Kennewick Man Is Native, and Probably Rlated to the Colville Tribe

A plastic casting of some of the most contentious bones in recent history.  From the New York Times

New DNA analysis indicates that Native groups were right all along to claim Kennewick Man as an ancestor.  Accordingly Native groups have referred to the remains as the Ancient One.  Not only is Kennewick Man Native (and therefore more correctly referred to as the Ancient One, though I use Kennewick Man in this post to further highlight the way that scientists have exacerbated an already toxic situation), he is even related to the groups that currently live in the area he was found.  Kennewick Man actually serves to prove the serious time depth of Native claims to indigenous-ness and connection to territory.  And Kennewick Man also serves as an example of the ways that ongoing archaeological arrogance toward Natives can continue to create conflict that serves no one.

Leaving aside the further demonstration of the silliness of trying to use hard and fast racial phenotypes on ancient remains (particularly with the recent finding of the phenotypically similar far more ancient girl in Mexico whose DNA is related to the vast majority of modern Natives), these DNA results just go to show that the arguments against treating Kennewick Man as a Native American were bunk. The archaeologist in me always wishes for as much knowledge to be gained as possible, but the archaeologist in me also feels like the kind of animosity created by the actions of Scientists toward Natives in this case only serves to make working together harder.

Archaeology in the US has a long history of stealing bones, and attempting to use archaeology to claim that Natives do not have claim to their own history and land. Episodes like the Kennewick Man saga only serve to deepen the mistrust and rancor between archaeology and Natives. As an archaeologist who wants to work WITH Native groups, this just feels like bad behavior that makes it harder for me to do my job, and harder for my profession as a whole to repair our relationship with Natives.

Now after decades of fighting, it is absolutely proven that Kennewick Man is Native, and appears to be related to extant local groups (we don't know for sure because they bad blood between Natives and scientists is so bad in this country that we don't even have decent genetic data on current populations). So in the end, the arguments that scientists used to get around NAGPRA turned out to be bogus, but those scientists did manage to hold back any meaningful forward progress in the relationship between Archaeology/Anthropology and Native Americans for a couple more decades.

The scientist in me always longs for more data, but the scientist who wants to actually do meaningful science in the future feels like the Kennewick Man saga has done more damage than revealed knowledge.

One Last Easter Island Mystery

And that mystery is of course, where does the time go?  It has been a pretty amazing trip.  I got to look at a lot of lithic debitage, and meet a lot of interesting people.  I'm looking forward to getting home, but it is sad to leave the island.

But I'm pretty sure I'll be back.

This is the Refugio Arquelogico where I stayed

Jose Miguel, my Chilean counterpart while I was herfe, and Jo Anne Van Tilburg, the Boss.  I am very thankful to Jo Anne for giving me the opportunity to come out her and work

And a beautiful Rapa Nui sunset

Easter Island Mysteries: What happened to the trees?

Anakena, the main beach on the Island.  Quite pretty, there are actually only two small beaches on the island

So what happened to the trees?  This is actually quite the mystery.  No one knows for sure when the last tree died.  No one even knows what trees originally grew on the island.  Were they all palms?  Were there other trees?

The traditional narrative is that the trees were all cut down to make statues.  But even the latest dates for the removal of all the trees on the island (the 1600's is about as late as the guesses get) don't go all the way to the end of the statue making period.  The biggest statues were actually made AFTER the trees were gone.

There is a recent paper that suggests that the trees were all killed by rats.  Most all the archaeologists I've spoken to here don't buy it.  I personally think that a combination of human usage and rat destruction probably accelerated the deforestation, but that only applies to certain palm species.  If there were other kinds of trees then it pretty much has to be human agency that deforested the island.

I heard over dinner the other night that there is potentially some late date wood from a non-palm tree. The stuff is still being studied, but it could actually push the date for deforestation closer to the historic era and indicate other local species besides palms.  The people I've talked to seem convinced that there were multiple species of trees on the island.

So what happened to the trees?  The honest answer is that no one knows for sure, we don't know how many or what kind of trees there were.  It's a mystery.

