An illustration of an adult male woolly mammoth as it navigates a mountain pass in Arctic Alaska, 17,100 years ago. The image is produced from an original, life-size painting by paleo artist James Havens, which is housed at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.
A view of the excavation site of the mammoth tusk from north of the Brooks Range in Alaska.
Photo by Pam Groves, University of Alaska Fairbanks
According to creationist superstition, a magic man made of nothing created the entire Universe, Earth, and all life on Earth, out of nothing, using magic words spoken in a language that no-one else spoke, and, using the rotation period of a planet that didn't exist, completed it all in 6 days during what creationists call 'Creation Week'.
7,000 years before that, mammoths were living their daily lives in what is now Alaska, and leaving tusks that carried a daily record of where they were living and consuming vegetation, in the form of 'signature' ratios of isotopes of strontium.
Strontium finds its way into the plants that animals eat from the underlying rocks where the ratio of the different stable isotopes of strontium (87Sr and 86Sr) in it changes very little over millions of years, giving a characteristic 'signature' that can be used to identify where the food plants were growing. This signature strontium was deposited in the growth layers of mammoth tusks, starting at the tip when the mammoth was born, and ending in the root when the mammoth died. In between the two is a complete record of where the mammoth roamed.
But first, scientists need to build a strontium isotope map so they can match up the record in the tusks with the geographical location in which the food grew that day. And this is where voles come in. Voles also eat the strontium-containing grasses that mammoths eat and so build up a record in their teeth. However, voles are mostly very sedentary in their habits so have a very restricted range and because the strontium in the rocks changes little, even present-day voles can be used to build up a strontium isotope map.
Using that knowledge, an international research team led by Clément Bataille, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the Faculty of Science, Ottawa University, Canada have analysed the strontium content of a mammoth tusk found on Alaska’s North Slope above the Arctic Circle, to build up a picture of its daily life and travels.
The study is explained in a press release from Ottawa University:
One of the easiest predictions to make is that, in the next few days there will be more science papers casually refuting creationism, without the slightest intention of doing so on the part of the authors.
This is inevitable, of course, because creationism is so profoundly counter-factual that just about every fact is inconsistent with creationism, so, by merely revealing the facts, scientists refute creationism.
And today's example is the revelation that there were hippos living around Rome during the Pleistocene, about half a million years before creationist superstition says Earth was magicked up out of nothing in 'Creation week'. The amazing thing isn't that there were Hippos living near Rome half a million years ago, but the fact that there are grown adults who believe the creationist superstition of a 'Creation Week' 10,000 years ago, before which, there was nothing and nowhere for anything to happen in.
This news comes in the form of an open access paper in PLOS ONE by Beniamino Mecozzi of the Sapienza University of Rome, and colleagues, and a press release from PLoS:
View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia.
DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically
lived in the region.
Photo: Brenna Henn/UC Davis
Nama women of Namibia The Nama are an indigenous population known to
carry exceptional levels of genetic diversity compared to other modern
groups.
In an article which passed beneath my radar last May, a team of anthropologists
led by Professor Brenna Henn of the Genome Center at the University of
California, Davis, cast doubt on the theory that modern humans all originated in
a single population in East Africa.
Instead, they propose a model in which early Homo sapiens spread across
Africa forming partially isolated populations, between which there was limited
gene flow by interbreeding.
The earliest split which is still detectable in the DNA of contemporary people
occurred between 120,000 to 135,000 years ago after two or more weakly
genetically differentiated populations had been mixing for hundreds of thousands
of years.
Before creationists start to get over-excited by the news that earlier
scientists might have been wrong about the exact details of the evolution of
modern humans, they should break the habit of a lifetime and find the courage to
read the abstract to the paper in Nature, which makes it clear that the debate
is about the details of our evolutionary origins in Africa. There is no serious
doubt about the truth of that explanation.
Sunrise over the Serengeti - where humans evolved, but did we need grasslands to spread into Eurasia?
