In this case, the question was why chemical analyses found tetracycline in these ancient skeletons. Some research and some experimentation concluded that the brewing of alcohol was a likely way for these people to have made an consumed tetracycline. The article mentions the consumption of an oatmealy alcoholic gruel, but I bet that the same substance could be applied topically.

The article also had me thinking about the origin of alcohol in general. Beer was independently invented in several regions of the world, both New and Old. To me, I don’t quite get how alcohol would be so popular. Prehistoric beers are hard to come by. At least in the New World, beer could have been accidentally made by forgetting about a jug of grains and spit, finding it again, tasting the contents, and deciding it was yummy. I find that implausible because I wouldn’t have gotten past tasting the contents, but alcohol does not have the intended effect on me. When I have a glass of beer, the effect is like someone punching my throat and taking a hair dryer to my face… not exactly how I like to spend my social time! But if there was some medical benefit, like treating your infection, I could more easily see how prehistoric peoples the world could really get into alcohol even if they’re fuddy duddies like me.

The actual conference was a extremely positive experience. Other conferences I’ve been to had some dealbreaking flaws that kept me from partaking too long. One organization’s annual meetings consistently had rooms which were unbearably crowded and hot. Another, well, was located in New Orleans which is not really a fault, but it really kept me from attending much! This conference was great: rooms at the America’s Center were airy and uncrowded. Most panels ran like clockwork. The staff and volunteers very nice. Pretty much anything that could’ve been good was good.

{Click to continue to the Flickr set!}

Well, OK, I’ll level with you. Some of the talks weren’t so good. Some people read verbatim from their notes. Some have slides that are unreadable (seriously, if you have to preface your talk about a slide with “I know you can’t read this, but…” you should really redesign that slide). I will say with my own biased perspective that MU’s presentations were very good and overall we have the prettiest, clearest, slides. Our Mac-ness certainly was a factor, as I saw a lot of Apple Keynote touches. On a related note, I’ve seen a lot of default iWork styles show up in presentations, not just those from MU. In a few years it will be bad form to stick with the (pretty) iWork default tables and graphs. I think we’re still safe for now though.

The good talks I saw, however, were great. There was one with no data or results (due to unforseen circumstances), but the speaker and his slides were so good that it was not a waste of anyone’s time. Some of the archaeoastronomy talks (full disclosure: organized by my advisor) had fantastic photographs of astronomical alignments, and the speakers really spoke to the audience to maintain their interest.

The best part was that each talk was 15 minutes, with no room for questions afterwards. I. Hate. Q&A. I think it is unfair for someone sipping a mocha in the audience to lob questions at a speaker who is tired from just having given a talk. The audience member has had 15 minutes to come up with something to say, and the speaker has 5 seconds for an answer. If the question or comment is constructive (protip: it’s not), it would be better as a one on one chat or email anyway. Q&A puts the power squarely with the loudest, most negative people in the audience. Not having room for questions makes pretty much makes everything better.

After seeing the array of talks I’m very hyped to present my own next year. I missed this year because of an unfortunate misunderstanding of the deadline. I’m all ready to go for 2011 in Sacramento, though!

Next post: hmm, maybe about the poster sessions? Or the food? We’ll see!

“First, arguing over the extent to which nature or nurture is responsible for cross-cultural regularities, such as the apparent long-standing dominance of males as perpetrators and victims of violent acts, is a sterile exercise. The question makes no more sense than arguing about whether the length or the width of a rectangle makes a greater contribution to its area (Petrinovich 2000).”

From: Walker, P. L. (2001). A bioarchaeological perspective on the history of violence. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 573-596.

Petrinovich LF. 2000. The Cannibal Within. New York: de Gruyter.

Ok, the behavior of an organism is affected by its genes and environment. This interaction, through our evolutionary past, has been acted upon by natural selection: gene-environment interactions that result in more successful reproduction than others is propagated through the gene pool until they are commonplace. That’s one train of thought.

Here is the other: Earth experiences seasons based on its axial tilt and revolution around the sun. Humans do not have a seasonal reproductive period, so babies can be born at any season. A human baby born in a certain season experiences different harmful environmental stimuli, like freezing weather, heat, predators. So, it would be beneficial if human babies had custom behaviors to maximize their own survival depending on the time they were born.

Ok, now mash those trains together (don’t worry, they’re pilotless freight trains). What if… humans have certain personality tendencies depending on the time of year they were born which were the result of genetic-environmental interaction? Or, what if some general aspect of western astrology (a yearly-repeating cycle of personality attributes) had a phylogenetic explanation?

A quick perusal of a zodiac book in my old bedroom and some internet sleuthing quickly dashed my inquiry. No study has found that astrological readings correlate with personality traits. But, if someone does explore this further and finds something significant, I wrote it down first lol.