I jokingly refer to this as my legally mandated photo op

The real mystery, why?  If you look at the side of the mountain you can see little notches and caves, all of those are places where a statue was carved.  Clear up the side of the mountain, and even on top.  The grassy slopes are actually meters deep deposits of stone chips from making the statues.  There are entire statues completely buried under the detritus.  No one knows how many.  Sounds like a job for GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) to me.

I was just proud of this photo of Tongariki I took from Rano Raraku

As an update on my work here, I am enjoying being in the lab.  UNESCO and the Japanese government built a nice fully modern lab at the museum.  I'm doing science and it's fun.  I'm washing and analyzing lots of rocks.  It's pretty fun for me, though maybe not everyone's cup of tea.

More Mysteries!

I was pretty proud of this picture I took of the Moai on Ahu Tongariki

So today I actually learned about a real mystery, but the mystery was really just a different way of looking at things.  Today I got to know my Chilean counterpart here on the island.  His name is Jose Miguel and he has been doing archaeology and working on the island for decades, he is currently a professor at the University of Valparaiso.  He pointed out that in his opinion the greatest mystery of the island is not how the statues were transported or carved, that stuff is pretty easy to explain, it's pretty much just mechanics.  What is really mysterious is why they carved the statues completely on the sides and top of a mountain, and then took the finished statues to their destination instead of moving less fragile blocks of rock into place and carving them there.  It would have been much easier and safer.

After all, Michelangelo didn't carve statues at the quarry, he carved them in a studio, where it is easier and safer.  A lot of Rapanui died in order to carve the statues in place, and then a lot of the finished statues broke during the transportation process.  It doesn't make much sense.  There must have been a very important reason that they would do all of the work on the mountain except for the eyes before they transported the statues.  Then they took the statues to their ahus, and only then carved out the eyes to give the statues Mana, supernatural power.

Here is me next to one of the wings of Ahu Tongariki for scale.  The thing is huge.  The platform the statues are on in the middle of the Ahu is the length of a football field by itself.

Here's my Moai impression in front of "the giant" this Moai was never completed, but is over twenty meters long

The Mysteries of Easter Island (Kind of)

Well, my reading thus far has revealed one true mystery about Easter Island so far, how many statues are there?  In the 40’s the first attempted count said that there were 600.  But then in the 50’s and 60’s Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition found dozens more than recorded just in the area of the quarry where the statues were made.  According to what I have read the current total stands at 887 of the moai (the big giant heads, that also have bodies underneath with long torsos and arms, with short legs).  But some statues are buried, and there is current work being done to catalog all of the statues.  You might think that it would be easy to count massive multi-ton statues that are taller than a man, but you would apparently be wrong.  The truth is that no one knows exactly how many statues were carved.  I think that’s pretty awesome.

In the area of the quarry, Rano Raraku, there are statues buried underneath the debris created by the making of other statues.  The prehistoric (just a reminder, in archaeology “prehistoric” just means before white people showed up, that’s actually all the word ever means, but it can be confusing.  In Europe and the Middle-East “prehistoric” means thousands of years ago, in North America Prehistoric” means 520 years ago, in Easter Island “prehistoric” means less than 300 years ago).  Rapanui were busy indeed.  It takes some work to bury giant statues under the rubble of other statues.  Especially with stone tools.  The Rapanui changed the shape of a mountain with stone tools and created so many giant statues out of solid rock that to this day nobody knows how many they made or how the mountain might have originally appeared.

A lot of the other mysteries boil down to the twin mysteries of smallpox and slavery.  After contact many of the Easter Islanders succumbed to smallpox.  There were also cases of black-birding, which is what the taking of Polynesians as slaves by European ships was called.  There is debate on how much black-birding there actually was on Easter Island, so it is unclear how much the Pacific slave trade affected population numbers.  But if you have ever wondered what happened to the people that built the statues, smallpox happened.  Having one’s population collapse, and then having survivors stolen by slavers is pretty rough on cultural continuity.  A lot of knowledge was lost shortly after first contact and before anyone decided to study the island.  So a lot of the mysteries come from that gap.

