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Recent Exciting Developments: 130kya American Hominins?

evolutiontheorist Human Migration, Cultures, and Species of Exit , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There has been SO MUCH EXCITING NEWS out of paleoanthropology/genetics lately, it’s been a little tricky keeping up with it all. I’ve been holding off on commenting on some of the recent developments to give myself time to think them over, but here goes:

  1. Ancient hominins in the US?
  2. Homo naledi
  3. Homo flores
  4. Humans evolved in Europe?
  5. In two days, first H Sap was pushed back to 260,000 years,
  6. then to 300,000 years!
  7. Bell beaker paper

1. Back in May (2017,) Holen et al published an article discussing A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA, in Nature:

Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum). The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion. The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial. Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum. 230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production.

Reconstruction of a Homo erectus woman, Smithsonian

Note that “Homo” here is probably not H. sapiens, but a related or ancestral species, like Denisovans or Homo erectus, because as far as we know, H. sapiens was still living in Africa at the time.

This is obviously a highly controversial claim. Heck, “earliest human presence in the Americas” was already controversial, with some folks firmly camped at 15,000 years ago and others camped around 40,000 yeas ago. 130,000 years ago wasn’t even on the table.

Unfortunately, the article is paywalled, so I can’t read the whole thing and answer simple questions like, “Did they test the thickness of mineral accumulation on the bones to see if the breaks/scratches are the same age as the bones themselves?” That is, minerals build up on the surfaces of old bones over time. If the breaks and scratches were made before the bones were buried, they’ll have the same amount of buildup as the rest of the bone surfaces. If the breaks are more recent–say, the result of a bulldozer accidentally backing over the bones–they won’t.

They did get an actual elephant skeleton and smacked it with rocks to see if it would break in the same ways as the mammoth skeleton. A truck rolling over a rib and a rock striking it at an angle are bound to produce different kinds and patterns of breakage (the truck is likely to do more crushing, the rock to leave percussive impacts.) I’d also like to know if they compared the overall butchering pattern to known stone-tool-butchered elephants or mammoths, although I don’t know how easy it would be to find one.

Oldowan tool, about 2 million years old

They also looked at the pattern of impacts and shapes of the “hammerstones.” A rock which has been modified by humans hitting it with another rock will typically have certain shapes and patterns on its surface that can tell you things like which angle the rock was struck from during crafting. I’ve found a few arrowheads, and they are pretty distinct from other rocks.

Here’s a picture of an Oldowan stone chopper, about 2 million years old, which is therefore far older than these potential 130,000 year old tools. Homo sapiens didn’t exist 2 million years ago; this pointy rock was probably wielded by species such as Australopithecus garhi, H. habilis, or H. ergaster. Note that one side of this chopper is rounded, intended for holding comfortably in your hand, while the other side has had several chunks of rock smacked off, resulting in convex surfaces. Often you can tel exactly where the stone tool was struck to remove a flake, based on the shape and angle of the surface and the pattern of concentric, circular lines radiating out from the impact spot.

Homo erectus, who lived after the Oldowan tool makers and had a fancier, more complicated lithic technology, did make it out of Africa and spread across southeast Asia, up into China. This is, as far as I know, the first case of a hominin species using tools to significantly expand its range, but we have no evidence of erectus ever expanding into places that get significantly cold in the winter, and boat-building is a pretty advanced skill. We don’t even think erectus made it to Madagascar, which makes it sailing to the Americans rather doubtful.

I dislike passing judgment on the paper without reading it, but my basic instinct is skepticism. While I think the peopling of the Americas will ultimately turn out to be a longer, more complex, and interesting process than the 15,000 years camp, 130,000 years is just too interesting a claim to believe without further evidence (like the bones of said hominins.)

Still, I keep an open mind and await new findings.

(We’ll continue with part 2 next week.)

Is Acne an Auto-Immune Disorder?

evolutiontheorist Genes and HBD , , , , , , , , , ,

Like our lack of fur, acne remains an evolutionary mystery to me.

