Early Civilizations:

Complex Societies of the New

and Old Worlds

Dr. Kathryn Denning

Anth 2150, Sept 2007 - Apr 2008

6 Nov 2007...

Welcome back!

Plan for the day

1   Announcements.

QUIZ #2 will be held on November 7th in tutorial.  Review guidelines are here. The quiz will cover material from Oct 16, 23, 30...  it will be primarily (but not exclusively) drawn from the textbook, chapters 4, 5, 6, 7.

After that, you'll be watching a short film clip about our hominid ancestors.

Next week in tutorial -- you'll see, close-up, various hominid skulls

2   Lecture

- a little recap/review of archaeological methods

- the story of humanity's journey begins: Meet the Ancestors!

- including film clips from The Story of Lucy (York vid #1033) and the BBC feature Walking with Cavemen

For the first part of this course....

We've focused on how archaeology is done

Ch 1 - the early days of archaeology, the major developments of prehistory, the past in the present

Ch 2 - the record of the past - what the archaeological record is / different kinds of site preservation.... how we reconstruct ancient lifeways, explain cultural change, and do archaeological research (plan, acquire data, analyse, interpret, publish)... the importance of context...  ethical responsibilities... 

Ch 3 - acquiring the record - how do we actually find sites and excavate? How do we determine dates?

Ch 4 - how did people live? - ancient technologies (stone, bone, metal, wood, ceramics, basketry/textiles) and how we analyse them...   how did people subsist? and analysis of ancient foods... animals and plants... reconstructing ancient diet

Ch 5 - individuals and interactions - understanding things like social ranking, gender, ethnicity, inequality, trade/exchange... e.g. Otzi, division of labour by gender at Abu Hureyra, plantations with enslaved people, war casualties in ancient Egypt, ancient exchange networks e.g. obsidian sourcing, Uluburun ship

Ch 6 - studying the intangible - the framework of common beliefs of ancient civilizations, ways of interpreting ancient art, the archaeology of death, the importance of context in interpreting artifacts, sacred places and their symbolism (e.g. ancient astronomical alignments)

Ch 7 - explaining the past - culture history, cultural change (e.g. cultural selection, diffusion, migration), doing archaeology by observation / experiment (ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology).... Explaining cultural change (different theoretical models, like cultural ecology, multilinear cultural evolution, processual and post-processual archaeology) ...

- and we had a week on bioarchaeological methods, or how researchers obtain information from the skeleton

Then Last week...

We took a Hallowe'en detour, to think about the role of the dead in societies, past and present... from the 'undead' vampire to mummies...

And now...  we'll begin telling the story of humanity's journey from our earliest human ancestors to civilizations. This is the information we have obtained through the methods of archaeology.

Remember, the four major developments in human prehistory (from Ch 1):

- origins of humankind around 2.5 mya

- origins of archaic humans like Homo erectus, and anatomically modern people, from 1.9 mya to 15 000 bp, and the spread of fully modern humans throughout the world by 15 000 bp

- origins of food production around 11 000 bp

- origins of civilizations around 3100 BC

This week's readings

Chapter 8 - Human Origins

Chapter 9 - African exodus

Ch 8 Topics:

- locating ourselves in time

- primates

- fossil evidence

- australopithecines (e.g. Australopithecus afarensis)

- early Homo  (H. habilis)

- early human technology

- foraging, scavenging, hunting

- mind... and development of language

- early social organization

Ch 9 Topics:

- Ice age

- Homo ergaster (Africa)

- Homo erectus (Asia   1.9mya - 200 000 bp)

- archaic H. sapiens (400 000 - 130 000 bp)

- Neanderthals (150 000 - 30 000 bp)

- origins of anatomically modern humans ( 180 000 - 150 000)

- out of Africa

Evolution

Social context of theories about evolution

- We all need explanations for how the world came to be this way - who are we? where do we come from? what does it mean to be human? what is our relationship to the natural world?  Every culture has a belief system that addresses these questions.

