Survivorwoman

Les Stroud for Prime Minister of Canada!

I am a huge fan of Les Stroud, of Survivorman fame.  Not only is he Canadian and full of integrity, he can play some mean harmonica while teaching viewers about survival skills in different ecosystems, from different camera shots he patiently positions and films without a video crew.

There's the awesome Ray Mears and the *ahem* so-so Bear Grylls as well - plus a few others who have achieved less celebrity status.  Like that guy on the Channel 4 series that cried about not wanting to kill a porcupine.

But all of these survival heroes are men, and I'd love to have a female survivalist to idolize - I'm not aware of any women who star in their own survival show though. I've done no research, but I bet most survivalist companies in Britain are led and taught by men as well.

When I realised this, it set me thinking - I'd LOVE to be 'Survivorwoman'!

A female take on wilderness skills would be fascinating.  Women and men are different creatures,  biologically and sociologically - and the result of watching a lone woman surviving and teaching an audience through the camera would be a new viewing experience.  Plus, I want to do it.

I could totes make one of these, man
from woodland-ways.co.uk

Now I'm not in any way an expert on wild food, bushcraft, or primitive skills.  I also have no presenting skills, and possibly no aptitude for it, though I used to be an English teacher and have no fear of the spotlight, and indeed often can't be stopped speaking.  I'm enthusiastic and curious, and determined - I don't mind being made a fool of either!  I grew up in the woods, and USED to know the trees and animal species and which berries to eat and not eat from the land, until I moved to bigger and bigger towns and finally changed country, where my knowledge of the natural landscape I live in is liteally now, quite foreign.

There's thousands of people in the UK that probably would have a much better CV suited for the star Survivorwoman casting role.  I'm small and weak, and probably can't swim (I'm not sure, I have a fear of water and generally try to avoid testing an old skill!  Is it like riding a bike?), and haven't even camped much since childhood.  I struggle to light fireplaces.  I've tried stone knapping, I put a hole in my jeans and got a blood blister.

BUT!  That means I'm someone who needs to learn, right?  And what better way for viewers to learn then watching another person repeatedly fail to light a fire?  Identify plants and trees?  Make a shelter in the woods?

So if you know anyone in a production company, please tell them my pitch and give them my name and details.  I'd love to go without a shower for seven days and sleep on the cold rocky ground with the bugs.  I'm an archaeologist after all.

Genetics and the Last Human Common Ancestor

I thought I was on to something yesterday, but it actually just highlighted the fact I need to learn a bit more (a lot more) about human genetics.  It involved a lot of rough sketching of human phylogenies, and confused questions to my husband.  I think sadly, the breakthrough I was working towards is not actually anything really interesting.

I was thinking about supporters of macromutations for the origin of grammatical language (as I do).  Many of these theories also posit a late emergence of language, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago (it's become quite normal to talk of some kind of 'consensus' that language evolved roughly 100,000 years ago - I'm sorry, did I miss that meeting?).  Some examples would be research by Norbert Hornstein, old work by Davidson and Noble, and basically anyone with a conservative view of language emergence who is smart enough to drop the 'human revolution' ideas of the 80s and 90s.  I'm guessing this date is reached because of accepted material culture proxies seen in the archaeological record taken as undoubtably 'symbolic' - 90,000 year old beads at Qafzeh cave and the like, and the dating of Out of Africa 2.

"Through random drift or selection lineage will
trace back to a single person. In this example
 over 5 generations, the colors represent extinct
 matrilineal lines and black the matrilineal line
 descended from the MRCA." - Wikipedia

My thought process went like this.  If humans require a robust neural substrate in order to be linguistic beings, this substrate must have evolved before the last common human ancestor, otherwise a portion of humans living today would not have this genetic endowment for language.  And since all human populations are language capable, this 'macromutation' or whatever is being proposed, is very old indeed.

Or so I thought.  mtDNA allows us to trace back our last maternal ancestor, our 'mitochondrial eve', and this human lived around 200,000 years ago.  Y-chromosone DNA can also be traced back to a last common ancestor, which if I'm remembering correctly dates to around 50,000 years ago.  Our ancestral... Adam we could say.  But for the sake of this argument, I wanted to know how long ago the most recent person that was ancestral to all living humans lived.  So I did some internet trawling and ended up with a big surprise.

