I'm Baaaaack

(Reuters photo)

Okay, I have to admit, I hit the six month blogging wall. Life started getting busy, and once I stopped posting, it became difficult to get into the swing of things.

Now I'm tanned, rested and ready for some more archaeology news.

The big story of the last couple of days is the discovery of the world's oldest wall painting, found in Syria at a Neolithic site on the Euphrates called Djade al-Mughara. (Oldest not counting cave paintings, of course). The painting has been carbon dated to 9000 BC. As you can see from the photo above, the decoration consists of geometric patterns in red, white, and black, created using hematite, chalk, and charcoal.


The abstract nature of the painting has prompted predictable comparisons to modern artists, such as Mondrian or Klee. Needless to say, any resemblance, as they say in Hollywood, is purely coincidental. The article linked above quotes a Syrian artist who says ""We must not lose sight that the painting is archaeological, but in a way it's also modern," he said."

No. It isn't modern. It is very, very old, created by a society with different ideas and beliefs than our own. Geometric patterns are found around the world, and there is no single wellspring for them, rather they are the product of the human mind's love of pattern. What it does show is humanity's common urge for artistic expression.

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Heaven Forbid

Connections, connections. The world of archaeology, and pseudoarchaeology, is a fairly small one. Those of my readers who clicked through the link a few posts back to the 'discovery' in the Gulf of Cambay would have seen a quote by Michael Cremo, who is identified as a 'researcher and author of Forbidden Archaeology.'

Meanwhile, recently I picked up an issue of Atlantis Rising. The title of this magazine tells you just about all you need to know about its contents. If that weren't enough, article titles such as "Was the Ark Electrical" would, I think, be sufficient to brand the periodical as a bit out there. To be fair, not everything in the magazine is bunk -- I'd say no more than 50% is. I picked up the magazine as it looked to be a good source of material on pseudoarchaeology to discuss in this blog. The column that first caught my eye is a regular feature called "The Forbidden Archaeologist" by none other than our Mr. Cremo. He has a website.

It doesn't appear that Cremo has any professional credentials whatsoever. That in and of itself doesn't prevent him from being a good popular writer. As a young field, archaeology has benefitted from the contribution of amateurs far more than most other fields. However, the column in this issue contains a mixture of good data and misplaced credulity that is a hallmark of pseudoarchaeology.

Cremo begins the column with a reference to Plato's Timaeus, the major source for the Atlantis story. Plato tells a story in this dialogue about a trip by the Athenian lawgiver Solon to Egypt. This probably never happened; Solon was a famous wise man to whom all sorts of stories and travels were attributed, much like Albert Einstein in the present day. Plato has the Egyptians tell Solon that their civilization was far older than the Greeks, and that even Greek history was older than the Greeks imagined; this is the intro to the Atlantis story.

Cremo then claims that, like the Egyptians, he will show modern scholars that humans have been in Greece longer than they currently imagine. The starting point is the Petralona skull, discovered in a cave in 1960. This is the oldest recognized evidence for hominids in Greece. Dated to between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago, it is now thought to be a specimen of Homo heidelbergensis. The skull is hard to identify and date because it was found embedded in a stalagmite, without context. A 1981 article in Nature dated the skull between 160,000 and 240,000 years old, significantly earlier than Poulianas put it.

From this firm starting point, Cremo goes off into ever murkier terrain. He brings up a later discovery by Poulianos, the Greek anthropologist who found the Petralona skull. In 1977, near the village of Perdikkas, Poulianos claimed to find a 3 million-year-old mammoth with associated stone tools. If valid, this would be the oldest evidence for hominids outside of Africa. However, this 'discovery' has not been generally accepted by the scientific community. Poulianas never published his finds in an independent scientific journal; the only articles on the topic are in Poulianas' own journal Anthropos, the house organ of his group the Anthropological Association of Greece, which has feuded with the Greek Cultural Ministry. You can find a rather wild rant by Poulianos against the Greek Cultural Ministry here.

I am not an expert in paleoanthropology, so I won't comment on the validity of the Perdikkas finds. However, it is clear that they haven't been properly published, nor are they currently accepted by the scientific community. Simply presenting the information as fact without mentioning any of this is irresponsible, albeit par for the course among pseudoarchaeologists.

