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Everybody welcome to the 39^th edition of the exciting Four Stone Hearth. What has been amassed is a wonderful collection of anthropological news from across the blogosphere. I promise that it will be awesome.

Let's do this chronologically, today, so we will begin with a post from A Very Remote Period Indeed which discusses meat eating in Neanderthals. We have known that Neanderthals had a diet largely carnivorous for quite some time, but it is interesting to see that juveniles were eating similar diets as adults were. Check out the post for a more in depth analysis and a link to the original paper from the Journal of Human Evolution.

This next one is not actually a post, but my own submission. I never blogged on it, because I was going to host this and could include the short snipet that would have been the blog post. I am generally succinct. The Australian has a new article entitled Hobbit had been to dentist. I am sure you may have heard a bit about this in the last few days, and I think it is complete crap, but that is just me. This is the crux of the new book and the article:

University of Adelaide professor of biological anthropology and comparative anatomy Maciej Henneberg says in his new book, The Hobbit Trap, that a lower left molar had a filling, a claim that threatens to blow out of the water conjecture by the fossil's describers that the Hobbit is 18,000 years old.

Are you kidding me? Seriously, the Homo floresiensis remains of LB1 had an amalgam or filling in the left M₁? Professor Henneberg has never proposed this in any peer-reviewed journal, and he is following the ideas of the endemic cretin paper that came out a few months ago which I blogged about. Both of these things preclude it from consideration as even a possibility. The cretin paper was bad and this theory is out of the water. CT scans, x-rays, and photographs clearly show that this is not the case.

Archaeoporn has a very nice post covering a Neolithic ritual site. It turns out that the site of Kfar Ha'Horesh may not have been a ritual site alone, but likely also was a site of habitation. The lithic assemblage and faunal remains suggest that both habitation and ritualism were present at the site, since they mirrored other Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites. The lack of houses can also be explained through taphonomy, but there are building at the site. Only a small portion of the site has been excavated, so there is still potential for some really good finds from Kfar Ha'Horesh. I have always liked the Neolithic in the Levant, and there is a lot to be learned about domestication by looking at these kinds of sites! Go check it out.

Still in the Neolithic, but now in Britain, Archaeozoology has a post on the Archaeology of Wool. It is quite interesting, and describes how wool evolved over the many years of domestication and the various types available and used. Certainly check this out.

Tim Jones over at Remote Central has a long post covering the Newark Earthworks. I have never been there, but they are fascinating to see. The long review is hard to summarize, so go check it out in all of its wonder. I just love the Woodland and Mississippian earthworks of the New World. They can be so beautiful and are wonders of architecture, if it can be called that, as well as their ties to the natural and astronomical world. My research experience is in the Caborn-Welborn phase Late Mississippians, who did not create earthworks, but I did help on an excavation of a Woodland period palisade and plaza. That was pretty cool.

Focusing on the first millennium AD in Sweden, we turn to the father of the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival, Aardvarchaeology, and examine his post on Examining the field of Saint Olaf, which makes me think of A Series of Unfortunate Events but that is besides the point. Go check it out, because sacred fields are just cool all around as is paganism. Not my field of interest or expertise, but certainly an attention grabber. It even involves Vikings.

Turning to the Renaissance in Europe, we look to British Humanist Association Science Group for a look into why science evolved there but not much elsewhere. The answer turns out to be disease...communicable disease. A quick excerpt:

What they did was create a composite measure of the prevalence of nine pathogens that are detrimental to human reproductive fitness (leishmanias, trypanosomes, malaria, schistosomes, filariae, leprosy, dengue, typhus and tuberculosis). They then correlated this with a variety of measures of individualism in countries and regions around the world (including the Hofstede Index). For all of them, the correlation was highly significant, with around 50% of the variation in individualism explained by historical pathogen prevalence.

This is an interesting I was completely unaware of: ExecutedToday.com For the date of April 14^th, the Orthodox “Old Believer” priest Avvakum was burned at the stake in Pustozyorsk — part of Russia’s brutal crackdown on religious dissenters, in 1682. If you like religion stuff, and especially if you like fundamentalism-type stuff, check this out. I am not saying that Avvakum was a fundie, because he was not, but it kinds of shows a parallel to modern times as well as the Protestant Revolution of Martin Luther (who was totally wierd and in my mind psycho). Religion can be quite quixotic and explosive, and in this case, a change in observance created a watershed of issues. The execution for today's date can be found here, 1945: Albrecht Haushofer, German Resistance intellectual.

A modern analysis with implications for the past two million years is summarized at Professor Olsen @ Large. He discusses the debate between the general intelligence and social/cultural intelligence hypotheses as they pertain to human brain evolution. After the analysis was completed, it turned out that the findings support the cultural/social intelligence hypothesis and contradicts the general intelligence hypothesis. Pretty cool stuff, so check out the entire post!

Also modern, is this post from Christopher O'Brien at Northstate Science. It discusses the need for archaeologists from all types of positions to be involved in public education. I think it would also help tremendously in private education, but lets not get too crazy here. The post is based off of a talk he gave at a professional meeting, so go check it out to get all of the information. It is really more of an informative post, so it is hard to summarize succinctly. We need to combat Intelligent Design!!

