Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[grumbler]

Grumbler remembers trying to converse with them at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOTKDgrdvdg

[ulmont]

Interesting. This is not an area I've done much reading in. Is the prevailing consensus that we had anatomic homo sapiens for about 200,000 that were mentally different from more recent homo sapiens? What sort of evidence (scant though it may be) is that built on, do you know?

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

[jimmy olsen]

They can't see one star because there is another star in the same place?  So when people would look up they would see seven stars in the constellation but decide that there are really 6 stars because they somehow remember the positions of all the stars prior to fully sentient human beings?

There used to be seven visible stars. People had stories about them. "Those seven stars are the seven sisters."

Over time, one of them moved so it was lined up with another. That made it look like there were six stars. People still called the group of stars the seven sisters because that's what they'd always been called.

... but they could only see six. So new stories were told, explaining how something happened to one of the seven sisters, "so now there's only six left."

Is this confusing?

(also Homo Sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago, so this is not "prior to fully sentient human beings")

I think I figured what is the cause of the confusion.  The stars that are overlapping are not both part of Pleiades, only one is.  The other star, Atlas, is part of Tauris, but isn't a major portion of it.  It's just classified that way because that's what it is close to. So if Atlas took Pleione's place in the Pleiades it would would still look like there are seven stars.   Also, they changed the name!  It was Tauri 57.  The name Atlas is new.

Anyway the point is moot.  Both Tauri 57 and Pleione are mentioned by Ptolemy.  So people could see it 2000 years ago.

Fair enough

Anatomically modern humans had evolved 300,000 years ago, but behavioral modernity took longer.  Stuff like abstract thinking, complex reasoning, connecting signifiers and the signified, happened within the last 100,000 years.  It's not clear when people could do all that, or what caused them to be able to do it.

Evidence is sparse and hard to date.  The point is that 100,000 years ago people may not have been able to think like we do now.

Interesting. This is not an area I've done much reading in. Is the prevailing consensus that we had anatomic homo sapiens for about 200,000 that were mentally different from more recent homo sapiens? What sort of evidence (scant though it may be) is that built on, do you know?

Eh, this is an extremely controversial statement. It's all argument by absence of evidence.

There's been a mountain of evidence discovered in the last 20 years that the Neanderthals (who separated from sapiens 600-700k years ago) were completely capable of abstract thinking, complex reasoning, long term planning, etc.

Read
https://www.amazon.com/Kindred-Neanderthal-Life-Love-Death/dp/147293749X

[jimmy olsen]

Apparently the little Yoda from the Mandalorian ended up on Earth and became Gregory IX.

https://twitter.com/archaeologyart/status/1453081539420606476

[jimmy olsen]

Lidar is doing great work in Latin America

https://gizmodo.com/archaeologists-map-nearly-500-mesoamerican-sites-and-se-1847928540

Archaeologists Map Nearly 500 Mesoamerican Sites and See Distinct Design Patterns

A sweeping survey of ancient settlements offers new clues to pre-Columbian life in Mexico.

By Isaac Schultz
Monday 12:48PM

Archaeologists created 3D maps of more than 30,000 square miles of precolonial settlements in what is today Mexico, revealing never-before-seen details of how sites were designed and their apparent connections to the ancient Mesoamerican calendar.

The 478 sites included in the new research were inhabited from around 1400 BCE to 1000 CE, and the way they were constructed appears to be linked to cosmologies important to the communities that lived there. Settlements that align with nearby mountain peaks or the Sun's arc across the sky suggest there may have been symbolic importance to the orientation of the architecture.

The team categorized the sites into five distinct types of architectural arrangement, which they think might correspond to different time periods and indicate more egalitarian societies. All the sites had rectangular or square features, which the archaeologists say may have been inspired by the famous Olmec site of San Lorenzo, which had a central rectangular space that was likely used as a public plaza. The team's survey and analysis were published today in Nature Human Behavior.

"The main point of this study is the discovery of nearly 500 standardized complexes across a broad area, many of them having rectangular shapes," wrote lead author Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to Gizmodo. "Until three years ago, we had no idea about the presence of such complexes. They really force us to rethink what was happening during this period."

