Art, resistance, and culture change

Petitions, boycotts, strikes, emigration, terrorism, assassination. People have used a wide variety of violent and non-violent means to resist what they view as oppressive social and political systems. One fascinating form of resistance is art. While artwork expresses the values, moral sensibilities, and perspectives of the culture in which it is created, artists also use their work to turn cultural convention on its head. This past November,  Benjamin Murphy, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Gallery of Art, visited UNCG to give a talk on this topic. His presentation, "Identity, Hybridity, and Transformation in Latin American Art from the Colonial Period to the Present," focused on how indigenous Americans overtly or covertly used their artwork to critique aspects of the colonial culture imposed on them by Spain.

A key component of this process was what Murphy called "hybridity," or the melding of cultural traditions, especially in terms of religious practices and iconography. Anthropologists call this syncretism. Native American artists would, for example, use indigenous techniques and raw materials (like feathers) to create art in the European Christian style. They would also draw analogies between indigenous religious beliefs and Christian doctrines. For instance, indigenous artists made sense of the Catholic Christian idea of transubstantiation--the idea that the elements of the eucharist convert into the body and blood of Christ--by referencing the Aztec concept of ixiptla, which also held that a material substance (a human female chosen for sacrifice) could hold an essence (of the Aztec god Huixtocihuatl). Hybrid art was also used to subtly critique the dominant Christian culture. Diego Quispe Tito's Last Judgement, created in 1675, is an interesting example of this. Tito, an ethnic Incan, showed his displeasure with what he saw as an indulgent Catholic clergy by painting the pope himself descending into the Hell Mouth. 

While listening to this presentation I found myself thinking about culture change and cultural borrowing. Indigenous artists clearly drew from Christian culture, and colonial officials co-opted indigenous concepts, and both did so to suit their respective needs. Just like there is no such thing as a pure human race, there is no such thing as a pure human culture. Whenever cultures come into contact--as they always have--an exchange of ideas, norms, and material culture follows. Indeed, such exchange can justifiably be seen as a core feature of the human experience. This process does, however, inevitably lead over time to a loss of cultural knowledge and a transformation of individual and collective identities. As unavoidable as it is, culture change feels especially distasteful when it is coerced, either implicitly or explicitly, by a more powerful, unjust, and oppressive culture. The hybridity described by Murphy is an example of this. However, the intentional manipulation of Catholic Spanish symbols by indigenous artists reminds us that members of a subordinate culture are not passive recipients of, but, rather, active participants in, culture change (as unwanted as that change may at first be).

Another look at the "deliberate body disposal" hypothesis in Rising Star Cave

The recovery of over a thousand human fossils from Rising Star Cave in South Africa has ignited debate among paleoanthropologists over the origins of human mortuary behavior. The fossils were deposited some 300,000 years ago and occur deep within the recesses of the cave system. Today, it is extraordinarily difficult to access the bone chambers--so difficult, in fact, that some believe the bones represent the corpses of people who were deliberately placed in the cave by other humans.  As I wrote in a previous post, my colleagues and I are skeptical of this "deliberate body disposal" hypothesis for a variety of reasons.

Late last year, researchers from the Rising Star team announced in a series of papers in the journal PaleoAnthropology the recovery of still more skeletal material in the cave. They again claim that the most likely explanation for the fossils is intentional disposal by humans. I was invited by the editor-in-chief of the South African Journal of Science to write a short commentary on the issue. Let me first emphasize how difficult it is to work in the cave system: it is dark and damp, the passages are tight, and the stratigraphy is extremely complex. Kudos to the Rising Star team not only for taking on the challenge, but for their open approach to the science. Many of the publications and accompanying data appear in open access journals and the public can follow the research via live streams and other venues. Having said that, I remain suspicious of the "deliberate body disposal" claim, and the commentary lays out why:

• There is good reason to believe that the cave system looked different 300,000 years ago than it does today. Importantly, the fossil-bearing chambers that appear to be largely cut off from the surface may not have been so in the past. It is therefore possible that water could have infiltrated the deepest recesses of the cave. What would have arrived with the water? A bunch of debris like sediments, leaves, branches, and, yes, bones.
• The human bones are poorly preserved, so any marks that might indicate their arrival via non-human means--tooth marks from carnivores, abrasion marks from bouncing around in water--will be difficult to detect.
• Baboon bones have also been found in at least one chamber. This shows us that the bones of a large-bodied primate can arrive within a seemingly inaccessible section of the cave system without deliberate disposal. (Unless, of course, baboons or perhaps humans were intentionally dragging baboons corpses into the cave.) 
• Many of the human fossils show cracks that mimic the weathering damage seen on bones that lay out in the open. This suggests that the fossils may have been exposed to the surface before their final interment in the cave.
• The frequencies of bones in the chamber do not represent complete corpses. This means that complete corpses did not enter the chamber in the first place or, if they did, then something disturbed them afterwards.

Paul Pettitt offers a very thoughtful commentary on the Rising Star data as well. He makes what I think is a critical distinction: namely the intentional deposition of corpses in a specific place (what Pettitt calls "funerary caching") versus the complex, symbolic ideas that accompany such behavior among modern humans. He points out that a variety of organisms, including non-human primates, interact with the corpses of their conspecifics, and many organisms also exhibit behaviors in the presence of the dead that we might interpret as grieving. He argues, then, that the deposition of bodies in deep caves can occur "without any sophisticated cognitive rationale behind the behaviour." In other words, there is no reason to automatically dismiss deliberate disposal just because these hominins were not modern humans. I agree completely. Pettitt also raises the important issue of whether or not alternative entrances to the cave existed in the past--other entrances that, if open to the surface at some point, could have served as conduits for stuff, including bones.

Is deliberate disposal a viable explanation for the fossil remains? Sure. But it still seems to me that other explanations--that the remains were washed in from somewhere else, for example--are sufficient and at least as parsimonious. Apparently an announcement from the Rising Star team is on the horizon that may produce new evidence that confirms, or at least strengthens, the deliberate disposal hypothesis (fire, maybe?).   

References:

Egeland, CP, Pickering, TR, Fadem, CM, Domínguez-Rodrigo, M. (2022). "Back from the Dead": another response to the contextual bases of the Rising Star 'deliberate disposal' hypothesis. South African Journal of Science. doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2022/13873

Pettitt, P. (2022). Did Homo naledi dispose of their dead in the Rising Star Cave system? South African Journal of Science. doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2022/15140

Sabertooth cats and early humans

It's been over two years (!) since I travelled down with my colleagues Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Lucía Cobo-Sánchez, and Enrique Baquedano to the Florida Museum of Natural History to examine the fossils from a site called Haile 21A. What initially drew our interest was the co-occurrence of two partial skeletons of the sabertooth cat Xenosmilus hodsonae with over two thousand peccary bones within the sediments of an ancient sinkhole. I returned home from that trip just days before much of the country shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. What a two years it has been...but I am happy to report that we have completed our analysis, and the results appear in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. The study has enjoyed some modest media attention from both Rice University and my own institution.

Sabertooth cats—named for their imposing upper canines—roamed the landscapes of Asia, Europe, and the Americas for several million years before the last species went extinct ~10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. As apex predators, sabertooth cats played an important role in regulating ancient ecosystems. While they are fascinating in their own right, what draws me to these remarkable predators is the fact that they shared the landscape with, and often came into contact with, our early ancestors. The invention of sharp-edged stone tools ~2.6 million years ago allowed early humans to butcher the meat, organs, and other soft tissues from the carcasses of large animals. This change in diet no doubt would have increased the chances of running into a sabertooth. The question is: what were those interactions like? We know that some unlucky australopithecines fell victim to large cats like leopards, so it is likely that sabertooths too preyed upon our ancestors. Some researchers also argue that the abandoned kills of sabertooths would have provided scavengers, including early humans, with a ready meal. This is not an unreasonable idea. The enormous canines of sabertooths, while no doubt efficient killing weapons, were relatively narrow and thus prone to breakage. So, the idea goes, sabertooths intentionally avoided tooth-on-bone contact in order to protect their delicate teeth but, in so doing, left significant chunks of flesh and all the goodies inside of bones (marrow, grease, and the like) behind for others to eat.