It’s a lot like the mystery of the “Lost Mound Builders” of the American Midwest.  The first person to conduct a serious excavation of a mound, Thomas Jefferson, was able to establish right there that the mound had been built by Indians (Thomas Jefferson excavated the mound that was where he decided to build his house).  Plus early explorers actually met with Indians that lived on and built mounds.  But that didn’t matter to people who were intent on finding out what mysterious people built the mounds.  One popular hypothesis was that it was the Lost Tribes of Israel.  It was important to the early American expansion mythology that the Indians have been capable of nothing noteworthy, and it would have been especially nice if they could have discovered that someone with lighter skin had been living in the US first, so that removing the Indians would have been more like reclaiming land stolen by the savages.  You might not have heard of the Lost Mound Builders, but that might be because as it became absolutely incontrovertibly obvious that they were built by Indians for Indians they seemed to become less amazing and mysterious to the general public.

When pondering the mysteries of lost civilizations there are a few things that should be kept in mind.  First, the term “civilization” is itself actually kind of racist.  Civilization refers to sedentary city building farming societies, but even then what societies are called civilizations seems pretty arbitrary.  The Iroquois were city building farmers whose federation of tribes inspired the design of the United States of America, but they usually aren’t usually called a civilization.  In the Americas the term civilization is usually reserved for polities that are no longer around, like the Aztecs, Mayans, Incans, or Anasazi.  But even then the descendants of those cultures are still around, but they aren’t living in their old big structures, so they are “lost.”  In the case of the Anasazi, even the name is an attempt to separate the big ruins from their descendants who are still around and still living in pueblos in some cases.  The correct name these days is Ancestral Pueblo.  So when you hear about “lost civilizations” just bear in mind that the term basically refers to non-modern people who were not of European descent doing something that colonial powers didn’t want to admit could have been done by the natives.  The second thing to remember is that in most cases there are still people around who are related to the people that did whatever inspired the idea of a lost civilization.

In many cases the people that are still around carry on oral histories that tie them to the “lost civilizations” and often provide details of what happened to those societies.  It seems like these days a lot of post-modernist anthropological thought likes to describe traditionally passed down history as “other ways of knowing” which I find absurd and worse in some ways than the traditional colonial approach of just ignoring the natives.  Native knowledge doesn’t require special magical ways of thinking nearly as much as it requires paying attention.  The example I love lately is the recent discovery of a 200 year old shipwreck… right where the local Inuit have been saying it was for the last 200 years.  The Inuit account didn’t conform to the Western account, so it took 200 years for someone to check out whether or not they were right about where the missing ship was. 

Native knowledge is not always hyper precise and completely factual though, any more than regular history is always super precise and factual.  History is basically the narrative structure we give to things that happened in the past.  Stuff happened long ago, history is the story we tell about it to give the past meaning and value to our present.  Oral history is not a different way of knowing, it’s a different way of learning.  Oral history requires shutting up and listening.  It also requires someone to be there to listen in the language that the teller speaks.  For many natives in the US, the history of residential schools squashing traditional languages helped fracture oral histories by getting rid of people who could listen. 

In Easter Island the oral histories were smashed by disease and enslavement.  In Easter Island there was actually even a system of writing, but the shattering of the traditional society cost even the memory of how to read what was written.  Much of the knowledge that would have helped illuminate the stories of the statues and why they were torn down was lost to disease.  The oral historical record for Easter Island is highly fragmentary.  The loss of people to tell and hear stories meant the loss of those stories.  So sadly a lot of the mysteries of Easter Island are actually tragedies.

Here's where I'm staying, the Refugio Archaeoligica

I'm all up in Easter Island n' stuff.  This is me on days of travelling and no sleep

I had to take a photo of the first Ahu with Moai I saw

Sorry if the end of the post seemed a little dark.  I just wanted to point out that the popular narratives of archaeological mysteries are often kind of problematic.  Rest assured I am having fun doing science in a tropical paradise.

Heading Off to Easter Island

I'm going here

Hello everybody who reads this blog, I was just wanting to write a quick post to let you know that I am going to be in Easter Island for most of November, so I probably won't be managing to do any blog entries.  I have heard that the internet is pretty unreliable out there.