The team used an aerial scanning technology called lidar to map hidden structures at these sites. With lidar, archaeologists can get precision measurements of ground elevation change, even through dense tree coverage, thanks to lasers that penetrate the surface and then bounce back to a detector. Lidar is "revolutionary for archaeology," Robert Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the University of Albany-SUNY who didn't work on the recent paper, wrote in an accompanying News & Views article for Nature

"The study foreshadows the future for archaeology as lidar reveals ancient architecture at an unprecedented scale that will reach into remote and heavily vegetated regions the world over," Rosenswig added.

In 2020, Inomata and his colleagues reported their discovery of the monumental site of Aguada Fénix using lidar imaging. Now, they've looked at 2,000 years of architecture in the region through aerial lidar surveys.

The people who designed these settlements are broadly called the Olmec and Maya, though there are better, more specific names for communities that fall under those labels, such as the Chontal-speaking residents of eastern Tabasco and the Zoke-speaking people of western Tabasco and Veracruz. The Olmec site maps are particularly handy; the center of San Lorenzo is the oldest capital in the area (it's the home of those colossal heads you might be familiar with), and as such, archaeologists believe it may have set the standard for how to lay out a settlement.

But San Lorenzo was well known already; part of the value of this new research is highlighting the structures of smaller settlements. "Although this part of Mexico is fairly open and populated, most of those sites were not known before," Inomata added. "They were literally hiding in plain sight."

Together, the nearly 500 sites give archaeologists a sense of how communities in the area organized. Inomata said the research impacts are two-fold: One, archaeologists now have a better idea as to the development of monumental building projects in the region over time. Two, based on the site layouts, it appears that communities didn't have a highly stratified social hierarchy.

"Traditionally, archaeologists thought large constructions were done by hierarchical societies with elites and rulers," Inomata said. "But we now see that those large and standardized spaces could be built by people without pronounced inequality." That determination is in part based on the lack of large permanent residences at many of the sites.

The archaeological team's next steps are to visit the sites in person, to verify that the patterns represented from the air are the reality on the ground. That's an extremely important step, as evidenced by a situation in 2016 in which a teenager thought he found a lost city in satellite imagery, only for archaeologists to disagree, saying it was probably a fallow maize field.

So far, only about 20% of the sites the team surveyed have been studied on the ground. While those ground survey results are promising, more data needs to be collected for researchers to know the extent of architectural similarities and differences in the region.

[Razgovory]

Interesting. This is not an area I've done much reading in. Is the prevailing consensus that we had anatomic homo sapiens for about 200,000 that were mentally different from more recent homo sapiens? What sort of evidence (scant though it may be) is that built on, do you know?

Earlier versions of humanity didn't do the stuff we do now.  Homo Erectus didn't create art or complex tools.  That's not surprising, as they weren't the same species as us.  They had smaller brains and were much uglier.  When the earliest modern human beings evolved they still didn't create art or complex tools.  So the thinking is that they were mentally different.  The consensus is that these traits developed in human beings 150,000 to 75,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, this is built not so much on evidence, but lack of evidence.  In particular the lack of art.  Arguing from lack of evidence is always tricky, but there had to have been a time when our ancestors became sentient because not all our ancestors were sentient.  The idea that this after anatomically modern humans evolved makes sense; you need the hardware before you write the software.

[PDH]

I think a lot of the reasoning behind the thoughts of some sort of cultural revolution have to do with population density.  Only the hardened outliers argue that earlier Homo sapiens weren't capable of such abstract thought, but that social functioning did not require the entire cultural package of what modern humans do.

For some, it may have been less complex tools instead of micro-flake tools, for others it was a lack of ornamentation vs making various apparent necklaces and beadwork, but there does not seem to be a need for continued and sustained mix of all the modern human elements all the time.  There are sites that show evidence of such things, and sites that do not. 

Perhaps the biggest point of contention is when complex communication became language, and that is not going to be spotted in the fossil record.  That is the the "over the hump" issue for some who study this, as the deep abstract thought and mixture of reality and time that is key to language would have sustained a lot of the cultural elements across a broad swath of groups.

[Iormlund]

... you need the hardware before you write the software.