Researchers have devised ingenious methods to reconstruct the killing and feeding behavior of sabertooths by analyzing the shape and chemical make-up of their teeth and bones. This information provides a wonderful window onto the adaptations of these animals. In order to directly infer what they ate and how they ate it, however, we really need to look at the bones of their prey. There are many sites around the world where sabertooth fossils are found in association with the bones of potential prey animals. The problem is that it's very difficult to be sure that sabertooths were the culprit. After all, lots of other animals and even geological processes can accumulate bones. So, it is only in very rare circumstances that we can be reasonably sure that sabertooths were responsible for the bones found at a site. It so happens that Haile 21A is just such a place: we can say with a good deal of confidence that the sabertooth cat Xenosmilus consumed about sixty peccaries there some million-and-a-half years ago.  

That's not to say this whole thing is straightforward. In fact, there are three carnivores in addition to Xenosmilus at Haile 21A, and one or more of them could reasonably be considered as suspects: a coyote-sized canid called Canis edwardii, a wolf-sized canid called Canis armbrusteri, and the sabertooth cat Smilodon gracilis. So why do we think the peccaries were eaten by Xenosmilus? The clues lie in the tooth marks left on the peccary bones. The marks are too big to have been created by Canis edwardii, so that's one suspect eliminated. We know, too, that modern wolves tend to gnaw on and break open bones, which results in lots and lots of individual tooth marks (try this at home with your dog). The peccary fossils, when they do preserve tooth marks, often only preserve a single, or perhaps a few, individual marks—quite unlike a large canid but very similar to what we see among modern big cats like lions and leopards. Another suspect down. That leaves us with the two sabertooth cats. To untangle this, we impressed the teeth from fossils of each species into clay in order to determine if the shape of their tooth marks could distinguish them. It turns out that yes, they can, and in most cases the tooth marks match up very well with Xenosmilus. In fact, the teeth of a Xenosmilus fossil from Haile 21A fit snuggly inside several tooth marks, which is about as close to a smoking gun as you can get.

Impressions of Haile 21A sabertooth teeth in clay (photo: Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo)

Xenosmilus tooth placed inside a tooth mark
(photo: Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo)

Now that we've identified our culprit, we can proceed with reconstructing how sabertooths consumed their prey. The peccary bones from Haile 21A show evidence for nibbling on or near muscle attachments, so much so that parts of the bone itself was chewed away completely. This is not what you would expect if Xenosmilus was afraid to graze the bone with its teeth. Nor would you see this if large hunks of meat were being left on the bones. The patterns of damage on the Haile 21A fossils in fact match well what we see on the bones of prey consumed by modern lions, who we know leave very little flesh behind. This means that little, if any, meat would be left on the peccary carcasses for a would-be scavenger. What Xenomsmilus did not do, or did not do very often, is break open the peccary bones. This, too, is consistent with observations of modern lions, who can gnaw off the softer parts of bones but typically do not crush or fragment them. So, a scavenger might have been able to scrounge some marrow and grease from the abandoned peccaries at Haile 21A. Our findings from Haile 21A do not appear to be a one-off, either. The 20,000-year-old fossils of juvenile mammoths at Friesenhahn Cave in Texas show that another species of sabertooth cat, Homotherium serum, also stripped clean the carcasses of their prey.   