I have grouped these last three posts together, because one, they all come from the same site, and two they are somewhat related. They all come from the blog Neuroanthropology which is a blog I was unaware of and certainly a cool field. First up, Real Beauty and Why Women Want. It is really quite interesting, and shows our own self image as very powerful, so give it a click. Next, Do Antidepressants supress identity? which is a nice alliteration. Long term studies of drugs have not really looked at the long term effects of drugs, so people out there who have been on drugs for a long time are different people, AND they DO NOT know it! Antidepressants are supressing ourselves. How sad. Last of all, Microtargeting or Macrotargeting? On Politics and Culture. The first few paragraphs are informative, but I do not think they are necessarily true:

As Kim Severson opens, “If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too. And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out next week in Pennsylvania.”

Shocking, no? I support Barack Obama quite a bit, but I do not like granola. I do love olive oil and tea lattes though...so, am I just as sucked in as everyone else? Check it out! Political anthropology...that is just scary.

It has been great writing this all up and reading all of these posts. I hope you have had as much fun reading all of these as I did, and even better...it was posted at noon! How wonderfully perfect.

Jason, signing off.

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The Four Stone Hearth is in progress, so I would like to let you all know that it will be up this afternoon. I had some late submissions, so I am giving it a little more time for them to filter in! It shall be very good.

Jason

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The next edition of the Four Stone Hearth is coming up this Wednesday, and it will be hosted right here at Hominin Dental Anthropology. I already have some stuff to be included, but send in all of your stuff to JacenSolo_1 AT yahoo DOT com, obviously removing the stuff in caps, and please include FSH or Four Stone Hearth in the subject so that I take notice to it. So...send away; I await your submissions.

Jason

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So, as the subject of this post states, I have decided to write a book. After it is written, I will see how it is and see if I want to have it published. It is aimed for people who are skeptical of Christianity, namely skeptical Christians, and is somewhat based on my experiences over the years of skepticism. Yea for me. I will be famous, damn it!! I am also looking at buying a house, so there is all kinds of stuff on the horizon for me. I hope all kinds of things work out.

Jason

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I totally own those knives, and they rock my socks. But this post is about my weekend, not about my kitchen knives. This weekend is pretty much going to suck in terms of work. As some of you know, I was recently promoted to sous chef (link to Wikipedia) so I mostly work in the mornings. As I am going to the PPA's Annual Meeting in Columbus, OH on Tuesday and Wednesday, I have to be off, so I am working this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Normally, it would not be all that bad, but this weekend I work Saturday night, Sunday day, and Monday morning. So, in other words, I work and am off in 8 hour time blocks until Tuesday. I hate when that happens. It results in lack of sleep and loss of the day. Anyway, I am off to watch some tv and read a little.

Jason

Obendorf, P.J., Oxnard, C.E., Kefford, B.J. (2008). Are the small human-like fossils found on Flores human endemic cretins?. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, -1(-1), -1--1. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1488

Tocheri, M.W., Orr, C.M., Larson, S.G., Sutikna, T., Jatmiko, E.W., Saptomo, R.A., Due, T., Djubiantono, M.J., Morwood, W.L., Jungers, . (2007). The Primitive Wrist of Homo floresiensis and Its Implications for Hominin Evolution. Science, 317(5845), 1743-1745. DOI: 10.1126/science.1147143

Like ¹⁴C, ¹⁰Be is mainly produced in the atmosphere, but through spallation reactions on oxygen (O) and nitrogen (N) rather than via a (neutron, proton) reaction on ¹⁴N as is the case for ¹⁴C. The particle-reactive ¹⁰Be adsorbs on aerosols and is rapidly transferred to the surface of the Earth in soluble form by precipitation. If deposited in an aqueous environment, ¹⁰Be is ultimately removed from water on settling particles and deposited in marine and lacustrine sediments. If deposited in a continental setting, ¹⁰Be associates with continental particles, where it decays with a half-life of 1.4 million years. This opens up the possibility to date sedimentary deposits in the range of 0.2 to 14 Ma.

C-14 has a universal initial ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio because it is rapidly oxidized to form gaseous ¹⁴CO₂ and is then globally homogenized with the natural carbon isotopes during its 7 to 8 years residence time in the atmosphere...much like the atmospheric ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio, the initial authigenic ¹⁰Be/⁹Be ratio is sensitive to variations of the geomagnetic field intensity and the solar activity that effect ¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be production in a similar fashion.

The radiochronological data concerning Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Toumai, TM 266) reported here is an important cornerstone both for establishing the earliest stages of hominid evolution and for new calibrations of the molecular clock. Thus, Sahelanthropus tchadensis testifies that the last divergence between chimps and humans is certainly not much more recent
than 8 Ma, which is congruent with Chororapithecus abyssinicus, the new 10-Ma-old Ethiopian paleogorillid. With its mosaic of plesiomorphic and apomorphic characters Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the earliest known hominid, is probably very close in time to this divergence contrary to the unlikely "provocative explanation," which recently suggested a "possible hybridization in the human-chimp lineage before finally separating less than 6.3 Ma".