That seems rather wasteful. You don't buy new hardware unless you want to run some fancy new software either. Hardware costs money (in this case a higher energy expenditure).

I would've guessed both evolved in parallel.

[The Minsky Moment]

Is the prevailing consensus that we had anatomic homo sapiens for about 200,000 that were mentally different from more recent homo sapiens?

According to Julian Jaynes the cutoff was the Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200-1000 BCE) but that as far from a prevailing consensus as you can get.

[crazy canuck]

Interesting. This is not an area I've done much reading in. Is the prevailing consensus that we had anatomic homo sapiens for about 200,000 that were mentally different from more recent homo sapiens? What sort of evidence (scant though it may be) is that built on, do you know?

Earlier versions of humanity didn't do the stuff we do now.  Homo Erectus didn't create art or complex tools.  That's not surprising, as they weren't the same species as us.  They had smaller brains and were much uglier.  When the earliest modern human beings evolved they still didn't create art or complex tools.  So the thinking is that they were mentally different.  The consensus is that these traits developed in human beings 150,000 to 75,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, this is built not so much on evidence, but lack of evidence.  In particular the lack of art.  Arguing from lack of evidence is always tricky, but there had to have been a time when our ancestors became sentient because not all our ancestors were sentient.  The idea that this after anatomically modern humans evolved makes sense; you need the hardware before you write the software.

The Bhimbetka Petroglyphs are at least 290,000 years old.

The Venus of Tan-Tan is hard to date but it is at least 200,000 years old and made by someone other than homo sapians.

Somewhat more controversially some hold the view that engravings made by Homo Erectus on shells should be considered as art. 

[crazy canuck]

Is the prevailing consensus that we had anatomic homo sapiens for about 200,000 that were mentally different from more recent homo sapiens?

According to Julian Jaynes the cutoff was the Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200-1000 BCE) but that as far from a prevailing consensus as you can get.

Pretty sure there is a wide consensus that homo sapiens post 2000 CE had significantly deficient mental abilities compared with prior 200,000 years or so.

[The Minsky Moment]

Pretty sure there is a wide consensus that homo sapiens post 2000 CE had significantly deficient mental abilities compared with prior 200,000 years or so.

The study of Cro-MAGAnons is still ongoing.

[Jacob]

Pretty sure there is a wide consensus that homo sapiens post 2000 CE had significantly deficient mental abilities compared with prior 200,000 years or so.

The study of Cro-MAGAnons is still ongoing.

You mean the Q-MAGA-anons?

[jimmy olsen]

New paper on the fate of lost Peking Man fossils. It argues that they were never actually given to the US marines, citing newly discovered state department documents from 1943. They also present evidence that a photograph of the footlocker discovered in 1972 that was supposedly in Marine custody was a fake made to mislead investigators with doctored modern bones. Unfortunately, they have no new evidence of where they may be. We are at square one, with no reliable evidence beyond the day that they were packed.

https://paleoanthropology.org/ojs/index.php/paleo/article/view/72/73

[The Brain]

For a modern take, see:

https://earthsky.org/space/myth-and-science-of-pleiades-star-cluster/

Again, people with good eyesight can see seven stars.

Allegedly, there is a Polynesian legend that once they were a single star, and a god smashed them into several fragments ... which does not correspond with any actual star history.

Is it important that the creation of what is seen in the star patterns correspond with what actually happened?  Isn't the point is the similarity of the myths.  But there are all kinds of holes that can be poked in those similarities.

The first question is why the myths are so similar. The explanation given in the theory proposed is that ancient peoples around the world noticed that the seventh star was "gone" so created similar myths to explain that apparent disappearance. The second argument being, if the myths were not a survival of an ancient memory, how do these peoples know there are seven stars?

Problem with the theory is that people with good eyesight can in fact see seven stars. So they don't need to have remembered stuff from so long ago to make the myth. Problem with the second argument is that there are lots of myths about those stars, some of which are quite different and do not correspond to actual astronomical events (a Polynesian myth is that they are the shattered bits of an original single star). The myths only seem very similar because of selection.

So all over the world there would be people who had really good eyesight in their youth who had experienced one star "disappearing" as their eyesight grew worse with age.