The earliest astronomers?

Alun Featured, Science, The Past 1 Comment , , , , ,

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.orgThe short ver­sion of this post is that Astro­nomy in the Upper Palaeo­lithic? by Hay­den & Vil­len­euve is a great paper. If you’re inter­ested in astro­nomy in hunter-gatherer soci­et­ies you should read it. I’m going to dis­agree with some parts of the paper below, but if Hay­den & Vil­len­euve are wrong about some things, then it’s for inter­est­ing reas­ons. And it’s by no means cer­tain that I’m right to dis­agree about the things that I do.

Reaching for the stars in Lascaux Cave

Reach­ing for the stars in Las­caux Cave. Photo (cc) tourisme_vezere.

The archae­ology of astro­nomy is con­ten­tious at the best of times, but the Palaeo­lithic is a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult period to study, because the remains are so frag­ment­ary and few in num­ber. So to put this in con­text we need to know when the Upper Palaeo­lithic is.

You’re prob­ably famil­iar with the Three Age Sys­tem, Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. In this sys­tem in Europe the Stone Age ends roughly between 4000 and 2500 BCE depend­ing on where you are and exactly where you want to draw the line. Everything before this is a long time period so you can split it up fur­ther. The Neo­lithic is a period when people settle down and become farm­ers, it starts between 8000 and 4000 BCE in Europe depend­ing on where you are. The south-east of Europe adopts farm­ing much sooner than the people in the north-west. The Palaeo­lithic, if you ignore all sorts of sub­tleties is the period before that. To nar­row down things fur­ther the Palaeo­lithic is sub-divided into three sec­tions, Lower, Middle and Upper. Again, roughly speak­ing, the Lower Palaeo­lithic is the time of early humans, the Middle is the time of Neander­thals roughly 300,000 BCE to 35,000 BCE, and the Upper Palaeo­lithic is the period after that with Homo Sapiens.

This gives the astro­nom­ical read­ers a rough idea of when we’re talk­ing about. Archae­olo­gical read­ers could very eas­ily pick holes in more or less everything I’ve said about the dates. One import­ant reason we’ll get to later is that when we use terms like Bronze Age or Palaeo­lithic, we’re not dir­ectly talk­ing about a spe­cific time, we’re talk­ing about the tech­no­logy we find that’s asso­ci­ated with a spe­cific time. So some ‘peri­ods’ make no sense out­side of Europe. If you live some­where where Obsidian was much easier to get than Bronze, then it’s pos­sible local people never bothered with a Bronze Age.

Hay­den & Vil­len­euve real­ise that evid­ence from the Upper Palaeo­lithic is scant, but they also recog­nise that the Upper Palaeo­lithic is not just a time, but it’s tied to a place. What they’re inter­ested in is whether or not eth­no­graph­ies of mod­ern hunter-gatherer soci­et­ies can give us inform­a­tion about pos­sible uses for astro­nomy. You can’t simply say that mod­ern hunter-gatherers from now were exactly like hunter-gatherers twenty thou­sand years ago, but you can see if tack­ling astro­nom­ical prob­lems pro­duces debris sim­ilar to what archae­olo­gists find. You can also see if there are com­mon fea­tures in astro­nomy around the world from hunter-gatherers. If you can see hunter-gatherer astro­nomy in action then you have clues why hunter-gatherers used astro­nomy in the past and that can pro­duce work a lot more inter­est­ing than “there’s marks on this bone, people could be count­ing moon phases.“
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Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , , , , , ,

A couple of years ago I came across the Long Now Found­a­tion on the web. I was plan­ning to blog on it, par­tic­u­larly some of the bets, but haven’t so far. If there’s one sub­ject which shouldn’t be affected by a delay of a few years it’s the Long Now Found­a­tion. I remembered, because I found this on Fora.tv. Fora.tv is a bit like TED, but longer.


Prof Sander van der Leeuw at the Long Now Foundation

Chapter 6 has a eas­ily over­looked prob­lem. Why did things stay so sim­ilar dur­ing the Pleis­to­cene? Change in the cli­mate, and pre­sum­ably the local envir­on­ments, didn’t spur any sig­ni­fic­ant change in tools. van der Leeuw pulls that prob­lem apart by look­ing at the devel­op­ment of short term work­ing memory and shows there’s actu­ally a lot of really com­plex cog­nit­ive pro­cesses to look at if you want to under­stand the man­u­fac­ture of Palaeo­lithic hand-axes.

