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 third archaic human population, and yes - we bonked them

The Denisova cave, Siberia (nsc.ru)

In the wake of recent news that a lot of us carry around Neanderthal genes, there's new evidence that a third species of modern human used to roam Eurasia. A couple small bones found in Russia's Denisova cave have mitochondrial DNA sequences that diverged from Neanderthals 640,000 years ago. Comparison to modern humans shows that Denisova people left a genetic legacy in the Melanesian people of Papua New Guinea - suggesting that they may have been a widespread population.

Where does that leave us? The big picture of recent decades—that modern humans evolved in Africa and spread from there, displacing all other populations—is still largely accurate. But the details are looking much more complex than they were just last year. Those other populations are suddenly seeming a lot more diverse, and they didn't go away without contributing a bit to the genetic diversity of the modern human population (Ars Technica).

That leaves us a recent family tree that looks something like this:

(Via Sciblogs)

The moral of the story? Sex. Modern humans got it on with Neanderthals and whatever other random types of humans they ran into on all those Palaeolithic wanderings across the steppes. Can we finally sweep the last remnants of racialist archaeology out the door now?!

Much more detailed analysis and updates at Discovery's The Loom blog.

Neanderthal lovin'

I never got around to posting this back in may, maybe you saw this (or this) back in May:

Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence
Most of us have some Neanderthal genes, study finds.

Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published May 6,2010

The next time you're tempted to call some oaf a Neanderthal, you might want to take a look in the mirror.

According to a new DNA study, most humans have a little Neanderthal in them—at least 1 to 4 percent of a person's genetic makeup. The study uncovered the first solid genetic evidence that "modern" humans—or Homo sapiens—interbred with their Neanderthal neighbors, who mysteriously died out about 30,000 years ago.

What's more, the Neanderthal-modern human mating apparently took place in the Middle East, shortly after modern humans had left Africa, not in Europe—as has long been suspected. "We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans," lead study author Ed Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a prepared statement.

It always seemed weird to me that the idea of these two kinds of humans interbreeding was always so taboo. Of course, Neanderthals were discovered in a time (1829) when Europe was in the grip of a deep interest in racial difference and classification, so it's not surprising that they were immediately consigned to absolute difference - and sex between slightly different shades of contemporary human was illegal in a lot of places only a generation ago. It never made sense on a gut level to me, though - Neanderthals were people, they could speak, make tools and jewelry, bury their dead, and lived along side Homo Sapiens Sapiens for millenia. The idea that at least a few of them wouldn't get it on at some point is ridiculous. (There's also an answer to this question here.) I kind of like the idea that I'm part Neanderthal.

Though maybe I just read Clan of the Cave Bear one too many times as a kid.


On the other hand, maybe it was the Neanderthals who were racist against us. Just sayin'.

Mesolithic Dildosity: Ancient 'Sex Toy' found in Sweden

Last month excavations at the Mesolithic site of Motala in Östergötland, Sweden, turned up this, ah, stimulating artifact made of antler bone:

Swedish National Heritage Board

Martin Rundqvist at ScienceBlogs describes the dig:

Excavations in waterlogged sediment along River Motala ström have produced great numbers of bone and wood objects that have rarely been preserved elsewhere. Most are harpoon and leister points, but now a bone dildo (a boner?) has joined the growing collection. Measuring twelve by two centimetres, its size is perhaps not very impressive, and there are many non-dildoish uses for which it may have been intended.

The articles note that relatively few phalluses are known from the stone age (mesolithic, neolithic) compared to the number of artifacts showing voluptuous female forms. Of course, if phalluses were usually carved in bone or wood, they wouldn't survive like clay or stone. The site at Motala is unusual because organic material is preserved so well.

Was it used for chipping stone tools? As a dildo? Both?!?!?! The coverage is very cautious:

"Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like – for you and me, it signals this erected-penis-like shape," said archaeologist Gšran Gruber of the National Heritage Board in Sweden, who worked on the excavation. "But if that's the way the Stone Age people thought about it, I can't say."

