Tag Archives: The Other Three Fields

Kennewick Skullduggery

Perhaps it is because most of my physical anthropologist friends spend their time looking at DNA rather than old bones, I’m never too enthusiastic about bone studies. Sure, they are important, especially when entirely new species are discovered, or people are discovered in a location they weren’t expected at a particular time, but the problem is that there are so few bones out there that it is hard to make much of a few isolated data points.

So I enjoyed this great post by John Hawks, debunking all hype surrounding the recent victory of scientists in the Kennewick Man case. As he points out, scientists are unlikely to learn much new after examining the 9,000-year-old skeleton. Why? Because scientists have already analyzed the skeleton!

Yes, it’s true. The plaintiffs in the case have assembled at last to study the remains, and are putting on a public show of it. But almost all of what they are going to do has already been done. And most of the new analyses they intend could be accomplished with data that are already published.

The National Park Service maintains a website related to the Kennewick case. Included on the site are detailed reports of the analyses that were carried out on the specimen during the preparation for the court proceedings.

Interesting … as part of the preparation for a court proceeding over whether or not scientists would have the right to conduct scientific investigations on the skeleton, scientists conducted investigations on the skeleton. No wonder Native American’s don’t trust the government!

The National Park Service website is truly an interesting find. It includes, for instance, this report by Eugene S. Hunn, a student of Berlin and Kay, on the “linguistic evidence that Sahaptin-speakers were intimately familiar with the flora and fauna characteristic of the central Columbia Plateau habitat surrounding the Kennewick Man site.”

Here is some more background on the controversy. And here is a post explaining what is involved in analyzing the remains.

(John Hawks post found via Pharyngula.)

LA Times Takes On Intelligent Design

David Barash, a psychologist at U of Washington, poses the fundamental question posed by Intelligent Design theories: if the universe is so well-designed, why are human bodies such a mess? We have bad backs, weak knees, prostates that have older men leaning against a wall for half an hour trying to take a leak, and birth canals routed through skeletal structures barely (and often not even barely) wide enough to fit a baby through. In his words:

…these and other incongruities testify to the contingent, unplanned, entirely natural nature of natural selection. We are profoundly imperfect, cobbled together rather then designed. And in these imperfections reside some of the best arguments for our equally profound natural-ness.

Suspirium Puellarum Celadus Thraex

I never studied Latin, but the title supposedly translates as “Celadus the Thracier makes the girls moan!” and was discovered, along with much other well preserved ancient graffiti, in Pompeii.

From the archaeology blog A Visible City, we learn that the archaeology of graffiti has come a long way from copying boastful scribblings on ancient ruins. A recent NY Times article discusses the web site Graffiti Archaeology, which won a Webby award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The site allows you to explore how a single surface changes over time as old graffiti is covered over by the new.

In effect, Mr. Curtis has made antigraffiti. He uncovers the layers that each successive graffiti artist has covered up..

The Times article criticizes the site for failing to include some of the photographic context necessary for a more academic endeavor. But even though it won the Webby in the “art” category, I difer to Alexandra’s expertise when she says that “it is fair to call it archaeology.”

There is also a Graffiti Archaeology Flickr pool.

Finally, via Boing Boing, I discovered some early 18th century English graffiti, including this one:

No Hero looks so fierce in Fight,
As does the Man who strains to sh-te.

Holding the Chicken

Over the weekend I’ve been reading “Aping Language”:http://www.citeulike.org/user/rex/article/232188, Joel Wallman’s scrupulous dissection of claims that apes can learn language. It is well-written and brief (the main body of the text is just about 150 pages). In fact I would even go so far as to say it was a great read, except that Wallman’s analysis of the data is too close for someone like me, a sociocultural anthropologist who just wants the big picture and isn’t too interested in nitty-gritty on a lazy saturday afternoon. Indeed, Wallman seems at times to be actively supressing a talent for academic bloodsport which, while discrediting his books objectivity, would make it much more entertaining. Those of us just along for the ride have to content ourselves with zingers like this:

Partisans of the apes have protested that detractors employ rubber rulers and moving targets in comparing apes and children. The ape researchers, on the other hand, could be described as having fixated on certain of these criteria, generally the most mechanical and readily quantified, and then having either expressly trained them or searched them out in their data. This, in itself, is not an objectionable practice. One is put in mind, however, of Diogenes, the Athenian cynic who, in response to Plato’s definition of man as “a featherless biped,” produced a plucked chicken. In both cases, the claimed identity may be valid on the narrow grounds used, but there is still a profound difference between the alleged equivalent and the genuine article. The difference between the cases — aside from the fact that, as I have argued, the apes are _not_ equivalent to children on the various indices used in the literature — is that Diogenes knew he was holding a chicken.

