Anyway, I’ll start with this article I read on one of my favorites, John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, back on my birthday, June 18:

Don’t ask the experts if they can’t agree on the question

The post is about a conference convened as part of the World Science Festival to discuss “what it means to be human.” Predictably, most of the discussion centered around this trait or that trait, but as Dr. Hawks points out, no one trait can really include all humanity while excluding all other animals we wouldn’t call ‘human.’ What makes us human?

One thing is shared by all humans, and cannot be taken away: our evolutionary history. Each of us bears some — but none has all — of the marks of this history.

It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors.

Within the span of fifty generations, a selected gene may completely transform a species, going from less than one percent to ubiquity. Indeed, a single genetic mutation may make you radically different from the rest of humanity, perhaps by restoring a thick coat of body fur, or making your tissues age at many times the average rate — both characters that some people would make part of the definition of “human.” Indeed, many such changes actually have happened in the past few thousand years.

Only history defines humanity, and will continue to define us no matter what we become in the future. We have not severed the genetic links between maize and teosinte, but they are tenuous enough to make the relationship difficult for the layman to see. We have intertwined several inbred strains, more than doubling grain production in a few decades. We regularly add genes from other organisms to our maize, subtly changing its phenotype. Yes, a good part of our corn now shares a history with Bacillus thuringiensis. But that does not deny its shared history with teosinte, or its unique history as a human domesticate. History is additive, inclusive — not subtractive.

Read the whole essay, it bears it.

Bomb it back to the stone age from the… iron age?

This controversy simmered throughout the Vietnam War when some anthropologists assisted the US government in cultural consulting and even intelligence gathering. The fall-out led to the adoption of a code of ethics by the American Anthropological Association forbidding anthropologists from, in essence, taking sides in conflicts, even ones in which their nation of origin is participating.

Well, the issue flamed over once again with the inception of the US Army “Human Terrain Teams,” which brought social scientists of various disciplines to Iraq and Afghanistan to try to help the army gain understanding and cultural sensitivity in interacting with the local people. And it’s back, with the recent call by the World Archaeological Congress to refuse any military requests to identify culturally important sites in Iran, in case of bombing.

I’m not going to try to deal with Human Terrain Teams here, because, honesty, it’s a much more complex issue that I would have to do more research to handle intelligently. But the suggestion of the World Archaeological Council does pique interesting questions in and of itself.

How does refusing to help the military identify sensitive sites violate any of the anthropologist’s natural duties? What about the duty to the subject people? The issue is that the Iranian people, at various times, let archaeologists into their country to study and understand Iranian sites of interest to all humanity, and then allowed the information to be published around the world. They themselves also did some studying and publishing, again with the same implicit trust that none of that information would be used to hurt them.

Now naively it would seem that the Iranian people would be better served by the preservation of their historical sites than by their destruction. But when archaeologists briefed US officials on important sites in Iraq before the coalition invasion there, they got the most widespread archaeological destruction in recent history. So, if archaeological consulting ends up being ineffectual in stopping damage to Iranian sites, then in some respects archaeologists could be said to be betraying the trust given them by Iranians in the past by softening the PR impact of an attack on their country.

Duty to the discipline? The archaeologist’s duty to his discipline has two needs: the preservation of the integrity of the field so archaeologists from any country can continue to work at any site in the world, and the preservation of archaeological data, in the form of both research and material remains of all sorts. So here we have something of a conflict within a conflict! Arguably, helping a government legitimize aggression against a subject people would damage the implicit assumption of anthropological objectivity and hinder Western archaeologists from working in some countries. But in terms of the preservation of data, the balance in clearly in favor of helping any invaders not destroy important sites.

And does the archaeologist has a duty to humanity beyond what he contributes as an archaeologist? I would say certainly he does. So he should also consider whether his actions are really helping or hurting people. It seems unlikely mere scientists can actually do anything to hinder US military policy, but by diligently assisting military forces to protect precious historical resources, archaeologists can help give the Iranian people a continuity of cultural identity that might be essential to them in the aftermath of the humiliation of an invasion and defeat, or even just the chaos of widespread bombing.