Image: Mostphotos
A reconstruction of the face of an adult female Homo erectus, as seen on display in the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It was based on fossils KNM-ER 3733 and 992. The first hominins out of Africa may have inhabited forests.
Most of the abilities that enabled humans to spread across the world and occupy so many different habitats, from grasslands, forests, Arctic tundra and the icy wastes of Greenland, Northern Canada and Alaska are the result of our evolution on the savannah of East Africa in that long period of history before the mythical 'Creation Week' when creationists think the universe was created. In this case, 1-2 million years before humans and Earth were created according to the creation myths of the Abrahamic religions.
And, because we evolved as a savannah species, it has been assumed that the earliest humans to migrate out of Africa would have migrated along grassland corridors and eventually up into the steppes of Central Asia. But new research by anthropologists at Helsinki University, Finland, led by Tegan I. F. Foister, is casting doubt on that assumption. They argue that human cultural plasticity enabled us to exploit and expand different ecological niches. In effect, we were 'generalist-specialists', which means we could adapt to a new environment, and then quickly become specialist at living in it.
The team have published their findings in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology and explain their work on a news release from Helsinki University:
The origins of human genus have long been associated with savannah and grassland environments of Africa. Due to this association, it was thought that the first human dispersal into Eurasia followed grassy corridors leading from Africa to Asia and to Europe. This link between humans and savannah-grasslands has been considered so strong that it delayed the appearance of early humans in Europe compared to Asia, as open grassy environments appeared in Europe later than in Asia. According to this view, early humans were ecologically clearly less versatile than our own species, Homo sapiens, as we have colonized almost all terrestrial environments on the planet.
“But that’s clearly not the whole story” says the lead author Tegan Foister, a doctoral researcher in the Hominin Ecology group at the University of Helsinki. “Because we knew of some studies suggesting that early humans were living in environments other than savannah-grassland, we thought that it would be interesting to do a more systematic investigation on the environments humans are known to have occupied during this crucial time period”.
The research published in Evolutionary Anthropology is a systematic review of 121 previously published reconstructions of early human habitats and it revealed that humans, when dispersing out of Africa for the first time, started to occupy a diverse set of environments from grasslands to forests.
“We have long associated early humans with savannah-like environments outside of the African continent. However, when the research published over the past two decades is considered together, it shows humans inhabiting diverse environments early in the evolution of the genus Homo. Already one million years ago humans in Europe were occupying fully forested environments”. Foister continues.
Although the analysis shows that grasslands and savannahs were important components of early human habitats, it places humans into a wide spectrum of environments, and in many cases environments with varied vegetation composition. This suggests that commonly held beliefs about early humans are not entirely correct: Humans did not have that strict requirements for their habitats and they seem to have been ecologically more versatile than previously assumed.
The study also indicated regional differences in human habitat characteristics. The grasslands and savannahs show the highest prevalence among African habitats, whereas forested habitats were more prominent in Eurasia making the range of different habitats wider in Eurasia. This suggests a possibility that the first human range expansion into Eurasia was accompanied and potentially even enabled by the expansion of human ecological niche.
The research is part of University of Helsinki and Kone Foundation funded project that investigates the evolution of the human niche over the past 2 million years. Although the present study focuses on the early humans, its findings are important also to the understanding of the origins of uniquely wide niche of our own species Homo sapiens.
Co-author Miikka Tallavaara, leader of the project and the Hominin Ecology group, says: “The ability of Homo sapiens to occupy most of the terrestrial ecosystems has enabled our ecological dominance and triggered the current biodiversity crisis. Our finding that human species in the Early Pleistocene were also able to thrive in multiple environment types provides an exciting target for future research into the evolutionary origins of the human plasticity and ecological success.”
