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... 

Society for American Archaeology meetings 2017

This year's Society for American Archaeology meetings were held in Vancouver, British Columbia from March 29th to April 2nd. I flew into town on Thursday night (the 30th) and had to run out on Saturday night. It was a whirlwind trip for me, as I presented a paper, co-chaired a special session, and supervised two undergraduate researchers who also presented at the meetings. As always, there was too much going on to see everything that was of interest, but I'll present my highlights:

• Way back in June 2016 I was invited by Karen Ruebens to contribute a paper to a symposium entitled "Connecting Middle Paleolithic Datasets: the Interplay of Zooarchaeological and Lithic Data for Unraveling Neanderthal Behavior," which was co-organized by Geoff Smith, Theresa Steele, and Tamara Dogandzic. Around that time I was reading an interesting paper by Marie-Cécile Soulier and Eugène Morin about the use of cutmark orientation to reconstruct planning depth in the Paleolithic, and this sparked my interest because, in 2014, we published a paper suggesting that cutmark orientation might be used to identify the skill level of prehistoric butchers. So, I thought the symposium would be a great venue to explore this issue further and I happily agreed to participate. The paper I presented with my colleagues Chris Nicholson, Kevin Covell, Robert Sanderford, Kristen Welch, and Metin Eren "Cutmarks, Lithics, and the Identification of Skill and Tool Utility in Experimental and Middle Paleolithic Contexts," turned out to be slightly different than what I had originally submitted in our abstract (a not unusual situation given that abstracts are due a full seven months, yes SEVEN MONTHS, before the meetings), but our major findings were (1) that inexperienced butchers tend to create more cutmarks and more variation in cutmark orientation than do more experienced butchers and (2) that Levallois flakes (which were produced by Metin, who is a world-class knapper and lithic technologist) are ideally suited to butchery because of their versatility. 

The preparation of cores for the removal of Levallois flakes.
From Eren and Lycett (2012: Figure 1).

While both conclusions are interesting, the latter was of particular note in the context of the symposium, since the creation of Levallois flakes is a labor intensive, not to mention difficult to learn, process (see figure above). Our results suggest that Levallois flakes' utility and durability as butchery implements may partially offset the energy expended to create them. In other words, it might make sense to spend an hour or two preparing cores (and wasting a lot of raw material in the process) if it results in the production of three or four Levallois flakes that can butcher a couple of carcasses without being replaced. I slipped out briefly after our talk to visit the poster session down the hall since my student, Liat Lebovich, was presenting on some landscape taphonomy we've conducted on the savanna just north of Olduvai Gorge, but returned for the symposium's first question break and the remainder of the session. Several questions were thrown my way, relating mainly to the application of our cutmark data to archaeofaunal assemblages (we have not yet taken that step). One interesting query, I believe from Eugène Morin, involved cutmark frequencies: we found that novice butchers produce more cutmarks within each "cluster" (defined by us as a group of cutmarks separated from other groups of cutmarks by at least one centimeter) than do experienced butchers. He asked if I thought that novice butchers would create more, or fewer, cutmark clusters. After thinking about it for second, I responded that while novice butchers create more cutmarks per cluster, they probably produce fewer clusters since the marks they create tend to be scattered across relatively expansive portions of the bone surface rather than the few discrete clusters (that make anatomical sense) created by more experienced butchers. I hadn't thought to examine this variable, and I certainly will do so as we move forward with our study. The rest of the papers were interesting, and the integration of faunal and lithic data is obviously critical to understanding Neandertal lifeways. Very honored to have been invited to participate in the symposium.


