Science Journalism? Skeleton Lake in India.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Rachel Gutman apparently misstated the conclusion of a genetic study of human remains from Lake Roopkund in Uttarakhand, India. She wrote that "the skeletons’ genetic makeup is more typical of Mediterranean heritage than South Asian", but the abstract of the article in Nature Communications says that they sequenced DNA from 38 individuals, of which a group of 23 individuals fell within the range of variation for modern south Asians, whereas, in contrast, another group of 14 have ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean. The final individual exhibited southeast Asian ancestry.  The different genetic groups corresponded to different chronological groupings. The south Asian bones dated from ~800 CE, while the others were much later, ca. ~1800 CE. Thus, saying that the skeletons are typical of the Mediterranean is so imprecise as to be significantly misleading. Otherwise, it was an interesting article, just as the original research article is.

Perhaps I should add that, as an archaeologist who works in Florida (at least from time to time), the idea of burying people in a lake does not seem mysterious or implausible because in the Archaic period we have examples here of lake bottom cemeteries, such as at the famous Windover Pond site.

Happy New Year Stipulations!

I haven't posted in quite a while because I couldn't get the Blogger site to work properly in my normal browser, Firefox. I had fiddled with the Flash settings in my browser to block the incredibly intrusive Flash cookies, and guess what? Google services stopped working, including Blogger. So, they must be using Flash cookies in some way, a way that I hope is not evil, but it's hard to believe in the innate goodness of anything these days.

I eventually tried to re-establish the settings, but didn't have any luck, and finally I switched browsers, at least for this task, which itself turned into a nightmarish swirl of settings, reminiscent of Neuromancer.

So, I'm late, as usual, which makes this the most appropriate time for my exciting ANNUAL STIPULATIONS!

I HEREBY STIPULATE TO THE FOLLOWING:

1. I'm sorry for not posting more often...although I'm not sure why because I wrote a record number of posts last year and watched my pageviews plunge because none of the entries was popular.
2. I'll whine less. Ooops! Already violated that one. I'll try that again next year. 
3. I apologize in advance for the informal, chatty spirit of the posts. It seems my peers' blogs all read like peer-reviewed journals by comparison. I thought that blogging was supposed to be relatively free-form self-expression, but apparently that's restricted to Twitter now--hence our nation's foreign policy--and blogging is now supposed to be very serious.
4. Similarly, I apologize for the limp (not limpid) intellectual content of the posts. I try to save the good ideas for papers, even though the list of papers I intend to write is now so long that I need to use scientific notation just to number them. I will never make any kind of dent in the list in this lifetime. So, I should probably just toss ideas out there more freely, unless cryogenics makes startling leaps in the very near future. 
5. This blog is a non-commercial, non-work related activity. The blog is not monetized in any way, and if anyone is making money at it, the checks aren't coming to me. All ideas and opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone--unless a post is signed by a guest blogger or I cite sources for my statements, thus attributing them to someone who was writing publications instead of blog posts. Therefore, I, Clifford T. Brown, am responsible for the content of the blog, not my employer, colleagues, co-authors, mentors, protégés, students or minions.  (I'm not sure if I have any minions, but I felt I should put them on the list, you know, just in case.)
6. Finally, I stipulate hereby that I have probably forgotten to list some of the stipulations to which I should stipulate, but I'll include them if I remember them.

(Belated) Happy New Year!

Florida Anthropological Society's annual announcement of the Dorothy Moore grant for student research in archaeology

This morning I received the Florida Anthropological Society's annual announcement of the Dorothy Moore grant for student research in archaeology. Here is the text I received:

ANNOUNCEMENT

THE FLORIDA ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY DOROTHY MOORE STUDENT GRANT

The Florida Anthropological Society (FAS) is making available $500.00 to be awarded annually to archaeology students (B.A., M.A., or Ph.D.) who are currently enrolled in a Florida university. The grant money will assist students conducting archaeological research in Florida. Grant funds can be used to cover the costs associated with archaeological fieldwork, special analyses (e.g., radiocarbon dates, faunal or botanical analyses, soils analysis, etc.), and, in some cases, travel expenses associated with presenting a paper based on the student's research at a professional meeting.

Students interested in applying for the grant should submit a letter not to exceed two pages that describes the project for which the funds are being requested; what research question(s) or problem(s) are being addressed; how the funds will be applied to these problems; what, if any, additional funds will be used to accomplish the research; and how the research will contribute to Florida archaeology. The applicant should include a budget indicating the amount requested and describing how the money will be spent along with a letter(s) of support from faculty.