I'm heading out to do some archaeology!  Yay science!  I won't be doing any digging, but I will get an opportunity to do work in the lab with existing samples.  My work is basically going to be counting and sorting many small bits of rock, but I am pretty excited about it.

Getting the opportunity to work in Easter Island is really quite exciting.  When I tell people that I am an archaeologist, if their response is not "ooh, I always wanted to dig up dinosaurs," then it is usually either "like mummies?" or "like the giant stone heads?"  Now I will be able to say, "Yes, EXACTLY like the giant stone heads on Easter Island."  I will get to help further the understanding of how those heads were made, and that is pretty exciting to me.

I won't be able to say "yes, like mummies."  At least not yet, but I will get to say that I've worked at one of the super famous archaeological locales.  My personal interests lie primarily in the arctic, and in learning about the ways people lived before we had written records, but that kind of stuff often lacks the "wow" factor of GIANT STONE STATUES!!! and ANCIENT MUMMY CURSES!!!  Archaeology isn't typically much like the movies, but it is fun and exciting to me.  And now I get to work on something that many people around the world find exciting.

So, have a good November.  I'm off to do science.







P.S.  If I ever unleash unspeakable ancient evil or find evidence of ancient aliens I will be sure to let you know here.

Anatomically Modern Humans Out-competed Neanderthals with a Combination of Weakness and Fat

Z: So, these... these termites, they're... they're, they're... these guys aren't going to put up much of a fight, right? I mean, we're talking about pushovers, right?

Barbatus: Not really, kid. They're five times our size and spit acid from their foreheads.

Z: [panicked] Hey, wait a minute. Let's not get... we're being too hasty here. These guys sound like bruisers. Just how were you figuring on beating them.

Barbatus: Superior numbers, kid. Overwhelm their defenses, and kill their queen.

             --Antz, 1998

It seems like every article I read about why Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) out-competed Neanderthals (I like the "h" spelling, and I'm sticking with it) focuses on what short-comings Neanderthals might have had that explains their extinction.  I think that this focus is backwards.  While it may seem counter-intuitive, I think it was AMH's short-comings that led to them out-competing Neanderthals.  To glibly sum up my pet hypothesis, humans wiped out the Neanderthals by being weak and flabby.

Natural Selection is not the same as Survival of the Fittest

People tend to assume that the biggest and the strongest are most likely to survive.  That idea is so strong that it is commonly held as an unquestioned assumption.  In fact the phrase "survival of the fittest" is commonly confused with evolution.  Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest," Darwin's phrase was "natural selection."  Survival of the fittest was coined by Herbert Spencer, and actually expresses a common misconception about evolution.  Evolution does not favor those who are strongest or smartest.  Evolution favors those who make the most babies that in turn make the most babies.

Hypothetically: if you had a type of mouse that lived for 30 years and were smarter and stronger, but didn't start having babies until age three and only had one baby at a time and another group of mice who only lived to three, but had large litters starting at six months, which group would you think were at an evolutionary advantage?  If you went with survival of the fittest you might expect the smart long lived mice to do better, but in reality it would be the stupid mice that make lots of babies early and often that would be likely to be more successful.  Because even though the smart long-lived mice are individually fitter, there are going to be fewer of them.

There are a lot of mice in the world.  They don't live long, but they make lots of babies.  That's a good thing since there are lots of things that eat mice.  If mice took years to reach sexual maturity there wouldn't be enough surviving to keep the species going.

This is just my pet hypothesis, not a commonly accepted theory

Now, just as a heads-up, this is my personal hypothesis.  I have never read this hypothesis in any reputable science publications, so if you are in an archaeology class I would not suggest putting this forward as an accepted theory.  I didn't even come up with this idea through ideas presented in archaeology papers.  My pet hypothesis was inspired by this documentary, The World's Strongest Toddler.  I recommend watching the documentary, it's pretty interesting, but I will summarize.

Myostatin and the World's Strongest Toddler

The World's Strongest Toddler is Liam Hoekstra, who was profiled as a toddler.  He was very unusual because he has a myostatin deficiency.  Myostatin inhibits muscle growth.  That might seem like a bad thing, but here's a picture of a bully-whippet (a whippet with a myostatin deficiency) next to a normal whippet:

When you look at this difference you can see that there could potentially be some problems.  The most obvious for a dog owner is how much food the bully whippet would clearly need to stay so bulky.  That is an important thing to remember going forward.

