An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions ...are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships.
South Africa continues to receive substantial attention from scholars researching modern human origins. The importance of this region lies in the many caves and rock shelters containing well ...preserved evidence of human activity, cultural material complexity and a growing number of early modern human fossils dating to the Middle Stone Age (MSA). South Africa also hosts the world's smallest floral kingdom, now called the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR), with high species richness and endemism. In paleoanthropological research, improving our capacity to reconstruct past climatic and environmental conditions can help us to shed light on survival strategies of hunter–gatherers. To do this, one must use actualistic studies of modern assemblages from extant habitats to develop analogies for the past and improve paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Here, we present a phytolith study of modern surface soil samples from different GCFR vegetation types of the south coast of South Africa. In this study, the phytolith concentration and morphological distribution are related to the physicochemical properties of soils, the environmental conditions and the characterization of the vegetation for the different study areas. Our results show that phytolith concentration relates mostly to vegetation types and the dominant vegetation rather than to the type of soils. More abundant phytoliths from Restionaceae and woody/shrubby vegetation are also noted from fynbos vegetation and grass phytoliths are a recurrent component in all the vegetation types in spite of being a minor component in the modern vegetation. The grass silica short cells from these plants, however, suggest a mix of C3 and C4 grasses in most of the vegetation types with a major presence of the rondels ascribed to C3 grasses. The exceptions are riparian, coastal thicket and coastal forest vegetation, which are characterized by the dominance of C4 grass phytoliths.
Genetic and anatomical evidence suggests that
Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200 and 100
ka, and recent evidence suggests that complex cognition may have appeared between ∼164 and 75
ka. This ...evidence directs our focus to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6, when from 195–123
ka the world was in a fluctuating but predominantly glacial stage, when much of Africa was cooler and drier, and when dated archaeological sites are rare. Previously we have shown that humans had expanded their diet to include marine resources by ∼164
ka (±12
ka) at Pinnacle Point Cave 13B (PP13B) on the south coast of South Africa, perhaps as a response to these harsh environmental conditions. The associated material culture documents an early use and modification of pigment, likely for symbolic behavior, as well as the production of bladelet stone tool technology, and there is now intriguing evidence for heat treatment of lithics. PP13B also includes a later sequence of MIS 5 occupations that document an adaptation that increasingly focuses on coastal resources. A model is developed that suggests that the combined richness of the Cape Floral Region on the south coast of Africa, with its high diversity and density of geophyte plants and the rich coastal ecosystems of the associated Agulhas Current, combined to provide a stable set of carbohydrate and protein resources for early modern humans along the southern coast of South Africa during this crucial but environmentally harsh phase in the evolution of modern humans. Humans structured their mobility around the use of coastal resources and geophyte abundance and focused their occupation at the intersection of the geophyte rich Cape flora and coastline. The evidence for human occupation relative to the distance to the coastline over time at PP13B is consistent with this model.
The Assimilation Model (AM) was developed to explain the presence of evidence for small, but not insignificant, anatomical contributions of Eurasian archaic humans (including Neandertals) to modern ...Eurasians within a framework of the documented African origin of the majority of modern Eurasian ancestry. The AM was based entirely on morphological evidence for introgression in Eurasia and was initially not well supported by genetic studies, including ancient DNA. However, beginning with the publication of the first Neandertal draft genome in 2010, genomic data have consistently demonstrated low levels of archaic human gene flow into modern Eurasian populations and recently have shown modern gene flow into a Siberian Neandertal. Current data also indicate the complexity of archaic–modern human population dynamics during the late Pleistocene, another tenet of the AM. We conclude that the AM is strongly supported by current genetic and genomic data, as well as morphological evidence that has been documented elsewhere.
Approximately 50 ka, one or more subgroups of modern humans expanded from Africa to populate the rest of the world. Significant behavioral change accompanied this expansion, and archaeologists ...commonly seek its roots in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA; ∼200 to ∼50 ka). Easily recognizable art objects and “jewelry” become common only in sites that postdate the MSA in Africa and Eurasia, but some MSA sites contain possible precursors, especially including abstractly incised fragments of ocher and perforated shells interpreted as beads. These proposed art objects have convinced most specialists that MSA people were behaviorally (cognitively) modern, and many argue that population growth explains the appearance of art in the MSA and its post-MSA florescence. The average size of rocky intertidal gastropod species in MSA and later coastal middens allows a test of this idea, because smaller size implies more intense collection, and more intense collection is most readily attributed to growth in the number of human collectors. Here we demonstrate that economically important Cape turban shells and limpets from MSA layers along the south and west coasts of South Africa are consistently and significantly larger than turban shells and limpets in succeeding Later Stone Age (LSA) layers that formed under equivalent environmental conditions. We conclude that whatever cognitive capacity precocious MSA artifacts imply, it was not associated with human population growth. MSA populations remained consistently small by LSA standards, and a substantial increase in population size is obvious only near the MSA/LSA transition, when it is dramatically reflected in the Out-of-Africa expansion.
