Archaeozoology

Hundreds of prehistoric dogs found buried throughout the south-western United States show that canines played a key role in the spiritual beliefs of ancient Americans, new research suggests. Throughout the region, dogs have been found buried with jewellery, alongside adults and children, carefully stacked in groups, or in positions that relate to important structures, said Dody Fugate, an assistant curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Fugate has conducted an ongoing survey of known dog burials in the area, and the findings suggest that the animals figured more prominently in their owners’ lives than simply as pets, she said.

“I’m suggesting that the dogs in the New World in the Southwest were used to escort people into the next world, and sometimes they were used in certain rituals in place of people,” Fugate said.

To conduct her research, Fugate collected data on known dog burials and urged her archaeologist colleagues to note when canine remains were found during excavations. “I have a database now of almost 700 dog burials, and a large number of them are either buried in groups in places of ritual or they’re buried with individual human beings,” she said. Many of the burials are concentrated in northwestern New Mexico and along the Arizona-New Mexico border, she said.

Fugate’s database indicates that dog burials were most common between 400 BCE and 1100 CE. “The earlier the [human] burial, the more likely you are to have dog in it,” Fugate said. By the 1400s and 1500s the practice of burying people with dogs had stopped. Indeed, she noted, today’s Pueblo and Navajo Indians believe it is improper to bury dogs. What the ancient dogs looked like is an open question, she said, but their remains suggest that they were far more diverse than was previously believed.

Susan Crockford is a zooarchaeologist at Canada’s University of Victoria who has studied dog breeds in the Pacific Northwest. She agreed that dog remains have often been overlooked during archaeological excavations. Archaeologists tend to examine animal bones at excavation sites with an eye to what humans were eating, rather than what their relationships with dogs were like, she said. Crockford suggested that dogs’ spiritual role was among their most important functions in the region, second perhaps to their value as hunting or herding companions.

Source: National Geographic News

And as a follow-up to the last piece of news about the ‘Hobbit’: Peter Brown refutes Flores filling claim.

The 39th edition of the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival can now be found over at Hominin Dental Anthropology. It’s full of the usual anthropological and archaeological goodness, so go and check it out.

An interesting review of an in press paper on faunal exploitation in the Middle and Late Stone Age can be found at Anthrosite’s Blog.

The first domestic sheep were introduced to Britain during the Neolithic c. 4000 BC. The only evidence of these sheep comes from their skeletal remains and they are presumed to have a coat not dissimilar to their wild forebears with bristly fibres, known as kemps, obscuring an undercoat of fine wool.

It is thought that the small, brown Soay sheep that survives in a feral state on St Kilda off north-west Scotland best represents Bronze Age breeds in Europe, evidence for this coming from the similarity of skeletal remains with those of the Soay, and the similarity of wool in Bronze Age cloth with the fleece of the Soay. This wool was already much less hairy than the coat of wild sheep.

Further changes to the coat appeared in the Iron Age when white sheep seem to make their first appearance. White wool has been found in a Scythian burial mound in central Asia dated to c. 400 BC. But there was in fact a range of colour: black, white and grey, in addition to the brown of the Soay. Evidence for this comes from textile remains and surviving breeds.

Roman textiles from Britain and the Continent show that more changes in fleece type took place at that time. The predominant wool type at that time, in addition to being white, was fine to the naked eye. It is presumed that selective breeding was taking place at this time.

Sheep were found everywhere in England during Saxon times, as judged by place-name evidence. Saxon wools are comparable to those of the Roman period, ranging from hairy medium wools through the generalised medium type to the true medium fleece and even the fine fleece, evidence for the latter including some yielded from the Sutton Hoo burial. At around this time, many northern areas were occupied by those of Viking descent and it is possible that some northern breeds contain Norse and Danish influence.

In the early Middle Ages, the main function of sheep was to provide milk to make cheese for winter food; wool, manure and meat were by-products in that order of importance. Breeds in the modern sense did not exist, although a classification of sheep by fleece type was already in use by wool buyers. Records and the wool in cloth remains confim the persistence of coloured sheep. The predominant fleece type appears to be the hairy medium/generalised medium fleece comparable to the surviving short-tailed and vari-coloured breeds in Orkney and Shetland. Skeletal remains support this conclusion.

Reference: Ryder, ML. 1984. Medieval Sheep and Wool Types. The Agricultural History Review 32.1: 14-28

Welcome to the 18th edition of the Boneyard, the blog carnival devoted to all things palaeo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between.

We begin this latest edition in the Middle Palaeolithic with Julien Riel-Salvatore of ‘A Very Remote Period Indeed’ who discusses the interpretation of a new isotopic study of Neanderthal diet, based on material from a Neanderthal tooth from the French Middle Paleolitihic site of Jonzac.

