Clothing Origins

A study of the evolution of lice has been used to date the possible origin of human clothing.

Previously, researchers have opined that clothing was developed from 40,000 to 1.2 million years ago. The 40,000 year old time was considered the strongest candidate. But there is little direct evidence for the first clothing.

These estimates took into account the fact humans lost their full-coat body hair about 1.2 million years ago; and hide scrapping – indicating development of leather – has been traced to about 780,000 years ago.

Now the lice study suggests the origin of clothing was 190,000 years ago, Andrew Kitchen of Pennsylvania State University told the AAPA meeting. This would put clothing development in the early days of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Kitchen used a Bayesian coalescent modeling approach to examine mutations in a dataset of human head and clothing lice. His group found that head and clothing lice initially diverged at 190,000 years ago, inferred as the time of the first clothing.

“This suggests that the use of rudimentary clothing likely originated with anatomically modern humans in Africa, even though several species of archaic Homo already occupied northern latitudes at that time,” he says.

Skulls Repatriated

Historically, repatriation of human remains from museums to native groups can be contentious. A recent international repatriation case shows how smoothly a transfer can go.

The remains included a dozen skulls, a skeleton and bloodied artifacts taken by an anthropologist in 1902 from Yaquis in Sonora, Mexico – after federal troops killed at least 125 men, women and children at Sierra Mazatan. In that era, the Yaquis were enslaved for field work and brutalized by the dictatorial Mexican government.

The repatriation by the American Museum of Natural History in New York to Mexico last November is detailed in an AAPA poster by Heidi Bauer-Clapp, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her Amherst co-author Ventura Perez initiated the project after learning the remains and bloody blankets were at the American Museum.

Beginning in 2007, Perez worked with Andrew Darling of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, who put the team in touch with Yaquis near the massacre site east of Hermosillo, Sonora. Yaqui tribal members traveled to New York for a ceremony, and then the bones were returned for internment in Vicam, Sonora.

Early anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka cut off the heads and defleshed them shortly after the massacre. The bones then were stored away at the museum with little scrutiny, noted Bauer-Clapp.

She said the crude collection methods limited the ability to study the living experiences and stresses endured by the victims. Recent tests confirmed the blood was human, but no DNA analysis was conducted.

Genetics Training

Researchers from the American Association for Anthropological Genetics [AAAG], a 70-person organization also meeting with the AAPA, announced it is planning a series of annual educational workshops to provide instruction to anthropologists on rapidly developing genetics and genomics techniques.

AAAG also sponsored a seminar on social/environmental aspects of anthropology research increasingly meshing with genetic techniques on human variation, population structure, phenotype analysis [including race], and disease susceptibility.

Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton

In the heart of the United States’ historically-rich southwest, three anthropological organizations met this week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to share studies of humans, primates and associated lifestyles.

The main session (14-17 April) was the 79th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology (AAPA), in conjunction with the 35th annual Human Biology Association and the 37th annual Paleopathology Association. It was announced at the meeting that the Paleopathology Association now will have an official publication, the International Journal of Paleopathology, to be published by Elsevier. The first edition is slated for later this year.

At the AAPA meeting, there was a strong theme of genetics in the program organized by this years’ program chair, Lorena Madrigal of the University of South Florida in Tampa. In a time when hardly a month goes by without another release of genetics studies linking ancient peoples with those of today, the theme isn’t a surprise. But the extent to which human genome probing is altering the anthropological field appears unmatched. AAPA President Dennis O’Rourke, a geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, put this in perspective with a talk noting how three recent instances of ancient DNA analysis adds an unprecedented perspective on anthropological field work. Those cases were the first complete ancient human genome from a 4,000-year-old hair specimen of a Saqqaq in Greenland, whose lineage was traced to Siberia; analysis of DNA in feces from Paisley Caves in Oregon, reflecting Pre-Clovis peoples at 14,000 years ago; and DNA recovered from bone of a 9,300-year-old male from On Your Knees Cave on an island off southeastern Alaska. Interestingly, the On Your Knees Cave specimen has already been repatriated to the local Native American tribes – a process made quicker by the ready availability of DNA analysis.

For anthropologists interested in the paleo record, the big disappointment was the withdrawal on 15 April of a talk by University of Michigan at Ann Arbor researchers and colleagues on a new primate fossil from Saudi Arabia dated to 28-29 million years ago. The team that also includes researchers from Saudi Geological Survey decided not to discuss the research before it is published in a peer-reviewed journal. A general description of the study is included in the AAPA abstract book. Based on that abstract, the details are as follows:

Not much is known about the timing and origin of old world monkeys and hominoids, our ancestors. Lead author Iyad Zalmout of Michigan reports the discovery of a partial cranium from the Shumaysi Formation in western Saudi Arabia. The features of the specimen are interpreted as “an advanced stem catarrhine close to the ancestry of apes and old world monkeys.” This fossil is allowing the authors to test hypotheses about the ancestral characteristics of old world monkeys and apes. Such analyses indicate that the old world monkey/ape split “could have occurred as early as the beginning of the late Oligocene, but likely not earlier.” Stay tuned for the full description likely in the coming weeks.

There also was more on early primates from Lauren Gonzales of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and colleagues – who reported on the brain of Victoriapithecus macinnesi, from the 15 million year old Maboko formation in Kenya. The report is based on the most complete and minimally distorted skull of a eucatarrhine known prior to 6 million years ago. The skull was discovered [Nature 388, 368-371 (24 July 1997)] by Gonzales co-authors. The V. macinnesi brain analysis was in a poster. CT scans showed the large male had a smaller brain than anticipated. But the brain had a particularly large olfactory lobe, indicating keen sense of smell and sight. This has prompted the authors to hypothesis that such vision acuity may have driven the subsequent development of the frontal lobe – which is associated with advanced social intelligence in higher primates. And thus the resulting evolutionary decrease in olfactory lobe size in later anthropoids.

Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton