Over the last couple of months, it would have been perfectly possible to do a weekly column on nothing but paleoanthropology. And in fact, most of those weeks could have been filled with nothing but a single topic: The Neanderthal Renaissance.
The pop-culture picture of our beetle-browed cousins has never been good. They tend to appear wearing crude clothing, carrying crude weapons, and behaving … crudely. Grunting, snarling, and pointing a spear at the lithesome cave girl from some “more advanced” version of humanity would seem a typical pose. You can’t tell on film, but you simply know — these guys stank.
Not too long ago, the picture of Neanderthals even among anthropologists wasn’t all that different. Sure, they occupied Europe and the Middle East for a long time, displacing even earlier humans to do so. And they operated during an Ice Age, which must have taken some serious adaptation. However, the tool kit they carried seemed almost the same when they wandered into Europe as it did hundreds of thousands of years later when modern H. sapiens came up to play. And yes, some Neanderthal sites did contain more advanced artifacts, but the assumption was that these were adopted by the resident Europeans only after they got a look at some of that advanced tech straight out of Stone-Age Wakanda.
However, the picture of both when modern humans appeared and when they left Africa is crumbling on literally all fronts, as West Africa reveals apparently modern remains far older than expected, and the Middle East shows trans-continental excursions were happening far earlier than previously known. It now appears that modern humans could have moved into Europe much sooner. Only it also looks like they didn’t.
At the same time, new discoveries about Neanderthals are delivering a kick to our smooth, rounded foreheads. Cave art previously associated with modern humans has been re-dated in a way that suggests Neanderthals were painting on walls and making sketches of animals millennia before any modern human created symbolic art. New discoveries suggest Neanderthals’ tool-making prowess was greater than expected, their artistic skills more varied, and their lives simply richer than we would have credited a decade ago.
So … come into the cave. Let’s interpret some symbols.
Environment
No matter where you live, you probably have a mine near you. Not necessarily a coal mine. Or a mine for any kind of metal. But something that’s more commonly called a “quarry” or a “sand pit,” where sand, gravel and stone is collected to use for construction. Rock and sand are heavy, and they’re also inexpensive, so it makes economic sense to mine them near where they’re used rather than hauling them around.
But in some places, that local hunger for building materials is generating some serious problems.
Across Asia, rampant extraction of sand for construction is eroding coastlines and scouring waterways. Scientists are beginning to assess the environmental toll; already, poorly regulated and often illegal sand removal has been linked to declines in seagrasses in Indonesia and in charismatic species such as the Ganges River dolphin and terrapins in India and Malaysia.
Sand might seem like one of the most common materials on earth, but that doesn’t mean there’s so much that its can be taken without damage. Sand, taken primarily for fill material and for making concrete, is being dredged from lakes, rivers, and sea coasts as well as being mined at a furious pace. These removals are leading to the erosion of coastlines, and essentially “channelizing” rivers, in ways that often make the water flow faster, reduce wetlands, and leave the surrounding plains drier and less ecologically diverse.
A group from the University of Colorado looked at improving instrumentation for measuring sea levels and found that the rise is accelerating at a rate pretty much in line with climate models — less than a tenth of a millimeter a year. Which certainly doesn’t sound like much. Except it adds up to 65 cm by the end of the century. The miracle of compound interest, as applied to your environment.
Anthropology
The first of this week’s Neanderthal articles is perhaps the most amazing. According to a team from Germany, Italy, and Spain, Neanderthals were both using shells as art, and painting art on shells, more than 115,000 years ago.
Cueva de los Aviones (southeast Spain) is a site of the Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic of Europe. It has yielded ochred and perforated marine shells, red and yellow colorants, and shell containers that feature residues of complex pigmentatious mixtures. Similar finds from the Middle Stone Age of South Africa have been widely accepted as archaeological proxies for symbolic behavior.
Those Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa are definitely modern human sites, and they all post-date the site in Spain. With the previous announcement about cave paintings going back over 60,000 years, this seems to be another example where Neanderthals were doing art well before modern humans. In fact, the Spanish site is at least 20,000 years older than any similar find associated with modern humans.
This certainly suggests that modern humans did not bring art to Neanderthals. It may suggest that Neanderthals brought art to modern humans. But the authors of the paper have a different take.
Given our findings, it is possible that the roots of symbolic material culture may be found among the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans, more than half-a-million years ago.
The oldest art may be far, far older than we expected. It may be time to revisit some previously studied sites with a fresh eye.
We may call it the Stone Age, or the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age. But the truth is every age, including our own, might as well be called the Wood Age, because that handy substance is probably the biggest resource for human beings in any time. The only reason we call those other ages by those other names is that the wood tends to go away. We don’t get the arrow, we get the arrowhead. We don’t get the ax, we get the blade.
Except sometimes, we get extremely lucky. as this team did in central Italy.
Excavations for the construction of thermal pools at Poggetti Vecchi (Grosseto, Tuscany, central Italy) exposed a series of wooden tools in an open-air stratified site referable to late Middle Pleistocene. The wooden artifacts were uncovered, together with stone tools and fossil bones, largely belonging to the straight-tusked elephant Paleoloxodon antiquus. The site is radiometrically dated to around 171,000 y B.P
A collection of wooden tools, at a time that clearly points to Neanderthals, gives an opportunity for a look into a part of their technology that we usually can’t see. The association of these wooden shafts (the team interpreted them as “digging sticks,” though it’s not entirely clear why) and a large number of stone tools with a stack of animal bones suggests that some serious meat prep might have been underway at the site.
