Welcome to the family, Red Deer Cave People

Fantastic news this week of the discovery of yet another archaic hominin, this time in southwest China and shockingly recent (via The Guardian):

The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.
The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.

Named the Red Deer Cave people, after their apparent penchant for home-cooked venison, they are the most recent human remains found anywhere in the world that do not closely resemble modern humans. The individuals differ from modern humans in their jutting jaws, large molar teeth, prominent brows, thick skulls, flat faces and broad noses. Their brains were of average size by ice age standards.

"They could be a new evolutionary line or a previously unknown modern human population that arrived early from Africa and failed to contribute genetically to living east Asians," said Darren Curnoe, who led the research team at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

At work in Red Deer Cave (Livescience)

The full article is at the Public Library of Science. The fossils were found by geologists in 1979, but they were encased in rock and not analyzed until 2008. When Ji Xueping and his collaborator Curnoe analyzed the fossils, they were stunned by the combination of unusual anatomical features and its extremely recent age (derived from C14 dates from charcoal deposited within the skull). These people were contemporaneous with the oldest known temple complexes at Göbekli Tepe, and lived a few thousand years after people settled South America. They outlived Neanderthals by several millenia.

Artist's reconstruction (Livescience)

Suddenly the world of early humans is diverse and complex. In the last few years we've learned about the "Hobbits" of the Indonesian island of Flores, the Denisovans (who got around all over Eurasia), an unnamed African hominin, and now the Red Deer Cave people. There's probably more out there somewhere waiting for us. I call them 'humans' because a lot of modern people are their descendants. Eurasian people get 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals, Melanesians 4-6% from Denisovans, and African people 2% from an as-yet-unnamed hominin (see this article and this article for more). The Red Deer Cave people and - who knows? - even the Hobbits could be in the mix somewhere too.

We can't talk about 'us' and 'them' anymore: we're all descended from some of these early human variants. This is despite the technical genetic difficulties involved: one estimate is that perhaps only 2% of Neanderthal-modern human liaisons produced children. Getting so much DNA into the gene pool must have required some mating persistence. Racists beware: in the long run, physical differences are no match for the human sex drive. This image of richness and complexity in human origins is a beautiful thing.

For more on archaic sexy time, read: A Third Archaic Human Population: and Yes, We Bonked Them 

A Brief History of Social Games

From game designer John Radoff comes a great poster that combines seriation and typology of social games, from knucklebone divination to XBOX and MMORPGs (via Kotaku).



Click on the image for a printable full-size version.

There's a lot to like here from the archaeologist's point of view. Radoff understands that sociocultural change is multilineal - in other words, it's not a question of one thing leading to another in a tidy sequence, but of multiple influences combining to spark changes in cultural forms. He's also captured a lot of forgotten pastimes, like play-by-mail strategy games, that were destroyed by the advent of the internet. One thing that is missing is a sense of spatial or geographical causality: i.e. how exactly do Go, Senet, and Leela connect to Monopoly historically, besides having some similar cognitive or gameplay aspects? Correlation does not imply causation.

I'm also a little curious why, given the elaborate historical paths he devises, why the modern social network games are all grouped together indiscriminately at the bottom - it gives a hint of the teleological fallacy, as if all of history was somehow a prelude to Mafia Wars, music pets, and the big-boobied princesses that are apparently the entire population of Evony. To be fair I don't think that's Radoff's point exactly - he's starting from contemporary social gaming and working backwards, rather than trying to show some kind of causal connection. (He probably could have shown this better by putting the modern social games at the top!)

Anyway, that's me being kind of hard on what's really a fun historical chart. Radoff includes a historical essay that makes some good points about the role of D&D in the evolution of social game culture:

1974 was perhaps the most important year in modern game history; this is when Dungeons and Dragons came to market. It integrated the ideas of abstracting tactical combat along with storytelling and a unique social aspect in which individual players used their imagination and creativity to contribute to the ongoing game. From D&D, you can trace a history through early mainframe computer games, to MUDs (multiuser dungeons) to MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, many people were looking to engage in asynchronous games that wouldn’t require groups to gather at set points in time, giving rise to play-by-mail games. The earliest implementations of online PBM games (aside from their manifestation as play-by-email games) were BBS “Door” games. Trade Wars is probably one of the most famous; and I wrote a game in this market called Space Empire a long time ago. A lot of these play-patterns are similar to what you’ll find in current Web-based and social-network games.

Read the rest!