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This article presents a case study based on the results of an archaeological survey conducted between 2011 and 2014 in Diros Bay, southern Lakonia, Greece. This survey, conducted as part of the Diros Project and under the auspices of the Ephorate of Paleo-anthropology and Speleology, was the first systematic, pedestrian survey to be undertaken in the Mani peninsula. Specifically, this article examines two concentrations of ceramic assemblages within the survey boundary that represent secure archaeological evidence for activity in the region from the Greek Classical to the Late Roman period. Together, the macroscopic, petrographic, chemical, and geophysical analyses presented in this article demonstrate the potential that lies in examining small, rural settlements. The goals of the present work are threefold: first, to demonstrate the importance of analyzing pedestrian surface survey finds and in recording the material culture in understudied regions; second, to illustrate the discrepancy between the historical record of classical antiquity and the actual record of occupation in the form of archaeological remains; and third, to emphasize the potential that this region holds for understanding the nature of rural settlements in the ancient Mani peninsula throughout classical antiquity. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most modern mammalian populations exhibit higher mortality at both ends of the age-at-death distribution. Yet our hominin ancestors reportedly do not exhibit this same distribution, with explanations ranging from predation to taphonomic causes. This paper compares mortality distributions of extant nonhuman primates to fossil hominins by applying the D0-14/D age-at-death estimation method. Using subadult and adult counts for four extinct hominin taxa, we fitted the hominin data to a modern human mortality curve, resulting in hypothetical mortality distributions. With the expectation that fossil hominin taxa likely fall somewhere on the continuum of nonhuman primate to human life histories, we compared the distributions to those of five extant catarrhine primate populations. Subadult mortality amongst the extinct hominin groups was typically within the range of that of extant nonhuman primate groups, and the previously reported high mortality amongst young and middle-aged adults in hominin assemblages may be explained by normal, multi-cause deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The habitual consumption of large-animal resources (e.g., similar sized or larger than the consumer) separates human and nonhuman primate behavior. Flaked stone tool use, another important hominin behavior, is often portrayed as being functionally related to this by the necessity of a sharp edge for cutting animal tissue. However, most research on both issues emphasizes sites that postdate ca. 2.0 million years ago. This paper critically examines the theoretical significance of the earlier origins of these two behaviors, their proposed interrelationship, and the nature of the empirical record. We argue that concepts of meat-eating and tool use are too loosely defined: outside-bone nutrients (e.g., meat) and inside-bone nutrients (e.g., marrow and brains) have different macronutrient characteristics (protein vs. fat), mechanical requirements for access (cutting vs. percussion), search, handling and competitive costs, encounter rates, and net returns. Thus, they would have demanded distinct technological and behavioral solutions. We propose that the regular exploitation of large-animal resources—the "human predatory pattern"—began with an emphasis on percussion-based scavenging of inside-bone nutrients, independent of the emergence of flaked stone tool use. This leads to a series of empirical test implications that differ from previous "meat-eating" origins scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paleo-landscape investigations contextualize how people have inhabited and coevolved dynamically with their landforms, resource zones, and social-ecological niches during measured time intervals and through extended chronological sequences. Toward illustrating this research potential, changing paleo-landscapes 2500–1500 BC reveal the ancient conditions of the places where people lived in both Taiwan and the northern Philippines, in this case exploring what transpired there during a critical time period that heralded deep transformation of the language history, cultural heritage, economic production, and population demography of Island Southeast Asia as known today. During the time range of interest, the region's coastlines and habitat configurations were substantially different from today's circumstances, prior to change in sea level, accelerated slope erosion, lowland sedimentary buildup, and some of the world's most rapid recorded tectonic uplift. The results show that people in