More technical detail is provided in the Abstract and Introduction to the team's open access paper in Evolutionary Anthropology:
Abstract
To understand the ecological dominance of Homo sapiens, we need to investigate the origins of the plasticity that has enabled our colonization of the planet. We can approach this by exploring the variability of habitats to which different hominin populations have adapted over time. In this article, we draw upon and synthesize the current research on habitats of genus Homo during the early Pleistocene. We examined 121 published environmental reconstructions from 74 early Pleistocene sites or site phases to assess the balance of arguments in the research community. We found that, while grasslands and savannahs were prominent features of Homo habitats in the early Pleistocene, current research does not place early Pleistocene Homo, in any single environmental type, but in a wide variety of environments, ranging from open grasslands to forests. Our analysis also suggests that the first known dispersal of Homo out of Africa was accompanied by niche expansion.
1 INTRODUCTION
Our own species, Homo sapiens, has expanded globally to dominate an exceptionally diverse range of ecological settings. This has often happened at the cost of other species, leading to the present biodiversity crisis.1, 2 To understand the long-term causes of this, it is necessary to investigate the trait thought to have enabled this rapid expansion—plasticity.3 The degree to which the ecological plasticity displayed by H. sapiens is unique compared to other species of the genus Homo is increasingly studied.4, 5, 6 An emerging concept in this research is the generalist-specialist niche.4, 7 This term refers to the specific plasticity of H. sapiens and how it allowed the development of highly specialized adaptations to exploit resources across a wide range of different ecosystems.6 Evidence on the range of suitable habitats earlier H. species occupied8, 9, 10 may provide important insights into the origins of the plasticity which has enabled H. sapiens to adopt its generalist-specialist strategy and colonize almost all environments on the planet.
Here we apply a novel approach to review and synthesize published reconstructions of the environmental context of early Pleistocene humans to explore the current state of the research regarding the variability in suitable environmental conditions. We focus on sites dated to between ∼2.0 and 0.8 Ma. When using the term human, we are referring to any member of the genus Homo. In many cases, human presence is indicated just by archaeological remains, making species identification impossible. However, in this period the human species occupying this site can often be treated as Homo erectussensu lato. We nevertheless remain agnostic about the taxonomy of Homo in the early Pleistocene and operate at the genus level.
Figure 1.
A map with points indicating the geographic distribution of sites for which environmental reconstructions were extracted from the corpus. Many of the points represent several individual locations, for example in Nihewan, Northern China, what appears as one point is six sites within our data (Supporting Information Appendix and Table 1). The coloring of points corresponds with regions used in the analysis: Africa (Red), Asia (Purple), Europe (Blue), Levant, and Caucasus (Green).
Creationists will tie themselves into knots to explain these finding, invoking 'flawed' dating, 'changing radioactive decay rates', Satanic conspiracy theories and forged fossil evidence, but the fact will remain that 99.97% of Earth's history, and several million years of hominin history such as this paper reveals, occurred in that vast expanse of time before they think the Universe was created.
According to the creationist favourite arguments - the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy - anything which is complex, such as cells, multicellular organisms, cultural ethics, etc., must have been intelligently designed by their particular god by magic, because that is the only answer allowed. Evolution is ruled out by dogmas, as too hard to understand, by someone too lazy to learn biology and too afraid to consider being wrong.
So, following what passes for creationist logic, creationists should believe that the species-specific, obligate parasite, the head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, must have been intelligently designed by the creationists' god.
Which begs the questions, why would an omnibenevolent designer:
design an irritating parasite?
design its DNA to look like head lice had co-evolved with humans over millions of years from a common ancestor with the louse, Pediculus schaeffi, that parasitises chimpanzees?
And, as with all host-specific, obligate parasites, like pubic lice, chlamydia, and other STDs, there is the little matter of who on the Ark, was host to them and how did they acquire them?
Of the three lice that can infest humans, the head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, the closely-related body louse, P. h. humanus and the more distantly-related pubic louse, Phthiriasis pubis, all have their counterparts in our nearest great ape relatives, in the latter case, the gorilla, and all have genomes that map closely onto the evolutionary history of different human populations.