Duty to country is the most deceptively simple requirement of the three, and it’s the most problematic in application. Should anthropologists even consider duty to country? This is an issue few other scientists grapple with so intensely. Anthropologists embrace (to some extent, at least) the ideals of cultural relativism and reject ethnocentrism and simplistic comparisons between cultural practices. So can they thus judge their country to be more worthy of aid and support than any other? And finally, what does that support actually mean?

If an archaeologist believes in good faith that war with Iran would be bad for his country, is he duty bound not to aid his government in making that war happen? That’s what makes the charge that this call by the World Archaeological Council is simply political so interesting. Does it lose legitimacy because it’s motivated in part by political beliefs?

Alright, I suppose at this point I should step back and make clear that there hasn’t actually been a call by any military for information on Iranian archaeological sites (at least as far as any of us know), and the World Archaeology Congress’s statement doesn’t at all reflect some sort of massive archaeological rebellion against being drafted into a war against Iran. The potential ethical dilemmas are still interesting, though, and that’s really what I sat out to explore here. What’s the answer? Well, I’m not sure.

Lucy’s Child is the second paleoanthropological narrative from Lucy discovery Donald Johanson, this time co-authored with James Shreeve. The book’s focus is the discovery of a partial Homo hablis skeleton by Don Johanson, Tim White, and company in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, legendary stomping ground of Louis and Mary Leakey. This story device is generally less dramatic and less intrinsically interesting than that of Johanson’s first book, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, written with Maitland Eddy, and indeed as a story it isn’t quite up the standard of the first.

Don Johanson

Nevertheless, it shares with Lucy stretches of beautiful prose describing African landscapes past and present and the life of paleoanthropologist, which makes me strongly suspect that Johanson himself is a better word smith than his seeming reliance on popular science writers as co-authors would suggest. Johanson also does a good job of weaving the many elements of his story–scientific politics, the excavation of OH 62, and the evaluation of theories of human evolution–into a single intellecutal thread. This is a book about measured, patient scientific investigation, injected with a streak of sober skepticism.

Lucy’s Child practically has a third co-author: Lewis Binford, who joined Johanson on his trip to Olduvai. Binford is a legendary figure in archaeology, practically the father of the modern field, and he established his New Archaeology precisely in the intervening years between the publication of Lucy and of Lucy’s Child. His influence on the later work is palpable. Lewis Binford’s zeal is in attacking assumptions. One of my favorite quotes from the book summarizes his position:

[W]hat you know about things is much less important than what you don’t know. Put another way, the first, crucial task of any scientist is to deliberately and unsparingly stock of his own ignorance–because only when he knows the level of his ignorance can he begin to carve away at it, leaving the truth behind like a sculpture brought forth from raw stone. Instead of wasting time building theories we have already assumed to be true, let us cast a critical eye on those assumptions and see if they hold up to the facts.

p. 229-230

Binford laid all this out in his seminal and deeply controversial Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths, published the same year as Johanson’s Lucy, 1981. In it he took aim at cherished images of early human behavior, especially hunting. Binford’s assault on all the fanciful interpretations of life at the Frida Leakey Karongo in the Olduvai Gorge (the site where Zinj the Australopithecus boisei skull was discovered) was particularly central to Johanson’s book, but its a bit to complicated to be related in a review. Instead, I’ll give you the story of Torralba, Spain.

Torralba was a site discovered by archaeologist (and Johanson’s graduate adviser) Clark Howell, a revolutionary in his own right for bringing sophisticated site development techniques into paleoanthropology. Torralba was once a large swamp, and in it Howell discovered the remains of thirty elephants and other large mammals, some in queer arrangements like leg bones placed in perpendicular lines, along with charcoal and Acheulean stone tools, associated with Homo erectus. His conclusion was that the Homo erectus had used torches to drive the mammals en masse into the swamp and then butcher them, using the lines of elephant legs as a causeway to port out the massive quantities of meat. The story was compelling, seemingly impenetrable, and became the crown jewel in the argument that by Homo erectus at least, man was an accomplished, coordinated big game hunter.

