Kozlowski (2001) Origin and Evolution of Blade Technologies...

[Daryl Habel]

 
As you say, though, some of what Vishnyatsky asserts is open to debate - specifically "earliest UP strictly coincides with the distribution of "classic" neanderthals". I am not sure  this is strictly true - after all, the mousterian persisted in southern Spain to maybe 30,000kya, fully 15,000 years after the earliest UP in Europe.
Also, was there really nothing in Australia that was ever equivalent to the UP elsewhere? I do not know enough of Australia to be sure about this, so perhaps someone on the list could clarify.

Cheers
Colin

Hi Colin,

Yes, I agree that your quote from Vishnyatsky is poorly worded at least as I understand things.  But I think his point is not so much that the distribution of early UP and 'classic' Neanderthals strictly coincides WITH, but rather that whenever and wherever it appears, the early UP always falls WITHIN the distribution of the 'classic' Neanderthals.

And is never found outside that geographic range of 'classic' N's (well, maybe Siberia problematic N's).  Re late persistence in southern Iberia, there is late Mousterian (40-30 ka) scattered throughout
Europe (and at Okladnikov Cave, Siberia), found here and there long after early UP industries first appear in a region.

Apparently there is no Australian equivalant for the European MP/UP lithic technology.  The best I have off my shelf is Josephine Flood "Archaeology of the Dreamtime" (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1983,1988), and it says the toolkit found in the Willandra Lakes, specifically with the Mungo cremation site, has been described as 'the Australian core tool and scraper tradition' and that this term has now been adopted Australia-wide for the early Australian stone industry (Flood 1988:50).  That's surely not to say that the early Australians were intellectually inferior - the logistics required for crossing the open-sea  60-50 kya colonization prove otherwise. It just seems that the Australians adapted their tools to a different ecology.

Cheers,
Dar

 

[colin]

Hi Dar,
Your clarification of Vishynatsky makes sense - perhaps a little of his original meaning had been lost in translation.

Your comments on Australian lithics  and the lack of an equivalent to the UP there are interesting. Years ago it was almost a commonplace that the UP followed the advent of AMH like night followed day (in fact I recall an article posted on Palnth1  just a year or two back positing some kind of "gene miracle" 50kya leading to the UP "flowering"); and yet in Australia AMH lived without an equivalent for tens of thousands of years. This  surely underlines the fact that the UP developed as a  response to particular environmental/demographic circumstances, and is not the inevitable result of some "improved" cognitive abilities in AMH. Just as we do not think that human intelligence has necessarily "evolved" between inventing the wheel and driving a car, we should be wary of ascribing the transition from MP to UP to some   transformation of human abilities.  
All of which is probably to state the obvious, although not if you read some populist accounts even today.
Cheers
Colin  

[lagarvelho]

Dar and Colin:

Your comments on Australian lithics  and the lack of an equivalent to the UP there are interesting. Years ago it was almost a commonplace that the UP followed the advent of AMH like night followed day (in fact I recall an article posted on Palnth1  just a year or two back positing some kind of "gene miracle" 50kya leading to the UP "flowering"); and yet in Australia AMH lived without an equivalent for tens of thousands of years. This  surely underlines the fact that the UP developed as a  response to particular environmental/demographic circumstances, and is not the inevitable result of some "improved" cognitive abilities in AMH. Just as we do not think that human intelligence has necessarily "evolved" between inventing the wheel and driving a car, we should be wary of ascribing the transition from MP to UP to some   transformation of human abilities.  
All of which is probably to state the obvious, although not if you read some populist accounts even today.

But some people are still peddling some sort of "brain mutation" idea for supposed AMH "superiority".  As recently as this year, there were people who latched on to the idea of a "gene for speech" that somehow AMH had and "others" didn't.  This idea was based on the finding that some people have a genetic disorder that makes them hard to understand(IIRC, can't remember all the details)
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dar and Colin:
<snip>
But some people are still peddling some sort of "brain mutation" idea for supposed AMH "superiority".  As recently as this year, there were people who latched on to the idea of a "gene for speech" that somehow AMH had and "others" didn't.  This idea was based on the finding that some people have a genetic disorder that makes them hard to understand(IIRC, can't remember all the details)
Anne G

Well, I think some of the details can be tracked down by having a good look at the "On the genetic foundation of language" topic ("Molecular Anthropology") board, a discussion in which, if I recall, your participation was quite extensive.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[rich]

Hi to u all,
not dropped out of the thread, just inwardly digesting and cross reffing, will be in the frame again within the week.
Rich

[rich]

Now back in the frame!
Just a few ramblings as I have now come to terms with all the material thrown up. Please feel free to argue and debate for it is only this way that we learn.


Invention is driven by something to gain, in my opinion. So how did movement into new territory initiate a change of technology,  was this change due to fuana, environmental change, availability  and type of new raw materials, the hominid involved. Any or all of these factors could also have been  forcing movement up the technological ladder.

