Archaeozoology

Domestication of the cat

The wild ancestor of our domestic cat is Felis silvestris, and more precisely its Levantino-African subspecies, F. s. lybica. The exact place and date of its domestication is unknown, but domestic status seems to have been reached by the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040 - 1782 BC) in Egypt, at the latest during the 12th dynasty (c. 1976 - 1793 BC) when the animal begins to appear frequently in Egyptian art. However, a tomb painting from Saqqarah dated to the 5th dynasty (c. 2500 - 2350) depicts a cat with what seems to be a collar around its neck and three hieroglyphs representing seated cats have been found on a limestone building block probably dating to the end of the Old Kingdom and perhaps to the 6th dynasty (Pepy II c. 2278 - 2184 BC).

Hierakonpolis

Hierakonpolis is located between Esna and Edfu in Upper Egypt, and is the largest pre- and protodynastic site known to date, occupied from at least 4000 BC onwards. The so-called elite cemetery (KH 6) is one of the areas that have yielded unique results. Excavations have been on-going since 1979. Thus far, two phases have been recognised:

1.  Naqada IC - IBB period (c. 3800 - 3650 BC)
2. Naqada IIIA2 - IIIC1 period (c. 3200 - 3000 BC) and continuing into the 1st dynasty (c. 3050 - 2890 BC)

HK6 is unparalleled in the Predynastic period for the number and variety of animal taxa discovered buried within the graves. These included both domestic animals and wild species such as baboon, elephant, wild donkey, hartebeest, hippopotamus and aurochs.

A small felid

Recent re-examination of the contents of Tomb 12 at HK6 revealed the remains of a small, young felid together with the bones of at least 7 baboons and a hippoptamus of only a few days old. The felid appears to be too small for the swamp cat (Felis chaus) and too large for sand cat (Felis margarita). Although not conclusive, the evidence is in favour of the small felid being the wild cat (Felis silvestris) and, considering the geographical area, this would most likely be the subspecies Felis silvestris lybica. Fusion data indicates that the animal was probably about 6 to 8 months old at death, and was most probably a male. The left humerus shows a healed fracture with a smooth callus in the upper third part of the diaphysis. This fracture is consolidated in an oblique angle of about 30 degrees, as a result of which the bone is about 7% shorter than the right humerus. The right femur also shows evidence of a healed fracture which lead to shortening of the bone.

Whilst wild cat remains from settlement contexts merely prove that the species was hunted, the buried individual from HK6 indicates that it was also caught to be kept in captivity. The bone fractures probably healed without direct intervention, but without human protection against predators and without nursing, the cat would probably not have survived. Taking the length of the healing period into account, the animal most probably was held in captivity for at least 4 - 6 weeks. This, therefore, suggests attempts to tame cats. The process of cat domestication was probably very gradual, leading to full domestic status only during the Middle and New Kingdom. The felid from HK6 provides us with evidence for an early stage in that process.

Reference: Linseele, V., Van Neer, W., and Hendrickx, S. 2007. Evidence for early cat taming in Egypt. Journal of Archaeological Science 34: 2081-2090

In the second blog as part of the ‘Know Your Pathology’ series, I will look at Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS). This is a common condition of the vertebral column in which osteophytes develop at the intervertebral space as spurs or as complete bone bridges uniting the vertebral bodies. They develop on the ventral and lateral sides of the vertebral bodies, but may also be found projecting dorsolaterally into the vertebral canal, although these are small and less common. The synovial and cartilaginous joints are affected and erosion and fusion of some of the joints, especially the sacro-iliac joint, occurs; involvement of the sacro-iliac joint is considered to be the hallmark of AS. As the spine fuses, the bodies remodel and their normal shape is lost; the ultimate appearance is smoothing and squaring of the vertebrae or the ‘bamboo spine’.

A progressive, inflammatory disease of unknown aetiology, AS in humans has been associated with the HLA-B27 antigen, found in the blood of up to 95% of Caucasians with the condition. People with AS are at risk from passing the gene to 50 percent of their children; and then the children have a 30 percent risk of developing AS. It affects males predominantly with a male to female ratio of 5: 1, with an age of onset of between 15 to 35 years of age. It is seen commonly in Caucasians and native American populations but rarely in Japanese or African groups.

This condition is common in bulls, pigs and dogs, but is also seen in other species, if less often, and is a disease of some antiquity. It has been described in two crocodiles, one from Egypt and one from Cuba, dating to the Miocene and Pliocene periods respectively. Numerous other prehistoric animals have been described with spinal lesions similar to AS, including the dinosaurs Diplodocus and Polacanthus foxi, the cave bear Ursus spelaeus and the sabre-toothed tiger Smilodon californicus. The mummified remains of animals from Ancient Egypt also show evidence of this condition, whilst descriptions by the fifth century neurologist, Caelius Aurelianus, and Hippocrates also refer to afflictions that could well be AS in humans.

