Anthropology3
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viewinguideJOURNEYOFMAN1.pdf
Anthropology
VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man Dr Spencer Wells is head geneticist with The Genographic Project, Explorer-in-Residence with National Geographic, and professor at Cornell University.
To give you some context, this video was produced in 2002 (it accompanied a book Wells wrote, The Journey of Man: a Genetic Odyssey). —So, when Wells refers to his embarking on these studies with Luca Cavalli-Sforza (“It’s only in the last decade that we’ve discovered how to read these stories”; “Ten years on, and we’re ready to re-write history”), that places the beginning of the project in the early 1990s. Wells has published a second book, Pandora’s Seed: the Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (2010), and a new video, but this older one is more useful for this course. TIME “Passage” àInstructor observation 02:20 “But it’s only in the last decade that we’ve discovered how to read these stories.” 02:55 à Field studies by Luca Cavalli-Sforza in the 1950s and 1970s: The studies he was doing back
then involved taking samples of blood from individuals, and indirectly extrapolating genetic inheritance based on the blood proteins found in each sample.
05:25 “Ten years on, and we’re ready to re-write history.” à Cavalli-Sforza initiated this effort, using the genes of currently living individuals to open a window to past generations, in the early 1990s. This was shortly after the technology for breaking down an individual’s chromosomes into the component genes became perfected. The Human Genome Project (mapping the human genome; discovering the function of each gene) had already been initiated in the late 1980s by James D. Watson (co-“discoverer”, with Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, of the DNA molecule in the 1950s).
06:05 “Listen, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve got a problem. … If our ancestors made the journey I believe they did,
they would have had to be superhuman.” à I (your intrepid instructor) “read” this as a bit of hyperbole inserted by the script writer, who felt bound to introduce a bit of (contrived) drama to ‘pull the viewers in’ before they started picking up their remotes.
—What this contrived drama is referring to: “We” (anatomically and culturally modern humans) evidently emerged roughly 125,000 to 50,000 years ago (in the video, Wells and paleoanthropologist Richard Klein place the emergence between 72,000 and 50,000 years ago). The genetic evidence places their emergence in south-central Africa. However, the earliest archaeological sites attributable to these language-capable ancestors are found in Australia dating 40,000 years ago, with no sites in between. —So, like, they left Africa one day and made it to Australia by nightfall!
—But even if our language-capable ancestors emerged as recently as 50,000 years ago, it would certainly be possible for a group to migrate out of Africa, and over generations, migrate across southern Asia and into Australia in 10,000 years. A plausible explanation for the fact that we don’t find any archaeological trace of their migration is embedded in the segment of Journey featuring Julia Lee Thorp: during the Pleistocene, sea levels were 300 feet lower than present due to glaciation, so coastlines extended miles farther out than they do today. The global drying that took place exerted heavy environmental pressures on landlocked plants and animals, “and their populations cratered” (Richard Klein). But as Thorp points out, ocean species were unaffected, and would have been in great abundance. So during this time, our language-capable ancestors were arguably sticking to coastlines, where the food was. —Which means their ancient campsites are now under 350 feet of water. Also, lowered sea levels mean rafting from the Sunda continental shelf (Indonesia) to the Sahul continental shelf (Australia and New Guinea) was do-able.
Anthropology
VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man 10:00 The San Bushmen.
You’ll be meeting the grandparents of these people in another video during the traditional societies portion of the course—when we draw on the ethnographic record. As you’ll see in the video, an important component of their culture is their unique language family, Khoi-San, which includes oral clicks and pops as part of their arsenal of consonants.
They’ve evidently inhabited a large territory on the margins of the Kalahari Desert (south- central Africa) for untold generations. They (and plenty of other societies worldwide) have maintained their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life well into the 20th Century. Over the last 30 years, however, most if not all San-speaking groups have been forced out of their traditional lands and way of life, and into lives of poverty on reservations, as the governments of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa, along with international financing agencies, see increased agricultural production for global markets and petroleum production as the priority.
★17:50 [Merritt Ruhlen, linguist (language classifications), Stanford University]—the San family of languages ★18:35 [Richard Klein, evolutionary anthropologist, Stanford University] “Speech is more than communication,
it’s the way you model your world. …” ★19:30 [Klein]: “In every detectable archaeological respect, meaning the manufacture of art, the widespread
use of materials like bone and ivory, and shell, burial of the dead with ceremony and ritual;; in every detectable archaeological respect, after 50,000 years ago you see this burst of creativity. —There’s a big difference in behavior. The form is fixed, and culture ‘takes off’.” Paleoarchaeologists have known for decades that, after ca. 50 KYA, there’s a ‘sudden’ uptick in the rate of technological innovation at H. sapiens sites worldwide. The term they coined for referencing this phenomenon is “The Great Leap Forward”, but they’d been at a loss to explain it. The lines of thought voiced by Ruhlen and Klein, based on recent-ish findings in Genetic anthropology and Linguistic anthropology, provides an elegant explanation.
