The time has come to talk of many things: Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax– of the 24th edition of the Four Stone Hearth! the web’s most amazing (only?) anthropology-encompassing blog carnival. The last edition, as you might remember, was held over at Archaeoporn on election night. For those of you as enthralled with anthropology as I, and you know who you are, please consider hopping on over to 4SH and signing up for one of the future hosting vacancies. So, now that we have all of the administrative business taken care of let’s get to the anthropology, shall we?

Of soils: Give Archaeoastronamy a try. Alun asks “Growing Gods?” in reviewing an article from a recent edition of Antiquity. According to the article, in order to understand Greek temples you really need to get to know the dirt under the temples:

What you want from Hades site is a connection with the underworld, so rocky crevices which plunge into the bowels of the earth are just the sort of thing you’re looking for. As I recall there’s a Plutonium (another brilliant name) in Hierapolis, Turkey, built over a geological fault which emits noxious gases, so that seems perfectly sound. He also attributes Persephone to rock crevices, and this is something I’m a bit more wary of.

Maybe you have an opinion on the matter? I’m sure Alun would love to hear it.

Of girating hips: A recent 1.5 mya, practically complete, pelvis of early Homo is reviewed by the very well known anthropologist John Hawks in his recent post Mrs. Elvis, the Homo erectus pelvis. Included here is an image from the data supplement. According to Hawks, the real question about Simpson’s find is:

Is the new pelvis, BSN49/P27, an australopithecine? To be sure, it’s a lot bigger than the relatively complete female australopithecine pelves, like AL 288-1 (Lucy) and Sts 14. But its acetabular diameter does fit easily within the size range of australopithecines. Mayer and van Gerven (1978) provided an estimate for the vertical acetabular diameter of SK 50 (which was malformed by a probable dislocation) of 41 mm, the same as the new pelvis. SK 50 even has a large ilium, although probably not large enough to make a 288 mm bi-iliac breadth.

So, is Elvis an australopithecine? Click the link to find out.

Of vicio: A 4SH just wouldn’t be complete without some interesting neuroanthropology, am I right? In this issue Daniel Lende is giving us a great heaping dose of his addiction, sin. It appears Lende’s problem all along has been:

craving, that compulsive desire drug users can experience and which plays such a powerful role in relapse in excessive use and relapse. In both the popular accounts and scientific literature on addiction, dopamine often takes the blame for addiction.

Is this the right diagnosis? Is dopamine to blame? Once again, stop looking at me for all the answers: just click the link and see what anthropology has to say about addiction.

(Also, while you’re over there check out a recent post [bio] on a good friend)

Of… Danish stuff: I have to admit, Danish archaeology is not my forté. The good news is, the very sleek archaeoblog Henrikkarll.dk has us covered. Apparently there is a bit of contention as to the reason for the existence of certain burial goods in Danish graves, and this post just happens to give us an explanation. I don’t know about you, but I was looking everywhere for one! I’m not sure if you knew, but

it turns out that actually very few of the people buried in the Viking Age would get anything useful with them to the presumed afterlife. This, so the explanation goes, is because the differences in grave goods - or indeed grave furnishings - reflect similar differences in the stratified society that was Viking Age Denmark.

Of interesting figurines: Brian Hoffman over at Old Dirt - New Thoughts is making his debut return (?… Whatever… You know what I mean) by giving us all an insiders view on some artifacts made out of cancellous bone he dug up at Aniakchack:

The Aniakchack assemblage has strong paralleles to the contemporary Kachemak tradition artwork, particularly the assemblage from the Uyak site on Kodiak Island occupied around AD 1-1100. Both Uyak and Aniakchack have small, ivory maskettes, animal figurines (including whale and caribou imagery), and other decorative pieces.

Cute, eh?

Of an elderly Constantinople (Isanbul! not Constantinople!): Remote Central, a regular at the hearth has us covered this time around with some news on the surprisingly surprising contentious date of the first settlers of modern day Istanbul (Give me a break, I’m working on my fourth cup of coffee today…). Apparently, according to some cremation urns:

this particular area was settled by 8.500 years ago, some 6,000 years before previous estimates, and puts old Constantinople in a similar time-frame as 9,000 year-old Çatalhöyük and subsequent settlements of the Late Neolithic that have been documented across Anatolia.

Click for deatails!

Of pretty pictures: Of course, no 4SH would be complete without some extra pretty pictures. Thankfully, Aardvarchaeology and Testimony of the Spade have us covered!

and, did you know:

+

=

Sad I know.

Well, it has been good having you all! I hope to see you again in the future. For now, my fingers are beat, so one of you must take up the torch. If you’re interested in hosting the 4SH please click the link and shoot Martin an e-mail!

