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48,000-year-old bone arrowheads and jewelry discovered in Sri Lankan cave
Artifacts uncovered in southeast Asia offer clues on early complex human cultures.
23 June, 2020
Langley et al., 2020
- Archaeologists discovered a trove of bone tools used roughly 48,000 years ago in a Sri Lankan cave.
- Uncovered artifacts include the earliest known bow-and-arrow devices found out of Africa, weaving utensils, and decorative beads chiseled from the tips of marine snail shells.
- The findings underline the necessity of looking for early Homo sapien innovation in regions outside of the grasslands and coasts of Africa or Europe, where much of the research has been focused.
<p>A group of archaeologists have discovered a remarkable trove of bone tools used roughly 48,000 years ago in a Sri Lankan cave, according to new research published in the journal <a href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/24/eaba3831" target="_blank">Science Advances</a>.</p>
New discoveries
<p>The study was led by Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Australia's Griffith University, along with other researchers from Griffith, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), and the Sri Lankan Government's Department of Archaeology.</p><p>The scientists examined tools and artifacts used between 48,000 and 4,000 years ago that were discovered in the Fa-Hien Lena cave site located in Sri Lanka's southwest tropical forests, an area that has become one of the most important archaeological sites in South Asia since the 1980s. The assemblage of artifacts included 130 of the earliest known bone-arrow tips found out of Africa along with 29 utensils likely used to make clothing or bags. Also excavated were decorative beads chiseled from the tips of marine snail shells and the world's oldest known beads made of red ochre — an ancient pigment used for a variety of things from body paint to sunscreen.</p><p>Archaeologists believe that these tools correspond to four phases of ancient human habitation of the site. Using radiocarbon technology to date thirty items from the site, researchers were able to create a timeline detailing how the tools evolved to become more sophisticated over time.</p><p>"Most of these tools were made out of monkey bone, and many of them appear to have been carefully shaped into arrowheads," <a href="https://experts.griffith.edu.au/8914-michelle-langley" target="_blank">Langley</a> told Tim Vernimmen of <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/tools-human-early-migration-rainforest-sri-lanka/" target="_blank">National Geographic</a>. "They are too small and light to have been spearheads, which need some weight to gain force, and too heavy and blunt to have been blow darts."</p><p>On close inspection, the size, forms and fractures found on many of the bone points led the researchers to believe that they were used as arrow tips for bow-and-arrow hunting to catch swift and nimble rainforest prey like monkeys and other tree-dwelling creatures. The arrow points increased in length over time for the purpose of hunting larger mammals like deer. If the researcher's conclusions are correct, this finding marks the earliest definitive proof of high-powered projectile hunting in a tropical rainforest environment.</p><p>Additionally, the team uncovered a range of other bone and tooth tools used for scraping and piercing. They were likely used for making nets and working animal skins or plant fibers in the tropical environment.</p><p>"Evidence for the construction of nets is extremely scarce in artifacts many thousands of years old, making this aspect of the Fa-Hien Lena assemblage a startling find," Langley said in <a href="https://news.griffith.edu.au/2020/06/15/discovery-of-oldest-bow-and-arrow-technology-outside-africa/" target="_blank">a Griffith University press release</a>. Because this wasn't a cold region, the authors opine that the clothing made with the assemblage of tools may have been used for protection from insect-borne diseases.</p><p>Other tools discovered at the site were identified as implements probably associated with freshwater fishing.</p>Out of Africa and into the rainforest
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQxMDExMS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NTQ3NjQ4N30.6JVTKeCHRhzvg5lejtnsxf-2y0n1pHAch0MrxJSre1Y/img.jpg?width=980" id="56032" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8a86a57e2bb25a4caa3d1777fbcd060b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="assortment of bone arrowheads and tools" />"Bone projectile points (A to H) and scrapers (I to K) from Fa-Hien Lena. (A and B) Geometric bipoints, with (B) coming from phase D context 146; (C and F) hilted bipoint, red arrows indicate cut notches; (D and E) hilted unipoints, red arrows and red circle indicate wear indicating fixed hafting; (G and H) symmetrical bipoints"
Langley et al., 2020