The date of the most recent common ancestor is a limit on the minimum recency a genetic macromutation for language could have feasibly spread to all modern humans.  And I was expecting this date to resemble the date for mitochondrial eve, or at least farther back than the conservative estimate for the evolution of human language (though if I was thinking about the Y-chromosone dates I would have realised it wasn't going to be earlier than that).  But, dating back a single gene will necessarily go back further than the most recent common ancestor, which turns out to be a much more recent date that all humans can trace back to (Wikipedia):

The identical ancestors point for Homo sapiens has been estimated to between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago.^[4] 

Woah, really?  I wasn't expecting a date that recent for a common human ancestor between all humans living today (You can click on the Wikipedia citation in the quote for a link to a Nature article on this subject).

So, my idea about the dating of the last common ancestor of humans doesn't force back the limit on macromutationist accounts of a recent origin of human language like I thought it might.  But it was an interesting exercise.

So you're safe for now, macromutationists.  But you're still biologically unlikely.

Catch-up: France and Flint

Last summer I decided to pull up my socks and be a REAL archaeologist.  No more of this ‘watching time team and casually reading about Anglo Saxons’ stuff (which probably wont stop, but anyways)!  I volunteered for the Les Cottes dig in France directed by Marie Soressi, and for a month from half July to half August, I spent an amazing time crouched over on a meter square of dirt developing my right bicep.

It was a fantastic dig – giant cave, giant pit, giant piles of finds – and I felt like I learned so much, this being only my second excavation.  I will definitely try to go again.  The flint in France is gorgeous (pretty translucent ochre colour flint banded with red, and some a lovely raspberry, or deep violets that were almost black) – the area of Poitou we were in is renowned (by flint enthusiasts anyway) for the quality and abundance of material, and the area is rich with prehistoric cultures going back deep into the Palaeolithic. 

Les Cottes itself was first excavated in the 1800s, and again in the 50s.  This excavation led by Marie Soressi took place out in front of the mouth of the cave, in in-situ deposits that held amazingly rich layers of not only classic Aurignacian materials, but Proto-Aurignacian, Chatelperronean and Mousterian as well!  There were vertical walls where you could see the layers, full of flints and antler sticking out, and some layers were red with ochre or black with manganese.  A European Palaeolithic archaeologists’ dream!

Nodular flint we dug up from fields nearby

There were also opportunities while we were there to collect some nearby flint and try our hand at knapping.  I’ve tried knapping obsidian before, and this was my first time trying with flint.  I’ve realised I am a terrible knapper, and although I love lithic technology and the look and feel of flint and the amazing things it can do, I am going to need 5x as much tuition as the next person to be a competent flint knapper.  Lesson one: not putting a hole in the thigh of my trousers.

I met some amazing people on the dig and hope to keep in touch with many of them.  Most of all it’s made me fall in love with flint – although British flint is interesting, I find it a bit more cold and masculine – icy black Norfolk flint, or the steely grey of the south, or the dull orange patina some old flints get here – it’s definitely not as sexy as the French flint!!!

Here's a link to the description of Les Cottes on the Max Planck Institute website:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/files/les-cottes.htm

And here's a paper on Les Cottes if you are interested:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440311003463

European Palaeolithic Conference: 21-23 February

For a closer conference (temporally and geographically), the European Palaeolithic Conference will be held at the British Museum.  It includes free entry into the current exhibition on Ice Age Art which should be good.

http://www.ahobproject.org/announcements.php

Here is a program as well, to see if anything tickles your fancy:

http://ahobproject.org/downloads/European%20Palaeolithic%20Conference%20programme.pdf

Evolang 10 in Vienna, Austria - and reflections on the last Evolang

Kyoto

February of last year was the 9^th biannual conference on the evolution of language – known affectionately as Evolang (http://kyoto.evolang.org/).  I had done some major saving and scraping to get together enough funds to go (especially since I had just had a wedding four months previously!), and dragged my new husband along with me too, promising that the evolution of language offers archaeologists PLENTY of interesting talks and networking opportunities.

