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Shots Fired in the Battle Over the Cinmar Biface . . . But Does it Actually Matter to the Solutrean Hypothesis?

5/31/2015

43 Comments

 
PictureThe Cinmar biface featured on the cover of Stanford and Bradley's (2013) book. Image source: http://smithsonianscience.si.edu/2012/01/new-book-across-atlantic-ice-the-origin-of-americas-clovis-culture/
This week, Darrin Lowery responded to questions raised about the circumstances of the discovery of the Cinmar biface, a bi-pointed stone tool that resembles, at least superficially, artifacts made and used by the Solutrean peoples of Upper Paleolithic Europe.  The point was reportedly dredged up in 1970 by a scallop boat named the Cinmar (hence the name) operating off the Atlantic coast of North America, and associated with mastodon bones that were radiocarbon dated to 22,760 +/- 90 RCYBP (UCIAMS-53545).  The Cinmar biface has assumed a prominent place in the debate about the Solutrean hypothesis (the idea that Upper Paleolithic peoples from western Europe colonized eastern North America sometime between about 21,000 to 17,000 years ago), even gracing the cover of the 2013 book about the idea by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, its two main advocates.

The circumstances of the Cinmar discovery were called into question in a paper by
Metin Eren, Matthew Boulanger, and Michael O'Brien titled "The Cinmar Discovery and the Proposed Pre-Late Glacial Maximum Occupation of North America," published in the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS) in March of this year.  Eren et al. questioned the history and details of the find, focusing particularly on inconsistencies and omissions in the various accounts of the discovery.  The JAS is a high profile venue, and the paper by Metin et al. generated a significant amount of discussion among archaeologists interested in the peopling of the Americas.

Full disclosure
: I consider Metin Eren a friend of mine.  We have some overlapping research interests, and have occasionally exchanged emails and papers.  I think we've even had beers together at one or two professional conferences.

I should also say that I'm very skeptical of the Solutrean hypothesis. 
The claim of a trans-Atlantic colonization of North America during the Last Glacial Maximum is an extraordinary one, and I have seen nothing so far that convinces me it is correct. I'm not alone.  The Solutrean hypothesis does not enjoy widespread support among North American archaeologists for a number of reasons (see this 2014 exchange for some summary arguments).  Unfortunately, it has captured the imaginations of some ugly elements outside of the professional community, serving as the basis for white supremacist and neo-Nazi fantasies about the importance of white people to North American prehistory.  That's not the fault of the developers and proponents of the idea, but it's a social dimension to the Solutrean hypothesis that is nonetheless worth being aware of and keeping an eye on.

After reading through both the JAS paper and Lowery's self-published response, I can't say much has changed for me.  The discussion about the circumstances of the Cinmar discovery is an interesting one (especially if you like to see an argument), but it's a debate about the details of a single discovery that, in my opinion, doesn't have the power to "prove" anything either way. Despite its appearance on the cover of a book and a charged exchange about the credibility of the artifact and those who are interested in it, the Cinmar biface doesn't really matter. 

Let me explain what I mean by that.

On the one hand, what if the case for the Cinmar biface is materially flawed and you just have to throw it out?  Eren et al. ask several pointed questions about the discovery, any one of which could potentially sink it as a reliable piece of evidence. Maybe we can't be sure it was in the same dredge load as the mastodon bones, or maybe we can't be sure the artifact was even recovered at sea.  So maybe the Cinmar biface means nothing in archaeological terms because we just can't trust it. 

But, on the other hand, what if everything about the Cinmar discovery is "best case scenario" for the Solutrean hypothesis? Let's the say we can be sure the point was dredged up in 1970 in the same immediate area as some mastodon remains - what does that actually get us? The "association" between the point and the fauna (on which the age estimate is based) is still incredibly weak, leaving us still with just a single stone point largely without context.  Is that the kind of "site" that will change anyone's mind about something as significant as the first colonization of the Americas?  I don't think so, and history agrees with me. Think about the sites that have been pivot points in our acceptance of alternative ideas about prehistory in the western hemisphere: L'Anse aux Meadows, Monte Verde, Folsom . . . those were all sites with clear evidence that falsified an existing model. Proponents and skeptics could stand there together and look at the deposits and have a meeting of the minds about what they meant.  That's never going to be the case with something like the Cinmar biface.  A point that "resembles" a Solutrean artifact with a provenience of "same dredge load as some mastodon bones" is not at the level of a site like Monte Verde - not even close.  Under the most charitable reading it doesn't have the power to move the needle on acceptance of the Solutrean hypothesis.  By itself it's just not a game changer.