Applications for the 2017 award are now being accepted and can be sent to: Dr. Robert Austin, FAS Student Grant, 7224 Alafia Ridge Loop, Riverview, FL 33569 or via email to roc_doc@verizon.net. Deadline for applications is March 31, 2017.


Best of luck to those who apply.

Cliff

High Chancellor Sutler is in the Senate!

I know the presidential election has sucked all the air out of the room, but let's not forget that the down-ballot races may be important.

For example, did you know that High Chancellor Sutler was running for re-election to the Senate from Missouri?

Don't believe me? Compare the photos below. The High Chancellor is the sane-looking one.

Vote.

٧

Anonymity in Peer Review

In a recent blog post, Michael Smith has raised important concerns about the anonymity of peer review. I wish to raise another. In their endless quest to invade our privacy, companies like Microsoft and Adobe have reduced or eliminated the anonymity of document authorship. In other words, personal information such as your name or affiliation may be embedded in electronic documents that you create. I realized this as I was writing up a peer review a few days ago. This could, obviously, compromise the anonymity of peer review. If you send your review to a journal editor in a document that contains your name and then he or she forwards it to the article authors, they could easily discover your name. In some cases, just your institutional affiliation would be sufficient to identify you. I, for example, am the only Maya archaeologist at my university, so it would be relatively easy to deduce who a reviewer was if the name of the university were hidden in the document properties.

In fact, you can remove such information from Word documents and, I believe, pdfs.  I had to dig through a bunch of help files to find out how to do it, and then I changed my settings to prevent saving personalized information. Of course, the new settings now force me to click on pop-up dialogue boxes every time I save a document. That won't get old.

So, you might want to check the document properties before you send a supposedly anonymous review to an editor.

Capuchin monkey flaking creates flaky editorial in the journal Nature

In an article posted on the journal Nature website yesterday, a team of scientists reported that Capuchin monkeys in Brazil engage in a kind of percussion with quartz pebbles that results in the creation of split cobbles and flakes that are sometimes conchoidal (Proffitt et al. 2016). The purpose of the behavior is mysterious, but the monkeys can bee seen liking the stones or the debitage from them.

It's an interesting article, but what really caught my attention was a strange editorial about the research, which was published in the current issue of the journal (Anonymous 2016). It's common, of course, for Nature to publish commentaries on major articles. They are written by experts in the field and are designed, I suppose, to provide both context for and insight into research, especially for readers who are not specialists in the field. Those commentaries are attributed to their respective authors (i.e., signed) and published in a section entitled "News and Views." The commentary on the flaking-monkey article, however, was published anonymously as an editorial before the appearance of actual article in print.

Editorials in Nature, as in other similar journals, normally address matters of science policy and ethics. I can't remember seeing an editorial that commented on an article in the issue unless there was some policy or ethical issue related to the article.  This seemed so strange to me that I flipped back through several issues to check my memory, and I couldn't find another instance like this one.

What, you ask, did the editorial say? I find it hard to pin down main point of the little essay, but perhaps the penultimate line summarizes it: "In the end, the activity of banging rocks together should be seen as precisely that, and not as the first, proleptic step towards the stars." That statement and similar ones could be read as an attempt to diminish the significance of the findings. I don't know if that was the intent of the editor, but I note that the editor did not say anything laudatory about the research.

Again strangely, the title of the editorial is different in the html and pdf versions of the journal. In the html version it is "One sharp edge does not a tool make:Capuchin monkeys have been observed smashing stones to produce flakes ­ — but why they do so remains a mystery." In the pdf it reads, "Sharp Practice: Monkeys can make tool-like objects, but that doesn't mean they know what they are doing."

What a mix of enigmatic weirdness! All in all, it is peculiar, perhaps extraordinary, that the editor of a journal, especially such a prestigious and prominent one, would publish such a vague, rambling, ambiguous, and possibly unflattering commentary on a research article published in their own journal. 

Anonymous (2016). Sharp Practice: Monkeys can make tool-like objects, but that doesn't mean they know what they are doing. Nature 538:290.

Proffitt, Tomos, Lydia V. Luncz, Tiago Falótico, Eduardo B. .Ottoni, Ignacio de la Torre, and Michael Haslam (2016). Wild Monkeys Flake Stone Tools. Nature doi:10.1038/nature20112.