It is possible that many cases of AS in archaeological human populations are not being diagnosed because of the problem of differentiating between AS and Forestier’s disease (also known as Diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, or DISH). However, several features can be used to distinguis the two from each other, and from rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. AS has significant erosions of the synovial and cartilaginous joints of the axial skeleton. PA, however, involves the synovial joints of the appendicular skeleton and the cartilaginous joints of the axial skeleton, whereas both promote erosion and repair of the entheses involved. Bony profileration and fusion with no osteoporosis characterises PA and AS, and in RA the cartilaginous joints may or may not be affected. Therefore, if a complete skeleton is available for analysis, it should be possible to differentiate these erosive arthropathies.

This condition has also been reported upon under the following names: spondylosis, spondylosis deformans, ankylosing spondylosis, Bechterew’s disease, Marie-Strumpell’s disease, Morbus Bechterew-Marie-Strumpell, pelvospondylitis ossificans, rheumatoid ossifying pelvispondylitis, rheumatoid spondylitis, bamboo spine, poker back, spondylitis ankylopoetica, spondylitis deformans, atrophic spondylitis… and others.

References:

Jubb, K. V. F., Kennedy, P. C., and Palmer, N. 1993. Pathology of Domestic Animals. 4th Edition. Volumes 1, 2 and 3. London: Academic Press.

Roberts, C. and Manchester, K. 2005. The Archaeology of Disease. 3rd Edition. Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd.

Spencer, D. G., Sturrock, R .D., and Buchanan, W. W. 1980. Ankylosing Spondylitis: Yesterday and Today. Medical History 24: 60-69

As the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival enters its second year, the entries in issue #26 demonstrate that it is still going from strength to strength. Hosted by Eric Johnson of ‘Primate Diaries’, it brings us posts from the whole spectrum of archaeological and anthropological interests. All are worthy of a read, but entries I found particularly interesting were Mango Girl’s discussion of how fasting in Hinduism is perceived to have spiritual benefits, but only for women and Victor at ‘Music 000001’s exploration of the evolution of music and how primate vocalisations could be connected to the origins of melody.

Cashew nut fossils have been identified in 47-million year old lake sediment in Germany, revealing that the cashew genus Anacardium was once distributed in Europe, remote from its modern “native” distribution in Central and South America. It was previously proposed that Anacardium and its African sister genus, Fegimanra, diverged from their common ancestor when the landmasses of Africa and South America separated. However, groundbreaking new data in the October issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences indicate that Europe may be an important biogeographic link between Africa and the New World.

“The occurrence of cashews in both Europe and tropical America suggests that they were distributed in both North America and Europe during the Tertiary and spread across the North Atlantic landbridge that linked North America and Europe by way of Greenland before the rifting and divergence of these landmasses,” explain Steven R. Manchester (University of Florida), Volker Wilde (Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Sektion Palaeobotanik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), and Margaret E. Collinson (Royal Holloway University of London, UK). “They apparently became extinct in northern latitudes with climatic cooling near the end of the Tertiary and Quaternary but were able to survive at more southerly latitudes.”

The cashew family (Anacardiaceae) includes trees, shrubs, and climbers prominent in tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates around the world. A key feature is an enlarged hypocarp, or fleshy enlargement of the fruit stalk, which is a specialized structure known only in the cashew family.

The researchers examined possible fossil remains found in the Messel oil shales, near Darmstadt, Germany, which are dated to about 47 million years before the present and reveal the presence of a “conspicuously thickened” stalk. In four out of five specimens, this hypocarp was still firmly attached to the nut, indicating that the two were dispersed as a unit. According to the researchers, the size and shape of the hypocarp – like a teardrop and two or three times longer than it is wide – support its assignation to the Anacardium genus, common to South America, rather than the African Fegimanra genus, though the fossils have features common to both.

“The occurrence of Anacardium in the early Middle Eocene of Germany suggests . . . that the two genera [Anacardium and Fegimanra] diverged after dispersal between Europe and Africa,” the researchers write. “Presumably, Anacardium traversed the North American landbridge during the Early or Middle Eocene, at a time of maximal climatic warmth, when higher latitudes were habitable by frost-sensitive plants.”

The astoundingly close similarity between the fossil and modern day Anacardium also indicates little evolutionary change to the cashew since the mid-Eocene period: “Although cashews have been cultivated for human consumption for centuries, it is clear that they were in existence millions of years before humans. The cashew had already evolved more than 45 million years ago, apparently in association with biotic dispersers,” they write.

Reference: Steven R. Manchester, Volker Wilde, and Margaret E. Collinson, “Fossil Cashew Nuts from the Eocene of Europe: Biogeographic Links Between Africa and South America.” International Journal of Plant Sciences 68 (8): 1199-1206.

Source: EurekAlert!

A new study by Kevin Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research and John Terrell of The Field Museum adds insight into the migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and into Asia less than 100,000 years before present (BP). The comprehensive review of human genetic, environmental, and archaeological data from the circum-Pacific region supports the hypothesis, originally based largely on genetic evidence, that modern humans migrated into eastern Asia via a southern coastal route. The expansion of modern human populations into the circum-Pacific region occurred in at least four pulses, in part controlled by climate and sea level changes in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. The initial “out of Africa” migration was thwarted by dramatic changes in both sea level and climate and extreme drought in the coastal zone. A period of stable climate and sea level 45,000-40,000 years BP gave rise to the first major pulse of migration, when modern humans spread from India, throughout much of coastal southeast Asia, Australia, and Melanesia, extending northward to eastern Russia and Japan by 37,000 years BP.