That's all well and good, but it's important to point out that the fossils from Haile 21A and Friesenhahn Cave were deposited before humans ever set foot in the Americas. How, then, can we use these findings to test the idea that early humans scavenged from the remains of sabertooth kills? Importantly, the teeth and skeleton of Xenosmilus and Homotherium are very similar to those of other species of sabertooth cats that shared the landscape with humans in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas between 2.5 million years ago and 10,000 years ago. We therefore think it is plausible that most of these cats consumed their prey in a similar fashion. If that is the case, an abandoned sabertooth kill would probably have been an insignificant and irregular source of meat. A scavenger hoping for a more substantial meal would need to be willing and able to drive these big cats from a kill, a strategy referred to as "confrontational scavenging." Cut marks left by sharp-edged stone knives indicate that early humans were indeed fully capable of gaining quick access to carcasses, either as confrontational scavengers or hunters in their own right. In fact, it has been suggested that early humans not only were major competitors but may in fact have contributed to the extinction of some species of sabertooths. I look forward to seeing more research on these iconic predators...there certainly are many more questions to answer.

References:

Domínguez-Rodrigo, M, Egeland, CP, Cobo-Sánchez, L, Baquedano, E, Hulbert, RC (2022). Sabertooth carcass consumption behavior and the dynamics of Pleistocene large carnivoran guilds. Nature Scientific Reports. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-09480-7

Social networks at the end of the Ice Age

Humans are in many ways defined by their social interactions with others. Think about it: much of what we do hinges on peoples’ use of social networks to facilitate solutions to collective problems like resource shortfalls, information acquisition and dissemination, and political or conflict resolution. I don't think it's a reach to say that humans live and die within the context of social networks. Material culture—think clothing, artwork, jewelry—is often used to advertise important information about one’s personal and group identity within a social network. One way that people do this is to adopt or manipulate the style of an object to distinguish themselves from, or more closely identify themselves with, other people. (If you've ever put on the merchandise of your favorite sports team, you know what I'm talking about.) Archaeology is uniquely equipped, through the study of artifact style, to track this most fundamental aspect of human behavior across vast expanses of space and time.

Way back in 2016, the Archaeology Program at UNCG organized an Ashby Dialogue around social networks generally, and social network analysis, or SNA, specifically. SNA is a methodology based in graph theory that allows us to visualize and quantitatively describe relationships between social entities (people, organizations, tweets, etc.) and the features that bind them together (kinship, shared identity, common interests, etc.). This approach has gained significant traction in archaeology, as artifacts can be used as representations of social entities and the stylistic attributes of those artifacts can be used as proxies for social proximity. The idea here is that if two people create or use a pot with the same or similar decorations, they must share, at least at some level, aspects of their social identity with each other, whereas people that create or use pots with very different decorations probably share little or no part of their social identity with each other. As part of our Ashby Dialogue, I was asked to lead a discussion on the use of SNA in my period of interest, the Paleolithic. I quickly realized, however, that while there was a ton of research on Paleolithic social networks, only one study had used SNA. How, then, might we apply SNA to the Paleolithic more broadly? 

Some time soon afterwards, I attended a luncheon organized by UNCG's RISE Network. The purpose was to connect STEM researchers in order to facilitate collaboration across academic fields. At one point, I found myself sitting at a table with Dr. Jing Deng, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. The attendee list provided to us listed his area of expertise as—you guessed it—social network analysis. Jing showed a great deal of interest when I described the sort of data we Paleolithic archaeologists work with. A small exploratory analysis supported by UNCG's Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creativity Office (and the hard work of then-anthropology and computer science students Amanda Chase and Nathaniel Arnold) convinced us that SNA could be a valuable tool for reconstructing Paleolithic social networks. While any time period is ripe for SNA, we decided for two reasons to focus on the Magdalenian of western and central Europe (ca. 20,000 to 14,000 calibrated years before present). First, Magdalenian cultures are famous for the creation of a staggering array of art, including rock paintings, carved and engraved bones and stones, and perforated bones, minerals, and fossils—all of which encode potentially important information about social identity. Second, Magdalenian peoples were confronted with rapidly changing environments as Europe, and the rest of the world, emerged from the last Ice Age. These volatile circumstances no doubt placed stress on the social networks of folks moving into landscapes only recently vacated by ice sheets. To estimate social "distance" between Magdalenian sites, our initial analysis used frequencies of shared artifact (stone tools, beads, engraved bones) and raw material (stone, bone, fossil, ivory, shell) types. As we worked through this, I began to wonder if it was possible to measure social distance not only by the frequencies of artifact types, but by the stylistic motifs of the engravings on individual artifacts. Could we figure out a way to compare the engravings objectively in order to determine which artifacts were stylistically more similar?  