Part of science is not jumping to conclusions, but jeez, let's not overdo it.


Another look (SNHB).

Whether it's a dildo or not is a different story. Dildos have a pedigree going back at least to Classical Greece - see the jokes about lost dildos in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, or Herodas Mime 6, where we learn that shoemakers sometimes also took orders for custom-made toys (red leather!)¹ I find the idea of much older dildos totally unsurprising perhaps because I assume that ancient people were just as creative (and sex-obsessed) as we are. Another instance of archaeological optimism, if you will!

Of course, any kind of decoration is a problem for archaeologists. Does the decoration mean it was 'symbolic' and not functional? If we're not sure what it was, it must be a ritual item! At least the archaeologists here have a functional hypothesis - or as one commenter jokes, maybe using a dildo for flint-knapping gave the owner 'plausible deniability'. It's true that we can't say for sure. But the guys interviewed in this Livescience article sure are trying hard to avoid the idea that this thing is even penis-shaped, much less a sex toy.

That seems kind of weird to me. But of course, most of the world's archaeologists come from cultures with a strange attitude toward representations of sex. By which I mean the Judeo-Christian-Islamic strain of monotheism, which has a conspicuous lack of festivals celebrating giant penises. In a lot of cultures such things are normal and fun: a Dionysian phallus-fest in a modern Greek village, various Japanese fertility festivals, or the veneration of the lingam of Shiva are just things people do. And then there's this unforgettable description of a Dionysian procession in Alexandria sponsored by Ptolemy II (mid-200s BC):

In another [cart] was a gold phallus one hundred and eighty feet (55m) long, painted in various colours and bound with fillets of gold; it had at the extremity a gold star, the perimeter of which was nine feet.²

Oops, not supposed to see that.

It might be stretching the article too much to say that the dildo-skepticism is part of some kind of Christian cultural baggage. But how much does cultural 'common sense' affect our interpretation of objects, archaeologically? Would Japanese or Indian archaeologists approach this find less cautiously? Would it even be newsworthy in a culture that wasn't still afraid of sex? Given that relatively few countries dominate world archaeology, how much of what we think we know about the past is colored by our cultural conditioning?

1 One could do a blog full of nothing but archaeological penises. I'll even let you claim credit for the idea if you start it.
2 From Callixeinos of Rhodes, quoted in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae 413D.

Archaeology in Fiction: “A New Race of Beachcombers”

A white convertible approached, the driver flashing his headlamps as I stepped from my car. I stumbled, my right knee giving way after the effort of driving. At my feet lay a litter of dead leaves, cigarette cartons, and glass crystals. These fragments of broken safety glass, brushed to one side by generations of ambulance attendants, lay in a small drift. I stared down at this dusty necklace, the debris of a thousand automobile accidents. Within fifty years, as more and more cars collided here, the glass fragments would form a sizable bar, within thirty years a beach of sharp crystal. A new race of beachcombers might appear, squatting on these heaps of fractured windshields, sifting them for cigarette butts, spent condoms and loose coins. Buried beneath this new geological layer laid down by the age of the automobile accident would be my own small death, as anonymous as a vitrified scar in a fossil tree.
- J.G. Ballard, Crash

Crash captures both the loneliness and perverse excitements of the modern automotive landscape. In this passage, Ballard gives us a profound truth about archaeology: lives and deaths are tiny anonymous things that get lost in heaps of mundane garbage. In the end, all that’s left of a person’s life is the waste they deposit, which can be read by an archaeologist to create a kind of rough analog doppelganger. (There’s a strange implication here, that littering is a profound act of historic preservation – and a route to immortality.)

Ballard tries to push past this conundrum with characters who make their automobiles into extensions of their bodies, and fuse their sexuality with the crushing and twisting of their metal frames. An amusingly literal take on theoretical approaches to the archaeology of the body: not only can we can find traces of gender, sexuality, and physical experience in the archaeological record, but now we have the notion of a whole stratigraphic layer that is nothing but durable, material traces of sexual experiences. A new category of human remains?