We often think of Neanderthals hunting large animals, though their ability to bring down mammoths has been doubted because their technology seemed to be limited to hand weapons (and their frequent broken bones suggested a lot of direct tussling with challenging prey). But Paleoloxodon was actually larger than a modern elephant — 13 feet high and about 11 tons. That’s a lot of food. Butchering one up might explain why there were a lot of tools around, including what probably were not “digging sticks.”
A trio of wooden Neanderthal spears were found in the 1990s, but this expands greatly on the number of wooden artifacts known. The wood tools from Italy also appear to have been intentionally charred, a process that hardens wood.
Computational biologist Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University in New York City and his colleagues have used crowdsourced data to make a family tree that links 13 million people. The ancestry chart, described today in Science1, is believed to be the largest verified resource of its kind — spanning an average of 11 generations.
The biggest thing that they’ve determined from this number and name crunching study is — don’t get cocky if granddad lived to 100. Also, don’t fret too much if he only made it to 55.
The group concludes that heredity explains only about 16% of the difference in lifespans for these individuals. Most of the differences were down to other factors, such as where and how people lived.
I’d suggest living now, somewhere near a good hospital, and not so close to that new donut shop down the street that I can practically smell from here.
It seemed only right to group this with the previous study. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel looked at gut biota and discovered that they, like lifespan, aren’t so much a function of who you are, but where you live.
We show that, by contrast, there are significant similarities in the compositions of the microbiomes of genetically unrelated individuals who share a household, and that over 20% of the inter-person microbiome variability is associated with factors related to diet, drugs and anthropometric measurements.
Now, if we could combine the gut biota study with the lifespan study, we’d know where to live and who to hang around with to live longer.
Vanuatu is a group of islands about 1,100 miles north east of Australia. The first people reached the area only around 3,000 years ago — which is late, even for isolated Pacific islands. But trying to determine just who those people were has proven a challenge, as the islands’ culture and language show multiple roots.
For more than a century, researchers have puzzled over why its inhabitants speak languages rooted in southeast Asia, but trace most of their genetic ancestry to what is now Papua New Guinea, which has its own distinct languages. The genomic studies now suggest that a series of population replacements on the islands led to this unusual situation.
These latest studies show that the first Vanuatuans came down from Taiwan — which is more than 6000 kilometers away. Then came groups from Papua-New Guinea. Then these first groups were overrun by a third wave, including some from Australia and Indonesia. But even at the end of the study, the team didn’t conclude exactly how completely each wave erased the previous, or how some features of language and culture reached the islands.
Chemistry
Water is strange stuff. From how it freezes to how it behaves as a liquid, it’s simply one of the oddest things we know — which is good, because it if wasn’t so odd, we wouldn’t be here. But scientists always seem bound to find new ways to make water demonstrate even odder behavior. Like this study that took some very, very cold ice, then rapidly lowered the pressure.
Using a rapid decompression technique integrated with in situ X-ray diffraction, we show that a high-pressure ice phase transforms to a low-density noncrystalline (LDN) form upon rapid release of pressure at temperatures of 140–165 K. The LDN subsequently crystallizes into ice-Ic through a diffusion-controlled process. Together with the change in crystallization rate with temperature, the experimental evidence indicates that the LDN is a low-density liquid (LDL)
If you’re wondering about that ice-Ic piece in there, it doesn’t represent scientists starting to break into a bad rap song. Ice-Ic is a stable form of ice that has cubic crystals. It was first identified in 1943, along with some other variations of ice.
The ice you know, love, and pop into your tea is (almost certainly) Ice-Ih. That little ‘h’ means that it has hexagonal crystals. If you warm up cubic ice above -33 degrees C, it turns into hexagonal ice. So unless you’re having that tea in Antarctica, it’s hexagonal ice for you.
Biology
Neanderthals can’t be the only primate to get some ink. Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania looked at the ‘vocabularies’ of non-human primates and found that they simply are not very large. But what they lack in words, they may make up for in inflections.
When compared with humans, nonhuman primates have small vocal repertoires that show little acoustic modification during development. These limitations pose a dilemma for those interested in the evolution of language. Recent research, however, suggests that monkeys and apes show an extensive ability to modify their use of calls in different social contexts. Many vocalizations function to facilitate social interaction by reducing the uncertainty about the signaler’s intentions and likely behavior.
The researchers suggest taking a look at successful individuals who have spent long times in social groups to determine whether their ability to express themselves well with that limited vocabulary is a factor in survival, and important in forming social bonds.
Astronomy
The big astrophysics story of the week was certainly a study from Arizona State that peers through the literal clouds around the early years of the universe to find some of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang.
But there was at least one strange thing in their findings.
Here we report the detection of a flattened absorption profile in the sky-averaged radio spectrum, which is centred at a frequency of 78 megahertz and has a best-fitting full-width at half-maximum of 19 megahertz and an amplitude of 0.5 kelvin. The profile is largely consistent with expectations for the 21-centimetre signal induced by early stars; however, the best-fitting amplitude of the profile is more than a factor of two greater than the largest predictions.
What this suggests was that, before those stars started burning, the universe was colder than expected. Much colder.
This discrepancy suggests that either the primordial gas was much colder than expected or the background radiation temperature was hotter than expected.
Neither one of those seems like a great explanation. If the energy levels of the early universe were much different than what we’ve previously suspected, we should see that difference in the cosmic microwave background radiation. But we don’t. So maybe there is some other good explanation.
Or maybe, like dark energy and dark matter, we have some unknown force that selectively heats up the universe slowly over time. The Dark Crock Pot.
As usual, this week’s infographic came from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit his site for a larger, easier to read version of the image.