I spoke with Jing about this, and he introduced me (at yet another RISE event) to Dr. Minjeong Kim, another faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. Minjeong's research focuses on image analysis, particularly medical MRIs and CT scans. She was optimistic that a computer could be trained to extract the engraved patterns from 2D digital images of artifacts and overlay and compare the shapes of the extracted patterns to gauge their stylistic similarity. Among the most common engraved Magdalenian artifacts is called a "perforated disk." These small, flat disks were crafted from stone, bone, or ivory and often include engravings of geometric designs and/or animals. Just like humans today make choices about what to wear in order to (sometimes unconsciously) signal something about themselves, Magdalenian people likely created and used perforated disks to signal aspects of their own identity to others. It just so happened that a good friend of mine, Dr. Rebecca Schwendler, had looked at more perforated disks than just about anyone else in the world. (In fact, it was Rebecca's paper on Magdalenian art and social networks that I discussed way back in 2016 as part of the Ashby Dialogue.) We also needed someone to help reconstruct the ancient environments of post-glacial Europe. Enter Dr. Chris Nicholson, a GIS whiz with tons of experience working with paleoclimatological data. With Chris and Rebecca on board, we had an extremely interesting project (at least to us) and a talented research team that was fully capable of pulling it off. 

In 2019, we put together a research proposal to the Archaeology Program at the National Science Foundation. After two years, three submissions, and tons of valuable input from NSF's hard-working review panels, we were awarded ~$230,000 in 2021 for a three-year project entitled "A network approach to Magdalenian social landscapes." As of this writing, we are a little less than a year into the project, and I am very excited to see where things go from here. If you are interested in more information, including updates on our progress, please visit the project's homepage.

Cut marks, saw marks, and forensic anthropology

Human skeletal remains are not a common occurrence at forensic scenes but, when present, they can preserve a great deal of information about the events surrounding the deposition of a corpse. Forensic anthropology, the field that specializes in the analysis of human skeletal remains in medico-legal contexts, has garnered a good deal of attention from the popular media in recent years. Most of that attention comes from Fox's drama series Bones, which ran from 2005 to 2017 and followed the exploits of forensic anthropologist Temperence Brennan (a character from the novels of forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs). Suffice it to say, forensic anthropology is now among the most popular courses offered in anthropology departments (including at UNCG where I teach), and undergraduate concentrations and graduate programs in forensic anthropology have popped up across the country. 

Forensic anthropology encompasses a wide variety of methods and techniques, one of which is forensic taphonomy. Taphonomy, broadly defined, is the study of how organic remains (like skeletons) transition from living to static entities. In a forensic context, we ask the question "what happens to a person between death and discovery"? A class of taphonomic data, known as bone surface modifications, or BSMs, is particularly useful for answering this question. Marks on bone surfaces, like carnivore tooth marks, saw marks, insect damage, and the like, can provide critical evidence concerning an individual's death and their body's journey after death. Some insects, for example, are only active on the surface, so if we find damage from that particular insect on human bones, we can be sure that the bones were exposed on the surface, at least for some period of time. A few years ago, in a high-profile murder case in North Carolina, where I live, marks on the bones of a human skeleton were used to help identify the saw used to dismember a body. 

Last fall, my friend and colleague, Travis Pickering, who has spent the better part of 25 years studying taphonomy, was solicited to write a review on the use of BSMs in forensic anthropology for the journal WIREs Forensic Science. He graciously invited me to collaborate on the undertaking, and he and I spent the last year researching how BSMs were integrated into the forensic sciences and how they've been used in crime scene reconstruction. The result of those efforts is an article titled "Cruel traces: bone surface modifications and their relevance to forensic science." (I wish I could take credit for the clever title, but that was all Travis.) As much work as they are, I enjoy writing review articles that cover such a wide swath of a particular field of inquiry because they force me to explore literature that I otherwise might not even have come into contact with. 