eastern Taiwan at 2200–2000 BC faced a crisis of limited suitable landforms for their particular mode of subsistence economy, thus instigating overseas migration to the northern Philippines as a means to expand into other territories, with continued effects through 1500 BC and thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paleoanthropology emerged as a science during the late nineteenth century. The discovery of prehistoric artifacts in Pleistocene deposits soon led to the excavation of fossilized human bones. The archaeologists and geologists who unearthed them were primarily concerned with determining whether the human fossils and the artifacts found with them actually dated from the Pleistocene, thus offering evidence for the geological antiquity of humans. Prehistoric archaeologists reconstructed the way of life of prehistoric peoples through the artifacts found, while anthropologists examined the human fossils. They wanted primarily to identify the races of prehistoric humans. It was within this context that French anthropologists began to use the term "paléo-anthropologie" to refer to a new scientific discipline devoted to the study of prehistoric human races and human paleontology. This essay examines how paleoanthropology was defined as a science during the 1870s and 1880s. It shows that a tension existed between the objectives and methods of archaeologists and anthropologists. Paul Topinard criticized archaeologists and argued that a new type of scientist, the paleoanthropologist trained in anatomy or zoology, was needed to study human fossils properly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of paleogenomics (the study and analysis of ancient genomes) has provided a new, powerful source of information that can be used to test previous hypotheses regarding human evolution. However, various misunderstandings concerning the interpretation of genetic data in an archaeological and paleontological context and the existence of different scientific goals tend to hinder the fluent and fruitful collaboration between these fields. Here we explore some of the subjects creating confusion, such as the problems associated with molecular clocks, the difference between sequence divergence and species divergence, and the limitations of the uniparental markers. Limited understanding of how the expression of a genome shapes the phenotype (including morphology and cognition) is the main obstacle to linking the genetic and the morphological evidence available. In the case of Neanderthals (and probably Denisovans, too), it is obvious that the conspicuous morphological differences cannot be explained by differences in a list of about 100 genes alone, thus suggesting that regulatory genomic elements must have been involved. A functional analysis of the genes involved as well as a study of the genomic architecture- a complexity level above the simple DNA message-could help us fill this gap. It is hoped that this future work will lead to the emergence of an interrelated and multidisciplinary view of the study of the past based on real collaborative efforts among disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fate of the Neandertals is the oldest debate in paleoanthropology and one of the longest, most contentious in science. Here I present my perspective on the biological distinction of Neandertals and their role in the emergence of modern people in Europe and the circum-Mediterranean. Neandertals were highly adapted to life in the cold, demanding realm of Europe during the later Pleistocene. This adaptation was strongly biological, and it came at a high energetic price—a price that negatively affected Neandertal reproduction and ultimately resulted in their "extinction." The word "extinction" is in quotes because Neandertals did not go extinct in the classic sense. Rather both morphological and genetic evidence demonstrate a relatively small, but certainly not insignificant, contribution by them to the earliest modern populations that migrated into their range. From my perspective, the current data best support the assimilation model of modern human origins, first formally presented by two of my graduate students and me almost 25 years ago (Smith et al. 1989), to explain Neandertal–early modern population dynamics. I present an update of that argument here. Also I present my views on why it took modern people so long to establish themselves in Europe and what all this means for the study of biological race in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the connection between architecture and paleoanthropology, focusing on the theories of the cultural critics André Leroi-Gourhan and Sigfried Giedion. Topics include the process of interpreting prehistoric artifacts after the physical decay of their context and accompanying signifiers, the use of spatial metaphors as methodological models, and analysis of Giedion's book "The Eternal Present."