20:10 26:00
(Wells): “—So they didn’t use stone….”
[the scene in Die Kelders Cave with Royden Yates and the worked stone flake spear points] Spencer Wells makes it seem that, after 50,000 years ago, nobody made weapons from stone any more. Stone points remain into modern times. The real point, here, is that one aspect that distinguishes culturally modern humans is that they were more likely to also use materials other than stone in their technology mixes. (Also, that conceptualization of more inventive technological interventions for solving problems, innovation in designs and execution strategies, trajectories of technological development, all “took off” around this time.)
★21:20 [Ruhlen]: “…get inside the mind of their prey. Fifty thousand years ago, this would have given them an
immense advantage over their competitors (H. neanderthalensis;; anatomically modern H. sapiens)….” ★22:58 [Ruhlen]: “Language is basically responsible for all human behavior, whatever it is. … Language lets us
do an enormous number of different things, and hunting is just one of them.” 25:10 [The scene in Die Kelders Cave, with Royden Yates]
The Mandible (lower jaw bone)…anatomically [chin] but not yet culturally modern H. sapiens.
★27:40 [Klein]: “It’s difficult to find archaeological sites that dated between 60- and 30 thousand years ago. …
—So few they have no archaeological visibility.”
Anthropology
VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man 28:00 [Julia Lee Thorp, paleo climatologist (and more), University of Oxford.]
à As part of her data, she refers to “forams”, short for foraminifera—small sea creatures (you need a magnifying glass to see them in detail) that live in their own tiny shells. The shells survive in ocean deposition layers, which she cores, and then analyzes the profiles. Analysis of ratios of 18O (oxygen 18) to 16O isotopes in the shells constitute a gauge for water temperatures at the time they were alive: higher levels of 18O / lower levels of 16O indicate cooler water temperaturesàincreased glaciationàlower sea levelsàdrier conditions globally. àLast glacial maximum during the Pleistocene Epoch (“Ice Age”): 72-50 kya.
30:00 à The take-away, based on the evidence presented in the video: humanity was on the verge of
extinction. Many small population groupings/societies of anatomically modern humans existed in Africa and elsewhere in the Old World (along with Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis…possibly small groups of Homo heidelbergensis, Homo antecessor). Recent discoveries lead to the modelling that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals probably possessed the capability for “speech” (involving sets of standardized sound combinations that could reference things in the ‘here and now’).
The Broca’s Area is the ‘word processor’ of our brains. Language (spoken, signed, or written) gives us the capability of referencing and communicating about a) the past and future, b) plans, strategies, tactics, ideas, thoughts, feelings—and have others take these ephemerals that you’ve communicated and append their own “takes” or additions.
By the current widely-accepted modeling: Among the anatomically moderns, there was one small population in south-central Africa. Some individual in that population just happened to acquire a genetic mutation on his Y-chromosome (creation/acquisition of mutations occur randomly); or perhaps more than one key mutation happened to enter the gene pool of this population at about the same time. This individual/these individuals upon whom this/these alteration/s were bestowed then possessed the ability to generate and interpret language. During his/their reproductive life/lives, he/they passed [the mutation or complex of mutations] on to individuals in subsequent generations, who passed it on to more individuals in subsequent generations….
Speculation: “Language able” individuals interbred at a high rate, passing on the “language” gene/s, so that over some number of generations, those with the capability for speech and language were ‘the only ones still standing’ in this one population.
Among populations of hunter-gatherers, particularly in times of food shortage, their territories can expand, and can even ‘migrate’ some relatively small distance. Additionally, it is common that groups within a population of hunter-gatherers in these circumstances will “fission off”— leave their society of origin to establish themselves in other territories. Often, finding suitable unoccupied territory can carry a group some distance from the original population. So, over a multitude of generations, the descendants of this ‘ancestral’ population came to inhabit all regions in the Old World, often out-competing/occasionally interbreeding with populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis that they encountered.
—So, this is one ‘elegant’ explanation for the genetic finding that every person alive today is a descendant of a single ancestral population. Initially, the genetic and paleo archaeological evidence suggested the “cultural modernization” arose between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. More recent paleo archaeological evidence suggests that may have occurred between 125,000 and 100,000 years ago.