Humans inherited the ancestor of P. humanus when we diverged from the chimpanzees and, as we lost body hair, it became isolated to our head and facial hair. Later, when we started wearing clothes, our lice diverged into two sub-species, P. h. capitis and P. h. humanus (also called P. h. corporis) respectively. How we managed to acquire the sexually-transmitted pubic or crab louse, Phthiriasis pubis, from an ancestor of gorillas about 3.3 million years ago, is a matter for speculation.
What are the three species of lice that infest humans and what can they tell us about our evolutionary history and the history of different human populations?
There are three species of lice that infest humans:
Pediculus humanus capitis:This is the head louse, which infests the human scalp and hair.
Pediculus humanus corporis:This is the body louse, which lives and lays its eggs on clothing and only feeds on the human body.
Pthirus pubis:This is the pubic louse, which infests coarse body hair, especially in the genital area but can also be found in other coarse body hair.
These lice can provide insights into our evolutionary history and the history of different human populations through a field known as "phylogeography." Phylogeography involves studying the genetic variation within a species to understand its historical migration patterns and population dynamics.
Lice are highly host-specific, meaning that they have evolved to live on and feed exclusively from humans. The divergence of head and body lice is thought to have occurred when humans began wearing clothing. The body louse adapted to live in clothing and only feeds on the human body when needed, while the head louse remained adapted to living in human hair.
Research on the genetic diversity of human lice has contributed to our understanding of human evolution and migration. For example, studies have used genetic data from lice to estimate when humans started wearing clothing, which is linked to the migration out of Africa. The idea is that as humans migrated to different climates, the need for clothing increased, leading to the divergence of body lice from head lice.
Additionally, the study of lice genetics has been used to investigate the timing and patterns of human migration and to trace the movement of human populations over time. This research helps scientists map out the historical interactions and separations of human populations, providing valuable information about the peopling of different regions of the world.
In summary, the genetic diversity of human lice provides clues about our evolutionary history, including migration patterns, the development of cultural practices like clothing use, and the historical interactions among human populations.
Now, a group of scientists led by Marina Ascunce, of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), together with colleagues, have used this knowledge to show that head lice came to America twice; once with the first wave of human migration from Siberia via the land bridge, Beringia, which was located between Siberia and Alaska, what is now the Bering Strait, when sea-levels were lower, and again with European colonists. They report these findings in a new study published on November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
The new study analysed the DNA of 274 human lice from 25 geographic sites around the world. This analysis revealed the existence of two genetically isolated clusters of lice that only rarely interbred. Cluster I had a worldwide distribution, while cluster II was found in Europe and the Americas. There is also a population found in the Americas which appears to be the result of a mixture between lice descended from populations that arrived with the First People carrying cluster I lice and those descended from European (cluster II) lice, which were brought over during the colonization of the Americas.
The researchers also identified a population of lice in Central America which shows a close genetic with lice in Asia. This is consistent with the idea that people from East Asia migrated to North America and became the first Native Americans. These people then spread south into Central America, where modern louse populations today still retain a genetic signature from their distant Asian ancestors.
Abstract
The human louse, Pediculus humanus, is an obligate blood-sucking ectoparasite that has coevolved with humans for millennia. Given the intimate relationship between this parasite and the human host, the study of human lice has the potential to shed light on aspects of human evolution that are difficult to interpret using other biological evidence. In this study, we analyzed the genetic variation in 274 human lice from 25 geographic sites around the world by using nuclear microsatellite loci and female-inherited mitochondrial DNA sequences. Nuclear genetic diversity analysis revealed the presence of two distinct genetic clusters I and II, which are subdivided into subclusters: Ia-Ib and IIa-IIb, respectively. Among these samples, we observed the presence of the two most common louse mitochondrial haplogroups: A and B that were found in both nuclear Clusters I and II. Evidence of nuclear admixture was uncommon (12%) and was predominate in the New World potentially mirroring the history of colonization in the Americas. These findings were supported by novel DIYABC simulations that were built using both host and parasite data to define parameters and models suggesting that admixture between cI and cII was very recent. This pattern could also be the result of a reproductive barrier between these two nuclear genetic clusters. In addition to providing new evolutionary knowledge about this human parasite, our study could guide the development of new analyses in other host-parasite systems.