Cremo next claims that there is evidence for hominid occupation of Greece and nearby areas as far back as the Miocene. The Miocene ended at least 5 million years ago, so this would put us at a time at or before the split between the ancestor of hominids and chimpanzees. Needless to say, this would upset all of paleoanthropology. What is Cremo's evidence? A paper given at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology in 1872 reporting early horse bones with evidence of human modification, and an article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1874 reporting carvings on animal bones. That's it -- two articles written over 125 years ago, at a time when knowledge of human ancestors and geology was in its infancy. I haven't been able to get access to these articles (apparently even the library here at Penn has its limits), but the lack of followup calls into question the degree to which these can be used to support any kind of argument. Occam's razor would suggest that the first author was mistaken about the use of tools (this is well before use-wear analysis) and the latter was mistaken as to geological context. At the least, one would have to return to the sites in question and confirm the finds before printing them as fact.

Cremo then drifts off into woo woo land arguing that the Sanskrit Puranas are evidence for human civilization millions of years ago. From fact to questionable to 'evidence' to fiction in three pages -- all in a day's work in the world of pseudoarchaeology.

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Mmmmm.....Prehistoric Donuts......

Via Pharyngula, this is a very funny story. Apparently promoters of the upcoming Simpson Movie have painted a giant Homer Simpson next to the famous artwork known as the Cerne Abbas giant. This figure is held by Wiccans to be an ancient fertility symbol, but there is no record of it before the 17th century, and many scholars feel monks from Cerne Abbas, a major Benedictine monastery, would have destroyed it if it was really a pagan image. It is more likely either a hoax or, according to an alternate interpretation, a caricature of Oliver Cromwell as Hercules.

Whatever its origins, it is now a national symbol and owned by the National Trust. It was covered during World War II to prevent the Germans using it as a navigational landmark.

For those worried, the paint is biodegradeable and will wash away when it next rains. Apparently the local 'pagans' are angry and have promised to perform some rain magic to hasten that day. Hmmm, how hard can it be to manufacture rain in Britain?

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2000-year-old Chariot Discovered Intact

News has been filtering out of Bulgaria since this weekend about a discovery of an intact chariot of the 2nd century B.C. in a tomb in Bulgaria. (Some reports say the chariot dates to the 2nd millenium B.C., but this appears to be in error). The ancient land of Thrace comprised much of what is today Bulgaria, northeastern Greece and European Turkey, but much about their culture is unknown, due largely to the dearth of written records. Many spectacular tombs have been discovered in Bulgaria in recent decades (the pic in the header is one such, of the 4th c. BC), of which this is only the latest. Although the wooden parts of the chariot had rotted away, its shape could be reconstructed based upon the iron fittings used in its construction. It apparently was pulled by three horses, had two wheels and a bronze roof, and the passenger rode in an iron seat.

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More Bad Archaeology Reporting

This is a bit old, but I intended to make a brief comment on it as an example of how not to make archaeological findings accessible to the public. Discovery News posted an article on a recent British survey of caves in northern Britain. One of the results of the survey was that ancient humans did not randomly select caves to dwell in, but favored those with large entrances and deep passages, eastern or western aspects, and level areas in front.

So far, so good. Not terribly surprising perhaps, but there are differences in cave selectivity depending on region and the purposes for which the cave was used. I suspect the main goal of the project was simply to survey caves for evidence of occupation and then catalog them. The problem lies in the introductory 'grabber' paragraph:

House buyers today usually peruse properties with a checklist of desired features in mind. This aspect of human behavior has apparently not changed much over the millennia, according to a new study that found prehistoric cave dwellers in Britain did exactly the same thing when choosing their homes.

The study found no such thing. A 'checklist'? A checklist implies writing, which of course these prehistoric people did not have. We can say that they preferentially settled certain kinds of caves, but this says nothing about the selection process. For all we know, the local shaman took the omens and declared a particular cave propitious for settlement. I understand that the reporter was trying to phrase the findings in a way a layman would understand, but this was the wrong way to go about it.

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Interpreting DNA Evidence

Last week, I posted a link to a NYT article that discussed recent DNA studies of people and cattle in Italy. These studies found genetic similarities between current populations of both species in Italy and those in various regions of the Near East. This link was then interpreted as evidence that the ancient people known as the Etruscans arrived in Italy from the Near East (either directly or indirectly) sometime in the last three or four thousand years.

John Hawkes' has a post on his anthropology blog that examines another such attempt to use DNA evidence to reconstruct ancient migrations, this one published in Science. The results have been controversial, which has led to much scholarly back-and-forth. I thought this would be a salutary example of the dangers of overinterpreting DNA evidence. So what's the controversy?

For those wanting more detail, Hawkes ably sums up the issues involved, but in brief the evidence is this: DNA testing of people from North Africa found that they possess specific variations in their mitochondrial DNA similar to people living in the Near East. Based on the differences between these lineages and other mitochondrial DNA, we can estimate the time at which these groups branched off from their neighbors. In this case, the answer is about 45,000 years ago. The authors argue that this indicates that there was a migration into North Africa from the Levant around that time, displacing the earlier people that lived there. The date corresponds to the first peopling of Europe, and the authors suggest that both movements were part of the same pattern of migration.