Acheulean tools from Torralba

Binford disagreed. He surveyed the concentrations of stone tools with elephant bones at the site, and actually found an inverse correlation, not what you’d expect if they tools had been dropped after having been used to deflesh carcasses. The charcoal was indistinguishable from that caused by lightening fires. The arrangements of bones could be explained by running water and the site by all appearances had been filing up with pachyderms over a long period of time, perhaps hundreds of years. Instead of a great hunt, the site rather appeared to be a great drainage basin-turned-graveyard. I’d heard the Torralba story a few places before, but this is definitely the most forceful retelling I’ve encountered as part of a general celebration of scientific skepticism. That spirit is probably the biggest thing I took away from Lucy’s Child.

Lewis Binford

Lucy and Lucy’s Child also share a somewhat more dubious distinction: Tiring reiteration of the Leakey/Johanson feud, and Lucy’s Child is the worse offender. A good 50% is given up to politics, and some of the stories, although entertaining, are a bit uncomfortable to read. Johanson could have made his point with better taste, it seems, but then paleoanthropologists aren’t known for pulling punches. The book is also a relatively old one , published in 1991. Needless to say, paleoanthropology has changed a bit in the intervening 17 years. The conclusions that it comes to on OH 62 are also pretty light, although the descriptions of painstaking recovery and analysis in the field are intriguing. If you ever wanted to know what deplorable shape most hominids come out of the ground in and what researchers go through to make them presentable, this is your book. In the end. we basically just learn that it’s a Homo habilis female that is unusually small and had surprisingly long arms with respect to the length of its legs. Neat-o.

OH 62, Lucy’s child, figuratively, as Johanson believes H. habilis to be a descendant species of Australopithecus afarensis.

I shouldn’t be facetious, it is an important discovery that tells a lot about the body proportions of H. habilis, an important species in human evolution, but, Lucy it ain’t. And that might be a good way to describe Lucy’s Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor. A good story with a lot to say and a lot of merit, but, Lucy it ain’t.

Are pets allowed?
For health reasons, pets are not allowed in the halls or on the premises.
The only exception is fish (must be submerged in water) and guide dogs accompanying sight impaired persons.

I guess I’ll have to leave the aquaphobic lungfish that I keep in a drawer in my bedroom at home.

(Just kidding. There might be some more monkey sex, though.)

L. magnus cranium

Why is it relevant? Because L. magnus is an adapoid, specifically a member of the European family of the Adapidae. And that gives me the opportunity to tell an interesting story.

The type specimine of the Adapidae, the Adapoidae, and indeed the first fossil primate ever discovered was Adapis parisiensis, described by no less than Georges Cuvier in 1822. It was unearthed in the Montmatre quarry south of Paris, which was the origin of its specific epithet (parisiensis).

A. parisiensis cranium

Cuvier didn’t recognize A. parisiensis as a primate however, and instead classified it in with an eclectic mix of elephants, hippos, and perissodactyls he called the “Pachyderms.” In a flight of mythological fancy, Cuvier imagined the fossil reminiscent of a sacred bull of Egyptian legend known as Apis. Thus, the generic name ad (toward)- apis.¹

At 1.3 to 4 kg, L. magnus is the largest of member of the family moving toward Egypt’s sacred bull. Think of adapoids as like lemurs. The were diurnal and arboreal with long snouts and bony bars behind their eyes. Advanced features that might link adapoids conclusively with modern lemurs are controversial, however, and L. magnus shows none of them.

Reconstruction of A. parisiensis. Scale this up a bit to get L. magnus.