Why was expansion away from settled areas undertaken, even in MSA of Africa. And how does this lye with the East Asian experience where, flake tools are evidenced up to  around 30k. The different criteria here is perhaps the hominid, pop pressure,  fauna, environment, or seclusion.

Therefore, are tools ruled by fauna,  raw material, social pressure, hierarchy and the availability of raw material in an area. Perhaps, in the sense that a throwaway society with  ease of procurement will prevail and, when raw material is scarce for whatever reason, they will have to carry a tool kit with them by necessity, and so would opt for a smaller kit  resulting therfore in them having to invent one.

Not to forget string technology in the gracilisation of the hominid of whatever population. And  note that nean was becoming  less robust before they disappeared from the record.

I have a problem with the reduction in a dental size related to  obligatory cooking. They is evidence of  cooking , but why then  would natural selection automatically favour the smaller dentition,, when larger dentate individuals were just as equipped to masticate cooked foods and perhaps even more efficiently.  Form follows function I appreciate, but surely some other  selective pressure forced the survival of a population which coincidentally had a reduced dental size. What we must not forget  is that cooking did not produce a magical gene to reduce dental science. Some mutation occurred and the reduced dentition prevailed, but why would cooking alone be responsible for that selection  I must be missing something. (open to debate.)

Is it  related   to the north temperate zones they were now occupying, the fauna therein ,  the lifestyle, (technology acting as a buffer to gracilisation).

I can see Nean versus modern humans sponsoring the transition to full UP within zones, and not an introduction from outside,the fuel for this transition the cmpetition vs the 2 pops. But we must not forget that blades had been experimented with in preceding millennia, perhaps fuelled again by a need to acquire a different strategy, or as a response to any of the above,except of course MH involvement.
Also we should ask why transition came after such a long time with LP technology.

Late mousterian is in Iberia, but also elsewhere as Dar stated. I do not see this as a problem, for it was perhaps the interaction anywhere of the two cultures which kicked off the transition, whether the former lasted afterwards or not is due to the contemporary pops , and besides dates can be inacurate as we all are aware.

In Australia modern humans appear to have lasted long enough without UP tools and therefore in my opinion elsewhere the UP  was driven by the necessity to invent, and not ability, by a population needing to advance due to external pressure, be it population increase and therefore a need for identity, hunger, competition for resources, environmental pressure, all of this perhaps coming from chance use of waste product from what they were already involved in producing , and this chance in a needy situation of   competition. and as we know the UP emerges at the time of a demographic explosion. Since there is only one way to go with lithic technological advancement this would fit in with a multi regional origin and invention driven by something to gain, as invention always is.  

Richard

[colin]

Hi Rich
The problem  you mention with reduced dentition is explained by Dr  Brace's notion that a trait no longer being actively selected for will tend to reduce - so it is not so much a question of smaller dention being favoured by natural selection, rather that in the absence of selection for robust dentition, smaller dentition will result. Dr Brace had a good name for this "law", but I  cant remember it i'm afraid! The classic example he gives is that of cave-dwelling fish who are effectively blind - it's not that natural selection favours blindness in these creatures, just that it doesn't favour sighted fish, and in the absense of pressure for good vision, vision reduces. So the parallel would be that with the advent of cooking, the ability to process tough foods with robust teeth is less crucial, so one would expect that this trait would diminish over time.
Cheers
Colin

[rich]

Hi Colin,  
Thanks for the reply. Now I understand  how it could come about, when thought about it seems pretty obvious, but I had missed that one. My initial remarks of the previous post coming to the fore. By conversing we can only learn.
Regards,
Richard.

[Daryl Habel]

IIRC Brace calls this "evolution by entropy".

Dar

[Alec Christensen]

Brace actually calls it the Probable Mutation Effect. He argues that most mutations have a deleterious effect, such as reduction in the size of a structure, and that the relaxation of selection allows such mutations to accumulate. I have worked quite a bit on tooth size reduction myself, and I have little faith in the PME. I, and many others, favor a balancing selection explanation. That is, some forces select for larger teeth and some for smaller teeth, and the tooth size in a given population or species is the result of the balance between the two.

In populations where dental wear is the primary cause of tooth loss, selection causes teeth to be as large as possible so that there is more material to wear away. Foragers like Neanderthals and Australian Aborigines are examples of populations subject to high levels of wear. Once earth ovens began to be used, there was less wear, so selection for larger teeth was slightly less important. Since large teeth can cause their own problems--impaction and infection--slightly smaller teeth were selected for.

Agriculture dramatically changed the selective pressure, because caries came to be the primary dental pathology. The smaller the tooth, the less surface area there is to get infected. And when you are eating cooked grains, your teeth can be quite small or even absent without hindering your nutrition. As a result, as Brace has demonstrated, the modern populations with the smallest teeth are those whose ancestors have had agriculture for the longest time.