• On Saturday morning, I co-chaired a session with my friends and colleagues Tori Johnson and Ryan Byerly entitled "Ecological Perspectives on Hominin Landuse Use during the Early Stone Age of Africa." Included in the session were papers presented by Julio Mercader, Cynthia Fadem, David Braun, Briana Pobiner, and another of my students, Cory Henderson. The session was well-attended (it wasn't a massive room, but most of the seats we did have, perhaps 75 or so, were full). As I stated in my short introductory remarks, the impetus for the symposium stemmed from Rick Potts's "Variables Versus Models of Early Pleistocene Hominid Land Use" manuscript published in Journal of Human Evolution in 1994. In that paper, Potts argued (correctly, I believe) that paleoanthropologists should resist the urge to force early Pleistocene archaeological sites into specific "types," or, using Potts's terminology, models (e.g., Home Base vs. Refuge vs. Central Place). A more productive approach involves the identification of the ecological variables (e.g., the distribution of raw material outcrops, plant and animal foods, competitors, etc.) that influenced where and when early hominins accumulated stones and bones on the landscape. I also made it clear that our purpose in convening the symposium was not to chastise paleoanthropologists for not taking this approach--it is, in fact, relatively common among researchers investigating Early Stone Age archaeology--but, rather, to highlight the latest work being done from this perspective. UNCG undergrad (and recently accepted graduate student to the biology program at Penn State) Cory Henderson summarized the analyses we've been conducting on raw material outcrops in the Olduvai Basin over the past couple of years. Quartzite dominants a majority of the Bed I and Bed II sites at Olduvai, and it has always been assumed that the source of this raw material is Naibor Soit, a set of three closely spaced inselbergs just north of the gorge.

View looking south at one of the inselbergs (foreground) that makes up the
Naibor Soit quartzite outcrop. Photo by C.P. Egeland.

This is not an unreasonable assumption: Naibor Soit is very close to most of the archaeological sites and would certainly have been a conspicuous feature on the landscape, just as it is today. However, Naibor Soit may not have been continuously accessible, especially when a fully transgressed lake Olduvai likely transformed the inselbergs into islands. There are at least two additional sources of quartzite in the basin, Shifting Sand and Naisiusiu Hill, and we wanted to know if hominins were traveling to other parts of the basin to access this type of toolstone. This is not a straightforward exercise, though, because the quartzite from all the sources is macroscopically very similar. We decided to use X-ray fluorescence to determine if the outcrops could be distinguished based on their elemental composition. It turns out that there is considerable overlap, but samples of known origin can be correctly classified with between 36% and 76% accuracy, which is better than random chance (which would be 33%). When we threw some archaeological artifacts from Bed I into the analysis, most (64%) were inferred to have derived from Naibor Soit. However, a couple were a better match for one of the other quartzite outcrops. So, while hominins appear to have used Naibor Soit a majority of the time, they also visited other parts of the basin to acquire quartzite (from Shifting Sand, Naisiusiu or, perhaps, other sources that are currently buried or otherwise unobservable). The ability to tie artifacts to individual outcrops could potentially reveal very nuanced patterns of movement, which is required to rigorously test various models of hominin land-use at Olduvai. The most interesting paper, at least for me, was presented by Dave Braun on behalf of his co-authors Jonathan Reeves and Matthew Douglass and entitled "Behavioral Inferences from Early Stone Age Sites: A View from the Koobi Fora Formation." Every so often archaeologists, particularly those working in the Paleolithic, need to be reminded of the importance of scale: that is, the scale at which we would like to reconstruct behavior and ecological affordances (months, years or, ideally, days) and the scale at which our proxies of these variables actually permit (months, years, decades, and millennia--rarely, if ever, days). Dave provided exactly that reminder within the context of their on-going work at Koobi Fora, Kenya. They point out that archaeologists continue (wishfully, perhaps?) to apply behavioral models suited for temporal scales that are in most cases simply not reflected in the scatters of bones and stones that litter early Pleistocene paleolandscapes. Cynthia presented the latest geoarchaeological data from our ongoing excavations at DK East (Bed I) and BK East (Bed II). Perhaps most important is her identification of several unnamed tuffs within the DK East sequence. Dating these sediments should allow us to increase greatly the chronological precision in the area and, thus, derive narrower age ranges for the numerous fossiliferous deposits and more accurate estimates of sedimentation rates.    