A new reason to boycott Elsevier

There are lots of good moral reasons to boycott Elsevier journals, from unconscionable open access fees to high subscription charges. I can add another, less moral than selfish, but a new reason nonetheless.

I have grown increasingly frustrated with the monumentally complex Elsevier manuscript management system that the company has used to manipulate authors and reviews. I have had to create multiple profiles, and then went through hell to consolidate them into one system. I finally had the courage to complain to a journal editor about it, and he was very rude about it, so much so that I fear that I have foreclosed my opportunity to contribute to the journal, which is particularly unfortunate because it is one of the most highly ranked journals in the field. Even more unfortunate, two of the four top journals in my part of archaeology are published by Elsevier. Take a look at the Archaeology Journal Ranks page on this blog and click through to see who publishes what.

So as not to burn all of my bridges, I agreed to review an article for another Elsevier journal and it turns out they have instituted yet another new document management system and they old accounts didn't roll over to it. So, I had to start the registration process again, and create a new account. I really couldn't believe it. I mean, really, what could the executives at Elsevier possibly be thinking? It's truly astonishing the horrendous disregard that they seem to have for all their clients, the authors, editors and reviewers without whom Elsevier cannot exist.

If one could actually communicate with any of the executives of Elsevier, I suspect they would give the typical corporate answer, that they changed the software for our convenience, as when your bank tells you that they moved all the ATM machines to Malaysia "to serve you better."

So, Elsevier has a disproportionate influence on archaeological publishing. They publish the Journal of Archaeological Science and the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (via Academic Press). We probably can't do anything about the latter, but we might be able to change the publisher of the Journal of Archaeological Science. It is published by the Society for Archaeological Science, and so we could try to get together and pressure them to change their publisher when their current contract ends. I'd rejoin the Society just for that. How about you?

Piedras Pintadas, Icalupe, Somoto, Nicaragua

I don't want to leave my devoted readers hanging, so I'll start by saying that Hurricane Matthew had little to no effect on Boynton Beach. The big headline was that one of the restaurants on the Intracoastal Waterway got a few inches of water in the parking lot.

Now, to the point of this post: a much delayed description of the petroglyphs at Piedras Pintadas.

Near the end of our last field season, Jorge Zambrana very kindly took us up to Somoto to see the Cañon de Somoto and the petroglyphs at Piedras Pintadas. Somoto itself is a lovely old town in the highlands, cool, picturesque, and pacific. (Most of the photos in this post were taken by Kelsey Willis.)

Somoto in the northern highlands

Colonial church in Somoto during Sunday mass

The first day, we visited the museum and took photos of some of the pieces in municipal museum. They have some interesting artifacts, including Ulua Polychrome, Campana Fine Line Polychrome, Usulutan ware, Segovias fine supports, and an Ulua-style marble vase.    

 In the evening, we drove to the Parque Ecológico Municipal Piedras Pintadas in Icalupe. It's a huge doline or perhaps an uvala high in the pine-clad hills. On one sheer wall, where is slightly undercut, there is a whole field of petroglyphs, in many places daubed with red and blue paint.

Pine-clad hills around Piedras Pintadas

First view into the doline where the petroglyphs are located

The limestone strata are clearly visible

The first petroglyphs you see as you come down the path

More petroglyphs

The red paint is noteworthy in this section

And yet more...

I like the blue wading bird

Do you see the crab?

Very interesting petroglyphs. There have been some studies of the iconography, but I doubt the subject has been exhausted.

There are some artifacts scattered about. We saw a couple of sherds of Segovias.

Deymins, the archaeologist who acted as our guide and who knows the site well, told me there are caves about, including at least one in the park.

Deymins

The next day we went to the Cañon de Somoto. It was indescribably beautiful, but we have no pictures because we couldn't carry them in the inner tubes. It is truly spectacular and merits a visit.

 Later in the day, Deymins took us to another petroglyph site near Somoto. The first set of carvings occur in a small rock shelter formed by a group of fallen boulders. I don't remember the name of the site, and I apparently did not write it down.

Petroglyphs in rock shelter near Somoto

Another petroglyph at the entrance to the rockshelter

As I was about to kneel to crawl into the rockshelter, I saw a snake. Deymins said it was a tamagás, one of the deadliest vipers in the region.  I killed it with my new machete. (My old machete was "detained" by Customs, even though I bought it in Nicaragua.)  Unfortunately, the new sheath was not up to its job, and the machete cut through it and halfway through my belt.