A little further back time, we find Tim Jones at ‘Remote Central‘ discussing Pre-Clovis Humans in the Oregon High Desert, whilst at the same blog Terry Toohill puts ‘Human Evolution on Trial - North to Alaska’.. Meanwhile, here at Archaeozoology, we examine the later evolution of Pleistocene Horses in the New World.

We move into the Tertiary period with Emile of ‘The World We Don’t Live In‘ who discusses The oreodonts: the tylopods successful venture. Meanwhile, Brian Switek at ‘Laelaps‘ describes the ‘Truly Terrifying Entelodonts’ of the Early Miocene and Oligocene. In the same blog we also find a tale of another fearsome predator, this time of the middle Eocene: the Bad Cat from Wyoming, the largest meat-eating mammal from what would become the Wind River Formation.

Travelling back into the Mesozoic, we have two blogs about the ever-popular topic of dinosaurs. Darren Naish of ‘Tetrapod Zoology‘ talks about the land ‘Where the scelidosaurs and iguanodontians roam’, whilst GrrlScientist at ‘Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)‘ reviews ‘What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Insects, Disease and Death in the Cretaceous’ by George Poinar, Jr., and Roberta Poinar.

David Hone of ‘Archosaur Musings‘ brings us a series of three posts on the Early Triassic pterosaur Raeticodactylus filisurensis: part one describes the pterosaur, part two introduces Rico Stecher, the man behind Raeticodactylus, and part three is an interview with Rico about his work. Also from the Triassic comes the story of enigmatic hellasaurs, some of the most important insect fossils in the world from the Madygen Formation of Kyrgyzstan, courtesy of ‘microecos‘.

Reaching the Permo-Triassic boundary we find Peter Ward discussing ‘Suspending Life’ in Seed magazine; If almost every species on Earth was killed some 250 million years ago, how did our ancient ancestors survive and evolve into us?

We take a look at ancient plant-life with Christopher Taylor of ‘Catalogue of Organisms‘ as he tells us about Prototaxites, one of the Giants of the Silurian.

Dinochick, meanwhile, brings us more proof that only money speaks in a discussion of the recent news about fossils for sale.

We finish on a lighter note with Zach of ‘When Pigs Fly Returns‘ and Spinodracus dysonii, the porcupine dragon.

Thanks go to everyone who contributed to this edition of the Boneyard. The next edition will be hosted by Familiarity Breeds Content on May 3rd.

The later evolution of horses can be problematic and this is perhaps best illustrated in the Americas, where more than 50 species of Pleistocene equids have been named, most of them during the 19th and early 20th centuries (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0001). Whilst it has been argued that this number should be drastically revised, no consensus has as yet been reached about the number of valid species or their phylogenetic relationships (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0001). It was to address this problem that a recent study by Weinstock et al., looked at a segment of between 349 and 716 base pairs of the mitochondrial control region of fossil equid remains from a number of different localities in North and South America and Eurasia ranging in date from c. 53,000 years ago to historical times (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0002).

Using maximum likelihood, phylogenetic analysis resolved Hippidion, New World ’stilt-legged’ horses (NWSL) and caballines (including the domestic horse, Equus caballus, and the extant wild Przewalskii horse) as three genetically divergent species within a monophyletic group (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0002). African zebras and asses and Asian asses (onager and kiang) form a basal polytomy (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0002). However, the close phylogenetic relationship between Hippidion and caballine horses is in direct contrast to palaeontological models of hippidiform origins (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0002; Benton, 1997: 342).

It is suggested that the origin of Hippidion should not be seen as a descendent of Miocene pliohippines; instead, its origins appear to be more recent, probably during the last stages of the Pliocene (c. 3 Ma), which is close to the time of the first fossil occurrence of this genus (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0003). This is in opposition to views expressed by authors such as McFadden (1997) who claim that hippidiforms (genera Hippidion and Onohippidium) were present in North America as early as the late Miocene (c. 7 - 8 Ma).

The situation with the phylogenetic position of the NWSL is also apparently resolved with the molecular evidence, which places them as North American endemics tather than Eurasian migrants (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0003). Specimens from both north (Alaska/Yukon) and south (Wyoming/Nevada) of the Pleistocene ice sheets clearly belong to the same taxon. This apparent large geographic distribution raises the possibility that other Late Pleistocene NWSL currently described as different species (E. francisci, E. tau, E. quinni, E. cf. hemionus, E (Asinus) cf. kiang) may in fact represent the same taxon (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0003). Their origins probably lie south of the Pleistocene ice sheets, where Mid-Pleistocene remains (c. 0.5 Ma) with similar limb characteristics have been found (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0003). Frequencies of NWSL are much lower in the north and they appear to have a restricted temporal distribution. It would appear that, despite their presence in eastern Beringia (unglaciated Alaska/Yukon), they failed to disperse through the Bering land-bridge into western Beringia (north-east Siberia) (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0003).