• Over the weekend I did Rock Band’s endless setlist on hard. I was both guitar and vocals. Endless setlist is where you play all 58 songs in a row. Luckily the game can be paused! I started around 7PM and belted out the finale, Won’t Get Fooled Again, at around 1AM. Everything was hurting by then, my fingers from guitar, my torso and throat from singing, and my feet from standing the whole time. It was totally worth it though, and now I have gold icons representing me when I go online, lol.
• Speaking of Rock Band, lots of Rock Band 2 news came out today, including the new setlist of 80 songs (not looking forward to endless setlist in this one!). The game sounds amazing and it’s only two months away.
• I thought I would get more reading done if I did it at Stephens Lake Park. Unfortunately I brought my camera and spent much of the time taking pictures of animals at pond-side. Link to Flickr.
• What I attempted to read (and later finished) was textbook on evolutionary psychology. I’ve been taught the basics before but it didn’t take hold. In fact, I was very opposed to the concept because it seemed so deterministic. Now, maybe with a more open mind, I totally get evolutionary psychology and I see it everywhere.
• In preparation for Comic-Con I had a few copies of Keeley’s comic issue 2 printed. Hae Eun from Planet Tokki was kind enough to let me attempt to sell them at her table. One tidbit: the night scenes were so dark that the toner used caused paper jams at the university printers!

Dr. Wadley and I arrived at MU in the same semester. As I ran around trying to make sense of grad school, I saw him adapt to his new office and his new class in Middlebush. Because of our mutual newness he kind of became my anchor: if hey can work this out (being in a more high-pressure position), then so can I.

On September 11th, a month after we started our first semester and hours after the event, I sat in his class and we discussed the breaking news and he reminded us that facts are scarce compared to speculation-disguised-as-fact.

Dr. Wadley’s class was lighter on other days. He told us about his research in Borneo and the Iban friends he made there. He told us about the battle for indigenous rights. He told us how he sacrificed a pig to increase his social standing in a traditional society. Some things were a mystery with him: the tip of a large tattoo could be seen on the back of his neck peeking out over the collar of his dress shirt but I never got the nerve to ask its story. In a way I didn’t want to know: it spoke of a life of unique experiences that cannot be distilled into an answer.

Here’s to six years of knowing Dr. Wadley and his impact on the lives of me and all of the students he advised and taught.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, asked, “Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?”

And:

“Dr. Spencer Wells, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and Director of the Genographic Project, said … “Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.””

My suspicio-meter immediately hit the jackpot. That’s a pretty tall order for a study on genetics. The mention of climate also sounds like an attempt to make the news by linking this study to global warming. I followed a link to the Genographic Project which was the source of this story. Being the responsible researchers they are (after all being part of National Geographic), they had a free link to the actual scientific paper that is the root of these findings. Of course I read it immediately.

It’s a good paper. And this is coming from someone who, let’s say, doesn’t have that much faith in genetics research. It’s highly technical of course, but the introduction and discussion are very clear. And I’m glad to report, the article is very non-sensationalist. It does contradict the popular digest of the source material on several key points:

Humans were Near Extinction
The AP article states that populations might have been as low as 2,000 around 70,000 years ago, citing another scientific paper not referenced. I tracked it down!* It actually does not say that the human population dropped to 2,000. Instead, the human variation we see today can be projected to exist in around 2,000 people 70,000 years ago. Is there a difference? Yes, because there could be untold number of people living 70,000 years ago whose unique genetic markers did not make it into our modern population. Unfortunately one of the flaws of genetic research in anthropology is that these hypothetical extinct lines cannot be detected, measured or accounted for, though they are likely to have existed. The scientific paper clearly states this, though that didn’t make it into the Genographic or AP articles.

The Wells quote is very dramatic, mentioning how ancient humans had to band together after a long split to repopulate Africa and then the rest of the world. But, the scientific article portrays this split differently. The split isn’t between caves, huts, villages, or other small groupings. The split is between the entire south Africa and east Africa! At this continental scale, there is really no personal drama as the quotes suggest. If one of the two groups had gone extinct who is to say that the other group wouldn’t have taken over and populated the world? Did the people living back then even recognize an intracontinental split between populations?

Climate is the Culprit
Even the AP article says “It is possible that this climatological shift contributed to the population splits,” (emphasis mine). In fact, there is absolutely nothing linking climate to low population in the scientific paper. The paper does mention droughts as an event that kind of coinicides with the period of low human population (actually according to the paper the droughts ended 20,000 years before the populations merged, making me wonder if they even correlate). In this case, both quotes about climate or the environment as the cause of these populations shifts are just pure speculation and “wishful thinking” if you can call it that.

It is very important to remember that correlation does not equal causation. Just because two things seem to be happening together, doesn’t mean they are related. It’s 70 degrees this fine morning and I had Chex for breakfast, but it doesn’t mean I ate Chex instead of Trail Mix Crunch (which is really good by the way) because it’s 70 degrees.

—

Considering material from the scientific papers, the popular quotes above exagerrate a few key points. Human population has not been determined to be around 2,000 at that time, nullifying any talk of near-extinction. Climate has not been determined to be the cause of the misinterpreted population estimate. There was a large split between two African populations, but not between individual bands. The groups eventually fused before humans crossed into Eurasia, but at such a scale of time and space that the lay-term of reunion is meaningless. So there you go, scientific research from paper to popular press and all of it’s varying forms. *sigh* if only I can write my dissertation proposal with this much speed and energy.

*Zhivotovsky LA, Rosenberg NA, and Feldman MW. 2003. Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 72:1171–1186