Building a taphonomy database

The use of databases is deeply embedded in scientific research. Any table of information you put together is, in fact, a type of database. However, advances in computing power now allow us to accumulate and analyze huge digital datasets in a variety of formats. Before these datasets can be analyzed, though, they must be compiled and digitally transformed. Archaeology and paleobiology now have several large online databases, including Neotoma (paleoecology) and the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database, among many, many others.

Josh Miller and Russ Graham, who invited myself and a group of other researchers to the University of Cincinnati for a workshop on August 23rd and 24th, thought it was high time that taphonomists thought seriously about the creation of an online database. Over the course of those two days we discussed a variety of issues, including the data that might be included in a database, how those data should be coded, the degree to which they should be standardized, and where one might store a taphonomy database.

Welcome poster for the taphonomy workshop in the
University of Cincinnati library.

We are still in the process of putting our ideas into practice, so I can't reveal much as this point, but I do hope that something emerges from what was a very stimulating workshop. I am very thankful to have been invited and to have learned so much.

Oh, and if you ever fly into Concourse B of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport, be sure to check out the beautiful replicas of North American Ice Age mammals:

Replica of a Megalonyx jeffersonii skeleton.

Replica of a Mammut americanum skeleton.

This was a pleasant surprise for a zooarchaeologist and taphonomist!

Paleoanthropology Society meetings 2018

The Paleoanthropology Society meetings were held in Austin, TX on April 10th and 11th. I'd never been to Austin and, for some reason, I envisioned a sleepy-ish college town, but boy was I wrong...it's big! There were, as always, several really interesting talks, but I was only able to stay for the first day. Also, this post is tardy by several months, so I'll keep it short.

The most important talk, in my opinion, came from Robyn Pickering, who presented an integrated view of U-Pb dates from flowstones in South Africa. Essentially, these things form during wet phases, when water is entering the caves and minerals are precipitating out of it. The fossil-bearing deposits occur between these flowstones, which means that sediment deposition occurred only during dry phases. The fact that hominin fossils are associated with drier habitats, then, appears to be largely an artifact the patterns of deposition within the caves, rather than a true reflection of habitat preferences. The other really fascinating talk involved the 3.6-million-year-old Laetoli footprints. The most famous, of course, is the "G" trackway that preserves the footprints of at least three bipedal individuals. Much less well-known (heck, I had forgotten all about it myself), however, is the "A" trackway originally identified as hominin but later hypothesized to have been formed by an ursid. Ellison McNutt and her colleagues reexamined the ursid hypothesis by convincing several American black bears to walk bipedally through mud. The Laetoli A prints, interestingly, are similar in some regards to bipedally walking bears and chimpanzees. However, the stride width of the Laetoli A prints is much narrower than that seen among bears or chimps, which McNutt et al. interpret as evidence for a pelvic stabilizing mechanism and/or a valgus knee--both of which are only seen in human bipedalism. So, they conclude that while the Laetoli A prints are not modern human in form, they most likely belong to a hominin, perhaps a species that did not utilize a modern human form of bipedalism.   

Our team, with Faith Wilfong as lead author, presented a poster about our ongoing work with modern bone scatters on the eastern edge of the Serengeti. Of particular relevance, too, was a poster from Charné Nel, Jason Heaton, and Colin Menter that provided a taphonomic analysis of baboon carcasses from Misgrot Cave, which is one of the comparative samples my colleagues and I used in our recent PNAS paper.

To wrap up the trip, I had a quintessential taxi experience on the way to the airport. The driver, a really nice dude named Chris, told me all about how he had moved to Austin from New England in the 1970s for college, tried to slip into the music scene, and eventually found himself working for a music shop that built guitars for members of the Rolling Stones. Ah, Austin...