All caballine horses from western Europe to eastern Beringia - including the domestic horse - would appear to be a single Holarctic species (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0003). This group can be split into two major clades. The first is broadly distributed from central Europe to North America north and south of the ice. The second clade appears to have been restricted to North America. If present in the Old World at all, it would appear to have disappeared before domestication of the horse took place, around 5,000 years BP, as all domestic horses cluster in the first clade (Weinstock et al., 2005: 0004).

Reference:

Benton, MJ. 1997.Vertebrate Palaeontology. Second Edition. London: Chapman and Hall.

McFadden, BJ. 1997. Pleistocene horses from Tarija, Bolivia, and the validity of the genus Onohippidium (Mammalia: Equidae). Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 17: 199-218

Weinstock, J, Willerslev, E, Sher, A, Tong, W, Ho, SYW, Rubenstein, D, Storer, J, Burns, J, Martin, L, Bravi, C, Prieto, A, Froese, D, Scott, E, Xulong, L, and Cooper, A. 2005. Evolution, systematics, and phylogeography of Pleistocene horses in the New World: a molecular perspective. PLoS Biology 3 (8): 0001-0007.

John Hawks discusses the latest development in the on-going saga of the Hobbit in ‘Was Homo floresiensis the tooth fairy?‘

The next edition of the Boneyard blog carnival will be hosted here at Archaeozoology on April 19th so please get your palaeontology submissions in to me by the end of the week.  The email address to send things to is silverthorn AT bardicweb DOT com or you’re welcome to leave a link in the comments.

Probably the most common developmental defect reported archaeologically is spina bifida (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55). This ‘neural tube defect’ varies in frequency worldwide today, although there are indications that the highest frequencies are found in the British Isles, e.g. 62 of 5607 babies for 1998, and that the lowest frequencies are in Japan, with North America in between (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55). Males are more frequently affected than females generally, and genetic and environmental factors are potential causes, these including deficiences in maternal folic acid (vitamin B12), zinc and selenium during foetal development (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55).

It is the occulta type, rather than cystica, that is described most frequently (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55). Spina bifida occulta is the incomplete fusion of the posterior neural arches of the sacral segments and/or lumbar vertebrae (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55). No structures such as the spinal cord protrude out through the space and thus no complications such as infection or paralysis occur (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55). In living persons the condition often remains undetected unless X-rays are taken. Spina bifida cystica, on the other hand, is often fatal (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 55). Three types of severity have been described (Aufderheide and Rodriguez-Martin, 1998: 61):

• meningocele - involves the protrusion of the nerve roots and meninges through the defect, with the spinal cord remaining in the canal and a covering of skin in place,
• myelomeningocele - involves the added protrusion of the spinal cord without normal skin covering,
• myelocele - involves the non-closure of the skin and meninges at the defect, the infection of which usually results in death.

It is unlikely that individuals in the past would have survived such a severe defect, which perhaps explains why there is so little evidence archaeologically (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 56). If someone did survive, potential complications would include paralysis, incontinence and hydrocephalus (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 56). For example, a 14-16 year old individual from Florida has been described with spina bifida cystica from lumbar vertebrae 3 to the 2nd sacral vertebrae with subsequent disuse atrophy of some of the bones: this may represent paralysis as a result of the condition (Roberts and Manchester, 2005: 56). More data is available for spina bifida occulta. For the early medieval period in Britain, three sites reporting absolute frequencies (percentage of sacra affected) give frequencies of 8.7% (Roberts and Cox, 2003), while other authors have indicated an average rate of 2.7% for some early British populations (Brothwell and Powers, 1968).

References:

Aufderheide, AC and Rodriguez-Martin, C. 1998. The Cambridge encyclopedia of human palaeopathology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brothwell, D and Powers, R. 1968. Congenital malformations of the skeleton in earlier man, pp 173 - 203. In DR Brothwell (ed) Skeletal biology of earlier human populations. Symposia of the Society for the study of Human Biology Volume 8. London: Pergamon Press.

Roberts, C and Cox, M. 2003. Health and disease in Britain: prehistory to the present day. Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

Roberts, C and Manchester, K. 2005. The Archaeology of Disease. Third Edition. Stroud: Sutton Publishing