• The session I most enjoyed, and learned the most from, was chaired by Erick Robinson, Robert Kelly, and Nicolas Naudinot and was organized around "The Future of 'Big Data' in Archaeology." An archaeologist's idea of big data (thousands to hundreds of thousands of records) differs substantially from what is typical in computer science (millions and millions of records), but increased computing power and more sophisticated statistical techniques now permit the aggregation and analysis of huge archaeological databases. I recently received a Digital Partners Grant from the UNCG libraries to collaborate on a database for Paleolithic sites, so I was particularly interested to hear about the latest from folks that have been thinking deeply about data and databases. There are a number of open-access databases, some of which I am familiar with and others with which which I am not, including:
• Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD): a global compilation of 14C dates.
• Ancient Cacao Map: an interactive database for samples of ancient cacao in the Americas.
• ARIADNE: this is a database of archaeological databases spanning many periods and regions.
• The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA): a repository of artifact distribution maps and images. 
• The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA): this site creates interoperability among archaeological site databases in North America. A good friend with whom I attended graduate school, Josh Wells, is one of the senior investigators on this project.  


Some of the major lessons that I drew from this symposium are:
• The longevity of databases is a real issue, since the people who run them retire and the funding that supports them expires.
• There was a lot of discussion about 14C databases. Many people are using them to model demography, for example (the basic idea: more 14C dates for a particular time period = higher population sizes), but the quality of dates remains very difficult to assess. This same issue of data quality applies to many large databases.

• I recently developed an interest in the use of social network analysis in archaeology. In fact, I've begun a collaboration with a colleague of mine at UNCG, Jing Deng, who is a computer scientist that specializes in online networks. We've joined forces to use his technical know-how and my background in archaeology to apply network analysis to the Paleolithic. Our Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creativity Office here at UNCG just funded a proposal we put together to build a social network database for the Magdalenian of western Europe with the aid of Amanda Chase (an anthropology major) and Nathaniel Arnold (a computer science major). The Magdalenian is an ideal test case since there are hundreds of well-dated sites with thousands of artifacts suited to the construction of social networks: portable art. The idea is that stylistic similarities reflect some sort of shared social identity, so if we can identify sites with high frequencies of shared artifacts with shared stylistic variants, we may be able to reconstruct social networks. Jing is adept at using social network software to identify important nodes and relationships between nodes. I do not know much about Paleolithic art and how it is categorized, so I sat in on a "Not Just Good to See: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art" session. While the focus was on rock, and not portable, art, I gained some perspective on how we might organize art into an analysis. Elizabeth Culley, who is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, outlined an ontology of parietal art from France between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago. I listened closely as she discussed her use of the number of distinct scenes, the number of narrative scenes, the theme of the scenes (e.g., fighting animals), and the number of animals as important features that distinguish various sites. The other paper I was able to listen to, from Melanie Chang of Portland State University and April Nowell of the University of Victoria, discussed the (mis)use of gender binaries in interpretations of Paleolithic art. They show convincingly that many images that are traditionally identified as either male or female are, in fact, quite ambiguous when it comes to biological sex. Much of this "forcing" of images into male or female reflects modern western gender biases. This was pertinent to me, too, because I need to be careful about past interpretations of some of these images, since biological sex would be an important trait to use in the classification of images for social network analysis. The last presentation that I visited related to social network analysis was a poster by William Ridge (University of Illinois at Chicago) on social networks in the Early Bronze Age of the Aegean. What I thought was interesting was his use of geographic distance between sites ("nodes" in social network terminology) as the null hypothesis for further analysis. In other words, all else being equal, one would expect sites that are closer to each other in an absolute geographic sense to have stronger social ties than sites further apart. If the network analysis does not show strong ties between closely spaced sites, then other hypotheses (trade routes, etc.) can be explored. I will certainly use this approach with our own work in the Magdalenian.  

Well, that's it from my notes, great meeting!