Several key themes emerge in our review, namely that: (1) the study of BSMs developed first in the paleontology and archaeology of the mid- to late-1800s and was later adopted by forensic investigators; (2) ultimately, a BSM's utility for forensics (or any other field) is only as good as our ability to link that BSM with a particular process, and that link can only be established through systematic observations of a process actually producing a specific BSM; (3) the features of the BSM itself are not always enough to provide a positive identification, and contextual information must always be used (e.g., serrated knives and shark teeth create very similar striations on bones surfaces, but if the bones were recovered far inland, a shark origin is much less likely); (4) the admissibility of expert scientific testimony in federal courts (the so-called "Daubert" standards) privilege the validity of a scientific methodology over the expertise and experience of any one scientific expert.

As an example, consider a linear striation on the surface of a bone recovered from a crime scene. Now, we might logically interpret that mark to have been produced by a knife. That's all well and good, but lots of things can create a linear mark on a bone: a small, sharp sand grain on the ground, the tooth of a scavenging dog, and so on. How might we know that the knife is, in fact, the source of the mark? Well, for one, we need to conduct an experiment where a knife is observed to create a particular mark on a bone's surface (this can be done with donated human skeletal material or, more commonly, the bones of other mammals like deer or pigs). That way, we know for sure what a knife mark looks like. There are lots of different types of marks, though, and even the same knife can create slightly different marks depending on how it is wielded, so one experiment is typically not enough. However, what if a knife was found alongside the human skeletal material? This sort of contextual information, when considered along with the morphology of the mark itself, can provide additional clues and make our identification that much more probable. When this evidence is presented in court, its admissibility, at least according to federal standards, will have less to do with the experience of the expert witness than with the rigor of the methodology used to identify the BSM. 

Importantly, no methodology can definitively, with 100% confidence, identify the source of a particular BSM. Why not? Well, forensic investigators do not themselves witness a crime: the relevant details must be reconstructed. This is where we get the phrase "crime scene reconstruction" and its common association with archaeology, and for good reason. Forensic investigators are in many ways like archaeologists: whereas archaeologists use artifacts and architecture to reconstruct ancient cultures, forensic investigators use evidence to reconstruct a crime. This means, though, that we must work with probabilities, rather than absolute certainties. When we are able to match up a BSM from a crime scene to an experimentally produced BSM, it becomes highly probable, thought not absolutely certain, that the object that created the crime BSM is the same as the object that created the experimental BSM.

A major hurdle for forensic investigators is that some BSMs can be difficult to tell apart from each other. The marks produced by different types of saws, for instance, share many features. So, too, do the marks produced by different types of knives. With so much overlap, how similar do the little bumps, grooves, and edges of a crime BSM have to be to an experimental BSM to be considered "the same"? What features should we even be looking at, and how do we define them? One analyst's "deep groove" may be another's "V-shaped striation." This sort of inconsistency makes it difficult for BSM analysis to attain Daubert-level methodological rigor. Travis and I conclude with the suggestion that computerized image analysis of BSMs coupled with statistical classification might get us closer to reaching that level of rigor. Either way, it will be interesting to see how the field progresses from here.

Peccaries and sabertooths

I spent my spring break down in Florida--not at the beach, but at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. The draw? Sabertooths. My colleagues and I have long been interested in the behavior of these large cats, largely because they shared the landscape with the early hominins that we study at places like Olduvai Gorge. With the exception of the La Brea Tarpits in California, there is no better place in the world than Florida to uncover evidence for sabertooths. The state's karstic landscape contains an almost unrivaled collection of well-preserved Pleistocene fossil assemblages, many of which include the skeletal remains of sabertooths. One of these cats, Xenosmilus hodsonae, lived in Florida between about 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago. A nearly complete skeleton, and the species' holotype, was found a few miles west of Gainesville at a site called Haile 21A. We visited the museum's Florida Fossil exhibit to see a cast of the skeleton.

