we already knew had left the Mother Continent. Which would be pretty freaky.

I notice that some of the people quoted in the Guardian article are trying to come up with scenarios where Big Bad Destructive H. Sapiens (oooh, we're so butch) could have been responsible for the hobbit extinction, rather than the more obvious "volcanic eruption" scenario. Humans aren't that special and we need to get over ourselves, guys.

Headlines! Homo Floresiensis!

Homo Floresiensis, the "hobbit" of Indonesia, is the coolest paleontological discovery ever, and that's including megafauna. I have no doubts that they were a human species, and none of the arguments or evidence marshalled against that interpretation strikes me as more than flimsy special pleading. New hobbit stories always attract me, and here's one:

Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small?

I read my new DWJ book, my husband's picking up the car after three weeks in the garage and will use it to pick up our backlog of comics at the comic store, the new dishwasher is installed, and I get a hobbit news story. Could this day get any better?

It Came in the Mail

More maily goodness.

For one thing I got my Skin Horse: Volume 1 compilation book, with free original art thrown in and an irradiated operatic Italian silverfish sketch on the envelope! Skin Horse is a daily webcomic about the underfunded secret government department in charge of the welfare of nonhuman sapients - monsters who have escaped from/eaten their mad scientist creators, classified bioweapons who turn out to be pacifists or uncontrollable or both, irradiated silverfish who escape from their terrerium and create Italian-renaissance civilizations in basements full of classified documents, that sort of thing. I'm making my husband read it, too.

Also, and more to the point of this blog, I got a Mammoth Trumpet, the quarterly educational outreach publication for the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M in College Station. Less comprehensive but also a lot more readable than the annual journal, Current Research in the Pleistocene, the Mammoth Trumpet contains nonscholarly articles about what is going on in the study of Pleistocene America.

First up, "Paleo Woman: Lost to History." I only skimmed this, because they're preaching to the choir with me and it's basically a distillation of stuff I've already read. The article talks primarily to Elizabeth Chilton and James Adovasio on the reasons why women are so absent from traditional views of prehistory when obviously they were present and doing important stuff throughout.

"Finding Traces of Early Hunters Beneath the Great Lakes" is cool - all about a team using sonar to identify potential archeological sites on drowned terraces of Lake Huron. They've spotted a number of features that resemble historical caribou drive lines. Of course now they need to go down and test the hypothesis, which has its problematical elements. But the great thing is, if sites survive down there, materials that are perishable when buried on dry land are often preserved when buried in freshwater lakes, so there might be ropes, or basketry, or fabric, or all kinds of stuff we don't normally see from so long ago.

"Decoding the Woolly Mammoth: Part II" talks about DNA analysis of frozen mammoth remains, and how they show that mammoths in Alaska and Siberia related, with Alaskan mammoths spreading back into Siberia after a period of depopulation. Plus a sidebar on mammoths.

"Early Human Occupation in the NW Plains of Uruguay" - this is all new to me, and some of it is new to the field generally. Uurguay is virtually untapped as far as Pleistocene archeology goes and they've got a good site at Pay Paso, the earliest occupations of which are about as old as the oldest known Clovis occupations in North America.

"Use Wear, Up Close" is all about the process of putting a tool under a microscope and figuring out what it was used for. This is not a specialty for those of either short attention spans or lax work ethics, as it involves both hours of hunching over a microscope and inventive experimentation on modern rocks to find out what kind of traces different tasks leave. So you might have to butcher a bison with a number of different kinds of stone in order to understand what you see under the microscope.

And that's it except for the book sale on the back cover. Wonderful geeky goodness, and a nice break from Civil War Texas for me. If you want to get some, too, you have to get a membership to the CSFA, but it's only $30 for a year at the base level, so what are you waiting for?

If you want to know more in-depth stuff about what women were doing in the Ice Age, you can read The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory.

Headlines! Megafauna Forever!

Italian scientists want to "recreate" the aurochs by selective breeding of similar modern breeds. But it wouldn't really be an aurochs, which I presume was a species rather than a breed, and what place do they see in modern Europe for such a large critter? Is this just for the tourist trade? Or is there an ecological need for a large wild grazer in some areas of Europe? Or do they just think it'd be cool? A lot of science is proposed because the scientists think it'd be cool.

Which it would be.

Giant Cattle to Be Bred Back from Extinction

Meanwhile, up in Alaska, examination of genetic material in soil samples shows that horses and mammoths survived there much later than the fossil record shows, presumably in small remnant populations. This is an exciting technique for dealing with the fact that fossilization is a random event, not guaranteed to leave any traces of a species at all, and less and less likely to occur as a species declines in number. DNA doesn't survive well, either, but a small soil sample that has no bones in it at all could potentially have DNA from a good cross-section of the animals that existed in the area at the time it was laid down. Way more practical than rebreeding!

Late-Surviving Megafauna Exposed by Ancient DNA in Frozen Soil

Headlines! Erectus on Crete!

Probably erectus - no bones, just handaxes; but erectus is the go-to species for certain eras, the default assumption for reasons I'm not going to mess with this morning. The important thing is, some hand ax making population got to Crete, which is inaccessible except by water, at least 130,000 years ago. This fits well with the homo floresiensis population, which looks like a dwarf subspecies of erectus whose ancestors got past the Wallace line, which means they had boats or could fly. All of which means that water transportation is as much a part of the basic human adaptation as fire and toolmaking, and we need to get used to that.

Ancient Hominids May Have Been Seafarers

Excuse me if I'm a little less coherent than usual. There's physical reasons for that you don't need to know about. I expect I'll write better next time.

Headlines! Neanderthals

Pigment-stained seashells have been identified as "Neanderthal make-up kits." As usual in this sort of news story it's impossible to tell how other possibilities were eliminated, but that's what journal searches are for. Note that, though modern notions of make-up involve smooth skin and primarily women, the Neanderthal pictured is a singularly hairy man.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8448660.stm

Meanwhile, someon analyzed the teeth of a 30,000-year-old homo sapiens child and found interesting resemblances with homo neanderthalensis, showing how evolution keeps right on happening gradually even where we aren't looking for it.
http://www.palenews.net/2010/01/30000-year-old-teeth-shed-new-light-on.html

Headlines! Baby Mammoth Tour!

Lubya the Frozen Baby Mammoth is going to tour the world! It doesn't mention coming anywhere near me, alas. I never got down to Houston to look at Lucy, so I reckon I'm not likely to make it to Chicago, either.

I'm not too sure about all this traveling fragile fossil specimens do. Anybody who's moved as much as I have knows how likely things are to be lost, or damaged, during the process. Still - baby mammoth. Use your best judgement.