What would be a game changer? Proponents of the Solutrean hypothesis are going to have to find, excavate, and document a real site: good artifacts in good contexts with good dates. Period. If the hypothesis is correct, those sites should be identifiable.  The Cinmar biface was made from an inland raw material source, so there should be some sites on dry land with clear evidence of a Solutrean occupation.  All you need is one. One good site trumps dozens of finds of purported Solutrean or Solutrean-like artifacts with poor or no context. 
Think about how many sites with "associations" between stone projectile points and extinct fauna were dismissed in North America prior to the acceptance of the antiquity of humans in the New World demonstrated by careful excavations at the Folsom site.  The Solutrean hypothesis will ultimately need something similar.

The burden of proof in this situation pretty clearly has to be on the advocates of the Solutrean hypothesis: it is impossible to use material evidence to prove that Solutrean peoples did not make it to North America (
just as we cannot prove they are not currently orbiting the sun in a teapot). The falsifiable hypothesis in this case is that there was no colonization of North America by Upper Paleolithic peoples from Europe.  That's what would need to be proved wrong. Does the Cinmar biface, even under the best of circumstances, do that?  I would say no.  And I would also say that eliminating the Cinmar biface as a piece of evidence doesn't "disprove" the Solutrean hypothesis. Basically, I think that with or without the Cinmar biface the Solutrean hypothesis remains an idea based on an assemblage of circumstantial evidence, none of which at this point appears to be critical to whether the hypothesis is viable or not.  I think the Cinmar biface would not change that equation for me even if I had plucked it from the dredge myself.  It's just not enough.

Other than it's relevance to archaeology, the Cinmar discussion is interesting because of the speed and openness with which it's taking place.  The JAS paper was published open access, so it's available to everyone. Lowery published his response less than two months later on Academia.edu (again, available to everyone).  I'm not sure if there's a precedent for this sort of thing - we may be watching something new.  It will be interesting to see if the discussion continues and, if so, at what pace and in what format. 

Even though I don't think the Cinmar biface is as crtitical to the viability of the Solutrean hypothesis as it has been made out to be, I do welcome the vigorous questioning of evidence.  I think it tells you something important about where the debate about the Solutrean hypothesis is at the moment: it's a lot of energy expended over the minutiae of an artifact that greatly diminishes in perceived importance if a single "good" site can be located.  That's what I'll be watching for.


ResearchBlogging.org
Eren, M., Boulanger, M., & O'Brien, M. (2015). The Cinmar discovery and the proposed pre-Late Glacial Maximum occupation of North America Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2015.03.001
43 Comments

Human Evolution and the Stone Tool "Problem"

5/27/2015

4 Comments

 
PicturePhotographs of some of the artifacts from LOM3 (Harmand et al. 2015:Figure 4).
The recent announcement of the discovery in stone tools in Kenya dating to 3.3 million years ago (MYA) has been greeted with a lot of fanfare.  I first heard the story at some point earlier in the academic year, and I know there was a lot of buzz about it at the SAAs and Paleoanthropology meetings in San Francisco in April.  The publication of a formal paper in Nature last week (“3.3-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools From Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya,” by Sonia Harmand and colleagues) led to a flurry of stories in the popular media.  Many of those stories (for example this one in the L. A. Times) framed the discovery as one that "hints that anthropologists may have had the wrong idea about the evolution of humans and technology."

Spoiler alert:  The stone tools from Lomekwi 3 are an important finding, but not a surprising one.

Hyping and over-simplification by the popular media of scientific findings  are a fact of life, and I understand the need to find an "angle" for a summary story.  I find the media's coverage of the Lomekwi paper particularly annoying, however, because of the general implication that the discovery of tools of that age somehow caught us all by surprise.  It didn't.  Anyone who has been paying attention to the field for the last few decades will not be surprised at all by the claims that: (1) there are stone tools that pre-date Oldowan; (2) those tools were probably not made by members of the genus Homo; and (3) the use of stone tools can be traced back to at least 3.3 MYA.

Let me be clear:  this is a very important finding, just not a particularly surprising one.  The tool assemblage from Lomekwi 3 (LOM3) fits very comfortably within an emerging picture of tool use pre-dating Oldowan and Homo.  That picture has been coming into focus for decades now, thanks to a lot of hard work by many different scientists.  The LOM3 tools make a significant contribution to that picture by providing a line of direct evidence that was previously absent.  For the first time, we get some idea of what pre-Oldowan stone technologies might have been like.  I think it was only a matter of time, however, and there will be a lot more coming down the road.

Why did we expect stone tools pre-dating Oldowan to be found?