Fig 1. Humans and lice.
The map shows the geographic distribution of the modern human head lice included in this study using green dots. Archeological findings of human lice are shown with the figure of a human louse on the map with the corresponding estimated dates from: [3, 5, 6, 21, 22]. In addition, the map reflects the approximate locations of hominin fossil remains and their proposed distribution based on: [23–38]. Each hominin is color coded as follows: Neanderthal (Blue), Denisovan (Black), and Anatomical Modern Humans (Orange).
Fig 5. Proposed global co-migration of human lice and humans.
Top: Map depicting the collection sites of the human lice included in this study. The color of each circle corresponds to the majority nuclear genetic cluster to which sampled individuals were assigned. Sites with admixed lice are indicated with patterned circles including colors of the two major genetic clusters at that site. The proposed migrations of anatomically modern humans out of Africa into Europe, Asia and the Americas, as well as the more recent European colonization of the New World are indicated with thick grey arrows. Hypothetical human louse co-migrations are indicated with orange and blue arrows. At the bottom, the STRUCTURE plot from Fig 3A corresponding to the assignment of 274 lice from 25 geographical sites at K = 4 (Table 1) is shown.
As the author point out, analysis of the DNA of host-specific obligate parasites such as lice can help fill in gaps in the fossil record because their evolution is closely linked to their host's evolution, patterns of migration and , in our case, to cultural changes such as wearing cloths. Again, in the case of humans, a clear pattern emerges which maps exactly onto other evidence of migration, isolation and remixing, confirming the value of DNA analysis in this respect. There is a clear line of migration out of Africa into Asia and from Asia into the Americas with the earliest human migrants. The lice Europeans inherited, had been partially isolated in the European Peninsula with their hosts, or possible had evolved with Neanderthals who then passed them on the modern humans, were the able to remix with the Asian/American variety from the 15th century onwards.
So what creationists need to explain, as well as why their putative designer went to the trouble of designing an obligate parasite to live on us, is why it then gave them DNA that looked like they had evolved over millions of years, share a ecommon ancestor with those of chimpanzees and reflected our pattern of migration out of Africa and across the world over a period of several tens of thousands of years.
Super-resolution STED microscopy image of HEZ293 cells transfected with the zinc transporter ZnT9 (in green). In magenta the mitochondrial protein TOM 20 and in white the localization in mitochondria.
Credit: Rubén Vicente.
Geographic distribution of the substitution identified in the SLC30A9 gene in current human populations and possible scenarios of Denisovan introgression. Ancestral SLC30A9 corresponds to the version of the gene prior to interbreeding between Denisovans and sapiens. SLC30A9 variant, refers to the version shared with Denisovans.
Credit: Jorge Garcia and Elena Bosch. Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Created with mapchart
A team of researchers led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) , and by the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) of the UPF, has identified one of the most widespread traces of the genetic inheritance of the extinct Denisovans in modern humans.
These genes probably played an important role in helping early Homo sapiens adapt quickly to a cold climate, but, because they are involved in the regulation of zinc and play a part in cellular metabolism could also be a contributory factor in predisposition to mental health disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.
It's tempting to assume that they may also have contributed to a growth in religion since many 'prophets' seem to have had schizophrenic disorders in which they heard voices. However, that's not the main worry for creationists in this research. What they need to cope with is the fact that all this happened in that vast expanse of time before 'Creation week' when creationists believe the universe was magicked up from nothing, just 10,000 years ago.