Like the rest of the Adapoidae, L. magnus was a denizen of the second geological period of the Cenozoic, the Eocene (54-34 mya), and also lingered a bit into the early succeeding Oligocene Period. Leptadapis is the best known of the Adapid genera other than Adapis itself, and this is largely due to L. magnus. It occurs in abundance in the same south French deposits as Adapis at Quercy. The two are broadly similar as well. Both have high-crested cheek teeth ideal for eviscerating foliage and large attachment points for chewing muscles, the sagittal and nuchal crests, on the rears of their skulls. Those of Leptadapis are much larger, however, concomitant with its more muscular build.

As in Adapis, males are much larger than females, intimating a social organization of groups consisting of multiple females and males who would attempt to dominate each other for reproductive access. Other than its size and robusticity, Leptadapis is largely a more primitive genus than Adapis, lacking anything resembling a incisor-canine tooth-comb complex and with eyes placed further apart and toward the outer sides of the skull.

L. magnus was a large, slow-moving primate which was a member of an important prosimian radiation in the Eocene and early Oligocene. It demonstrates that the diversity of the group, both in adaptation and in derivation from the primitive pattern, at its height. Adapoids and their nocturnal counterparts the omomyoids ruled the primate world in the Eocene, so it makes sense that they would diversify into all manner of niches. This has implications to explain the rarity of early anthropoids in Europe and Asia. There my simply have been no room for them until a cooling climate forced the Eocene prosimians off their perch during the Oligocene.

¹ This story is related in Beard, page 35.

References

Beard, Chris. The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey. 2004. U of California Press.

Fleagle, John G. Primate Adaptation and Evolution. 2^nd ed. 1998. Academic Press.

Hartwig, Walter C. The Primate Fossil Record. 2002. Cambridge UP.

http://puntabulous.com/2008/03/17/puntabulous-guest-debate-10/

Welcome to another edition of Puntabulous Guest Debates! Today I welcome Avitable who has my favorite header and headline in the whole wide world. We’re going to wrestle the topic that has plagued dorky science fiction fans (are there any other kind?) since 1977.

STAR WARS VS STAR TREK!

Battlestar Galactica LOLcats is pretty good, too.

Productivity is over-rated.

Anthropoid diversity

First, what is an anthropoid? “Anthropoid” is a term that has suffered somewhat from a past history of loose application. You might be familiar with the term “anthropoid ape.” Insensibly, at one point this was another way of saying “great ape,” referring to members of the family Pongidae. The term still makes appearance in Ernst Mayr’s What Evolution Is, but thankfully for general comprehension it seems to have fallen entirely out of modern primatological literature.

In the true taxonomic sense, an anthropoid, or sometimes simian, is any member of the superfamily Anthropoidae of the Order Primates. These are monkeys, apes, and humans. An anthropoid is an anthropoid because of its collection of advanced features: a large brain, reduced snout, thick jaw and high face, the bony wall enclosing its eye socket, and its heavily forward facing eyes.

Cercopithecus mona, a characteristic anthropoid.

Now there are two ways of splitting up the Order Primates, and both are relevant to anthropoid origins. The traditional division sets up two “grades” based on a rough feeling of evolutionary development. The Anthropoidae is the more advanced of these grades, the other is the Prosimii, which incorporates the rest of the Primates (lemurs, bushbabies, tarsiers, etc).

Valecia veriegata, a characteristic prosimian.

Primatology, like all the rest of biology, has felt the impact of the cladisitic revolution and there is an alternate cladistic taxonomy. It sets up two sub-orders with support originating from molecular data, some cranial features (more on that later), the structure of the eye, and nominally the moisture of the external nose. The Hapolorhini are the dry-nosed primates (anthropoids and tarsiers) while the Strepsirhini are the wet-nosed primates (prosimians minus tarsiers).

Schematic representation of the taxonomies.