<p>Before the great migration out of Africa, smaller groups of humans began to leave the continent between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago eventually migrating into South Asia. These findings offer clues as to how our ancient ancestors adapted to diverse, precarious environments during their global expansion, such as the tropical rainforest. Though the early humans of South Asia likely didn't make their abode in the densely vegetated forest right away, opting instead for the coast, their decedents eventually would. And that move required some nifty new survival technology. </p><p>The researchers pointed out that their discoveries of these ancient tools underline the necessity of looking for early <em>Homo sapien</em> innovation in regions outside of the grasslands and coasts of Africa, or Europe where much of the research has been focused.</p><p>"[T]his traditional focus has meant that other parts of Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas have often been sidelined in discussions of the origins of material culture, such as novel projectile hunting methods or cultural innovations associated with our species," <a href="https://news.griffith.edu.au/2020/06/15/discovery-of-oldest-bow-and-arrow-technology-outside-africa/" target="_blank">said Patrick Roberts</a> from MPI-SHH. </p>Complex human societies
<p>The shell beads that the team found indicate that the ancient forest dwellers traded with the populations that stayed along the coast. The beads were rounded and pierced, suggesting that they were strung. Earlier dated beads (around 8,700 years old) were made from red ochre nodules. The ancient jewelry is gauged to be similar in age to other "social signaling" materials found in Eurasia and Southeast Asia, according to the authors, which was around 45,000 years ago. This highlights the importance of establishing social connections for these early people through trade and symbol. </p><p>"Together, these artifacts reveal a rich human culture in the tropics of South Asia which was creating and utilizing complex hunting and social technologies to not only survive, but thrive, in demanding rainforest environments," concluded study co-author Patrick Roberts, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Queensland.</p>
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Neanderthal bones: Signs of their sex lives
Inbreeding leads to a problematically small gene pool.
27 May, 2020
PIERRE ANDRIEU/AFP via Getty Images
In a cave tucked into the limestone hills of the Asturias region of Spain, there lie the remains of a group of 13 Neanderthals that date to between 50,600 and 47,300 years ago.
<p> The site is infamous among anthropologists who study the Paleolithic period for the evidence of what appears to be the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/science/21neanderthal.html" target="_blank">massacre</a> and <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/el-sidron-evidence-for-neanderthal-cannibalism-172640" target="_blank">possible cannibalization</a> of a family: Their bones seem to have been hacked at by stone tools and hammers, probably by another group of Neanderthals, to remove their flesh and marrow.</p><p>But more importantly, for this story, those bones also reveal something of the sex life of the cave's inhabitants. Anomalies and deformations, along with the DNA buried within their bones, suggest that the members of this group (and their parents) were mating with their close kin.</p><p>Lately, much news from the field of paleoarchaeology and anthropology has centered on Neanderthal bedfellows. You would be forgiven for thinking that paleoanthropologists think about little other than paleo-sex. Within the past several years, genetic evidence has emerged that Neanderthals interbred on more than one occasion with both <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/humans-mated-neandertals-much-earlier-and-more-frequently-thought" target="_blank">anatomically modern humans</a> and our newfound ancient relative, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/63400-neanderthals-denisovans-mated-leg-bone.html" target="_blank">the Denisovans</a>. One finger bone fragment from Denisova Cave in Siberia is now famous for belonging to a <a href="https://theconversation.com/ancient-teenager-the-first-known-person-with-parents-of-two-different-species-101965" target="_blank">teenage girl</a> who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.</p>
<p>But evidence also shows that while some Neanderthals were apparently breeding well outside of the family group, some were also finding mates much closer to home.</p><p>In the remains from El Sidrón Cave, paleoanthropologist Luis Ríos and colleagues found <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-38571-1" target="_blank">17 examples</a> of congenital anomalies—structural malformations of various body parts that occur while an individual is developing in the womb.</p><p>One young El Sidrón individual, for example, had an oddly shaped patella, the bone that forms the kneecap: It had three lobes rather than just one. This Neanderthal probably had a limp. An adult male in the same cave had a markedly narrow nasal passage and a "retained deciduous mandibular canine," writes Ríos and his co-authors—this adult Neanderthal never lost one of his lower canine baby teeth. That tooth developed a painful cyst, which left its mark on the bone of his jaw. Microscopic striations on the tooth itself suggest that he coped with the pain by avoiding chewing on that side of his mouth.</p><p>One possible explanation for these skeletal abnormalities is that they resulted from extremely stressful environmental conditions, such as brutally cold weather and scarce food. A pregnant mother experiencing a lot of physical stress and nutritional deprivation might give birth to an infant with some of the same conditions seen at El Sidrón.</p>