Paleoanthropology Society meetings 2016

I recently returned from Atlanta, which hosted the 2016 meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society. As usual, there were some really interesting talks, one of which (I hope) was a presentation I gave on behalf of my colleagues with some data we collected on stone raw materials in the Olduvai Basin. Here are my favorite talks as recorded in my notes:

• The meeting's first presentation was by Catalina Villamil, a graduate student at NYU, who examined variability in the orientation of the foramen magnum across several groups of primates and marsupials. Basically, her analyses found that among primates a more anteriorly oriented foramen magnum tends to be associated with orthograde postures (that is, postures that involve a vertically oriented trunk) rather than bipedal locomotion. This is important since, as she and others point out, paleoanthropologists often look for an anteriorly oriented foramen magnum to identify bipedalism and, thus, a fossil's identification as a hominin. It appears, then, that this is not necessarily a very good indicator. This calls into question inferences for bipedal locomotion for fossils like Sahelanthropus, whose purported hominin status rests partly on foramen magnum location.
• Michael Pante and his colleagues presented data from high-resolution 3D scans of experimentally produced stone tool cutmarks, carnivore tooth marks, and crocodile tooth marks. This is really important, as there has been a good deal of disagreement over the identification of surface modifications on fossil bones, largely because of a lack of consistency and precision among analysts in the definition of features used to differentiate marks created by various agents. Intriguingly, they suggest that some ancient marks that are thought to have been created by stone knives show similarities with crocodile marks. Theoretically, one could scan an unknown mark, compare it to the 3D structure of marks of known origin, and determine the "fit" of the two in order to make a probabilistic assessment. The only drawback, as Pante stated, is the time it takes to adequately scan the marks (24 hours in some cases). So, this method cannot yet be applied to whole assemblages. Regardless, I am in total agreement that this is the direction bone surface modification studies should be going and, at the very least, we should subject questionable marks (or extremely important ones−Dikika anyone?) to this sort of analysis. In a similar vein, J.A. Harris et al. reported on a Bayesian approach to identifying surface marks, which also produces a probability that a mark belongs in a specific category.
• Several talks touched on stone tool production and/or use among modern humans and chimpanzees and their implications for understanding Paleolithic technologies. Susanna Carvalho summarized her team's work in Guinea on wild chimpanzee stone tool use. She reported, really interestingly, that young chimps start to learn nut-cracking by observing close kin (this makes sense as these are the individuals with whom they grow up), while older chimps slowly shift their observations to more skilled individuals. She also provided what I thought was a cool quote: [Chimpanzee] "tools are not modified prior to use, but by use." David Braun piggybacked nicely on this talk when he reported some fun experiments conducted with these same chimps. Some background: Dave has previously demonstrated that hominins at the ca. two-million-year-old site of Kanjera South (Kenya) were pretty "choosey" when it came to the types of rocks they used for stone tools. Specifically, it appears as if these hominins intentionally selected rocks for their durability (i.e., their ability to hold a sharp edge over time). Dietz Stout has documented a similar level of selectivity (in this case, for stone with little or no impurities) at the 2.6-million-year-old site of Gona (Ethiopia). While this implied some level of cognitive sophistication, Dave related to us that he was often asked how these hominins could have possibly known about such physical properties of stone; where they, in fact, the first engineers? To explore this further, he designed an elegant experiment in which he transported the same rock types being used by the Kanjera hominins a few thousand kilometers west for use by the chimps living at Carvalho et al.'s open-air laboratory in Guinea. They laid the stones on the ground and recorded the frequency with which they were chosen by the chimps for nut-cracking. They found that the chimps selected harder rocks for hammers (not too surprising) and a soft, chalk-like rock for anvils. This latter observation was mystifying at first−after all, wouldn't you want a hard rock on the bottom, too?−until it was realized that successive nut-cracking events with these more malleable stones eventually resulted in the production of a deep impression that prevented the nut from slipping out from under the hammer upon impact. Pretty cool. They also witnessed how juveniles tended to "recycle" tool sets from older, more experienced individuals (that is, they passively took control of hammers and anvils after they were abandoned by those who knew what they were doing), which essentially provided a mechanism for how knowledge of raw material characteristics could be transmitted within a group. The two major take-home messages here were: (1) the properties that we, as modern humans, think are relevant when selecting a rock for use as a potential tool are different than those identified by chimps (and presumably, ancient hominins), and (2) an awareness of raw material characteristics (hardness, durability, what have you) does not necessarily require extensive knowledge of stone engineering and/or geology, and this information can be transferred in an entirely passive manner. This runs counter to interpretations that consider selectivity and multi-stage reduction sequences among Oldowan hominins as evidence for sophisticated cognition and/or complex modes of learning (however, see here for an example of recent work indicating that active teaching was probably not necessary to transmit knapping skills). The last lithic paper I'll mention came from Nada Khreisheh, who reported that an individual's skill with handaxe production correlated best with psychometric tests that involve planning.