I’ve been to Kyoto before, in 2006 when I went on a lone backpacking trip across Japan.  I absolutely loved the country and was so excited to return and utilise my rusty Japanese (for which I had brushed up on by taking an evening course after work twice a week, and submerged myself in language lesson podcasts!  (http://www.japanesepod101.com/).

Vienna

It was my third time attending an Evolang conference, and my first time actually presenting.  I had two posters – one written with Luke McCrohan called Sea Crossings are an Unreliable Indicator of Language Ability in Hominids.  The second I piece I presented, and on an idea I had been slowly nurturing called The First Word Was Not a Noun.  It’s a subject I would ideally like to come back to and develop - I'm just not sure how.  What I do know is that the origins of syntax remains my most curious topic in language evolution…

So my husband and I spent 6 nights 7 days in Japan, and ended up having an amazing time.  Though we never quite recovered from the jet lag, we met up with some amazing people I’ve met at past conferences, and made new friends as well.  The conference itself was fantastic, and had some great talks by geneticist Simon Fisher, biolinguist Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, and of course the incredible Simon Kirby. Palaeolithic archaeology in general was a bit lacking (understatement!), save for a few mentions of Neanderthals here and there (many thanks to Sverker Johansson).  Unfortunately the lack of archaeology, paired with copious amounts of talks on Zebra Finches, made the conference a bit boring for my archaeologist non-linguist husband.

As the conference was now a year ago I don’t trust myself to go too in depth on any of the topics heard (in fact I’m just too lazy to retrieve my notes), but I'll try to be good when the next one rolls around - which will be in 2014 in Vienna!

http://evolangx.univie.ac.at/

Plenary speakers will include:

• Michael Arbib
• Rob Boyd
• Bill Croft
• Chris Knight and Jim Hurford
• Ann Senghas
• Joan Silk
• Kenny Smith

I hope to see you there!

Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special

The Culture Show recently released a special episode on the new exhibition at the British Museum about Ice Age Art.  Andrew Graham-Dixon took us to a number of cave sites in Spain and France, and took a look at many of the items that will be at the exhibition, discussing cave art and prehistoric European portable art with notable people such as archaeologist Steve Mithen and anthropologist Camila Power.  It was an enjoyable look at pieces I hadn't seen before, especially more recent pieces from the end of the ice age.

My favourite guest was an experimental archaeologist from Germany - to be honest the whole programme could have focussed on him and the work he does because it was facinating!  It showed his mammoth ivory carvings made to be replicas of prehistoric pieces, fashioned with flint blades that must have taken so much more patience than I have when I'm sitting at a table with my malleable polymer clay which just pops into the oven for 10 minutes to be finished.

I enjoyed a class during my undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser in Canada, where archaeologist Brian Hayden led us in a number of experimental archaeology exercises.  In one, we all came to class with a shell - and out back in the sandbox/knapping pit, we went to work with clumsy obsidian tools to fashion a bead, including piercing a hole.  It took hours - and I cheated a bit by grinding my shell against the concrete side of the building.  My bead is still around somewhere as I used to carry it around in my purse, along with a little bone fish I also made in that class.  Good class!

In the programme, the host also spoke with art historians and artist Antony Gormley.  It was nice to have contributions from modern artists and people in the art world, but I think it might have lended some confusing speculation to the conversation.  Modern western art is its own beast, and while it may well have been similar in the past, we don't have any way of saying it was and I would have liked to see a bit more impartiality rather than the expected speculations about the prehistoric artists' motivations and intentions.

But still, speculation makes good and entertaining television, and I'm sure this programme will bring a lot of people to the BM and generate a lot of talk about art in the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe.  And anything promoting the Palaeolithic is good in my books - far too often I think people can forget that there is a past far beyond the Romans and Egyptians, illustrated by the bewildered looks and expresions of amazement from Graham-Dixon as he spoke about 'deep history'.

Which brings me to another problem I had with the programme - a few times he mentioned how these cave artists were all of our ancestors.  I don't mean to be pendantic, but they weren't.  They might be the ancestors of no one living today at all as well!  Without genetic evidence we can't be sure that these early European modern humans didn't die out and leave no genetic signature in modern populations today in modern Europeans.  And I resented how by 'everybody' he meant Europeans - which is a bit exclusionist.