From now on I’m going to incorporate the phrase “that guy’s holding a chicken (and he doesn’t even know it)” into my academic discourse whenever possible.

Funny, you don’t look Jewish

This is a followup to a previous post by Rex about an article which claimed that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically smarter. The folks at Gene Expression have had a few posts on the subject, mostly focusing on the ways in which the paper overlooks the historical importance of Sephardic Jews, and the general importance of “cultural” factors. They also reproduced an interesting paper by Howard Metzenberg. He argues that “above average Jewish intelligence can be traced to the origins of rabbinical Judaism itself around the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.” I would re-write that to say “the above-average engagement in academic pursuits” so as to avoid the tricky “intelligence” word, which Rex so rightly picks on in his post. (And which Metzenberg tactfully avoids discussing.)

Nonetheless, the article is full of interesting insights. For instance, I never thought of Judaism as an proselytizing religion, but that’s what it was in the first and second centuries:

In the ancient world of Greece and Rome, Judaism was a proselytizing religion and took in many converts. It has been estimated that in the 1st and 2nd centuries, about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, and as many as 25% in the Greek speaking cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. It was for this largely Greek speaking population that the Septuagint (a Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures) was produced. And it was amongst this Greek speaking Jewish population that Paul of Tarsus traveled, proselytizing Christianity.

He also argues that it is impossible to distinguish Ashkenazis as a distinct genetic group within the Jewish population:

One of the reasons that the authors could find no evidence of a population bottleneck in the Ashkenazi Jewish population is that the Ashkenazi population has never been as distinct or isolated as they imagine. The original Ashkenazi population probably descends from Italian Jews who migrated north in the early Middle Ages. Genetic testing of Y-Chromosome phenotypes supports the theory that Ashkenzi Jewish males are closely related to the remnant community of Romaniote Jews, who by tradition are the descendants of Judeans brought to Italy and Greece as captives after the many religious wars and rebellions in the Middle East. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews of Europe were engaged in trade with the Middle East, and it was through those trade routes that Jewish scholarship from the Middle East entered Europe. Later on, there was considerable gene flow from Sephardic populations escaping the Inquisition into the Ashkenazi community, and this is reflected in language and surnames.

Personally I still prefer the theory that Ashkenazis are primarily Central Asian in origin…

It’s All in His Head

Anthropologist Barbara King takes on Dean Hamer’s The God Gene at Bookslut. Hamer’s basic hypothesis is that there’s a gene that controls the chemical regulators in our brain and that people with one variant of this gene are more open to mystical experiences and other forms of “self-transcendence”. I had the unenviable position of defining the god gene for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Anthropology, in which I attempted to maintain some degree of balancedness, but if I hadn’t felt obligated to give Hamer a fair hearing, I might well have written along the lines King does:

Let’s deal with the title right away. Pretty unequivocal, no? The God Gene! Already on page 8, however, Hamer inserts a disclaimer: “There are probably many different genes involved, rather than just one. And environmental influences are just as important as genetics.” Hamer is nothing if not savvy: this measured estimation is too tepid by half for marketing a book (or making Time’s cover)….

Science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer is unsatisfied with Hamer’s page 8 retreat. He suggests a title that more accurately reflects the book’s contents: A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.

Zimmer’s title pretty much sums up my definition, though I might have added “…on Psychological Questionnaires Administered Only to Americans and Some Aussies and Designed to…” .

Fantastic Archaeology

Ahem. It isn’t my intention to dwell on my personal history here on Savage Minds. However, suffice to say that most of my knowledge of the Other Three Fields comes mostly from dating people from them. I appear to have a particular weakness for archaeologists from New England. I mention this just to say that it was from one such that I learned of the true value and insight of “Bettina Arnold’s”:http://www.uwm.edu/~barnold/thome.html work (“CV”:http://www.uwm.edu/~barnold/resume.html), and I’m glad that del.icio.us led me recently to her homepage. While only her intro class is entitled “Fantastic Archaeology”:http://www.uwm.edu/~barnold/193.html I have no doubt that her other courses, such as those on “The Celtic World”:http://www.uwm.edu/~barnold/381_02.html or “Who Owns the Past”:http://www.uwm.edu/~barnold/641.html are equally fantastic. I mean, anyone who has both Peter Wells and K.C. Chang on their committee has basically got to be a good person, right?