• David Patterson, a graduate student at George Washington University and the person largely responsible for manning the laptop to ensure that everyone's PowerPoints loaded properly, produced some fascinating data on stable isotopes across the ancient landscapes of Koobi Fora (Kenya) between 2 and 1.4 million years ago. Tons of data here, but what I found to be most interesting was the observation that one of the only taxa in the Turkana Basin with a pattern of C₄ enrichment was fossils of the genus Homo, which suggests that something special was going on with this bipedal ape over this time span: more C₄ plants, or the consumption of C₄-eating animals? This theme also appeared in a paper from Kay Behrensmeyer et al. who, in their analysis of the paleoecology and paleogeography of a slice within Koobi Fora's Okote Member (ca. 1.51-1.53 million years ago), found that hominins were so-called "transient" species−that is, they appear and then disappear within the sedimentary sequence. This could indicate that they utilized a greater diversity of habitats than other animals.
• The last talk before lunch on the first day was given by Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who reported on a new species of australopithecine, Australopithecus deyiremeda and its implications for diversity within the hominin family tree during the Middle Pliocene. Full disclosure here: even though this species was announced over a year ago, I had never heard of it. This just goes to show how difficult it is to keep up with the literature with a heavy teaching load and (most importantly) a toddler. In fact, I have so little time to go through the newest primary literature that I depend on conferences like this and Texas A&M's fantastic Anthropology in the News feed for the latest in paleoanthropology. Anyway, Haile-Selassie suggests that the hominin phylogeny may be as diverse prior to three million years ago as it appears to have been after three million years ago.   
• Behrensmeyer's presentation also criticized the use of the term "mosaic" in paleoecological reconstructions, mainly because it is so imprecise. Many of the reconstructions, including those from Amy Rector and colleagues for Cooper's D and Kay Reed et al. for the lower Awash valley, tend to converge on some sort of "mixed" habitat (usually between forest and bushland, or bushland and grassland). In these cases, though, the imprecision reflects the type of data (in this case, mammal fossil assemblages).
• Darryl de Ruiter presented on the new Homo naledi assemblage on behalf of the Rising Star team. As in their recent publications, de Ruiter maintains that the most likely explanation is that the bodies were deposited intentionally by members of the group using the cave system as a grave site of some sort. John Shea suggested that the assemblage could represent young, adventurous males that became stuck within the depths of the cave. An interesting hypothesis, although de Ruiter pointed out that it appears as if the assemblage includes individuals of both sexes and all ages. No news on the age of the assemblage...this is going to be very intriguing for some time.
• Because of my work in Armenia, my ears perked up during Simonyan et al.'s presentation (given by Miriam Belmaker) on test excavations in southern Armenia. They reported the recovery of a large assemblage of obsidian artifacts that show techno-typological affinities to the late Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Obsidan hydration dates (which, as Belmaker acknowledged, can be pretty temperamental) indicate at least two separate occupations, one at ~120,000 and the other >200,000 years ago. I look forward to hearing more about this as research progresses.   
• My team, including my friends and colleagues Cynthia Fadem, Ryan Byerly, and Audax Mabulla and UNCG undergraduate researcher Curran Fitzgerald, presented on our recent work with lithic raw materials in the Olduvai Basin. Building on the work of folks like Dave Braun, we reported on data we collected with a Proceq Schmidt Rock Hammer, which, by measuring rock hardness, provides an objective and quantitative proxy for raw material "quality." These sorts of data are critical if we want to start understanding why hominins chose the rocks they did for tool manufacture. We also collected a ton of additional samples to determine if the handful of macroscopically similar, but spatially discrete, quartzite outcrops in the basin could be distinguished based on their elemental composition. Encouragingly, this does appear to be the case, which means that determining the source of the quartzite artifacts from the Olduvai archaeological sites is a real possibility.    
• The most thought-provoking paper was given by Stanley Ambrose and his colleague Jibril Hibro. They argued that Neandertal-modern human admixture should not yet be viewed as a given. The weakest link in these studies is that African genetic diversity was woefully underrepresented, which means that genetic variants identified as deriving from Neandertals (or other archaic populations) could, in fact, have already been present (but unsampled) among African populations. So, the question that has not yet been adequately addressed is, as their paper's title suggests, Is Neandertal-human genetic admixture in Eurasians actually African ancestry? This paper certainly reminded me to be cautious in our interpretation of the genetic data.
• The last paper I'll comment on was the very last of the conference, given by Randolf Donahue and colleagues. They introduced Fossilfinder.org, which allows anyone to examine high resolution photos taken by drones around Lake Turkana for fossils and other items of paleoanthropological interest. This forms part of the "Citizen Science" movement, which attempts to harness the public to essentially crowd source the collection of data. I have looked at some of the photos myself and, even at relatively high resolution, it is not easy to pick out materials. Nevertheless, I am anxious to see how this project progresses...