Mounted skeletons in the main hall of the Florida Fossils exhibit. The
Xenosmilus skeleton is just right of center.

Found alongside this important fossil, inside an ancient sinkhole, was a large collection of extinct peccaries. We are interested in this assemblage because it may teach us a great deal about sabertooth feeding behavior. Our working hypothesis is that the peccaries were victims of predation and that Haile 21A itself represents a Xenosmilus den. The fossil assemblage was excavated in the early 1980s and is now housed and curated by the Vertebrate Paleontology section of the Department of Natural History in Dickinson Hall. The collection is expertly managed by Richard Hulbert, Jr., who is one of the leading authorities on the vertebrate paleontology of Florida and a genuinely nice person.

Collections room of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology in Dickinson
Hall.

My colleagues Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Lucía Cobo Sanchez, Enrique Baquedano, and I were given access not only to the fossil collection, but a fully functional lab, a photography rig, and comparative skeletal material.

Our assigned lab space in the Vertebrate Paleontology
Section. 

We spent about eight hours a day for the past week looking through ~1,600 peccary specimens. Now, its time to analyze the data, so stay tuned...

Bodies, race, and the history of anthropology

Another overdue post from our visit to Spain this past spring...

The Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid has a fascinating history. The first museum in Spain to be dedicated to the study of anthropology, it was founded in 1875 as the Museum of Anatomy by Pedro González de Velasco under the patronage of King Alfonso XII. Velasco's anatomical specimens and the ethnographic artifacts collected by the Spanish government from across its then-vast empire formed the museum's original collection. Off to the left of the main entrance lies a small, nondescript room that today displays some of these items as a record of, and a tribute to, the museum's past. For me, the most interesting, and, in many ways, poignant pieces in the room was the skeleton of Augustín Luego Capilla.

Skeleton of Augustín Luego Capilla

What makes the skeleton so remarkable, and the reason why Velasco acquired it for the museum, is its size: when Capilla died at the tragically young age of 26, he stood 2.35 meters (~8 feet, 3 inches) tall. Known as the "Gigante Extremeño," or "Giant of Extramadura," Capilla earned a living as part of a circus act and, when traveling through or near Madrid in 1875, sought medical attention from Velasco. By that time he was very ill, and on December 31st he died. His mother, Josefa, apparently in gratitude for Velasco's medical care, donated her son's body to the museum for anatomical study.

Capilla's extreme stature is likely explained by pituitary gigantism, a condition caused by the excessive secretion of growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor 1. The disproportionately large mandible, abnormal bone growth around the knee joints, and enlarged hands are all symptoms of acromegaly, which is commonly associated with pituitary pathologies. Capilla is one of only a handful of acromegalic skeletons on display in western museums. Velasco also created a full body cast of Capilla's corpse before it was skeletonized (this is also on display in the museum).

Pelvic girdle of Augustín Luego Capilla showing pathological proximal
femora (note anterio-posteriorally compressed femoral heads) and acetabula.

While the skeletal material is very interesting from a paleopathological perspective, some point out, correctly I believe, how tragic Capilla's life and afterlife was and is. Being displayed today as a museum oddity, Capilla's body, one can argue, has no more dignity now than Capilla himself had as a spectacle for gawking circus-goers when he was alive. While Capilla's body was donated, this was not the case for other acromegalic skeletons, many of which were essentially stolen to be included in medical collections.

The room also houses some objects that encapsulate the rather sordid history of biological anthropology, especially its obsession with racial typology.

Die Proportionslehre der Menschlichen Gestalt,
Carl Gustav Carus, 1854. 

References:

Giménez-Roldán, S (2019). The Giant of Extramadura: acromegalic gigantism in the 19th century. Neurosciences and History 6: 38-52.