There is also the matter of Homo sapiens not having a single founding couple who were created without ancestors, and don't even come from a single species, but are a hybrid between several related species.
Distribution of anthropogenic manufacturing traces, use-wear and residues on the Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (a) and Leang Panninge (b) tiger shark-tooth artefacts.
Figure 5. Use-related features of the Leang Panninge shark tooth: a) ground facet (indicated by red arrowhead) and striations on the lingual surface; b) grooves between the perforation and tooth shoulder from ligatures; c) plant fibre associated with hafting; d) cut notches along the base and grooves from ligatures (both indicated by red arrowheads) on the labial surface. White scale bars = 1mm (image c by B. Stephenson; all other images by M. Langley).
It's a fundamental requirement of the creation cult to believe that about 4000 years ago, their putative perfect creator god had a human-like fit of temper because its intelligently [sic] designed creation wasn't working as intended and inflicted a genocidal flood on the planet, killing everything apart from a few survivors who lived in a floating box for a year. They then disembarked onto a sterile planet somewhere in the Middle-east and somehow survived to create the biodiversity we see today.
From there, apparently, the surviving humans repopulated Earth, invented new cultures and languages as they did so, forgetting all about the flood and the god who inflicted it on their recent ancestors, and invented new gods and religions, with only one small tribe remembering it all in word-perfect detail.
Apart from the ludicrously narrow genetic bottleneck this would have cause, meaning almost all the surviving species would be extinct within a few generations, there is the little problem of so much archaeology being around that would not have survived such a flood, and evidence of cultures that existed before, during and after it apparently without noticing it at all.
An example is the 7,000-year-old fighting knife made from shark teeth discovered on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which should not have been there if the Bronze Age tales made up by people who thought Earth was small and flat with a dome over it and ran on magic, that creationists think were true history and real science, actually were true history and real science.
This discovery by a team of archaeologists from Australian and Indonesian universities led by Associate Professor of Archaeology, Michelle Langley of Griffith University, is the subject of an open access paper published recently in Antiquity. Five of the authors have also written about this discovery in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Bringing a shark to a knife fight: 7,000-year-old shark-tooth knives discovered in Indonesia
Excavations on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have uncovered two unique and deadly artefacts dating back some 7,000 years – tiger shark teeth that were used as blades.
These finds, reported in the journal Antiquity, are some of the earliest archaeological evidence globally for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons – weapons made with multiple parts. Until now, the oldest such shark-tooth blades found were less than 5,000 years old.
Modified tiger shark teeth found in 7,000-year-old layers of Leang Panninge (top) and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (bottom) on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Our international team used a combination of scientific analysis, experimental reproduction and observations of recent human communities to determine that the two modified shark teeth had once been attached to handles as blades. They were most likely used in ritual or warfare.
7,000-year-old teeth
The two shark teeth were recovered during excavations as part of a joint Indonesian-Australian archaeological research program. Both specimens were found in archaeological contexts attributed to the Toalean culture – an enigmatic foraging society that lived in southwestern Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until an unknown period in the recent past.
The shark teeth are of a similar size and came from tiger sharks (Galeocerda cuvier) that were approximately two metres long. Both teeth are perforated.
A complete tooth, found at the cave site of Leang Panninge, has two holes drilled through the root. The other – found at a cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 – has one hole, though is broken and likely originally also had two holes.
Microscopic examination of the teeth found they had once been tightly fixed to a handle using plant-based threads and a glue-like substance. The adhesive used was a combination of mineral, plant and animal materials.
The same method of attachment is seen on modern shark-tooth blades used by cultures throughout the Pacific.
Scratches and a ground section on the tip of the Leang Panninge shark tooth indicate its use by people 7,000 years ago.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Examination of the edges of each tooth found they had been used to pierce, cut and scrape flesh and bone. However, far more damage was present than a shark would naturally accrue during feeding.