Lots of other great papers, just not enough energy to write about them all. First trip to Atlanta, too...seems like it has a lot going for it.

Giving a talk at the Virginia Museum of Natural History

I am travelling to Martinsville, VA, tomorrow to deliver a talk at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. I was contacted a few months ago by the museum's executive director, Dr. Joe Keiper, to participate in their 2nd Thursday Science Talks program. This year's theme is "From Cosmology to Conservation: Your World and Your Place in It." In the spirit of that theme, I will be discussing what I think Neandertals can teach us about the concept of "Race" among modern humans. Here are the talk's particulars:

A Neandertal's Perspective on the Existence of "Races" Among Modern Humans

For many years, anthropologists have grappled with the central paradox of "Race." On the one hand, the nature of human variation seriously undermines the biological reality of racial categories. On the other hand, it is evident that one's race, as a marker of status, identity, or heritage, is real and, thus, really matters. In this presentation, we will step back nearly 35,000 years, when the last Neandertals roamed Ice Age Eurasia, to explore what these extinct humans can teach us about race and, ultimately, what it means to be human in today's world.

Looking forward to it! 

Osteology in the Carolinas 2

Here's another post from my backlog. In February of 2014, I attended the first Osteology in the Carolinas meeting. This year's event was held on February 7, 2015, hosted by UNCG, and organized by our own Bob Anemone. Twelve papers were given, and there were around 20-30 attendees, some from as far away as Virginia and South Carolina. Another set of really interesting papers, one of which was given by a UNCG anthropology undergraduate, Alexa Uberseder (great job, Alexa!) on our work at Olduvai Gorge this past summer. Some snippets from my notes:

• Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) focused on re-imagining the idea of social collapse, a theme made very famous by Jared Diamond's 2005 book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." In that book, he cites examples of past societies that apparently outstripped their resources and thus collapsed. Gwen made the point that "collapse" may not be the best word, as a detailed examination of the archaeological record indicates that when societies undergo dramatic changes, significant reorganization usually occurs, but the cultural framework remains intact. In fact, what often happens, as her work among South Asian prehistoric sites demonstrates, is that people decide to either remain in cities or move to more rural settings. The latter typically results in a signature that can be misunderstood as a total collapse of society.  
• Megan Perry (East Carolina), who spoke at least year's meeting, and one of her graduate students, Kathryn Parker, both gave talks on attempts to identify the origin of people living in Byzantine and early Islamic times in the Middle East. By assessing the isotopic signatures in food items or geological formations on the landscape, it is possible to determine where people did most of their eating and to track trade routes.
• David Hines (University of Florida and Regime Crimes Liaison Office Mass Graves Investigation Team) summarized some recent work on extracting DNA from skeletons in mass graves in associated with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Interestingly, they found that some bones are better for producing DNA profiles than others (as it turns out, the pelvis and femur work best).
• The last talk for which I took detailed notes was by Ashley Gosselin-Ildari (Duke University), who spoke about the use of clickers in large, introductory biological anthropology courses to encourage active learning. This was interesting, and timely, since I started using an on-line Student Response System (SRS) called Socrative to achieve the same goal. I am looking forward to hearing the student reaction at the end of the semester.