First, as pointed out in the LOM3 paper, the 3.3-million-year-old age of the tools is consistent with the 3.4 MYA cutmarked bones from Dikika, Ethiopia that were reported several years ago. Not everyone accepts those cutmarks as legitimate (here is a John Hawks' post about the critique), however.  I'm not a cutmark expert, so I don't really have a strong opinion.  I'll just say that finding a stone tool assemblage in east Africa that dates to the same time period as the purported cutmarks mitigates the "but where are the tools?" question for me.

Second, the idea that only humans use tools (and therefore evidence of tool use should only be associated with the genus Homo) is an antiquated one that has been solidly falsified by studying living, non-human primates.  The use of tools has been widely observed among wild chimpanzees, our closest living relative (and also among more distant relatives such as orangutans and gorillas).  The most parsimonious explanation for the presence of tool-using behaviors in chimpanzees and humans is that those behaviors were also present in the Last Common Ancestor (LCA).  If correct, that means that all hominids/hominins (as well as all members of the lineage leading to chimpanzees) had some capacity to make and use tools. If not correct, we need to explain the independent emergence of tool use in both lineages.  I think the first possibility (that the capacity to use tools is a homology) is more likely, and makes it much easier to explain the widespread use of tools among great apes and some other primates. The LOM3 assemblage pushes our understanding of a particular kind of tool use (stone tool use) back in time, but it is by no means at odds with the general idea that all hominids had the capacity to use tools.  It provides direct evidence, rather, to help evaluate hypotheses about the timing and nature of the evolution of tool-using behaviors that are peculiar to humans.

The presence of tool-using behaviors among several of our closest relatives suggests that the cognitive hardware required for tool use was present deep in the Great Ape lineage: it doesn't take a big, human-like brain to make and use simple tools. But what about other parts of our anatomy? 


Picture
Comparison of human and chimpanzee hands.
Picture
Comparison of distal phalanges (bones at the end of the thumb) in chimps (Pan), gorillas, Orrorin, modern humans (Homo) and Homo habilis (OH 7) (source: Almécija et al. 2010).
Human hands and chimpanzee hands -- both of which are capable of making and using tools -- differ significantly in several ways. Walking on two legs has removed selection related to locomotion from affecting the human hand, allowing our hands to be more-or-less optimized for manipulating objects (e.g., making and using tools).  As quadrupeds, chimpanzees operate under a different set of restraints.  A chimpanzee's hand anatomy reflects compromises between an appendage that can be used to manipulate objects and one that has to function for both arboreal and terrestrial locomotion.  Those demands of locomotion have produced a hand with long fingers and a stiff wrist:  long fingers are useful for grasping branches while a chimpanzee is in the trees; a stiff wrist serves to accommodate the forces that are transferred through a chimp's hand while it is walking on its knuckles. 

The features of a chimp's hand make it harder for a chimpanzee to exert precise control over objects.  The long fingers make a human-like "precision grip" (where the pad of the thumb is opposed directly against the pad of the index finger, as when you hold a key) impossible.  The stiff wrist places limitations on the range of mobility.   Although chimps can be taught to make and use simple stone tools (e.g., Kanzi), their hand anatomy works against them.

One of the features of a human hand is the broad, flat distal phalanx of the thumb.  Because of our precision grip (enabled by our relatively short fingers), we are able to exert a lot of force between our thumb and forefinger. The broad bones at the ends of our thumbs reflect those strong forces.  The shape of the distal thumb bone of OH 7 was one of the criteria used to define Homo habilis in the original 1964 paper by Louis Leakey, Philip Tobias and J. R. Napier:

". . . the hand bones resemble those of Homo sapiens sapiens in the presence of broad, stout, terminal phalanges on fingers and thumb . . ." (Leakey et al. 1964:8).

As more fossil hands have been discovered in the decades that followed, it has become apparent that many hominids had "broad, stout, terminal phalanges" in their thumbs.  The illustration above (from
Almécija et al. 2010) shows the OH 7 thumb bone compared to the thumb of Orrorin tugenensis (a possible hominid from around 6 MYA), a modern human, a chimpanzee, and a gorilla. Orrorin had a broad thumb.  What about robust australopithecines?  Yep. Australopithecus sediba?  Yep.  It looks like there were a lot of hominids that may have had good features for tool-using hands. If Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 MYA) was a hominid, it suggests that a chimpanzee's hand is in fact more derived from the ancestral condition than a human hand:  the LCA's hand may have been "pre-adapted" for tool use with a pliable, mobile wrist.  All that was needed to make the transition to a human-like hand was to shorten the long fingers (which could have happened in the process of shifting to a fully terrestrial adaptation) and broaden the thumb as a precision grip became possible. If tool use was at all important to our pre-Homo ancestors, the selective pressure to shorten the fingers would have been present all along, just less constrained once long fingers were no longer needed for a partially arboreal adaptation.