While these residues superficially suggest Toalean people were using shark-tooth knives as everyday cutting implements, ethnographic (observations of recent communities), archaeological and experimental data suggest otherwise.
Grooves and traces of red resin along the base of the Leang Panninge tooth show how the teeth were attached using threads.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Why use shark teeth?
Not surprisingly, our experiments found tiger shark-tooth knives were equally effective in creating long, deep gashes in the skin when used to strike (as in fighting) as when butchering a leg of fresh pork.
Indeed, the only negative aspect is that the teeth blunt relatively quickly – too quickly to make their use as an everyday knife practical.
This fact, as well as the fact shark teeth can inflict deep lacerations, probably explains why shark-tooth blades were restricted to weapons for conflict and ritual activities in the present and recent past.
Numerous societies across the globe have integrated shark teeth into their material culture. In particular, peoples living on coastlines (and actively fishing for sharks) are more likely to incorporate greater numbers of teeth into a wider range of tools.
Shark teeth are widely used to edge deadly combat weapons or powerful ritual blades in the Pacific. Left: a knife from Kiribati; centre and right: weapons from Hawai'i.
Observations of present-day communities indicate that, when not used to adorn the human body, shark teeth were almost universally used to create blades for conflict or ritual – including ritualised combat.
For example, a fighting knife found throughout north Queensland has a single long blade made from approximately 15 shark teeth placed one after the other down a hardwood shaft shaped like an oval, and is used to strike the flank or buttocks of an adversary.
Weapons, including lances, knives and clubs armed with shark teeth are known from mainland New Guinea and Micronesia, while lances form part of the mourning costume in Tahiti.
Farther east, the peoples of Kiribati are renowned for their shark-tooth daggers, swords, spears and lances, which are recorded as having been used in highly ritualised and often fatal conflicts.
Shark teeth found in Maya and Mexican archaeological contexts are widely thought to have been used for ritualised bloodletting, and shark teeth are known to have been used as tattooing blades in Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kiribati.
In Hawai‘i, so-called “shark-tooth cutters” were used as concealed weapons and for “cutting up dead chiefs and cleaning their bones preparatory to the customary burials”.
A shark-tooth knife from Aua Island, Papua New Guinea. Red arrows highlight wear and damage caused by fighting.
Credit: M. Langley and The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
Other shark tooth archaeological finds
Almost all shark-tooth artefacts recovered globally have been identified as adornments, or interpreted as such.
Indeed, modified shark teeth have been recovered from older contexts. A solitary tiger shark tooth with a single perforation from Buang Merabak (New Ireland, Papua New Guinea) is dated to around 39,500–28,000 years ago. Eleven teeth with single perforations from Kilu (Buka Island, Papua New Guinea) are dated to around 9,000–5,000 years ago. And an unspecified number of teeth from Garivaldino (Brazil) is dated to around 9,400–7,200 years ago.
However, in each of these cases the teeth were likely personal ornaments, not weapons.
Our newly described Indonesian shark tooth artefacts, with their combination of modifications and microscopic traces, instead indicate they were not only attached to knives, but very likely linked to ritual or conflict.
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The authors give more technical details in their paper in Antiquity:
Abstract
Although first identified 120 years ago, knowledge of the Toalean technoculture of Middle Holocene Sulawesi, Indonesia, remains limited. Previous research has emphasised the exploitation of largely terrestrial resources by hunter-gatherers on the island. The recent recovery of two modified tiger shark teeth from the Maros-Pangkep karsts of South Sulawesi, however, offers new insights. The authors combine use-wear and residue analyses with ethnographic and experimental data to indicate the use of these artefacts as hafted blades within conflict and ritual contexts, revealing hitherto undocumented technological and social practices among Toalean hunter-gatherers. The results suggest these artefacts constitute some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons.
Figure 1. Map with (inset) the location of Leang Panninge and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1
image by K. Newman.