I know this is a bit late, but it appears that the list of e-mails I was given to send out this notification to have resulted in a majority of mailsystem delivery errors. This being said, for those of you interested in being included in the 24th edition of the Four Stone Hearth please send all submissions to moneduloides at gmail dot com.

The US maps from a recent PLoS Medicine research article (Ezzati, et al. e66) show not election returns, but disparities in life expectancy. In this month’s Editorial (e208), the PLoS Medicine Editors argue that fixing injustices in the US health care system will require actively prioritizing health over financial gain.

The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in County Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States

PBA Galleries of San Fransisco is auctioning the library of the late Gerald I. Sugarman MD - and what a library it is. While most of the texts are a bit pricy (Aphorismi secundum doctrinam Galeni is potentially selling for $30,000USD), it is worth a glance for any of you interested in the art of anatomy and medicine. As you can see from the image I have included above, some of the texts get a bit interesting…

Hat tip: Morbid Anatomy - more images of auctioned items can be found here.

…is the title for the NOVA documentary on Homo floriensis that is going to air tomorrow, November 11th at 8:00pm.

I encourage all of you to set your alarms.

[This is a multiple-part series that will deal with the foundation and current state of research at the intersection of evolution and medicine]

A fantastic article was published in the journal Preventive Medicine in 2002 (As far as medicine goes, it might as well be from the Paleolithic… I know…), entitled “Evolutionary Health Promotion.” The authors, a hodge-podge of medical doctors, anthropologists, biologists, and zoologists, review here a question of potentially great importance to medicine: can evolutionary biology, via disciplines such as paleoanthropology and evolutionary genetics, teach us medically relevant information about modern humans that can in turn be applied in a clinical setting?

What we need to know about this question is that the authors are not attempting to apply evolutionary biology to questions which are not evolutionary biology’s questions to answer. For instance, if I were to have my finger severed by a sharp knife and needed emergency medical help, the last thing I would want is an emergency care physician who attempts to analyze the evolutionary reason for why my finger has been severed, or what Darwin could tell her or him about how to treat me. The authors here do not want this either (at least, I hope not). Instead, they wish to consider whether ‘evolutionary medicine’, as they call it, has the potential for providing a “solid foundation for health promotion research.” Here are the goals of evolution-based prevention they outline: to

(1) characterize differences between patterns of life in ancient and modern environments

(2) identify which of these are involved in the initiation and progression of specific diseases

(3) use this information to design innovative studies of the “proximate” pathophysiology

(4) integrate epidemiological, mechanistic, and genetic data with evolutionary principles to create an overarching “ultimate” formulation upon which to base persuasive, consistent, and effective public recommendations

Now, these seem to be quite lofty goals - and they are. As evolutionary medicine in this respect requires ethnographic data from extant humans, and the use of this data as potential anolog to are completely hunter-gatherer subsistent ancestors, not only are the aspirations lofty, but they can, if not careful, be perforated with logical fallacies. We are, however, going to keep our fingers crossed. As a review, the article itself doesn’t present new research, but it does exactly what I’m going to do here (except, in a much lengthier fashion), which is to outline the accomplishments and possibile applications of evolutionary medicine. Where fallacies poke their evil little heads, I will address them.

Infection

Perhaps the most interesting factor in the love-hate relationship between humans and microbes is the many ways in which human culture affects the transmission, and ultimately the evolution, of pathogens. Here the authors focus on what is arguably the most important human cultural advance in this pathogen-human dialogue: agriculture.

Around 10,000 years ago humans in many parts of the world adopted a more sedentary lifestyle brought on by the advent of agriculture, the domestication of crops and animals, which led ultimately to higher population densities and more frequent long-distance contacts. With a more fluid human population, and the constant contact of humans with animals, infections such as malaria and typhoid fever became influentially important as selective forces upon the human genome. To counter this humans have made advances in sanitation and have discovered antibiotics, but in return these advances have selected upon the genome of pathogens.

As a result of the misuse of antibiotics (e.g., using them in the feed of our demisticated animals) we are now faced with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant organisms to which the only answer for eradication lies within the confines of evolutionary biology. The authors cite, specifically, the use of vaccines directed against virulence-enhancing microbial antigens, therefore disproportionately affecting the dangerous strains in favour of less dangerous variants. Taking into consideration the cultural mechanisms through which rates of infection exposure are affected, and their correlation with degenerative diseases such as cancer and atherosclerosis, the authors hope avenues of possible preventative intervention via “evolution-based antibiotic prophylaxis and/or vaccine development” may be open for development.