But again, prehistoric publicity of any sort is good publicity and this exhibition looks to be one that shouldn't be missed!  It's running between now and late May, so get your tickets and enjoy if you can get to London!

Did you see the show?  What did you think?

Here's a link to the programme on BBC 2 (only available in the UK I presume!)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qrmpz/The_Culture_Show_Ice_Age_Art_A_Culture_Show_Special/

Blog reopening - watch this space!

After over a year and a half, (I see my last post was 2011...?) I've decided I'm going to start this blog up again.  I feel bad I let it trail off, but it illustrates how I found it difficult to keep motivated in my academic studies when my life was just so focussed on other things.  I would have loved to have launched right into a PhD back then, and keep this blog going as a journal/sketch pad of my thoughts and ideas, but things didn't quite turn out that way!

So why am I back now?  I've applied for a PhD to begin next Fall.  I have a potential project, a potential supervisor, and I'm really positive about the whole thing.

"Hooray!" say Cory's readers

What changed?  Well, after having lived in the UK now for over three years as a non-student, I'm now considered a 'home' student and am elligible to pay the regular tuition rate instead of the overseas rate.  I've also been working and saving in the meantime, and I'm going to try the self funded route (although fingers, toes, eyes, everything is crossed that I might be lucky enough to receive funding or partial funding!)

So with that I really need to get myself back into a headspace I was three years ago, fresh out of a Masters and somewhat up to date with the research.  I haven't been completely out of the loop - I've attended conferences, presented a poster here and there and even submitted a full paper to the last Evolang conference in Kyoto with a colleague.  I went digging in France in the summer, and now feel less of a 'fake archaeologist'.

Hopefully, then, this marks a step towards that academic career I've been striving for - watch and see if it is!

~Cory

Neolithic Adventures

I haven't really been using this blog completely in the way I intended... I guess I intended I would write a lot more (then an evening class and a startup jewellery business got in the way)!  But I wanted this to be a bit of documentation of the adventures of the foray into the world of academia, from the perspective of one who is just starting out.  And things keep happening, and I'm not documenting!!

I think I've missed my opportunity to properly recall a great day of lectures in Oxford entitled Neanderthals and Modern Humans (could there ever be a more interesting title for a day of lectures?? It also included a tour of their C14 dating Accelerator Mass Spectrometer unit!! https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/publictalk.html) But this month, my partner and I went on a lovely trip to Wiltshire to check out some of the amazing Neolithic monuments and earthworks only a short drive (to this Canadian anyway!) away.  To the right you will see - of course - the famous Stonehenge, which isn't actually even a henge...

It was great to be in the landscape, and my company and I had a lot of discussion of 'phenomenology', the study of archaeological areas through the experiences of the senses - it seems a bit of a fluffy approach but is really fascinating and cannot be ignored when trying to more fully understand a site.  Going beyond a positivist framework of facts and figures and ignoring the human experience, we can miss criucal pieces of what it was, and is, like to experience these ancient places.

We walked from Stonehenge down a long path in an effort to locate Durrington Walls.  It was a great way to take in th entire landscape - Stonehenge is but a part of this neolithic centre of activity, and when you see the huge amount of barrows dotted around the horizon it's really made clear.  We walked along fields with sheep and young lambs skipping about, and got a bit lost, but it was all worth it as it was a lovely walk.  When we finally found Durrington Walls, across from woodhenge, we realised it would have been a lot easier to drive - but then I couldn't look at molehills or collect pinecones and bits of iron slag off the ground, could I??

We next visited the West Kennet Longbarrow, perhaps the oldest of the sites mentioned here, and probably the one I found most fascinating.  It's located on top of a hill and is very windswept, and offers a great view around the landscape.  It's about a day's walk from Stonehenge (dont worry - we drove), and is also one of many monuments on a busy landscabe which includes Silbury Hill, and Avebury (a stone circle with a bank that makes Stonehenge look puny).  The longbarrow has an interesting entrance that keeps out the wind, and has a number of chambers off the long corridor once inside.  When it was opened to the public, they reconstructed the roof which had fallen in and installed plexiglass skylights that let in the light, so you can walk around inside and see inside the chambers.  Interestingly, a lot of newagers leave little stones and candles and flower petals everywhere, hints of the modern day uses of the barrow! 