However, science addresses them in a different way -- through developing theories, formulating hypotheses, gathering data, testing the hypotheses, modifying the theories... in a never-ending cycle which has resulted in a vast increase in our knowledge about evolution.

Highly public debates about what should be taught in schools are frequently more about politics and religion than about understanding biology.

Important principles:

1) just because we don't fully understand a process yet doesn't mean that the only explanation is that a divine being made it happen. Another option is to say that we don't know everything yet, and to keep investigating.

2) the study of evolution does not preclude belief in a divine being. That isn't the problem in the evolution-creation controversy. (The problem is the question of what exactly the divine being - if there is one - has been doing, and how exactly we can know that.)

Locating ourselves in time

What are the key dates for biological evolution?  (All dates are approximate!)

Locating ourselves within the sweep of biological diversity

binomial nomenclature: 

Always write as Homo sapiens. Generally, italicize.

Primate Taxonomy

Domain - Eukarya

Kingdom - Animalia

Phylum - Chordata

Subphylum - Vertebrata

Class - Mammalia   (more specifically, eutherians - cf monotremes and marsupials)

Order - Primates

etc.

   Primates - our family

Savanna baboon

Papio cynocephalus

Arboreal - tend to walk on top of branches more than swinging below them (think squirrels). Forelimbs 70-80% length of hind limbs. (Need more power in the back for jumping than in the front.) If in the New World, often have prehensile tails. In the Old World, often have long tails which are used for counterbalancing, but are not prehensile. Hands and feet are good for grasping.

White-nosed Bearded Saki (Chiroptes albinasus)

Prehensile Tail: interestingly, also seen in other orders of arboreal animals, like lizards, porcupines, opossums...

Spider monkey, right -->

http://primates.com/monkeys/spidermonkey.html

INDRI  (Indri indri)

Tarsier: another vertical clinger/leaper. Note pads on hands and huge (immobile!) eyes.

http://primates.com/philippine-tarsier.html  (n.b. not actually smallest 'monkey' ... that's the pygmy marmoset, over in the New World)

Gibbon  (Hylobates sp)

N.b. other locomotor variants

Orangs - quadrumanous - i.e. feet and hands all have opposable thumbs! primarily arboreal, use feet just like hands, unbelievably flexible. Eat fruit, tend to live alone or in very small groups.

Gorillas and chimps - knuckle-walkers but also climb trees. Gorillas live in small extended family groups and primarily eat leaves/stems, chimps in somewhat larger groups and primarily eat fruit.

Bipedalism - mostly just us and our ancestors -- the point at which habitual bipedalism emerged is much-discussed -- but bipedalism does occur occasionally in many primates. e.g. the sifaka bounces along bipedally, injured chimps may walk bipedally, and occasionally a monkey will develop the habit too.

Sifaka travelling bipedally http://primates.com/lemurs/sifbab.html

Photo gallery showing diversity of primates http://primates.com/

photo by Tommy Hayne. Captive monkey in Vietnam, 1994

To proceed with studying hominid evolution, we need to know our way around the skeleton...

Orienting ourselves anatomically

Some key features on a human skeleton: frontal, parietal, mandible, maxilla, occipital, clavicle, ribs, humerus, femur, foramen magnum, incisors, canine, premolars, molars

A few key principles about hominoid & hominid evolution

challenges include these:

 When we’re studying fossils:  We have to contend with infrequent fossilization, fragmentary remains and the challenges of taphonomy (the changes that occur to organisms or objects after being buried or deposited), including scattering of remains, exposure to the elements, etc.  Have to consider why things are found together (deliberate deposition, accidental coincidence, etc.) 

- fragmentary, damaged, infrequent fossils, often without a population for comparison ... so it can be hard sometimes to decide whether a fossil is a new species, or a variant on an older one, or whether it's a male or female. Entire skeletons are quite rare.

