Category Archives: Neanderthals

Frayer’s Prayer For The Neanderthal In All Of Us *coughbullshitcough*

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I’m just about up to my armpits in preparations for my move north, but of course I couldn’t resist seeing what David Frayer had to say yesterday in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, entitittled “Who’re you calling a Neanderthal?” 

That’s a lie. I didn’t have to look at it. I knew in advance what I was going to see—just a litany of the questionable inferences of Neanderthal abilities. So, going there was a little like the mortification of the flesh. 

And since it was the NYT, in spite of the piles of tasks I should be attacking, of course I’ve spent all morning trying to say something pithy in a letter to the Editor. O’ course, the 150 words they give you don’t go very far when you’re talking about a long list of equivocal inferences presented as if they were written in stone.

It’s been sent now. And it’ll probly never see the light of day. Nevertheless, I have to be patient and wait a week while they decide not to publish it, at which time I’ll put it up here, for posterity’s sake.

Half the bloody day’s gone! And here I am buggering around, telling you what I’m doing, when it’s prolly the last thing you needed to see today.

And just why am I up against the wall preparing for my departure from Surf City? Obvies because my departure has moved up two months to June 30th. *panicked screams heard deep in the CPU*

As it turns out, with no prospect of a job that offers healthcare benefits, and with the blasted U.S. Congress’s infernal “sequester” biting, the extended benefits that the POTUS initiated some years back will be reduced by almost 18%. So, when my California benefits run out on June 30, I’d better be somewhere that it doesn’t cost as much to live. That 18% will mean the difference between making ends meet and not. Thanks a lot, Repugnican Tea-Bagger Party! May you rot in Hell! [if there is such a place… apparently an Italian archaeologist working in Turkey recently claimed to have found the entrance. For real. The claim, that is, is real, not the claimed entrance to Hell, I must presume.]

*more agonized screams*

Found this on White House dot gov. At least POTUS has his priorities on straight.

ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST’S OWN, EXCLUSIVE “A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG” ONLINE BOUTIQUE

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist‘s facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett’s news feed), on Robert H. Gargett‘s Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett‘s twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog’s RSS feeds. You can also become a ‘member’ of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You’re the reason I do this.

It’s About Time! El Sidrón Neanderthals are 49 kyr old, not 10

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I truly believe that Tom Higham can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well. Maybe not. But he has served notice to the palaeoanthropological community that there’s a new sheriff in Temporal Town.

Photo credit: Nel Acebal, Elcomercio.es

Today Phys.org alerted me to the existence of new, more accurate and precise dates for the El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain) Neanderthals. And, once again, as it was at Kents Cavern and elsewhere, T.F.G. (call me Tom) Higham’s (Oxford) is the fount of this new information on old stuff. Using an ultrafiltration pre-treatment protocol on Neanderthal bone, the team is now reporting that they’ve obtained a date of 48,400 ± 3200 bp (OxA-21 776).

Tom Higham

WOOD, R. E., HIGHAM, T. F. G., DE TORRES, T., TISNÉRAT-LABORDE, N., VALLADAS, H., ORTIZ, J. E., LALUEZA-FOX, C., SÁNCHEZ-MORAL, S., CAÑAVERAS, J. C., ROSAS, A., SANTAMARÍA, D. and DE LA RASILLA, M. (2013), A NEW DATE FOR THE NEANDERTHALS FROM EL SIDRÓN CAVE (ASTURIAS, NORTHERN SPAIN). Archaeometry, 55: 148–158. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4754.2012.00671.x

This should put the kibosh, once and for all, on the fantastic notion, propounded last year [and spectacularly amplified in the media—New York Times are you listening?], that the ancient artwork at El Sidrón Castillo* Cave might have been attributable to Neanderthals.  Recall that those claims were being raised because the dates obtained ranged from 10,000 to about 46,300 BP (Torres et al. 2010).

I refrained from saying much last year, mostly ’cause I figgered you might be getting bored listening to my naked [incessant, really] scepticism about any claims of Neanderthal sophistication. But now I can say that nobody, perhaps not even the excavators themselves, thought such an amusing suggestion might have been the reality.

In addition to quashing the notion that Neanderthals in Spain were artistically precocious, this new date pretty much closes the door on the idea of an Iberian refugium for late-surviving Neanderthals.

I know. I know. I’m as naïve about radiocarbon physics as I am about anybody else’s radiometric dating prestidigitation. So, how is it that I can so readily accept some results and not some others. Some might call this unscientific. My expectations are based on a certain familiarity with the corpus of knowledge surrounding the Neanderthals. And it’s not scientific, for a very logical [philosophically speaking] reason. What’s known in philosophy of science as the contexts of “discovery” and “justification”[i.e. how we arrive at our hypotheses and how we support or refute them] are almost always independent of one another. Thus, even if I literally dreamed up an idea, it’s nevertheless subject to instantiation and later justification [A.K.A. hypothesis testing]. Getting back to the physics, in this case the mostly likely outcome was achieved [as far as my dreams are concerned], and by someone [and his technique] about which no one that I know [or know of] would [or could] dispute. In today’s example, there’s nothing like the uncertainty of provenance or of technique that I see, for example, in the luminescence dates from southern Africa. For that reason, if for no other, I have no aversion to hanging my hat on Higham’s test tubes, and getting on with my business.

You know how much I hate saying “I told you so.” There! I didn’t say it.

* In the original version I erroneously identified the art as having been at El Sidrón. It’s El Castillo. The substance of the comment remains the same—the Neanderthals, in all likelihood, were nowhere to be seen when the artwork was being created at El Castillo.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist‘s facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett’s news feed), on Robert H. Gargett‘s Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett‘s twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog’s RSS feeds. You can also become a ‘member’ of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You’re the reason I do this.