Do other furless mammals get acne? Like elephants or whales? Or even chimps; their faces don’t have fur. If so, everyone’s keeping it a secret–I’ve never even seen an add for bonobo anti-acne cream, and with bonobos’ social lives, you know they’d want it. :)

So far, Google has returned no reports of elephants or whales with acne.

Now, a few skin blemishes here and there are not terribly interesting or mysterious. The weird thing about acne (IMO) is that it pops up at puberty*, and appears to have a genetic component.

Considering that kids with acne tend to feel rather self-conscious about it, I think it reasonable to assume that people with more severe acne have more difficulty with dating than people without. (Remember, some people have acne well into their 30s or beyond.)

Wouldn’t the non-acne people quickly out-compete the acne-people, resulting in less acne among humans? (Okay, now I really want to know if someone has done a study on whether people with more acne have fewer children.) Since acne is extremely common and shows up right as humans reach puberty, this seems like a pretty easy thing to study/find an effect if there is any.

Anyway, I totally remember a reference to acne in Dr. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, (one of my favorite books ever,) but can’t find it now. Perhaps I am confusing it with Nutrition and Western Disease or a book with a similar title. At any rate, I recall a picture of a young woman’s back with a caption to the effect that none of the people in this tropical local had acne, which the author could tell rather well since this was one of those tropical locals where people typically walk around with rather little clothing.

The Wikipedia has this to say about the international incidence of acne:

“Rates appear to be lower in rural societies. While some find it affects people of all ethnic groups, it may not occur in the non-Westernized people of Papua New Guinea and Paraguay.

Acne affects 40 to 50 million people in the United States (16%) and approximately 3 to 5 million in Australia (23%). In the United States, acne tends to be more severe in Caucasians than people of African descent.”

I consider these more “hints” than “conclusive proof of anything.”

Back when I was researching hookworms, I ran across these bits:

“The [Hygiene Hypothesis] was first proposed by David P. Strachan who noted that hay fever and eczema were less common in children who belonged to large families. Since then, studies have noted the effect of gastrointestinal worms on the development of allergies in the developing world. For example, a study in Gambia found that eradication of worms in some villages led to increased skin reactions to allergies among children. … [bold mine.]

Moderate hookworm infections have been demonstrated to have beneficial effects on hosts suffering from diseases linked to overactive immune systems. … Research at the University of Nottingham conducted in Ethiopia observed a small subset of people with hookworm infections were half as likely to experience asthma or hay fever. Potential benefits have also been hypothesized in cases of multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s Disease and diabetes.”

So I got to thinking, if allergies and eczema are auto-immune reactions (I know someone in real life, at least, whose skin cracks to the point of bleeding if they eat certain foods, but is otherwise fine if they don’t eat those foods,) why not acne?

Acne is generally considered a minor problem, so people haven’t necessarily spent a ton of time researching it. Googling “acne autoimmune” gets me some Paleo-Dieter folks talking about curing severe cases with a paleo-variant (they’re trying to sell books, so they didn’t let on the details, but I suspect the details have to do with avoiding refined sugar, milk, and wheat.)

While I tend to caution against over-enthusiastic embrace of a diet one’s ancestors most likely haven’t eaten in thousands or ten thousand years, if some folks are reporting a result, then I’d love to see scientists actually test it and try to confirm or disprove it.

The problem with dietary science is that it is incredibly complicated, full of confounds, and most of the experiments you might think up in your head are completely illegal and impractical.

For example, scientists figured out that Pellagra is caused by nutritional deficiency–rather than an infectious agent–by feeding prisoners an all-corn diet until they started showing signs of gross malnutrition. (For the record, the prisoners joined the program voluntarily. “All the corn you can eat” sounded pretty good for the first few months.) Likewise, there was a program during WWII to study the effects of starvation–on voluntary subjects–and try to figure out the best way to save starving people, started because the Allies knew they would have a lot of very real starvation victims on their hands very soon.