So it looks like the cognitive capacity for tool use among our ancestors was probably present by at least the end of the Miocene (in the LCA), and the changes to hand anatomy that allowed human-like grasping were well underway during the Pliocene (ca. 5.3-2.6 MYA).  The discovery of stone tools dating to 3.3 MYA doesn't conflict with any lines of evidence that I know of suggesting when we could see the earliest stone tools.  The interesting questions that we can start address with the publication of the information from Lomekwi, really, are the "who" and the "why" questions: Why did hominids start making and using stone tools?  Which hominids were making these tools?  And what did tool use have to do with other aspects of human and hominid evolution?

Harmand et al. (2015:314) find differences between the lithic materials from LOM3 and Oldowan, and propose that the technology be given a new name: Lomekwian. 

"The LOM3 knapper's understanding of stone fracture mechanics and grammars of action is clearly less developed than that reflected in early Oldowan assemblages and neither were they predominantly using free-hand techniques. The LOM3 assemblage could represent a technological stage between a hypothetical pounding-oriented stone tool use by an earlier hominin and the flaking-oriented knapping behavior of later, Oldowan toolmakers."

The identification of "Lomekwian" tools is going to open up some new thinking about the roles of tool use in general (and stone tools in particular) in human and hominid evolution, not because stone tools at 3.3 MYA were unexpected, but because now we have some hard evidence of what those technologies might have been like. I don't work in Africa, but I'm probably not going too far out on a limb to suggest that there are plenty of places with mid- to late-Pliocene deposits that might be fertile ground for finding more direct evidence of these pre-Oldowan stone tool technologies.  It's going to be great to watch that story emerge.


ResearchBlogging.org
Harmand S, Lewis JE, Feibel CS, Lepre CJ, Prat S, Lenoble A, Boës X, Quinn RL, Brenet M, Arroyo A, Taylor N, Clément S, Daver G, Brugal JP, Leakey L, Mortlock RA, Wright JD, Lokorodi S, Kirwa C, Kent DV, & Roche H (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 521 (7552), 310-5 PMID: 25993961
4 Comments

Data from "Functional and Stylistic Variability in Paleoindian and Early Archaic Projectile Points from Midcontinental North America"

3/3/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
I have added an Excel file of the basic dataset for my 2013 paper in North American Archaeologist to the "Data" section of the website.  The file contains basic information on provenience (county), UTMs (county center), typological category, and morphometric data for the 1,771 Paleoindian and Early Archaic projectile points that I used in that study.  Like the 2014 AENA paper, the NAA paper was produced from a portion of the analysis in my dissertation. 

The samples I used for the morphometric analysis in my dissertation and in the NAA paper were identical, so the data in the Excel file are also in the appendices of my dissertation.  I'm hoping that providing the data in an electronic format will save someone a great deal of time doing data entry, and will encourage the use of the dataset that took me who-in-the-hell-knows-how-many hours and miles to collect, compile, and produce.  The measurements used, as well as the procedures for taking them, are defined in the paper and in my dissertation.

The ultimate goal of the two analyses (raw material and morphometric) was to produce a quantitative description of the apparent sequence of material culture change from homogenous (Early Paleoindian) --> regionalized (Late Paleoindian) --> homogenous (Early Archaic) that characterizes the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Midcontinent.  A quantitative description allowed an "apples to apples" comparison with data from model experiments, providing a basis for evaluating some alternative scenarios explaining the regionalization as a result of various changes in social network structure.  As the time to my defense was ticking away, I had to sacrifice some of the modeling work in order to get finished.  I was able to draw some conclusions, but a satisfying analysis of the "social boundary" question is still in the future.  Once I get set up at my new job I'll be able to restart the modeling work, add data from the southeast to my dataset, and reboot on the question of the social networks of early hunter-gatherers in eastern North America.


1 Comment

Data From "Changing Scales of Lithic Raw Material Transport Among Early Hunter-Gatherers in Midcontinental North America"

3/2/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
I am a proponent of openly sharing information, and one of my purposes in creating this website was to create a way that I could make available data from own papers and research projects.  I realized when I recently paid my bill for the site that it has been a year and I have yet to post any data.  So I'm starting now.

I have added an Excel file of the basic dataset for my recent paper in Archaeology of Eastern North America to the "Data" section of the website.  The file contains basic information on provenience (county), UTMs (county center), raw material, and typological category for the 926 projectile points that I used in that study.  The AENA paper was produced from a portion of the analysis in my dissertation.

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