<h3>Inbreeding leads to a problematically small gene pool</h3><p>But DNA tests from these bones indicate that inbreeding and a small population size were likely factors contributing to the physical peculiarities in this family. The 13 El Sidrón Neanderthals share much longer segments of their DNA than would be expected if they were the offspring of non-relatives.</p><p>Genetically, the three adult males in the group were closely related enough to be brothers, cousins, or uncles, while the four adult females in the group came from three distinct genetic lines. While all individuals were likely distantly related to one another (think third or fourth cousins), it is likely that the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/science/21neanderthal.html" target="_blank">males exchanged females</a> with another local, slightly less closely related group.</p><p>Today inbreeding carries connotations of "kissing cousins" or intimacy between even closer familial relations. But the term simply means mating between relatives, which increases the number of common ancestors in a family tree and the likelihood of inheriting deleterious genes from those common ancestors. Even third or fourth cousins are genetically similar enough for issues to arise.</p>
<p>The younger El Sidrón individuals (ranging in age from 5 to 15 years of age, along with one infant) were likely the offspring of at least some of the adults. At least one of these children, the young male mentioned above, possessed skeletal malformations that were likely passed down from parents who were fairly closely related.</p><p>The tangled familial ties of the El Sidrón Neanderthals are not a unique situation; DNA evidence from other Neanderthals <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160606103654.htm" target="_blank">elsewhere in Eurasia</a> also shows elevated instances of shared DNA segments around this time, suggesting that mating between individuals who shared recent ancestors was fairly frequent, and possibly unavoidable, if local populations were small.</p><p>In general, inbreeding leads to a problematically small gene pool. Rare harmful traits that might disappear in larger populations tend to be amplified if close kin interbreed. Yet inbreeding has happened throughout human history, especially in the royal families of different cultures. Just look at the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/3504-inbreeding-downfall-dynasty.html" target="_blank">Habsburg family line</a> in Spain or the <a href="https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/study-presents-evidence-extensive-inbreeding-among-ancient-egyptian-royalty-003045" target="_blank">royal families of Ancient Egypt</a> to see the effects of keeping family bloodlines "pure."</p>
<p>Neanderthals were not the only ancient hominins to mate with their close relatives. Anatomically modern humans have also been found with <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/frequent-inbreeding-may-have-caused-skeletal-abnormalities-early-humans" target="_blank">skeletal evidence of inbreeding</a>, such as abnormally bowed thigh bones, deformed arm bones, and even a case of a toddler with a swollen brain case <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hydrocephalus/symptoms-causes/syc-20373604" target="_blank">consistent with hydrocephalus</a>.</p><p>At the time that these congenital malformations appear, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, modern humans were traveling out of Africa. They fanned out across vast geographical regions, and, at times, were quite isolated from one another. Populations might have been separated by hundreds of kilometers at a time, only rarely encountering one another. This might be a simple reason why inbreeding occurred: Pickings were slim.</p><p>During the time that the El Sidrón Neanderthal family occupied their cave, it is likely that they were also fairly isolated. Their mating patterns probably had much more to do with small population size and low population density than any sort of cultural practice. There is no way to know if cultural taboos against mating with close relatives existed back then.</p><p>Interestingly, most of the individuals in the El Sidrón family group lived well past infancy despite physical conditions that, in some cases, would have made it difficult for them to get around and perform their day-to-day tasks. This family cared for one another, sharing physical burdens and helping each other to survive. Their relations, and their care, are recorded in their bones.</p><p><em>This column is part of an ongoing series about the Neanderthal body: a head-to-toe tour. See our <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/column/field-trips/neanderthal-anatomy/" target="_blank">interactive graphic</a>.</em></p><p>This work first appeared on <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/" target="_blank">SAPIENS</a> under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-ND 4.0 license</a>. Read the <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/column/field-trips/neanderthal-sex-lives-bones/" target="_blank">original here</a>.<img src="https://www.sapiens.org/track/10451-1590563253735/?dt=Neanderthal+Bones%3A+Signs+of+Their+Sex+Lives&dl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sapiens.org%2Fcolumn%2Ffield-trips%2Fneanderthal-sex-lives-bones%2F" alt=""><span></span></p>
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Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past
We'd like to think that judging people's worth based on the shape of their head is a practice that's behind us.
24 May, 2020
PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP via Getty Images
'Phrenology' has an old-fashioned ring to it. It sounds like it belongs in a history book, filed somewhere between bloodletting and velocipedes.