But all that extra muscle does more than just increase food requirements.  Those big muscles also make it much harder to store fat.  In the case of Liam Hoekstra, he was a toddler with no body fat.  Children need either body fat or constant food.  Because Liam had no fat stores he has much less wiggle room when it comes to skipping meals.  In modern day US that is not too much of a problem, because we have plenty of food.  However, for our evolutionary ancestors there were not fast-food burger joints on every corner.

But Liam Hoekstra is not just stronger and leaner than normal kids, he is also faster and has better balance.  In terms of physicality, Liam Hoekstra is better than you (unless you are the German kid with the myostatin knock-out mutation).  Neanderthals were much the same.

Neanderthals:  Bigger, Faster, Stronger, Extinct

When you think of Neanderthals you might think of the old fashioned representations of them.  Stooped, hairy, and ape-like.  These days the reconstructions tend to look a little different.  Here are some of my favorites:

This was a reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman published by National Geographic in 2008.  The article this was from actually provided a lot of the information that led me to my hypothesis.

A Neanderthal Family reconstruction by the incomparable Atelier Daynes  I strongly recommend you check out her stuff.  She does beautiful work.

And of course, the obligatory Neanderthal in a Suit.

 I show these images mostly to get you thinking about Neanderthals as people.  Because Neanderthals were
people.  People so much like you and me that unless you are of purely Sub-Saharan African ancestry a portion of your DNA is probably derived from Neanderthal ancestors.  Neanderthals were not dumb animals.  They used complex and varied tools, they took care of each other and the old, and they buried their dead.

They also had bigger brains than early AMH on average.  Some people claim that their brains were different somehow and that is why we out competed them.  Personally I find this idea a bit of a stretch.  If we had a good handle on how our own brains actually worked then I might be a little more credulous.  I think that an important thing to remember is that there is a broad range of normal brain sizes for modern humans, and it is not necessarily correlated with intelligence, I think that it is foolish to put too much importance on raw brain size.  But we should also remember that Neanderthals were more massive than humans.  We can compare that to men and women.  Women's brains average about 15% smaller than men's brains, but men's bodies average about 20% larger, which means that men's brains average about two percentage points smaller as a percentage of total body.  But this is kind of a tangent, but let us assume that Neanderthals were roughly as intelligent as humans.

The biggest difference between Neanderthals and humans is their metabolism.  Most humans can get by just fine on 2,000 Calories a day.  An average female Neanderthal probably required more than twice that.  In 2008, National Geographic stated the caloric requirements of an average Neanderthal woman would be 4,034 Calories per day.  That article is actually available online here.  The article was written a few years before the genome studies that found that a small percentage of the modern human genome is derived from Neanderthals for non-Africans.  The article uses the older mitochondrial DNA studies to suggest that Neanderthals were a separate species.  It's kind of ironic, even though archaeology studies things long gone and buried, archaeology is constantly changing.  You might think that the study of static objects from the past would be a static field, but it is not.

Neanderthals were much stronger than we are.  It's not just a matter of muscle size, it is also muscle placement and skeleton.  While it is true that your average neanderthal had muscle mass like a steroidal body-builder, they also had thicker stronger bones and their muscles were placed to provide better leverage.  If you think back to Liam Hoekstra you can remember that his increased musculature makes him faster, stronger, and gives him better balance, and that is on a human frame.  Imagine a group of people that were actually designed to be that strong.

Before moving on let us review briefly.  Neanderthals had slightly bigger brains.  They were stronger.  They had more muscle mass, and heavier bones.  And most importantly to my idea, they had twice the caloric requirements that we do.

Big Brains, Big Muscles, Big Appetites

Those muscles and brains have a very concrete cost.  They require a lot of food.  But not just any food will do.  Our muscles need protein, and our brains need fat.  If you don't get enough protein you can suffer from a type of starvation called Kwashiorkor.  Kwashiorkor is a funny name for a horrible disease.  It would seem to me that if you required much more protein just to survive that it would be much easier to slip into protein wasting.