Dead tamagás

We visited one more set of petroglyphs nearby and went back to Somoto. If you look on a map, you can see that the northern Chinandega borders of the Department of Madriz, where Somoto is located. In fact, the town of Somoto is located only 27 kilometers from the Chinandega border, but since there is no road that way, you have to go east at least as far as Leon and the north, all of which takes many hours.

The visit was truly lovely and unforgettable. The area will well reward a visit by anyone who enjoys a beautiful landscape or archaeological remains.

Hurricane Matthew

Well, well, the first bands of clouds from Hurricane Matthew are now passing over my house in Boynton Beach, Florida. One current forecast has the eye of the storm hitting the coast about 15 kilometers north of me, in West Palm Beach,  and then skimming the coast north and east to the Carolinas. Of course, 15 km is nothing to a hurricane like this. One tiny jiggle, and I could take a direct hit.  It is quite a powerful storm. It's currently a strong Category 3 with winds of 125 miles per hour (mph), but it's forecast to strengthen to a Category 4 before coming ashore.

I've been through six or seven hurricanes, not counting those I successfully dodged through evacuation, so I know that a Category 3 or 4 is no fun. I've never thought that hurricanes were a blast, but a major hurricane, Category 3 or higher, is a different beast from a Category 1 or 2. There's a world of difference between a 75 mph wind and a 150 mph wind. The difference is that, while a Category 1 storm may harm buildings, the damage is usually light, whereas a Category 4 can wreck, ruin, flatten, and totally destroy houses and other structures. The contrast is described in the Saffir-Simpson scale as "some damage" (Category 1) versus "catastrophic damage" (Category 4). Here's how NOAA describes a Category 4 hurricane:

"Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months."

The only good news is that the coast will be on the weak side of the storm--provided it doesn't come fully ashore--and also the storm is fairly compact--so that the very high winds only extend 30 or 50 miles from the eye. 

The bad news is that the storm surge is expected to be very powerful and dangerous. The storm has the potential to scour archaeological sites off the beaches from here to the Carolinas. In this region, the coastal sites, or what survives of them, are highly significant and, of course, already imperiled by sea-level rise. 

No small number of my students live north of me in the zones of greatest danger, from West Palm to Jupiter to Vero Beach. If you read this, seek shelter and stay safe. As the emergency folks say, you should be rushing your emergency preparations to completion.

I'm happy that my wife is out of town and safe. I'm supposed to fly out of Miami International Airport tomorrow afternoon to join her. Last time I checked, my flight was not eligible for a free rebooking. I have no idea whether the airport will be open tomorrow, and even if it is, who knows whether I will be able to get there. If my house is gone, I may have more important things to do. 

Of course, the Weather Channel is tuned to such an intensely unrelenting pitch of hysterical fear-mongering that I don't know how they can talk when they are panting so hard. If their voices get any higher, only dogs will be able to hear them. CNN is, naturally, giving them a run for their money.

It took me quite a few hours last night and this morning to get my inadequate hurricane shutters locked down. I hadn't lowered them in at least 6 or 7 years, and several of them were welded or rusted in place. I had to buy new parts and tools, and I ultimately had to cut some parts with a hacksaw to lower them, and even drilled new bolt holes to fasten them. Fortunately, as a bit of cave archaeologist, I had a great headlamp that I was able to use to work in the dark. It was quite a relief to finally get the the shutters in place. I've packed up most of our essential papers and other stuff just in case the roof blows off toward Tampa, and I need to jump in the car. 

Get under cover and stay safe!

Rosetta observes fluffy fractal particles from the early solar system in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk

I haven't written anything about fractals in this space in a long time, but this news item deserves mention.

A news brief in today's Science magazine (Clery 2016) reports that the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft has observed a population of fluffy fractal particles in the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk, which it is studying. The particles were observed at a wide range of magnifications, from ~ 1mm to 1 µ, using three different instruments on the probe. The shapes are statistical fractals that might have formed through the gentle agglomeration of particles. They are thought to have formed in the early solar system.

You can watch to parts of the relevant presentation that was apparently lived streamed from the ESA. The discussion by Thurid Mannel starts around 28:51, but it is continually interrupted by periods during which the signal was lost.

Fluffy fractal particles from the origins of the solar system! Hot stuff!

I have embedded the video below for your convenience.



Reference cited

Clery, Daniel (2016). Rostta ends 2-year comet mission with final descent. Science 353(6307): 1482-1483.