<p> We'd like to think that judging people's worth based on the size and shape of their skull is a practice that's well behind us. However, phrenology is once again rearing its lumpy head.</p><p>In recent years, machine-learning algorithms have promised governments and private companies the power to glean all sorts of information from people's appearance. Several startups now claim to be able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help employers <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SAUES8UM69EN8TSMUGF9/full" target="_blank">detect</a> the personality traits of job candidates based on their facial expressions. In China, the government has pioneered the use of surveillance cameras that identify and track ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of schools installing camera systems that automatically sanction children for not paying attention, based on facial movements and microexpressions such as eyebrow twitches.</p><p>Perhaps most notoriously, a few years ago, AI researchers Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135v1" target="_blank">claimed</a> to have trained an algorithm to identify criminals based on the shape of their faces, with an accuracy of 89.5 per cent. They didn't go so far as to endorse some of the ideas about physiognomy and character that circulated in the 19th century, notably from the work of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso: that criminals are underevolved, subhuman beasts, recognisable from their sloping foreheads and hawk-like noses. However, the recent study's seemingly high-tech attempt to pick out facial features associated with criminality borrows directly from the 'photographic composite method' developed by the Victorian jack-of-all-trades Francis Galton – which involved overlaying the faces of multiple people in a certain category to find the features indicative of qualities like health, disease, beauty and criminality.</p>
<p>Technology commentators have panned these facial-recognition technologies as 'literal phrenology'; they've also linked it to eugenics, the pseudoscience of improving the human race by encouraging people deemed the fittest to reproduce. (Galton himself coined the term 'eugenics', describing it in 1883 as 'all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had'.)</p><p>In some cases, the explicit goal of these technologies is to deny opportunities to those deemed unfit; in others, it might not be the goal, but it's a predictable result. Yet when we dismiss algorithms by labelling them as phrenology, what exactly is the problem we're trying to point out? Are we saying that these methods are scientifically flawed and that they don't really work – or are we saying that it's morally wrong to use them regardless?</p><p>There is a long and tangled <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P4-2077466723/something-old-something-new-something-pseudo-something" target="_blank">history</a> to the way 'phrenology' has been used as a withering insult. Philosophical and scientific criticisms of the endeavour have always been intertwined, though their entanglement has changed over time. In the 19th century, phrenology's detractors objected to the fact that phrenology attempted to pinpoint the location of different mental functions in different parts of the brain – a move that was seen as heretical, since it called into question Christian ideas about the unity of the soul. Interestingly, though, trying to discover a person's character and intellect based on the size and shape of their head wasn't perceived as a serious moral issue. Today, by contrast, the idea of localising mental functions is fairly uncontroversial. Scientists might no longer think that destructiveness is seated above the right ear, but the notion that cognitive functions can be localised in particular brain circuits is a standard assumption in mainstream neuroscience.</p>
<p>Phrenology had its share of empirical criticism in the 19th century, too. Debates raged about which functions resided where, and whether skull measurements were a reliable way of determining what's going on in the brain. The most influential empirical criticism of old phrenology, though, came from the French physician Jean Pierre Flourens's studies based on damaging the brains of rabbits and pigeons – from which he concluded that mental functions are distributed, rather than localised. (These results were later discredited.) The fact that phrenology was rejected for reasons that most contemporary observers would no longer accept makes it only more difficult to figure out what we're targeting when we use 'phrenology' as a slur today.</p><p>Both 'old' and 'new' phrenology have been critiqued for their sloppy methods. In the recent AI study of criminality, the data were taken from two very different sources: mugshots of convicts, versus pictures from work websites for nonconvicts. That fact alone could account for the algorithm's ability to detect a difference between the groups. In a new <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135" target="_blank">preface</a> to the paper, the researchers also admitted that taking court convictions as synonymous with criminality was a 'serious oversight'. Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw: using mugshots of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who got away introduces a statistical bias. They said they were 'deeply baffled' at the public outrage in reaction to a paper that was intended 'for pure academic discussions'.