For over a century, paleoanthropologists have listed the presence of prolonged periods of gestation, growth, and maturation, extremely short interbirth intervals, and early weaning among the key features that distinguish modern humans from our extant ape cousins. Exactly when and how this particular scheduling of important developmental milestones—termed a "life history profile"—came to characterize Homo sapiens is not entirely clear. Researchers have suggested that the modern human life history profile appeared either at the base of the hominin radiation (ca. 6 Ma), with the origins of the genus Honio (ca. 2.5 Ma), or much later in time, perhaps only with H. sapiens (ca. 200-100 Ka). In this short review, evidence of the pace of growth and maturation in fossil australopiths and early members of Homo is detailed to evaluate the merits of each of these scenarios. New data on the relationship between dental development and life history in extant apes are synthesized within the context of life history theory and developmental variation across modern human groups. Future directions, including new analytical tools for extracting more refined life history parameters as well as integrative biomechanical and developmental models of facial growth are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The picture of human evolution has been transformed by new evidence in recent years, but contributing disciplines seem to have difficulty in sharing knowledge on a common basis. The disciplines producing primary data in paleoanthropology scarcely reach out to a broader picture and are often bypassed by writers in other disciplines. Archaeology is encouraged by its material evidence to project a view that "what you see is what there was": by definition, there can be only a late flowering of human abilities. Yet there is a vital alternative paleontological record of the early hominins that gives us important information about their brains and suggests that brains become large and complex far earlier than that late material complexity might imply. How, then, to account for the large brains acting far back in time? Evolutionary psychology, in the form of the social brain hypothesis, claims that these large brains were concerned with managing a far-reaching social life. In becoming human, those brains did not merely become larger, but of necessity they took on new socialized perspectives, a domestication of emotional capacities allowing greater insights and collaboration. We argue that there is at least a 2-million-year social record that must be made part of mainstream interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fossils have been traded for centuries. Over the past two hundred years the market has developed into an organized enterprise, with fossils serving multiple functions as objects of scientific study, collectors' items, and investments. Finding fossils, digging them up or purchasing them, transporting, studying, and conserving them, and putting them on display was and still is expensive. Since the early nineteenth century, funding bodies, academic institutions and museums, philanthropists, dealers, collectors, amateurs, and professional paleontologists have constituted elaborate networks driven by collaboration, necessity, ambition, accolades, and capital to generate knowledge and produce geological artifacts, increasing our understanding of the natural world, advancing careers and institutions, and contributing to personal fortunes. The emergence of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline around 1900 generated a scientific focus on the human story that was easy to sell. The scarcity of ancient human remains made it close to impossible for a commercial market to evolve, yet finding them required serious funding. Elaborate schemes for financing expeditions and excavations went hand in hand with individual aspirations, patronage, philanthropy, networks, and alliance building, as concession rights and access to sponsors were objects of regular political intrigues and often bitter disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a special issue of Current Anthropology developed from a Wenner-Gren symposium held in Teresópolis, Brazil, in 2010 that was about the past, present, and future of biological anthropology. Our goal was to understand from a comparative international perspective the contexts of genesis and development of physical/biological anthropology around the world. While biological anthropology today can encompass paleoanthropology, primatology, and skeletal biology, our symposium focused on the field's engagement with living human populations. Bringing together scholars in the history of science, science studies, and anthropology, the participants examined the discipline's past in different contexts but also reflected on its contemporary and future conditions. Our contributors explore national histories, collections, and scientific field practice with the goal of developing a broader understanding of the discipline's history. Our work tracks a global, uneven transition from a typological and essentialist physical anthropology, predominating until the first decades of the twentieth century, to a biological anthropology informed by postsynthesis evolutionism and the rise of molecular biology, a shift that was labeled "new physical anthropology." We place biological anthropology in a broad historical context and suggest how the histories we document can inform its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite 20 years of concerted attention, paleoanthropology has established little of substance concerning the evolution of the modern mind, if by substance we mean conclusions that would be of interest and use to scholars of human cognition. Part of this failure can be linked to a poverty of appropriate interpretive concepts. There is more to the modern mind than symbolism and language, the two "abilities" most often cited in the paleoanthropological literature. Modern humans have a sophisticated ability to make and execute elaborate plans of action, something known in the cognitive science literature as executive functions. Cognitive science has further established that these executive functions are enabled by working memory, an interpretive