Overall, another enjoyable get-together...

Back from DC

As I said earlier, I was in Washington, D.C. last Wednesday and Thursday. I drove in a few hours before my talk was scheduled on Wednesday and decided, after checking in to my hotel (the 100-year-old Hotel Harrington, highly recommended for its location), to visit the National Archives. I was excited for two reasons. First, I really enjoy history, and second, I am a huge fan of the movie National Treasure, parts of which are shot (or at least are supposed to take place) in the archives. It was amazing. I was able to see the original Declaration of Independence (which is much, much more faded than the movie makes it out to be), Constitution, and Bill of Rights. They also have a copy of Magna Carta that dates to 1297 (the reign of King Edward I, who confirmed the rights laid out in the original 1215 version). No photos inside, unfortunately, but I did get this one from the outside:

National Archives from Pennsylvania Avenue. The temporary exhibit was

"Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History." 

Wednesday afternoon I spoke to the Anthropology Department for the Smithsonian's Paleoanthropology Seminar on our recent work at Olduvai Gorge. I gave the talk a cutsey title, "New Perspectives on Old Bones and Stones at Olduvai Gorge." That night I was treated to an excellent meal and great conversation by my hosts.

Thursday morning I was up early so I could visit the Woodrow Wilson House, which is a Georgian Revival on S Street SW where the Wilsons lived together from 1921, when the president completed his second term, until the president's death in 1924. His second wife, Edith, continued to inhabit the home until her own death in 1961. She graciously left the house and all its furnishings to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is beautiful, and the folks who run the house provided a wonderful tour (thanks Fay!) with a lot of interesting tidbits (they have Woodrow Wilson's famous fur coat, for example, which is made of kangaroo and wombat, and the huge tapestry given to Woodrow by the government of France apparently had a few too many exposed breasts and butts for Edith's liking). I was able to get some nice photos of the home:

A painting of an Armenian girl, done by her uncle, that hangs in the Wilson
sitting room. It was given to Woodrow Wilson in recognition of his service 
to the Armenian people.

The Wilson library. If you look just above the top row of books on the left, you
will see a rolled up screen, which the Wilsons would drop in order to watch 
movies.

Later that day, I met Briana at the museum to participate in an informal chat with Smithsonian volunteers about Neandertals. It turns out that I was on site for a little get together celebrating the five-year anniversary of the opening of the Smithsonian's David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins. Rick Potts, who was the driving force behind the exhibit, talked a bit about the trials and tribulations associated with getting everything up and running (as you can imagine, it was a ton of work). Check out the awesome cake (those familiar with the hominin fossil record will notice the dental abscess, which was fashioned to resemble the Broken Hill, or Kabwe, specimen from Zambia):

Cake commemorating the five year anniversary of the Hall of Human Origins
at the Smithsonian.

After we had nibbled on cake, I sat down with several of the Hall's volunteers to talk about some of our work in Denmark and Armenia on Neandertals. They were all extremely well informed on the latest information, particularly the paleogenetics, and it was a lot of fun discussing things with them.

Giving a talk at the Smithsonian

I am off for our nation's capital tomorrow morning to give a talk for the Smithsonian Paleoanthropology Seminar. I'm very happy to be reciprocating the visit of my friend and colleague, Dr. Briana Pobiner, who came down to North Carolina last fall to talk about her outreach work. I'll be discussing some of the recent goings on at Olduvai Gorge, and then on Thursday I'll be sitting down with some folks to talk about research we conducted some time ago on the possibility of a Neandertal occupation of southern Scandinavia. Looking forward to it!