</p><img src="https://d2e1bqvws99ptg.cloudfront.net/user_image_upload/1213/inset-case_study_criminal_machine_learning_.jpg"><br>From Wu and Zhang (2016)<p><br></p><p>Notably, the researchers don't comment on the fact that conviction itself depends on the impressions that police, judges and juries form of the suspect – making a person's 'criminal' appearance a confounding variable. They also fail to mention how the intense policing of particular communities, and inequality of access to legal representation, skews the dataset. In their response to criticism, the authors don't back down on the assumption that 'being a criminal requires a host of abnormal (outlier) personal traits'. Indeed, their framing suggests that criminality is an innate characteristic, rather than a response to social conditions such as poverty or abuse. Part of what makes their dataset questionable on empirical grounds is that who gets labelled 'criminal' is hardly value-neutral.</p><p>One of the strongest moral objections to using facial recognition to detect criminality is that it stigmatises people who are already overpoliced. The authors say that their tool should not be used in law-enforcement, but cite only statistical arguments about why it ought not to be deployed. They note that the false-positive rate (50 per cent) would be very high, but take no notice of what that means in human terms. Those false positives would be individuals whose faces resemble people who have been convicted in the past. Given the racial and other biases that exist in the criminal justice system, such algorithms would end up overestimating criminality among marginalised communities.</p>
<p>The most contentious question seems to be whether reinventing physiognomy is fair game for the purposes of 'pure academic discussion'. One could object on empirical grounds: eugenicists of the past such as Galton and Lombroso ultimately failed to find facial features that predisposed a person to criminality. That's because there are no such connections to be found. Likewise, psychologists studying the heritability of intelligence, such as Cyril Burt and Philippe Rushton, had to play fast and loose with their data to manufacture correlations between skull size, race and IQ. If there were anything to discover, presumably the many people who have tried over the years wouldn't have come up dry.</p><p>The problem with reinventing physiognomy is not merely that it has been tried without success before. Researchers who persist in looking for cold fusion after the scientific consensus has moved on also face criticism for chasing unicorns – but disapproval of cold fusion falls far short of opprobrium. At worst, they are seen as wasting their time. The difference is that the potential harms of cold fusion research are much more limited. In contrast, some commentators <a href="https://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=3313129" target="_blank">argue</a> that facial recognition should be regulated as tightly as plutonium, because it has so few nonharmful uses. When the dead-end project you want to resurrect was invented for the purpose of propping up colonial and class structures – and when the only thing it's capable of measuring is the racism inherent in those structures – it's hard to justify trying it one more time, just for curiosity's sake.</p><p>However, calling facial-recognition research 'phrenology' without explaining what is at stake probably isn't the most effective strategy for communicating the force of the complaint. For scientists to take their moral responsibilities seriously, they need to be aware of the harms that might result from their research. Spelling out more clearly what's wrong with the work labelled 'phrenology' will hopefully have more of an impact than simply throwing the name around as an insult.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/dd48096e-78e9-49c1-8254-eba6700ee14b.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/algorithms-associating-appearance-and-criminality-have-a-dark-past" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Remains of first modern humans in Europe found
The discovery may change what we know about early humans in Europe.
14 May, 2020
NIKOLAY DOYCHINOV/AFP via Getty Images
- Newly found human remains in Bulgaria have pushed back the date of Homo sapiens arriving in Europe by thousands of years.
- The site was also littered with animal remains and stone tools.
- These humans were not part of the tool-making culture that replaced the Neanderthals, leaving the fate of the discovered group a mystery.
Scientists working in a cave in Bulgaria have discovered bone fragments of the first examples of <em>Homo sapiens </em>to tread the European <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2259-z.epdf?sharing_token=8q7GR-AO9a_nqS5dLx2ksdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OVXHhivfr51DwikOJBoW_bh041Qf6qdcVzmaVGnnlsJIp79ARta8qLbiQgVSkdSnU9WhJ29RD8D0yEwD819LTHkYpCCK-M6xeXYeFflD4k-9zeWMM_GiNovwvlXArEGQpgdJs-osKynavFHl7iuXuXuojWOFszj3H8qNGt0JQ9CioxKxIQelFsrMRmYLQLvHHEmsRcN59Q5MB4wxHhZZAFU1YIgYSwDM-bltJEzjZxzYPXL173JcM5P076v_3K45U%3D&tracking_referrer=www.sciencenews.org" target="_blank">continent</a>. Dating back to around 45,000 years ago, this new record holder beats the previous one by two and a half thousand years. While the residents of Bacho Kiro Cave don't appear to have stayed in Europe for long, they may have left an influence felt long after they departed.
The first modern humans in Europe?