- this means there's a lot of room for differences of opinion, and different names for the same fossil... usually when a new type of fossil is found, it takes a few years for consensus about it to emerge

- new finds rewrite the taxonomies, quite often... also, you can 'lump' or 'split'

- we can sometimes get DNA out of semi-fossilized bone, but this is rare and only recently possible.  Can't get DNA from something completely fossilized. No DNA yet for australopithecines... but they're working on Neanderthal DNA now.

n.b. sometimes there are disputes about DNA analyses.... e.g. what the oldest DNA retrieved is. (Sometimes scientists make announcements but other scientists can't confirm their results)

- dating can be a challenge. Potassium argon dating is the primary method used for dating hominid fossils, but note -- this is dating the volcanic rock layers above or below the fossil, rather than the fossil itself.

[Radioactive potassium decays to argon gas... so we can only use this method on minerals which contain potassium and then trap the argon gas so that we can measure it. Volcanic tuff (compressed ash) has this chemical composition... and there's lots of it in East Africa, which is handy for hominid dating.]

Date range for K-AR - from 250 000 years ago back to the origins of life.

We can also use C14 dating, but that's for later specimens (not fully fossilized), from about 40 000 BP until present.

Note regarding dates/terminology:

mya = million years ago   (or, myr ago)

kya = thousand years ago

BP = before present 

BC = Before Christ = BCE = Before Common Era

AD =  Anno Domini = CE = Common Era

Have a hard time converting these?  Think about a timeline...

Also recalling -- how do we picture evolution taking place?

The "March of Progress" iconography... this is not how things happened.

Below, is a better way of representing human evolution.

.. we have many different specimens (these are just a few), and although we can group them approximately with a high degree of confidence, we can't trace a single line of human evolution. 

And also recalling... something important about adaptations.

there is variability in any population, and various evolutionary forces then affect the prevalence of different traits. (forces including natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, mass extinction events, etc.)

but note! according to standard evolutionary explanations: the variability doesn't arise "for a reason", i.e. there's no big plan or direction for evolution. So, for example, our primate ancestors began to develop nimble hands... but they didn't develop nimble hands so that we could later hold a pencil. They started to develop nimble hands, which proved to be an advantage in a certain environment, and then also turned out to have additional uses later on.

So we didn't evolve nimble hands for the purpose of playing the piano or firing a gun or typing on a keyboard, but it turns out that these are things we can do with our hands.

Similarly, we didn't develop a suspensory shoulder joint so that we could play baseball... it's a left-over feature from our earlier primate heritage. But even though we don't swing through the trees (much) anymore, it came in handy for other things -- like throwing things... rocks, spears, hand grenades, etc.

Human evolution overall
 

Becoming Human (Flash) http://www.becominghuman.org/

(Anatomy... hominid profiles)

Historical development of Understanding of Human Evolution

It has long been realized that the key trends in human evolution, i.e. the things that separate us from our ape cousins and ancestors, were...

terrestriality - coming down out of the trees

bipedalism - having to walk on two feet (obligate, not occasional)

encephalization - increase in brain size in relation to body, development of language

civilization - complex technology, moral systems, complex society

But in the earliest days of studying human evolution (up to 1920s), it wasn't known which came first...

- there weren't enough fossils, they weren't well understood, and they weren't securely dated

- Arthur Keith 1895 "Only four individuals to represent the millions and millions of men that must have lived and died in Quaternary times!" (German Neanderthal skull, Pithecanthropus from Java, two Cro-Magnon Belgian skulls)  (As opposed to now, when we have MANY)

- so different theories were abundant

This is why the Piltdown forgery worked.... people at the time wanted to believe that big brains came before other human traits, so a big-brained 'fossil' with an ape's jaw fit their preconceptions.

Now, we know that's not what happened...  Our brains were still pretty small when we became bipedal.