These sorts of human experiments are no longer allowed. What a scientist can do to a human being is pretty tightly controlled, because no one wants to accidentally kill their test subjects and universities and the like don’t like getting sued. Even things like the Milgram Experiments would have trouble getting authorized today.

So most of the time with scientific studies, you’re left with using human analogs, which means rats. And rats don’t digest food the exact same way we do–Europeans and Chinese don’t digest food the exact same way, so don’t expect rats to do it the same way, either. An obvious oversight as a result of relying on animal models is that most animals can synthesize Vitamin C, but humans can’t. This made figuring out this whole Vitamin C thing a lot trickier.

Primates are probably a little closer, digestively, to humans, but people get really squeamish about monkey research, and besides, they eat a pretty different diet than we do, too. Gorillas are basically vegan (I bet they eat small bugs by accident all the time, of course,) and chimps have almost no body fat–this is quite remarkable, actually. Gorillas and orangutans have quite a bit of body fat, “normal” levels by human standards. Hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, and sedentary butt-sitters like us have different amounts, but they still all have some. But chimps and bonobos have vanishingly little; male chimps and bonobos have almost zero body fat, even after being raised in zoos and fed as much food as they want.

Which means that if you’re trying to study diet, chimps and bonobos are probably pretty crappy human analogs.

(And I bet they’re really expensive to keep, relative to mice or having humans fill out surveys and promise to eat more carbs.)

So you’re left with trying to figure out what people are eating and tinker with it in a non-harmful, non-invasive way. You can’t just get a bunch of orphans and raise them from birth on two different diets and see what happens. You get people to fill out questionnaires about what they eat and then see if they happen to drop dead in the next 40 or 50 years.

And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that “corn” can mean a dozen different things to different people. Someone whose ancestors were indigenous to North and South America may digest corn differently than someone from Europe, Africa, or Asia. Different people cook corn differently–we don’t typically use the traditional method of mixing it with lime (the mineral), which frees up certain nutrients and traditionally protected people from Pellagra. We don’t all eat corn in the same combinations with other foods (look at the interaction between the calcium in milk and Vitamin D for one of the ways which combining foods can complicate matters.) And we aren’t necessarily even cooking the same “corn”. Modern hybrid corns may not digest in exactly the same way as corn people were growing a hundred or two hundred years ago. Small differences are sometimes quite important, as we discovered when we realized the artificially-created trans-fats we’d stuck in our foods to replace saturated fats were causing cancer–our bodies were trying to use these fats like normal fats, but when we stuck them into our cell walls, their wonky shapes (on a chemical level, the differences between different kinds of fats can be mostly understood that they are shaped differently, and trans fats have been artificially modified to have a different shape than they would have otherwise,) fucked up the structure of the cells they were in.

In short, this research is really hard, but I still encourage people to go do it and do it well.

 

Anyway, back on topic, here’s another quote from the Wikipedia, on the subject of using parasites to treat autoimmunie disorders:

“While it is recognized that there is probably a genetic disposition in certain individuals for the development of autoimmune diseases, the rate of increase in incidence of autoimmune diseases is not a result of genetic changes in humans; the increased rate of autoimmune-related diseases in the industrialized world is occurring in too short a time to be explained in this way. There is evidence that one of the primary reasons for the increase in autoimmune diseases in industrialized nations is the significant change in environmental factors over the last century. …

Genetic research on the interleukin genes (IL genes) shows that helminths [certain kinds of parasites] have been a major selective force on a subset of these human genes. In other words, helminths have shaped the evolution of at least parts of the human immune system, especially the genes responsible for Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and celiac disease — and provides further evidence that it is the absence of parasites, and in particular helminths, that has likely caused a substantial portion of the increase in incidence of diseases of immune dysregulation and inflammation in industrialized countries in the last century. …

Studies conducted on mice and rat models of colitis, muscular sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and asthma have shown helminth-infected subjects to display protection from the disease.”

 

Right, so I’m curious if acne falls into this category, too.