The best thing about Avebury, which we visited last, is that you can walk up and touch the stones (which are in an around the village and fields) which is a greater experience than standing behind the rope at Stonehenge.  It seems like a great town to visit and spend some time in - we witnessed a very 'free spirited' wedding, and all the new agers you could ask for making merry in the local pub.  I bet it attracts the most interesting of people... unfortunately, as we got to Avebury in the evening, the gift shop had already closed!  I love gift shops...

Having all this prehistory on your doorstep is something that I absolutely love about living in Britain.  Wood rots away unfortunately, and although the Museum of Anthropology at UBC is one of the most fabulous places to visit, it's hard to find any accessable bits of British Columbian PRE-history. 

My parter and I are now dreaming of living in a van for a couple of months and driving around to all the prehistoric sites in Britain - what an adventure that would be! 

This day was a great window into the ancient past - well - not too ancient.  The Neolithic was only a couple thousand years ago, really...

And for anyone who's interested in learning more about Britain's Neolithic past, I've been reading/keeping this book by my bed for the last 6 months or so now!  But don't let that fool you, it's really good... I'm just bad at finishing books these days!  Francis Pryor is a wonderful writer and makes you feel like your his buddy in the pub as he talks to you engagingly about this era.  He's a fantastic writer and balances the academic topics well in an accessable way.  Highly recommended, even if you're like me and know virtually nothing about the Neolithic... if it happened after 50,000 years ago, chances are it's news to me!

Languages that lack abstract concepts of time

An article being published in many news sources this week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13452711) claims that an Amazonian tribe called the Amondawa lack a concepts of time - but again, I find the headlines to be a bit misleading.

Disregarding The Sun and The Daily Mail, since it's generally a cheap shot to pick at their science news, we'll take a look at the BBC, who ran the headline: "Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says", while directly below by a few lines, they quote one of the researchers as saying, "We're really not saying these are a 'people without time' or 'outside time'... Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events..."

Isn't that contractictory?  

The researchers seem to be commenting more on the way the Amandowan people use their language, and do not appear to map time onto space such as with words like 'hour' and 'year'.  They still seem to use a concept of time, as it is mentioned people's names change as they age and come into a different stage of their life - it sounds like a pretty strong concept of time to me!  Just perhaps different linguistically from the languages we are used to in societies that are constantly watching the clock.

One of the research team along with an Amandowan child and their parent

It is noted, of course, that Amandowans who speak Portuguese are completely able to use these time-space mappings.  This supports how our culture affects our language - while the influence the other way around might be much smaller.

Phonetic Hints towards Language Origins



An article was published in Science and covered in the New York Times on April 14th.  Entitled, "Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born", I was understandably intrigued!!  Here is the online coverage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/science/15language.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Two young girls from Kalahari, Namibia. 
San is one of the languages famous for its 'clicks'

I haven't read the article published in Science yet, so maybe I shoud withold my judgements... but any theory that makes claims about the specific characteristics of an ancestral language farther back than 10,000 years makes me brace for a lot of skepticism!



The article in the Times says, "Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.  Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it."

But surely this can't always be the case - there are quite a few language areas that have considerably high phonemic inventories, for example the Northwest Coast of North America, and the Caucasian mountain regions.  The African Continent is covered mainly by very large language families, with a few isolates.  I was looking through some papers on African Language Diversity, and this one here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00124.x/pdf speaks of 10, which isn't very much when I wouldn't be suprised if North America, a continent that has been populated by a speaking species for only a tiny fraction of the time, probably can equal or succeed that number (I'm guessing, I haven't checked!)

To me Africa looks like a continent that has had major language shifts and growths over so many millenia that looking back in time to try and retrieve information on the first languages spoken and what they sounded like, or what phonemes they contained - seems very far fetched to me.  But then again, this is coming from someone who has not yet read the article.  Or the abstract for that matter.  That is great science.  Anyhoo, here is a link to the abstract (which I have yet to read):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346.abstract