Not so fast, say two other scholars. There are other ways for genes to move around. A later movement of peoples might have brought over these lineages. Or there might have been gradual diffusion of genes (via a series of short-distance interactions) instead of large-scale population movements. The archaeological evidence suggests that there was no large scale migration from Europe or the Near East into North Africa until much more recently, around 5000 BC.

For now, the evidence is insufficient to decide between the alternatives: 40,000 year-old mass migration? Slow diffusion? Recent mass migration? These are precisely the same problems that come into play in the Italian studies. Just because you share a common ancestry with someone 5000 years ago in the Near East doesn't mean that a bunch of people came over from the Near East at precisely that moment. There are lots of ways that genetic material can circulate.

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A Mite Unusual

Whether you are a great emperor, or even just an ordinary Joan, all of us hope that our accomplishments will survive somehow across the generations into the distant future. At the least, perhaps archaeologists to come will discover our bones or our discarded trash and learn something about us. However, when you are identified not by your great works, or your physical remains, but by the tiny animals living in the dung of your domesticated livestock, well, let's just say that takes my feelings of self-importance down a notch or two.

Archaeologists working on samples from the bottom of the now silted up Lake Marcacocha, near Cuzco, Peru, have discovered the remains of tiny fossilized mites, like the one pictured above. These mites typically live on the dung of large herbivores, such as llamas. Furthermore, you can date the mites by how far down they are in the sediment. It turns out that there is a huge peak in the number of mites right after the founding of the Inca empire. This can be correlated with the growth of llama caravan routes radiating out from Cuzco to peripheral regions of the empire. After the Spanish conquest, trade collapsed, partly due to warfare and partly due to animal diseases brought by the Europeans that decimated the llama herds, and the mite population fell in tandem. By the 17th century, the number of mites increases again as the Spanish replace the native animals with horses and cattle.

There you go. The rise and fall of a great empire, written in the skeletons of tiny mites.

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How to Move Very Big Rocks

One of the oldest arguments used by pyramidiots and other woo woo types to prove that the pyramids and other examples of massive stone architecture couldn't have been made by ancient peoples without futuristic technology is the sheer size of the stones used to build them. This is used to 'prove' that Atlanteans or space aliens must have been involved. This is rubbish, of course, and there have been many experiments conducted to show that the effort involved was not beyond the capabilities of early humans.

The above video is one more nail in the coffin. It shows one middle-aged Michigan man, Wally Wallington, moving huge stones by himself using techniques he developed. I was immediately reminded of Edward Leedskalnin, who over a period of 28 years built by himself a series of huge rock sculptures at his estate in Florida, called Coral Castle. As in the case of the pyramids, this feat has led some to claim that he had special technology or psychic abilities, since no one saw him construct the objects.

Contrary to the narrator in the clip, we can't know that the techniques used by Mr. Wallington were used to construct Stonehenge. It seems likely that a variety of approaches were used (note that one of his demonstrations requires a handy concrete slab under the block). Nevertheless, as an example of what can be achieved with human ingenuity, it is amazing.

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World's Oldest Perfumes Found on Cyprus

There are two stories today about a discovery of a Middle Bronze Age perfume factory by Italian archaeologists at Pyrgos, Cyprus, dating to c. 1850 BC. The finds include mixing bowls and small alabaster bottles that held the perfume. Natural herbs such as lavender, pine and rosemary (but not, so far, parsely, sage or thyme) were used for the fragrances. The scholars have attempted to recreate the perfumes using recipes written down by Roman authors. One of my professors, William Biers, got a grant from a major perfume manufacturer to do analyses of the contents of ancient perfume vessels in the hopes, I guess, of finding Cleopatra's perfume or something. Like most such investigations, one can detect certain ingredients, but not the proportions nor the method of preparation. It seems doubtful that ancient perfumes would appeal to modern shoppers anyway.

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Ancient grapes found in Greece

Part of the purpose of this site is to present regular summaries of archaeology news. Today, there is an interesting story from The Discovery Channel website. A team of archaeologists working in northern Greece at a site called Dikili Tash have found the remains of grape seeds and crushed grapes in one of the houses there. The site dates to the Neolithic period, around 4500 B.C. It's not clear whether the grapes were being gathered to make wine or simply used for their juice. Probably the former, as wine was being made in Iran a millenium earlier. The grapes were either picked from wild vines or were in the earliest stages of domestication. It's possible that the cultivation of the grape was motivated specifically by the desire for greater alcohol production. Some scholars think wheat may have been first cultivated in order to make beer, not bread, although there is really no evidence for this.

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