It shouldn't be too surprising that Neanderthals subsisted primarily on meat.  Recent studies have shown that Neanderthals did eat plants, but the majority of their diet was meat.  Some studies of residue on Neanderthal teeth has shown that they even ate medicinal plants.  Neanderthals understood their world, and ate vegetables and made medicine.  But they mostly ate meat, and their bodies needed that meat.

But we don't just need protein, we also need fat.  There is another silly sounding type of starvation, Rabbit-Starvation.  Rabbit starvation is what happens when you live off of lean meat.  If you don't have enough fat in your diet (or enough carbs to make up the slack) you will starve.  You can eat twelve rabbits a day and starve if you don't have access to fats and/or carbs.  So for Neanderthals with their primarily carnivorous diet, they needed not just meat, but high quality fatty meat.

Those big brains that Neanderthals had needed fat to keep operating needed fat to maintain.  But if they had metabolisms like Liam Hoekstra's then it must have been difficult to keep on a surplus of fat.  They needed fatty meat.  They needed a lot of it.  They needed big game.  And they did hunt big game.

Picky Carnivores vs. Generalist Ominivores

(Now we are getting into my conjectures, this is how I imagine things)

Neanderthals lived on the landscape like predators.  Large predators don't live in high density.  Think of wolf packs or lion prides.  Their groups can't get too big or too dense or there won't be enough high quality prey to go around.  Neanderthals lived in smaller groups than humans, usually in the 5-10 people range.  That size worked for the life style they led.

AMH lived in larger groups, even early humans lived in groups of 20-30.  Humans aren't carnivores.  We eat everything, and can survive on just about anything.  We will selectively eat big game, but if it's not there we can do just fine on grass seeds.  Today most humans live primarily on grass seeds in the forms of staples like wheat, rice, and corn.  With our lower metabolisms and our talent for making fat out of anything we can live in much higher densities.

Our higher population densities also provide us with another advantage, social ratcheting.  When you have a larger group of people you can divide labor.  Neanderthal women and men did a lot of the same work.  Everybody had to be able to do everything because there weren't enough people to have anyone specialize.  Having larger groups also means that there is a higher chance of having old people around.  Old people might not seem like a huge deal, but they are.  If you come across the worst winter in 50 years it can be awfully handy to have someone around who remembers how they survived the last time there was a disaster.

A lot has been made of the years about how slowly Neanderthals changed their technologies.  I think they changed slowly because they didn't have as many people around.  When everybody has to be going all the time it is harder to come up with new ideas.  But that is just conjecture.

I also think that part of the reason that Neanderthals stuck with hand-held spears instead of throwing spears was because they didn't feel the same need that humans do.  Neanderthals were already strong and fast.  They didn't need to find was to stay away from the animals they were trying to kill.  But once again, that is just an idea of mine.

Neanderthals needed the most nutritious animals around in order to survive.  When humans showed up on the scene they probably hunted the same animals.  When the populations of high quality prey dropped it was no big deal for humans, we just ate something else.  For Neanderthals that would have been a disaster.  If the big game was gone from an area they would need to go after it or they would starve.  Even if there was plenty of food around for humans to thrive in higher population densities than Neanderthals ever achieved it still wouldn't be enough for the Neanderthals.

There is evidence that humans and neanderthals fought.  I don't think it was war that wiped out the Neanderthals, but it is a fun thought experiment to imagine what the conflict could look like.  Neanderthals were stronger and faster, but humans didn't need to get up close to kill, they used projectiles.  But even if Neanderthals killed three humans for every Neanderthal, they would still lose, because there are lots of humans.

Conclusion

So there you go.  We don't need to look for any shortcomings in the Neanderthals to figure out why they died off.  We don't need them to be stupid, or unable to talk.  We just need them to be what their biology made them.  Their well designed bodies, highly adapted to the ice-age, were poorly adapted to being overrun by people who needed less.

Neanderthals thrived in Europe for far longer than humans have been around.  They were very successful.  If it all just came down to survival of the fittest one would expect them to still be around.  But other than remnant DNA they are gone and we are here.  We won the evolutionary competition because we are weak and fat.

You could say the weak inherited the Earth.