The northward push of modern humans along the eastern coast of Asia stalled north of 43° N latitude, probably due to the inability of the populations to adjust to cold waters and tundra/steppe vegetation. The ensuing cold and dry Last Glacial period, ~33,000-16,000 year BP, once again brought dramatic changes in sea level and climate, which caused abandonment of many coastal sites. After 16,000 years BP, climates began to warm, but sea level was still 100 m below modern levels, creating conditions amenable for a second pulse of human migration into North America across an ice-free coastal plain now covered by the Bering Sea.

The stabilization of climate and sea level in the early Holocene (8,000-6,000 years BP) supported the expansion of coastal wetlands, lagoons, and coral reefs, which in turn gave rise to a third pulse of coastal settlement, filling in most of the circum-Pacific region. A slight drop in sea level in the western Pacific in the mid-Holocene (~6,000-4,000 year BP), caused a reduction in productive coastal habitats, leading to a brief disruption in human subsistence along the then densely settled coast. This disruption may have helped initiate the last major pulse of human migration in the circum-Pacific region, that of the migration to Oceania, which began about 3,500 years BP and culminated in the settlement of Hawaii and Easter Island by 2000-1000 years BP.

Source: EurekAlert!

This blog meme was created by Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My parent is The Primate Diaries

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:

Ilium by Dan Simmons

The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is:

Children of Men

The best cult novel in beat fiction is:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I am propagating this meme on to:

Remote Central
A Very Remote Period Indeed
Clioaudio

It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment ends up. Don’t let it go extinct!

This is the first in a proposed series of blogs spotlighting specific pathologies that can be found in archaeological material. In this blog, I will tackle one of the more commonly discussed pathologies - osteoarthritis.

A term that has been widely misused in archaeological literature to include virtually any joint condition which results in new bone formation around the periphery of the joint, osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease primarily affecting the articular cartilage. The degeneration, which affects both the cells and matrix of the cartilage, exposes its confined fibres to produce a rough surface with clefts in the surface. This is worn away by the movement of the joint, resulting in the underlying bone becoming exposed. A non-inflammatory condition, it primarily affects the synovial joints. In human archaeological populations, the hip and knee are often those most commonly affected; these are the major weight-bearing joints.

In order for a definite diagnosis of ostoarthritis to be made, it is considered that at least three of the following four changes should be found:

1. grooving of the articular surface
2. eburnation
3. extension of the articular surface by new bone formation
4. exostoses around the periphery of the bone

The aetiology of osteoarthritis is multi-factorial. Increased age, a strong genetic predisposition, obestity, trauma, activity/lifestyle and environmental factors can all contribute to its development.

References:

Baker, J., and Brothwell, D. 1980. Animal Diseases in Archaeology. London: Academic Press.
Roberts, C., and Manchester, K. 2005. The Archaeology of Disease. Third Edition. Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

Acknowledgements:

Afarensis, whose ‘Know your primate’ series inspired the name.

The second blog carnival of the day is hosted by The Other 95%, a blog devoted to our spineless animal brethren. The 90th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival brings us everything from physiology to ecology, and from palaeobiology and archaeology to science and politics. There are some great posts to read, but I’d particularly highlight: ‘Evo-devo of mammalian molars‘ by PZ Myers and ‘Which Came First; Social Behavior or Elaborate Ornamentation?‘ by Grrlscientist.

Today we are celebrating the 1st anniversary of the archaeology and anthropology blog carnival, Four Stone Hearth. Ably hosted by Tim Jones at Remote Central, this 25th edition covers a vast spectrum of topics. Beginning with war and conflict, the entries then pass through to more birthday-related themes such as food and the all-important drink, via some significant archaeological finds. palaeoanthropology and a little linguistics.

Submissions that I found particularly intriguing were ‘Whoa, Neandertals were in Uzbekistan and Siberia‘ at anthropology.net, ‘ First Steps Toward Re-unification in Postwar Bosnia’s Only Integrated School‘ at Remote Central, and ‘The Phraselator II‘, which discusses how a high-tech military device is helping to preserve the tribal languages of American Indians. However, all are well worth a read so do take some time to do so. I believe you will find many to be very thought-provoking.

Reading Livers Through Reading Literature: HEPATOSCOPY and HARUSPICY in Iliad 20:469 ff & 24:212 ff, Aeneid 4:60 ff & 10.175 ff, Cicero and Pliny on Divination, among others - Co-authored research by Patrick Hunt, Classics, Stanford University and Whitney de Luna, Stanford Hospital Liver Clinic

Anthropology Goes to War, Part 1: Anthropologists in the war effort from “savages” to “terrorists” - Eric Michael Johnson at ‘Primate Diaries’

Publishing Archaeology Outside of Archaeology: Is archaeological research useful or relevant to scholars other than archaeologists? - Michael E Smith at ‘Publishing Archaeology’