Chapter 12 and 13 are also thought-provoking. I like the explan­a­tion that to be social you need someone to be social with. van der Leeuw’s ana­lysis shows that you can’t have a lone city. A city requires a com­munity of cit­ies. I’m more wary of col­lapse mod­els of soci­et­ies. It’s def­in­itely not a brain-dead model that van der Leeuw uses, but it is very com­pressed. If you chart the decline from the Roman Empire from its peak around AD 200-ish to AD 500-ish that’s three cen­tur­ies. On a human scale that’s the time from now back to your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, assum­ing a grand­father is around 50 years into your past. With the dis­tance of time I can see there is a decline but it’s less a col­lapse and more a gentle saunter down to the tri­umph of the bar­bar­i­ans. We could have soci­etal col­lapses because we have the his­tor­ical aware­ness and a social nar­rat­ive that ancient peoples lacked.

Iron­ic­ally as I was typ­ing up that cri­ti­cism, van der Leeuw was mak­ing a sim­ilar point in his con­clu­sion. The concept of deep time provides us with a way of think­ing and ana­lys­ing the past in a way that the Romans couldn’t. It’s a good talk and brings together a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent prob­lems and research top­ics into the same story. It’s a long video but worth the time.

You can watch the whole video at Fora.tv, or down­load the talk as an MP3 from the Long Now Found­a­tion.

If you put a snail shell to your ear can you hear the sound of your thoughts?

Alun Science, The Past 3 Comments , , , , , , , ,

ResearchBlogging.orgYou’ll be see­ing a lot of this but­ton around the web today as it’s part of the cel­eb­ra­tions for PLoS @ Two. It’s cer­tainly some­thing worth cel­eb­rat­ing as PLo­SOne is bring­ing a lot of good sci­ence to a wide audi­ence. That’s par­tic­u­larly import­ant with inter­dis­cip­lin­ary papers because it’s very easy to pub­lish them in just one field and miss half of the poten­tial audi­ence. That’s a major draw­back if you see pub­lic­a­tion as an iter­at­ive pro­cess with one paper build­ing on another. An example is this paper, Cli­mate Change, Genet­ics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind’s Earli­est Orna­ment Lar­ger in the Pleis­to­cene Than in the Holo­cene? by Teske et. al. in PLoS one. It’s a bit of clever work on the use of snail shells as orna­ments in Middle and Late Stone Age Africa. I think there’s one or two prob­lems with the con­clu­sions, but it’s a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to the study of human use of snail shells. That’s a much more import­ant sub­ject than it sounds, because these shells might be very import­ant evid­ence about how your mind came together.
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How Art Made The World — Revisited

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

While look­ing for some­thing else I found this snip­pet from How Art Made the World. It deals with the exag­ger­ated fea­tures of the Ice Age Venuses. Yes they’re unreal­istic images of women, but why do they look unreal­istic? The answer might be found in the actions of gulls. This seg­ment filled me with ambigu­ous feel­ings, so it’s good to have the oppor­tun­ity to watch it again.

I had to flip back to my ori­ginal com­ments, because I remembered feel­ing quite neg­at­ive about it. Yet look­ing at that clip it seemed that Nigel Spivey was an enga­ging presenter. It is an inter­est­ing topic and a change from the chro­no­lo­gical his­tor­ies and dis­aster porn which make up a lot of is his­tory television.

The other clips avail­able online made it clear what I dis­liked about the pro­gramme. It was the dis­join­ted con­nec­tion between pre­his­tory and his­tory, which can be seen in the clip below.
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Art in the eye of the Beholder?

Alun The Past No Comments , , , , , ,

Deer (best view)
It’s a deer. This is the most eas­ily seen of the carvings.

I went up to Creswell Crags on the bank hol­i­day week­end to see the Ice Age art which had recently been dis­covered. As a trip I can highly recom­mend it. Even though it was a Bank Hol­i­day week­end, there weren’t that many people there, which is odd because regard­less of the archae­ology the site is beautiful.

Creswell Crags Gorge 2

The gorge was formed mil­lions of years ago, but the archae­olo­gical interest comes from occu­pa­tion dur­ing the Ice Age. There’s evid­ence of Neander­thal set­tle­ment around 40kyr from the tools found in sev­eral caves in the gorge. The people would have been fol­low­ing anim­als to the sum­mer graz­ing grounds. These could have been long migra­tions as Great Bri­tain was still con­nec­ted to the European main­land. There is some slight evid­ence for mod­ern humans around 29kyr or so. This came to a halt when the cli­mate became colder. The polar ice cap grew down to within 20 miles to the north of the caves, which sug­gests the tun­dra in the area was barren.