Cheers,

Alec Christensen
US Army Central Identification Laboratory-Hawai'i

[Daryl Habel]

Brace actually calls it the Probable Mutation Effect. He argues that most mutations have a deleterious effect, such as reduction in the size of a structure, and that the relaxation of selection allows such mutations to accumulate. I have worked quite a bit on tooth size reduction myself, and I have little faith in the PME. I, and many others, favor a balancing selection explanation. That is, some forces select for larger teeth and some for smaller teeth, and the tooth size in a given population or species is the result of the balance between the two.

In populations where dental wear is the primary cause of tooth loss, selection causes teeth to be as large as possible so that there is more material to wear away. Foragers like Neanderthals and Australian Aborigines are examples of populations subject to high levels of wear. Once earth ovens began to be used, there was less wear, so selection for larger teeth was slightly less important. Since large teeth can cause their own problems--impaction and infection--slightly smaller teeth were selected for.

Agriculture dramatically changed the selective pressure, because caries came to be the primary dental pathology. The smaller the tooth, the less surface area there is to get infected. And when you are eating cooked grains, your teeth can be quite small or even absent without hindering your nutrition. As a result, as Brace has demonstrated, the modern populations with the smallest teeth are those whose ancestors have had agriculture for the longest time.

Cheers,

Alec Christensen
US Army Central Identification Laboratory-Hawai'i

Thanks Alec, for another way of looking at tooth reduction.  I don't know enough to have an opinion either way.

And yes you are right that Brace calls this (more formally) the "probable mutation effect", but I was not wrong in saying that he also refers to this concept as "evolution by entropy".  I checked my "IIRC" and found Dr. Brace's comments relating to this in palanth-l messages #9812,  7 May 2001 and #9836, 8 May 2001, these coincidently as part of the discussion on the Eswaran paper which has made its (re)appearance this month (Dec) in Current Anthropology.

Cheers,
Dar

[colin]

Yes, thanks Alec, Probable Mutation Effect was the phrase I was groping for in my post, although Dar is quite right I think that Dr Brace has also talked about evolution by entropy. The concept is important because there has been (and still is in fact) a tendency to the Panglossian view that everything we observe has been "selected for"; PME points out that traits previously selected for may reduce as a consequence of the removal of that selective pressure, without the need to invoke natural selection as an explanation. Often, therefore, PME is a more "parsimonious" explanation for a reduction of a feature rather than postulating an about turn in selective pressure in the completely opposite direction than that previously observed - thus it seems intrinsically unlikely that selective pressure for large teeth would suddenly reverse into selective pressure for smaller teeth, and PME makes it possible to explain smaller teeth  plausibly without having to postulate a sudden reversal in selective pressure.

You mention Australian Aborigines as an example of foragers where there is selective pressure for larger teeth, btw, and yet my understanding is (someone please correct me if I'm mistaken) that even in Aborigines tooth size has reduced since the Holocene, which does not suggest selective pressure pushing for "largest possible teeth".
Cheers
Colin

[rich]

Hi u all,
Glad there were more posts on the subject, because as soon as I had written my previuos post I went for a walk with the dog, (prime thinking time) and still couldn't see a natural selective process involved. But reading on with the previous posts the process now seems more credible.
I can see agriculture and caries definately coming into play but I was trying to get my head around reduction rates for 100k or so earlier.
regards,
Richard.

[Greg Laden]

At present I just don’t have the time to give this wonderful thread a detailed read, so I apologize if my comments are redundant with what has already been said.  Just a couple of points:

The point people are making about the Australian record is valid and important, but it is often forgotten or overlooked that the Australian lithic record includes microlithic industries, bifaces, and ground stone.  These are disparate in geography and timing so they are not likely to represent some single later infusion of people or ideas, and if so, then the linkage between modern aboriginal populations (their ethnography) and the Early Stone Age looking record is too simplistic.  (supporting the “if needed invent it” hypothesis, perhaps)

There is, of course a correlation between morphology of hominids and lithics, at the broadest levels at least; at finer levels it has become axiomatic that the correlation breaks down with “modern” and “archaic” forms in the MSA/MP.  Fankly, I don’t think we understand the problem at this level yet, but it is worth noting that the African record has for some 30 years now shown a switching back and forth between more and less blade-rich industries, even with a microlithic industry thrown in here and there, throughout the MSA (as has been pointed out in this paper and the thread on it).  What is interesting to me at this time is that the clearly robust (“African Neanderthal” as it were), gracile/modern, and the early moderns that are derived as moderns in virtually every respect but a little robust, occur in a biogeographical mixture across the continent, from several hundred thousand years ago to ca 40K more or less, and the record has shown this for some time.  The confusion of the West Asian fossil/lithic record that has led so many to a strong conclusion about lack of correlation has existed in Africa for a long time, but did not force that conclusion so strongly in Africa.  I believe that this is because of  dating problems, lack of confidence in association of many of the materials, and a predisposition to be careful about assigning lithic industries to hominids because of the Plio-Pleistocene record (i.e., who