concept introduced by Alan Baddeley in 1974 and subsequently tested by more than 30 years of intensive research. Recently, Coolidge and Wynn have advanced a controversial hypothesis that it was an enhancement of working-memory capacity that powered the final evolution of the modern mind. Wenner-Gren International Symposium 139 met in March 2008 in Cascais, Portugal, to discuss this hypothesis and the evolution of working memory and executive reasoning in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a review of the major results of the Tarquinia Project, a comprehensive study of the site of Tarquinia that the University of Milan began in the early 1980s. The project comprises new excavation at the site, comparison of newly excavated with already-known material culture from Tarquinia, detailed study of buildings at the site, and an analysis of the settlement process. The project also includes the study of a variety of literary sources, including numerous references to the ancient topography of Tarquinia; it produced a series of chronological maps of the ancient settlements in the area that help illuminate the history of Tarquinia and the changing relationship of the city with its territory. The Tarquinia Project also includes speleological, geographical, topographical, geophysical, paleoanthropological, paleobotanical, and archaeometrical research. To provide a better understandling of the fieldwork and to present our most important conclusions, I include in this article some of the most recent, as yet unpublished, discoveries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of the ca. 3,000-year-old Lapita cemetery site of Teouma on Efate Island, Vanuatu, has for the first time provided the opportunity for biological anthropologists to begin to address issues of health at a population level in these previously elusive people. Macroscopic observation and radiography have revealed the occurrence of erosive arthritis in seven individuals from Teouma. Differential diagnosis of the disease causing the lesions includes gout, rheumatoid arthritis, and the seronegative spondyloarthropathies. On the basis of the type and pattern of lesions and the epidemiology of erosive arthropathies in the Pacific Islands, a diagnosis of gout may be tentatively proposed, giving a crude prevalence rate of 35% (n = 7/20) in the sample. The occurrence of gout in a skeletal sample of possible Polynesian ancestors provides tantalizing clues to the antiquity of a disease which is a significant modern health problem in some Pacific Island populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that differential human male investment in mating (male-male competition and mate-seeking behavior) and parenting effort may be associated with variation in testosterone levels. The Ariaal present an interesting test case because marital relations tend to be aloof and direct paternal care minimal by cross-cultural standards. Polygyny is prevalent and increases with age, and the age-set system highly structures the transition to marriage. A test of the effect of marital status on testosterone levels among the Ariaal involved 205 men aged 20 and older from a settled agropastoral community and nomadic populations. Each participant provided morning and afternoon saliva samples in which testosterone levels were measured, provided demographic background during interviews, and had anthropometrics taken. As predicted, during the dynamic ages (20-39) of transition from life as a bachelor and warrior to monogamous marriage, men with one wife had significantly lower testosterone levels than unmarried men. Contrary to prediction, however, polygynously married men did not have higher testosterone levels than their monogamously married counterparts. While variation in testosterone may be associated with mating effort in young Ariaal men, political networks and wealth may be better predictors of marital status in older men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cupmarks—artificial hemispherical depressions, often appearing in groups on bedrock surfaces—are found worldwide, often near Paleolithic sites and Holocene settlements. The term "bedrock mortars" expresses the interpretation that they were used for pounding/grinding collected plant foods. A reexamination of the cupmarks near the site of Hatula, on the margin of the Judean Shephelah west of Jerusalem, rules out the traditional functional interpretation in this instance. Instead, the evidence suggests that these cupmarks are remnants of intensive quarrying aimed at extracting flint nodules from the conglomerate beneath the surface and that the quarry was exploited not only for nodules but for limestone slabs. The cupmarks were drilled during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A occupation of the site (ca. 9600-8000 Cal BC) and constitute a component of the Neolithic techno-cultural tradition. Future research should enlarge the data set of cupmarks and furnish a better understanding of their role in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The record of the initial settlement of South America has significant geographical gaps, especially along the Pacific coast. The study of small sites with brief occupation spans can open windows on high-resolution contexts in which associations and activities are clear. Through the use of a program designed to identify lacustrine Pleistocene environments in which the initial human populations would presumably have settled, Quebrada Santa Julia, a site attesting to human presence dating to 13,000 calibrated years BP, has recently been located on the semiarid coast of Chile. It is the only known Paleoindian site with fluted projectile points in unambiguous association with extinct megafauna on the Andean Pacific coast. It represents a small lakeside camp with a brief occupation span in which multiple activities, including the processing of prey transported from a nearby location, were conducted. The present of extralocal lithic raw materials argues for movements into the interior, as has been suggested for other early settlements in the Andean region. Notwithstanding its proximity to the littoral, the site has not yielded any evidence of the exploitation of marine resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of