Around 13kyr the cli­mate eased enough for mod­ern humans to return. The tools of the period made Creswell the type-site for an Upper Palaeo­lithic cul­ture. The flint itself seems to have been sourced in South­ern Eng­land. The Creswell­ian cul­ture is tied to the Mag­dalenian cul­ture of Europe which came at the end of the Upper Palaeo­lithic. Else­where in Europe Mag­dalenian sites are known to have port­able art­works. More fam­ous is the static art of this period. This is the era of Altamira and Las­caux. Dur­ing this period the main­land of Bri­tain was still widely con­nec­ted to Europe across what would become the Chan­nel and the North Sea. The people were still mov­ing vast dis­tances across the con­tin­ent fol­low­ing the herds. So why hadn’t any­one found cave art in the UK? This was the ques­tion Paul Bahn, Paul Pet­titt and Ser­gio Ripoll asked and they went search­ing for it. Creswell is the first place they found it.

Hav­ing vis­ited the site I can’t help but admire their eyes. The images are cut into the rock, which means they’re partly vis­ible through light and shadow rather than pig­ment. Addi­tion­ally there’s also a tend­ency for the artists to use nat­ural fea­tures in the engrav­ings. It makes sense because it cuts out a lot of the effort in mak­ing an image when you’re cut­ting into rock, but it does make your won­der if you’re see­ing images that were inten­tion­ally cre­ated or if you’re pulling pat­terns out from ran­dom shapes.

Bison
A bison?

This may be a bison with its head facing to the right. How­ever now I come to write this I’m now won­der­ing if this isn’t a couple of anim­als with their heads on the left. It could pos­sibly be both. One inter­pret­a­tion is that there are sev­eral images over­lay­ing each other. This makes sense if you ser­i­ously ques­tion what pre­his­toric art is.

Art in mod­ern terms is some­thing that you look at. It’s the end product. If you try and improve the Mona Lisa by paint­ing a proper smile on it people would get upset. In con­trast in other cul­tures, par­tic­u­larly some of the Abori­ginal tribes of Aus­tralia, art is some­thing you do. If the pur­pose of the image is to cre­ate it rather than admire it then it could lose its mean­ing once it’s fin­ished. In that case there’s no loss in carving over the top of older images. It is pos­sible that there is another clue in what the art was for, in where it was found.

The animal engrav­ings are all on the east­ern side of the cave. I ini­tially though this was due to astro­nomy. The caves with engrav­ing are on the south­ern side of the gorge. They’re occu­pied in the sum­mer when the Sun is rising to the north of east and set­ting to the north of west. The animal engrav­ings are all on the east wall of the cave, which would mean it would be illu­min­ated by the set­ting sun. The animal engrav­ings look bet­ter in the after­noon, which would seem to indic­ate the time of day when they were cut. How­ever, these may not be the only art­works on the walls. On the west side are carvings inter­preted as fer­til­ity symbols.

Ice Age Pornography?

The tri­angle in the centre of the image above is, pos­sibly, sym­bolic of female gen­it­als accord­ing to one inter­pret­a­tion. I can’t see it myself, but maybe I should to get out more. If there is a divide between fer­til­ity in the east and anim­als in the west it would be inter­est­ing to see if this divi­sion was more widely found else­where. It could show that the pla­cing of the art was import­ant as well as the con­tent, bey­ond simply find­ing a suit­able blank patch.

If you can get to see it then I’d recom­mend pack­ing a pic­nic bas­ket and tak­ing a trip out. The gorge itself is pleas­ant and has a nice meadow adja­cent to it. If you’re keen on get­ting inside the caves then I’d also sug­gest that you phone up and book a place rather than turn­ing up on the day if you can. The tour groups are lim­ited in size and fill up quickly.

Creswell Crags Gorge 3

Unearth­ing Mys­ter­ies has an epis­ode on the dis­cov­ery of the cave art. Scroll down to the bot­tom of the page and click ‘Listen Again’ to hear it. This page also has a high­lighted photo of the deer.

There’s also pages at The Mega­lithic Portal and The Mod­ern Anti­quar­ian and The Brad­shaw Found­a­tion.

I’ve put my pho­tos up under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons licence.

Earliest Occupation of Britain Earlier than Previously Thought

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

Nature tomor­row will fea­ture a paper describ­ing the old­est arte­facts found in the Brit­ish Isles. The thirty-two blades would be pretty dull by them­selves, but they’ve been dated with what sounds like a reas­on­able degree of suc­cess to around 680,000 years ago. I have to admit I found ITV’s news cov­er­age a bit poor. The thrust of the argu­ment was that 680,000 was a Very Big Num­ber, which made the oth­er­wise dull look­ing blades Very Old Things. For­tu­nately there are more inter­est­ing things to say than that.