Human Preferences and Prevention

Much public resentment about health promotion comes because physicians recommendations are perceived as moralistic prohibitions, which deny people basic pleasures. Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in this - health advice often counters “natural” inclinations. Humans like foods high in fat, salt, and sugar and they regularly avoid exercise. The explanations for these tendencies also lie in our evolutionary heritage. Polyunsaturated fatty acids and sodium are required nutrients, but on the African savvana they were sometimes in short supply, so taste preferences for them were advantageous; there was active selection against wasting calories on unproductive exercise. These and similar insights are not magic bullets, but at least they explain why we have innate propensities which, in today’s circumstances, tend to promote disease and why health practices that forestall chronic illness are actually in accord with ancestral experience.

So, how exactly do we take our limited knowledge of human existance over evolutionary time and apply it in a clinical setting? We fill in the gaps in our knowledge by identifying, contacting, interviewing and examining remaining hunger-gatherers, the authors assert. In using these peoples as analogs, in understanding how they tick, how their bodies work in accordance with their environment, scientists potentially have a roadmap of possible explanations and, ultimately, solutions for many of the health problems of our day.

The major downfall of this application of evolutionary biology to medicine is the idealistic manner in which these specific researchers hold the hunter-gatherer way of life. It is one thing to assert that the agricultural and industrial revolutions had an enormous impact on human biology, and thus human health; it is an entirely different thing to assert that elements of hunter-gatherer lifestyle will aid in the treatment or prevention of disease. Sure, these revolutions have had a detrimental impact on our health in many ways, but at the same time it seems so much more likely that the prevalence of chronic degenerative diseases in modern times is a product of a higher mean age due to medical advances that are a direct result of these revolutions.

(References)

S Eaton (2002). Evolutionary Health Promotion Preventive Medicine, 34 (2), 109-118 DOI: 10.1006/pmed.2001.0876

An open access paper [pdf] published recently in PNAS delves into one of the most integral questions to the understanding of energetics and evolution. According to the abstract, “A fundamental but unanswerable biological question asks how much energy, on average, Earth’s different life forms spend per unit mass per unit time to remain alive.” Unanswerable? Perhaps. Scientists, however, are stubborn.

Using a database of over 3,000 species the authors demonstrate that, despite huge differences in body mass, physiology, biochemistry and ecology, there is marked homeostatis in the metabolic rate of life. Although there is a 30-fold variation in basal metabolic rates across life (0.3 to 9 W kg ^-1), this does not come close to the 4,000 to 65,000-fold difference between the metabolic rates of the smallest and largest organisms observed if life conformed to the conventional allometric scaling laws.

From these results the authors postulate that natural selection has favored a metabolic rate within this ‘physiological window’, and that this window of convergence may be the optimal metabolic rate for life as a whole.

Everybody mosey on over to Archaeoporn for the 23rd edition of Four Stone Hearth, “a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word.”

I’d like to draw your attention to a specific post in this edition from the folks over at Anthropology.net. It is a review of a recent paper from PLoS ONE entitled Genetic and Linguistic Coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia, and the results are quite interesting. It gets my vote for best post of the hearth this time around.

The next Four Stone Hearth will be hosted by yours truly on November 19th.

An article that just came out in PLoS ONE is the first to uncover a correlation between pathogen introduction and an extinction event in a mammalian species.

According to Wyatt et al., in 1899 black rats were introduced to Easter Island via the S.S. Hindustan, and with them a pathogenic protozoan by the name of Trypanosoma lewisi, which causes sleeping sickness. While the black rats were well adapted to this protozoan, the native species R. macleari and R. nativitatis were not. Soon after the “invasion,” the native species were seen staggering about on footpaths, and by 1908 had become extinct.

To rule out the possibility that competition between the invasive and native species was the actual causative agent in extinction, the authors used ancient DNA procedures to determine if a rat-specific trypanosome could be detected. Using 21 museum samples it was found that none of the pre-contact samples (3) collected were infected, while 6 of the 18 post-contact samples were.

“This study should get people to think about the spread of pathogen pollution,” says Greenwood. “Pathogen pollution is the introduction of animal or plant diseases into a new environment. This pollution could affect many species that are in decline or in small numbers, ranging from accidental to active introduction like the building of Pleistocene Park in Russia or the repopulation of species for conservation purposes.”

[Sciencedaily]

(Obligate Image)

Trypanosome brucei

The Leakey Prize was established in 1990 to reward intellectual achievement and express appreciation for research performed with courage and perseverance in the fields of ape and human evolution. The intention of the award is to honor a scientist for achievement transcending the boundaries of his or her discipline and linking widely differing branches of science. The Leakey Prize is to encourage multi-disciplinary science as well as to stimulate research that gives evidence of broad interest and ingenuity.

This year, The Leakey Foundation is honored to present the award to two brilliant scientists from the field of primatology, Dr. Jane Goodall and Dr. Toshisada Nishida.