…prior to the arrival of students, the beginning of school, and the traditional ramping up of Fall.
The Academy Fight Song, by Thomas Frank (The Baffler)
The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.
A large number of my colleagues in academia are passing this around…and for good reason.
Taphonomic comparison of bone modifications caused by wild and captive wolves (Canis lupus), by Nohemi Sala, Juan Luis Arsuaga, and Gary Haynes (Quarternary International, early view)
Abstract: This work presents data obtained from experiments conducted on wild and captive wolves. Actualism is a very useful tool for taphonomic studies, as it allows us to understand the behavior of fauna in the past. However, not many past experimental studies have dealt with wolves as taphonomic agents. The results of the study show that wolves modify animal carcasses in advanced stages that include fracturing the bones in order to consume the marrow. By comparing captive and wild wolves, we observe that captive wolves often modify ungulate carcasses to a greater degree than do wild wolves. Moreover, factors such as the size of the ungulate and the period of availability of the carcass influence the type and degree of bone alteration. Tooth mark dimensions also allow us to compare wolves with other large carnivores and reveal that wolves differ significantly from large felids and ursids, and they have more in common with hyenids.
One of the things I love about paleoanthropology is how readily it lends itself to cross-disciplinary work. Why should I care what wolves do to bones? Well…a small species of wolf (Canis etruscus) is one of the most common representatives in the Dmanisi faunal assemblage. Since Dmanisi was discovered, questions about site formation processes and accumulation vectors for the extraordinarily rich and well-preserved fossil assemblage have been raised. The site contains a lot of potential predator accumulators in addition to the canids, including hyaena, several species of large cats, smaller carnivores, and the hominins at the site. Being able to differentiate patterns of bone modification on fossils within the assemblage (e.g. canid vs. cat vs. hyaena) can reveal important aspects of how the site was being used during formative processes, and thereby potentially provide us with information about the temporal and spatial relationships of different materials found in the excavation, including the hominin fossils. Was part of the Dmanisi site a canid or hyaena den while the hominins were present in the environment? To address that question, you need to know what kinds of marks canids leave behind…
New evidence for early presence of hominids in North China (Ao, H., et al., Scientific Reports)
Abstract: The Nihewan Basin in North China has a rich source of Early Pleistocene Paleolithic sites. Here, we report a high-resolution magnetostratigraphic dating of the Shangshazui Paleolithic site that was found in the northeastern Nihewan Basin in 1972. The artifact layer is suggested to be located in the Matuyama reversed polarity chron just above the upper boundary of the Olduvai polarity subchron, yielding an estimated age of ca 1.7–1.6 Ma. This provides new evidence for hominid occupation in North China in the earliest Pleistocene. The earliest hominids are argued to have lived in a habitat of open grasslands mixed with patches of forests close to the bank of the Nihewan paleolake as indicated from faunal compositions. Hominid migrations to East Asia during the Early Pleistocene are suggested to be a consequence of increasing cooling and aridity in Africa and Eurasia.
The possibility of an early hominin presence in Northern China has been in the literature for more than a decade now, although the evidence has been limited to archaeological materials. This paper is another confirmation of that early presence on the basis of new dates, putting hominins in the area extremely early. An early presence of hominins in this region would be additional support that the technological and adaptive changes in early Homo really did open up a much greater range of habitats for hominins to exploit. The different kinds of seasonality, resource limitations, and ecological interactions of hominins ranging across a diverse range of areas of Eurasia, in addition to Africa, early in the Pleistocene poses interesting evolutionary questions and targets for research. The presence of hominins in Northern China in the Lower Pleistocene is also one of the reasons I was doing fieldwork in Eastern Kazakhstan earlier this summer….
And in honor of Seamus Heaney’s passing, the conclusion to his poem, “Digging”
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
*****
1. Nohemi Sala, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Gary Haynes, Taphonomic comparison of bone modifications caused by wild and captive wolves (Canis lupus), Quaternary International, Available online 30 August 2013, ISSN 1040-6182, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2013.08.017.
2. Ao, H., M. J. Dekkers, et al. (2013). “New evidence for early presence of hominids in North China.” Sci. Rep. 3. doi:10.1038/srep02403