Figure 2. Archaeological contexts of the perforated shark teeth: a) Leang Panninge cave; b) cave entrance at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1, at the foot of the isolated limestone karst tower; c) stratigraphic profile, Leang Panninge (2019); d–e) stratigraphic profiles, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (2018); f) Maros point excavated from Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (Square T9S1) above the Toalean-associated layer that yielded the shark tooth (scale bar is 10mm)
Photographs and image compilation by Y. Perston.
Figure 8. Comparison of the Toalean shark-tooth artefacts with examples of Maros points found at Leang Panninge (bottom left) and Leang Pajae (top and bottom right)
Photographs of Maros points by Y. Perston; figure by M. Langley.
Other than lying about science or blatantly misrepresenting it, I've yet to see a coherent explanation for why so much of Earth's history pre-dates the creation cult's 'Creation Week'.
We know, for instance that the scientists are using the correct decay rates when they use radiometric dating to determine the age of objects like these shark teeth because creationists assure us that if the basic parameters of the Universe were even slightly different, life would be impossible, yet decay rates depend on two of the four fundamental forces - the weak and strong nuclear forces, so, if they were very different 10,000 years ago by an amount that would make 10,000 years look like 3.8 billion, or 14 billion, or whatever is needed to explain the discrepancy between belief and observable reality, then life would have been impossible when it was supposedly created because quite simply, atoms larger than hydrogen would not have existed because their nuclei would have been unstable.
Creationism must be about the only cult that requires its followers to believe that the vast majority of history occurred when there was no place and no time for it to occur in.
But then these are people who can be made to believe that all life on Earth is descended from a tiny number of ancestors that lived in an unventilated box and got out of it onto a sterile planet on which every living substance had been destroyed (Genesis 7:23), including, presumably, the plants the herbivores needed, the insects the insectivores needed and where most of them would have promptly been exterminated by the carnivores.
No sooner do I write a blog-post in which I predict that it won't be long before yet more scientific papers which quite incidentally refute creationism are published, than along come another one, right on cue.
Of course, since almost all papers dealing with archaeology, paleontology and geology deal with the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before 'Creation Week' according to creationist dogma, this is a simple prediction to make. It is actually harder to find a serious science paper dealing with those subjects that doesn't casually refute creationism.
This paper would be embarrassing for creationists on a number of different levels, if they weren’t careful to remain proudly ignorant of it or at least had a strategy for ignoring inconvenient truths. It is a paper on the reconstruction of the face and cranium of an extinct primate that lived about 12 million years ago and which is believed to be close to if not directly ancestral to all the great apes, including humans.
So, we have another of those supposedly missing 'links' this time between the Hominidae and the other primates, and a fossil that is multiple times older than the Universe, according to the creationist creation myths. And yet the creation cult manages to stagger on regardless of all the evidence against it.
The skull is that of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, which was discovered in Catalunya, Spain, early this century:
In the third of this week's scientific papers that casually refute creationism by reporting on 'pre-creation' events of which Earth's history is 99.97% composed, we learn that Neanderthals in Europe were hunting cave lions for food and their pelts, 50,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic Age - which came to an end when, bizarrely, creationists believe the Universe was created.
There may well be more papers yet to appear, in what is turning out to be a week of which most creationists will want to remain ignorant, if they haven't already worked out a strategy for coping with the inevitable cognitive dissonance by dismissing the unwanted evidence. To creationists, it must feel at times that science is against them. It is, of course, but that's a problem for creationists, not science. It’s not compulsory to adopt counter-factual beliefs.
The scientific paper is published open access in Scientific Reports and is accompanied by a news release from Reading University. The discovery was made by lead author, PHD student, Gabriele Russo, of Universität Tübingen in Germany, together with a team of colleagues which included archaeologist Dr Annemieke Milks, of the University of Reading.
The skeleton of the cave lion dates to around 50,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, at a time when anatomically-modern Homo sapiens were just beginning to appear in Eurasia, and Neanderthals had western Eurasia pretty much to themselves.
