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I regularly read nature, science, PNAS, Current Anthropology, Journal of Archaeological Science, American Antiquity, Antiquity, Archäologische Informationen, Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt, (most of them on paper – my one big indulgence and luxury) and whatever tidbits I’m led to by finding them being mentioned somewhere. Whoever happens to share my particular interests can find a list of all the highlights of the current week, together with abstracts and the personal comments I feel compelled to make, here.
For the time being the archive of older entries also resides in my now defunct old blog 
which offers a search option.
I’m impressed by Notroff, Clare et al.’s restrained and factual response to Sweatman & Tsikritsis. Non-specialist outsider views are usually ignored or summarily dismissed out of hand. This thoughtful and serious reply is in spite of the latter article bearing all of the hallmarks of a crackpot theory: they do protest too much, their so-called statistic is the result of cherry picking, and they lump all kinds of nonsense together with their stronger arguments. All that said, those arguments do carry some initial plausibility and deserve to be rebutted by good arguments as Clare and his coworkers have done.
I am not sure, whether Margaryan et al. means anything or not. An admixture of, say, five percent of immigrants will leave a five percent signature in each of the full genomes of typical descendants a few generations later and can be detected. Mitochondrial genomes on the other hand follow a single straight line of descent. You need twenty genomes on average to find a single sign of a five percent admixture. Here we have 52 samples for the full 8 ka, typically less than six per relevant time slice. Seeing that even a total 100 % population replacement will still typically retain some common haplogroups, what is this small sample supposed to prove?
Since the foundational studies on the domestication process by Gordon Hillman 1990 (list of 2013-06-22 and 2014-11-09) it should have been obvious to everyone, that full plant cultivation as a way of subsistence took place long before the first biological traits of domestication became visible. (In fact that process only started when plants began to be transferred and cultivated far from their regions of origin.) Perhaps now that Ibáñez et al. finally supply proof in an archaeological publication the fact may finally gain wider acceptance in the community.
Defrance et al. is yet another blatant example of treating model outcomes as data. Explicitly calling a model run an experiment, as they do, is a travesty. As far as I know there are no real data backing up their claim and none of the paleoclimatic data I am aware of point in that direction.
From Tacail et al.’s results it seems that not going to be weaned for at least 20 months or more makes infants lay down tooth enamel of a different isotopic composition in their first five months of life. Now here’s one to put overblown claims about the temporal order of cause and effect firmly in their place.
The purpose of any theory is to make testable predictions. In the case of human genealogies this means describing in advance, what the next fossil found will look like given its age and provenance. So far every new find has come as a total surprise and yielded something entirely new and unexpected. As long as this continues to be the case, the suggested human family tree is still very far from being able to be called a theory.
Ancient Egypt has always been somewhat outside of and separate from the rest of African archaeology. As Watson and Schuenemann et al. have now shown, the same is true for its population up to Roman times, showing closer ties to the Near East than to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Admittedly, my inability to tell the difference between a content-free hoax and serious theoretical debate in the humanities probably says more about me than about the texts in question. But when this disability is shared by the editors and reviewers of respected journals from a leading publisher, we should begin to take a serious look.
Reading Taylor et al. on the spread of horses around 1200 BC I can’t help but wonder if the very first of the recurrent Mongol invasions might not have occurred near the time of the breakdown of the Bronze Age societies. It can’t have been the only or even main reason, but could it have added one more to the diverse triggers all coming together at nearly the same time?
For some time now I’ve warned about how indiscriminate squandering of precious natural gas in large electricity plants, where coal could be used just as well and where cleaning up flue gases is easy and cost efficient, would inevitably lead to a resurgence of coal gasification. As it happens China has now begun doing just that.
Why is it that I all too often read long articles from the humanities and, try as I might, fail to detect anything resembling a meaningful content? In the SAA’s membership journal Michael Smith (an archaeologist, not a scientist this time) gives a lucid summary about what distinguishes a study with a worthwhile substance from one without. Required reading for all undergraduate students of the humanities, IMnsHO.
If Eemian presence of humans in America, as reported by Holen et al. and Hovers, really can be substantiated, the next question is: Who were they, Neanderthals from Europe, Africans, Denisovans from East Asia or yet another group entirely?
As befits the author, Eco is a wonderful book and great fun to read. But more than that, it is, despite its age, of great practical value. When Eco wrote it in 1977, the Italian academic system was in crisis and graduates had to write their theses ill prepared, under resourced, lacking time, and under financial pressure – in fact, under just those circumstances as the German system has been driven into in the last decade. In this current state of affairs his section 1.2 is, I believe, the best advice one give today.
When Liebrand et al. find their data to be at variance with the political majority approved models, it is, of course, the measurement, that has to be wrong, never the modelling. And then there come Ludescher et al. and recklessly throw another spanner into the works. As most religions tend to find, it’s hard to stay a devout believer these days.
Both liberals and conservatives accuse each other of ignoring the science and neglecting critical scientific thinking in favour of following their given preconceptions. It is a valid and relevant question what exactly both sides mean, when they speak of science. Shi et al.’s is a novel, powerful and valid method to answer just that question and just like all new and untried methods its first results need to be scrutinized with care.
Unless I’m seriously overlooking something important, the abstract, discussion, methods and main text in Dowlati et al. all four seem to imply that a) all subjects in both groups knew the purpose and aim of the study, and b) no placebo was used and all subjects were well aware of being either in the treatment or in the control group. Unless I’m totally wrong here, this study is utterly useless.
The results by Schmidt et al. are well founded, but aren’t they trivial? Has it any bearing at all on fake news and its distribution?
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Whatever your academic subject and whatever your political persuasion, Spinney is required reading for everybody. Also see Kahan et al.
The environment of Beringia was not that different from that of Siberia at the time. If, as Amorim et al. say, there is a strong selection in the first wave of Native Americans similar to that found in Inuit, then that is much more compatible with the conditions postulated in Stanford & Bradley’s Solutréen hypothesis.
It would be very easy to quibble with Janssen et al.’s modeling. The terms in their equations alternate between overly detailed, overly simplified, and wrong. But the value ranges chosen for all their parameters look like a very sensible order of magnitude, making theirs an eminently welcome contribution to a highly understudied field of enquiry.
I have often criticised over reliance on and religious belief in computer models and shall probably continue to do so. Bassis and Chen however are two examples of well designed, simple, and comprehensible models that are actually helpful and explain a lot.
Nothing much to comment on this week but one point I failed to make last week for lack of time.
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Ordinary people’s choices are seldom as stupid and ill-informed as ivory-tower sociologists make them out to be. Are engineers really as sought after as Rozek et al. try to make out? From all I hear about career opportunities, pay offers, and forced early retirement, it does not look like it. What in American society are the real prestige jobs ...
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Helen Czerski’s The Physics of Everyday Life is exceptionally cheap at only 11.24 € for the upcoming paperback. If it’s only half as good as Engel claims it is, it may make the ideal gift for less science oriented friends.
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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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To my knowledge Croft et al. is the first report about a female menopause and grandmothering in a non-hominid species and should provide a good test for its differing explanatory hypotheses.
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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The first reports on oxytocin a few years ago led some to ideas, that a small addition to our drinking water or similar might solve all our social ills. As Samuni et al. demonstrate, the hormone and its Janus-faced counterside have been part of primate evolution for quite some time.
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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Cheon & Hong start from a plausible hypothesis – high ranking primates are known to monopolise high value food sources making it desirable for lower ranking ones to over indulge whenever there’s a chance. Unfortunately their study fails to prove their case and is systematically unsuitable for doing so. ...