So why, you ask, is the debate about anthropoid origins and not haplorhine origins? Well, anthropoids are still a monophyletic clade under the cladistic system, and it is the development of many of the relatively unique features which distinguished the anthropoids as a grade in the first place which interests so many researchers. Also, the traits which distiguish the living Haplorhini and Strepsirhini are often difficult to infer or absent in fossil species. The structure of the nose is an obvious example. All living Strepsirhines also retain a claw and a row of lower teeth known as a tooth comb used in grooming which are missing in the major early prosimian groups. Thus “anthropoid” and “prosimian” have a utility for the fossil record that “haplorhine” and “strepsirhine,” anchored in modern characteristics, lack. The possible origin of the Haplorhini as a whole does play importantly into understanding the evolution of the anthropoids particularly, though, so rest assured the question is not ignored.

Features distinguishing living strepsirhines missing in fossil prosimians.

There are four competing models seeking to identify the ancestry of the anthropoids. I will briefly give them hear as a sort of table of contents for the succeeding essays:

Adapoid origins - The hypothesis that anthropoids descended from relatively advanced members of a group of Eocene prosimians known as the Adapoidae.

Omomyoid origins - The hypothesis that anthropoids descended from relatively advanced members of another group of Eocene prosimians known as the Omomyoidae.

Tarsier origins - The hypothesis that anthropoids descended from tarsiers.

Deep origins (or the “ghost lineage” theory) - The hypothesis that anthropoids share a common ancestor with the tarsiers far back into the early Eocene or late Paleocene.

Finally I’d like to try to write something up on the various models that seek to explain the functional reasons for certain characteristic aspects of anthropoid morphology, like our enclosed eye sockets. Then, as a postscript, I’ll give an account of the anthropoid fossil record from the Oligocene up when the major groups of today’s living primates began to diversify.

The resources on the internet for this are a bit barer than I expected. For more refer to Fleagle’s excellent Primate Adapatation and Evolution as well as almost any introductory text on primate anatomy or evolution.

Ahaha, I’m not the first one to think of this. Victory.

And then it dawned on me. That’s John McCain or alternately that’s Colonel Tigh! Oh, grizzled, bald warriors. You’re all alike. Alright. That’s all for today. Just be sure to vote for the man who will be tough on terror/Cylons.

Smell the CO2.

Of the top 100 metro areas in the United States, Knoxville’s is number 10 in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide according to a report released yesterday by the Brookings Institute. I’d wager that this statistic has something to do with Knoxville’s entrenched car culture. We’re 7th in the country for urban sprawl (another top 10 appearance) and on top of that haven’t had a successful mass transit system since the streetcars stopped running in the ’40s. The city also has an historically extensive hinterland into the hills of the surrounding counties.

For years the city has been trying to pimp the Knoxville Area Transit, but by “Knoxville Area” they pretty much seem to mean Knox County (and not all of it). That means if you live in any of the suburbs of Knoxville in surrounding counties (like, say Seymour), you’ve got to drive to get to town. There’s no other choice. And since Knoxville fills most of Knox County, that leaves a sizable slice of the metro area reliant on their automobiles to get to work and everyone in the city reliant on their automobiles to visit their family out in Anderson or Blount or Jefferson or Sevier or Union County. So if the city wants to take this new ranking seriously, extend KAT service into the full “Knoxville Area.” At least that’s my sense of things from out in the hinterland. But the numbers from the people who made the report say that Knoxville has already been reducing its emissions in the major metrics since 2000, albeit slowly.

Here’s the Knoxville News-Sentinel article that provides some more insights on the problem.

And here’s the complete list from the Brookings Institute. Lexington, Kentucky was top, by the way. Dangburned Wildcats.

And the metro profiles on the cities included in the report.

Interesting stuff. Is your hometown on the list?

By the way, this is a new sort of feature for this blog. I’d like to start doing some local-themed blogging. I know most people from SFN won’t care, but I’ll try to bridge from the local into topics of wider interest.