anatomical and behavioural modernity in Homo sapiens has been one of the key focus areas in both archaeology and palaeoanthropology since their inception. Traditionally, interpretations have drawn mainly on evidence from the many large and well-known sites in Europe, but archaeological research in Africa and the Levant is increasingly altering and elaborating upon our understanding of later human evolution. Despite the presence of a number of important early modern human and other hominin sites in Southeast Asia, evidence from this region has not contributed to the global picture in any significant way. Indeed, the acknowledged simplicity of lithic assemblages has led generations of scholars to assume that Southeast Asia was far from the cutting edge of behavioural evolution. Comparison of sophisticated shell tools from levels dated to 32,000-28,000 b.p. in eastern Indonesia with lithic artefacts recovered from the same levels and an assessment of rawmaterial procurement suggest that using lithic technologies as markers of behavioural complexity may be misleading in a Southeast Asian context and, indeed, may be hampering our efforts to assess behavioural complexity in global and comparative frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paleoanthropological reconstructions of childbirth in the genus Homo typically rely upon a model incorporating the evolution of a monotypic human birth mechanism. Two features characterize this proposed mechanism or pathway taken by the fetus through the birth canal: fetal rotation and neonate emergence in a position facing away from the mother. The evolution of these two features is said to facilitate birth through the bipedal pelvis but is also taken as evidence of the difficulty of human birth relative to that in other primates and our smaller-brained ancestors. In contrast, the present work takes the position that birth mechanisms vary now and probably did so in the past. The notion of a monotypic birth mechanism has been imported into paleoanthropological discourse from typological thinking in Euro-American biomedical practice and text. The history of anatomical descriptions of pelvic types and associated birth mechanisms shows a trend toward the concept of a singular "normal" birth mechanism in biomedical practice. This paper suggests that biomedically defined pelvic typologies constitute a static definition of human variation in pelvic morphology and that pelvic typology, in turn, has contributed to a static definition of the normal human birth process that has been incorporated into paleoanthropological models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on paleoanthropological traces of a neolithic demographic transition. This transition, granted that it did occur, might be identified through three types of interpretive models. These are cultural, for example the density of archaeological sites, genetics, as it relates to migration, and paleonanthropological concerns, as it relates to the presence of skeletons in cemeteries. Data from cemeteries are commonly well dated and therefore can be taken as reliable basis of demographic information.

The article aims to demonstrate the potential of the refined analytical techniques with respect to the obtained paleodietary data from Salts Cave and Mammoth Cave in Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Such approach discovered that human paleofeces give direct evidence of food consumption by individuals in a variety of environmental and cultural circumstances. Related studies also generated a pioneering effort to obtain and measure steroids of the paleofeces to determine its gender. Further, the author gathered results from evidences to discuss the implications of variability in plant utilization by the prehistoric forager/farmers of the Mammoth Cave along three attributes, the temporal, interindividual, and contextual.

The article presents a response by the author to several comments on his report "The Excavations in Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel," that appear in the December 1992 issue of the journal "Current Anthropology." He said that there is no doubt that the KMH 2 burial, found in the excavation of Kebara Cave in Israel, was in a pit, least 20-30 cm deep. According to him, the phylogenetic relationship among the various Near Eastern hominids is a hotly debated issue.

The article presents a discussion of the Piltdown hoax. It explains that the said hoax had an impact on the development of paleoanthropology that is still being appreciated. It reveals the process and personalities of science. It conventionally interprets that the forgery was a masterful splicing of human and orangutan bones to provide material support for the theories of Grafton Elliott Smith and Arthur Keith. It states that the hoax involves an academic professional. The case for an accomplice has not been focused on, but a review of its arguments shows that it is strong.

The article presents the author's comment on the paper "Dense Forests, Cold Steppes, and the Palaeolithic Settlement of Northern Europe," by Wil Roebroeks, Nicholas J. Conard, and Thijs van Kolfschoten, that appear in the December 1992 issue of the journal "Current Anthropology." According to him, the paper raises the significance of interglacials for understanding early hominid behavior.

The article presents the author's comment on the report "The Excavations in Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel," that appear in the December 1992 issue of the journal "Current Anthropology." According to him, the report is a collection of preliminary reports on excavations at Kebara Cave in Israel. He said that the stratification of KMH 2, a partial skeleton found in Middle Paleolithic deposits, is difficult to interpret because only the bottom of the burial pit was discovered.

The article presents the author's comment on the paper "Dense Forests, Cold Steppes, and the Palaeolithic Settlement of Northern Europe," by Wil Roebroeks, Nicholas J. Conard, and Thijs van Kolfschoten, that appear in the December 1992 issue of the journal "Current Anthropology." According to him, the researchers have lessened the endemic ignorance of the facts concerning early Paleolithic settlement in Northern Europe.