The finds at Pake­field aren’t simply old, they also are a lot fur­ther north than other known occu­pa­tions of the same time. We know of pop­u­la­tions of Homo Ante­cessor liv­ing in Spain. The date of these finds would sug­gest that Homo Ante­cessor had a much wide range than pre­vi­ously thought. This means we may have to rethink our ideas of how intel­li­gent earlier hom­in­ins were and what it takes to be able to col­on­ise new territories.

It’s in the news at:

Update: and also now the BBC with some nice maps. No doubt many more will appear shortly.

Mexican Footprints II

Alun Science, The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

I know I’ve had some sleep recently because last night I dreamt I was in a sleep-deprivation exper­i­ment, but I haven’t had much. There­fore you should also visit the other sites lis­ted at the end for more intel­li­gent comment.


A foot and an ancient foot­print. Photo from the Mex­ican Foot­prints media sec­tion.

The dat­ing of the Mex­ican foot­prints is prov­ing to be a prob­lem. This week in Nature the foot­prints are the sub­ject of a Brief Com­mu­nic­a­tion Geo­chrono­logy: Age of Mex­ican ash with alleged ‘foot­prints’. I’ve added two recent press release from Berke­ley and Texas A&M on re-dating the prints. They tackle quite a prob­lem, how do you sample an absence of some­thing to get a date?

I prin­ted out the art­icle, which was really clever as I don’t have access to it from home. How­ever I’ve just dis­covered I left it on the printer, which is really stu­pid. I’ll try and recon­struct the argu­ment as best I can.
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Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought

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Alleged foot­prints of early Amer­ic­ans found in vol­canic rock in Mex­ico are either extremely old — more than 1 mil­lion years older than other evid­ence of human pres­ence in the West­ern Hemi­sphere — or not foot­prints at all, accord­ing to a new ana­lysis pub­lished this week in Nature.

The study was con­duc­ted by geo­lo­gists at the Berke­ley Geo­chrono­logy Cen­ter and the Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia, Berke­ley, as part of an invest­ig­at­ive team of geo­lo­gists and anthro­po­lo­gists from the United States and Mex­ico.
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Texas A&M anthropologist studies ancient human footprints

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An art­icle pub­lished in the pres­ti­gi­ous sci­ence journal Nature and co-authored by a Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity researcher places the age of rocks found in Mex­ico con­tain­ing pos­sible human foot­prints at over 1.3 mil­lion years. The gen­er­ally accep­ted date for the arrival of humans in North Amer­ica, across a north­ern land-bridge from Asia, is 11,000 years ago.

But whether humans really made the marks found in the rocks in Mex­ico is con­tro­ver­sial, says Michael R. Waters, dir­ector of the Cen­ter for the Study of the First Amer­ic­ans and an anthro­po­logy and geo­graphy pro­fessor at Texas A&M.
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Neanderthals more like Modern Humans than we thought?

Alun The Past 1 Comment , , ,

There’s an inter­est­ing press release below the fold. Exam­in­a­tion of Neander­thal teeth sug­gests that their child­hood phase was a lot longer than pre­vi­ously thought. It is cur­rently thought that Neander­thal chil­dren grew up a lot faster than their mod­ern coun­ter­parts. A big bit of the evid­ence in favour of this is exam­in­a­tion of perikymata. These are mark­ings in teeth that show how the tooth grew, a bit like rings in tree trunks.

Pre­vi­ous work sug­ges­ted that Neander­thals grew up to 15% faster than mod­ern humans. Thus they reached matur­ity faster and this meant less time was neces­sary for guid­ing them to matur­ity. This is a handy thing, as evid­ence of age of death sug­gests that a Neander­thal was doing well to reach thirty. In addi­tion they were mar­tyrs to arth­ritis, so it would be an advant­age to have rap­idly grow­ing children.

How­ever Debra Guatelli-Steinberg, an anthro­po­logy pro­fessor, at Ohio State has gone back and examined what yard­stick was used to meas­ure the Neander­thal growth against. Team­ing up with aca­dem­ics from other uni­ver­sit­ies she’s examined teeth from a wide vari­ety of mod­ern people and found that Neander­thal growth actu­ally falls within a com­par­able range.

This is poten­tially very excit­ing. If Neander­thal chil­dren did take a lot of care, where did this come from? Nor­mally you’d expect the par­ents, but in this case there’s a strong pos­sib­il­ity that the par­ents would be injured or dead, and the longer the child­hood, the more likely a child is to become an orphan while a depend­ent. We’ve ten­ded to think that life for a Neander­thal was nasty, bru­tish and short – and that they were too. Instead more and more evid­ence is sug­gest­ing that they were rather sophisticated.

I’ve now dis­covered there’s a Dental Anthro­po­logy Asso­ci­ation. That sounds like hard work.

The press release is below.
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