origin of Neandertals Hublin, J.J
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
09/2009, Letnik:
106, Številka:
38
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Western Eurasia yielded a rich Middle (MP) and Late Pleistocene (LP) fossil record documenting the evolution of the Neandertals that can be analyzed in light of recently acquired paleogenetical data, ...an abundance of archeological evidence, and a well-known environmental context. Their origin likely relates to an episode of recolonization of Western Eurasia by hominins of African origin carrying the Acheulean technology into Europe around 600 ka. An enhancement of both glacial and interglacial phases may have played a crucial role in this event, as well as in the subsequent evolutionary history of the Western Eurasian populations. In addition to climatic adaptations and an increase in encephalization, genetic drift seems to have played a major role in their evolution. To date, a clear speciation event is not documented, and the most likely scenario for the fixation of Neandertal characteristics seems to be an accretion of features along the second half of the MP. Although a separation time for the African and Eurasian populations is difficult to determine, it certainly predates OIS 11 as phenotypic Neandertal features are documented as far back as and possibly before this time. It is proposed to use the term "Homo rhodesiensis" to designate the large-brained hominins ancestral to H. sapiens in Africa and at the root of the Neandertals in Europe, and to use the term "Homo neanderthalensis" to designate all of the specimens carrying derived metrical or non-metrical features used in the definition of the LP Neandertals.
Late Middle Pleistocene hominins in Africa displaying key modern morphologies by 315 ka are claimed as the earliest Homo sapiens. Evolutionary relationships among East Asian hominins appear complex ...due to a growing fossil record of late Middle Pleistocene hominins from the region, reflecting mosaic morphologies that contribute to a lack of consensus on when and how the transition to modern humans transpired. Newly discovered 300 ka hominin fossils from Hualongdong, China, provide further evidence to clarify these relationships in the region. In this study, facial morphology of the juvenile partial cranium (HLD 6) is described and qualitatively and quantitatively compared with that of other key Early, Middle, and Late Pleistocene hominins from East Asia, Africa, West Asia, and Europe and with a sample of modern humans. Qualitatively, facial morphology of HLD 6 resembles that of Early and Middle Pleistocene hominins from Zhoukoudian, Nanjing, Dali, and Jinniushan in China, as well as others from Java, Africa, and Europe in some of these features (e.g., supraorbital and malar regions), and Late Pleistocene hominins and modern humans from East Asia, Africa, and Europe in other features (e.g., weak prognathism, flat face and features in nasal and hard plate regions). Comparisons of HLD 6 measurements to group means and multivariate analyses support close affinities of HLD 6 to Late Pleistocene hominins and modern humans. Expression of a mosaic morphological pattern in the HLD 6 facial skeleton further complicates evolutionary interpretations of regional morphological diversity in East Asia. The prevalence of modern features in HLD 6 suggests that the hominin population to which HLD 6 belonged may represent the earliest pre-modern humans in East Asia. Thus, the transition from archaic to modern morphology in East Asian hominins may have occurred at least by 300 ka, which is 80,000 to 100,000 years earlier than previously recognized.
Attempts to identify a ‘homeland’ for our species from genetic data are widespread in the academic literature. However, even when putting aside the question of whether a ‘homeland’ is a useful ...concept, there are a number of inferential pitfalls in attempting to identify the geographic origin of a species from contemporary patterns of genetic variation. These include making strong claims from weakly informative data, treating genetic lineages as representative of populations, assuming a high degree of regional population continuity over hundreds of thousands of years, and using circumstantial observations as corroborating evidence without considering alternative hypotheses on an equal footing, or formally evaluating any hypothesis. In this commentary we review the recent publication that claims to pinpoint the origins of ‘modern humans’ to a very specific region in Africa (Chan et al., 2019), demonstrate how it fell into these inferential pitfalls, and discuss how this can be avoided.
We report here on the direct isotopic evidence for Neanderthal and early modern human diets in Europe. Isotopic methods indicate the sources of dietary protein over many years of life, and show that ...Neanderthals had a similar diet through time (almost equal to120,000 to almost equal to37,000 cal BP) and in different regions of Europe. The isotopic evidence indicates that in all cases Neanderthals were top-level carnivores and obtained all, or most, of their dietary protein from large herbivores. In contrast, early modern humans (almost equal to40,000 to almost equal to27,000 cal BP) exhibited a wider range of isotopic values, and a number of individuals had evidence for the consumption of aquatic (marine and freshwater) resources. This pattern includes Oase 1, the oldest directly dated modern human in Europe (almost equal to40,000 cal BP) with the highest nitrogen isotope value of all of the humans studied, likely because of freshwater fish consumption. As Oase 1 was close in time to the last Neanderthals, these data may indicate a significant dietary shift associated with the changing population dynamics of modern human emergence in Europe.
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