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-media_id="rmavKR0g" data-player_id="FvQKszTI" data-rm-shortcode-id="a90da9fe163529e8d4633f1250c4f325"> <div id="botr_rmavKR0g_FvQKszTI_div" class="jwplayer-media" data-jwplayer-video-src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/rmavKR0g-FvQKszTI.js"> <img src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/thumbs/rmavKR0g-1920.jpg" class="jwplayer-media-preview" /> </div> <script src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/rmavKR0g-FvQKszTI.js"></script> </div> <p>One of the more popular models for the spread of anatomically modern humans out of Africa suggests that they reached the Middle East 50,000 years ago and then began to move into Europe. This discovery lends weight to that theory, as it would fit the timeline very nicely.</p><p>The cave also had a variety of stone tools and ornaments inside. These were made from quality flint brought with them over great distances and refined in ways particular to the Initial Upper Paleolithic time frame, giving even more evidence of exactly when these people lived. </p><p>The similarities between some of the ornaments found, including jewelry made from animal teeth, to items found at Neanderthal sites from thousands of years later led the authors to speculate that these first arrivals from the Middle East may have influenced the Neanderthals. <br> <br> Of course, you mustn't forget Neanderthals were already doing their own thing for a <a href="https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/neanderthals-fish-brain" target="_blank">while</a>, including making tools and jewelry. While it is possible that the newcomers influenced them, it is also possible that they weren't. As the Neanderthals were ultimately replaced by later arriving <em>Homo-Sapiens</em>, known as the Aurignacian culture, this new group may have been a mere blip on their Paleolithic radar. </p><p>There is also the highly controversial claim that a 210,000-year-old skull belonging to an anatomically modern human was found in Greece a while <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/greek-skull-oldest-human-homo-sapiens-outside-africa" target="_blank">back</a>. However, that finding was unable to confirm exactly what species the skull in question belonged to. </p><p>The Bulgarian discovery also adds a curious chapter into human history, as the members of this group were not members of the group of modern humans that ultimately replaced the Neanderthals, albeit with some interbreeding with their neighbors. That latter group dates back to 43,000 years ago at most, meaning that the residents of Bacho Kiro Cave were a few thousand years too early to the party. </p><p>For whatever reason, their attempt to move into Europe was either a failure, too limited in size and scope to be part of the replacement of the Neanderthals, or was somehow otherwise unable to gain a foothold on the <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earliest-known-humans-europe-bacho-kiro-bulgaria" target="_blank">continent</a>. Finding out why this is will be a very interesting topic for future research. </p><p>Perhaps they only found Europe to be a nice place to <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/early-fossil-evidence-of-humans-in-europe" target="_blank">visit</a>. </p>
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What did Ancient Romans do without toilet paper?
Many of the bathrooms uncovered at Pompeii and elsewhere were communal.
28 April, 2020
Photo by Inés Castellano on Unsplash
We've all been caught unawares by our digestive tract at one time or another.
<p>It happened to the Nash family several months ago. We were nearing the end of an extended road trip, driving down a secondary highway through a sparsely populated area of Colorado at night, when one of my 9-year-old twin sons had to use the bathroom. Despite my pleading, he said he couldn't make it to the next town. (He had to poop.) So we pulled over and headed for the bushes. After he took care of his business, we realized that we didn't have toilet paper with us.</p><p>The whole dramatic episode got me thinking, and for the next couple of hours, I pondered toilet paper and the cultural nature of bathroom routines. (Cut me some slack. It was a long drive.)</p><p>Toilet paper is now such a routine part of our lives that we rarely give it any thought. That boring reality, however, should make us think—because toilet paper is an artifact, a technology, and is therefore grounded in culture.</p><p>As we finally re-entered Denver—my wife and kids blissfully asleep—I saw the Colorado state capitol building, beautifully lit on the horizon. I started thinking about the ancient Romans. With tall columns, colonnades, and a high, golden dome, the capitol is nothing if not a Roman temple to civics.</p><p>Modern American society, and Western societies more generally, tend to look back on ancient Rome as the pinnacle of Western civilization. We emulate their institutions and cultural practices. Why? Are they worth it?</p>
<p>When I thought more about their everyday habits, I realized that, despite all of their accomplishments, ancient Romans engaged in some practices that many people today would find thoroughly revolting. Take a minute to consider, for example, what many of those supposedly "civilized" people did when they had to go to the bathroom.</p><p>When Mt. Vesuvius erupted on August 24 in A.D. 79, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other Roman settlements were sealed as time capsules. They were first excavated in the 18th century, and since then these sites have given us a wonderful view into ancient Roman society.</p><p>Many of the bathrooms uncovered at Pompeii and elsewhere were communal. In many cases, they were beautiful, with frescoes on the walls, sculptures in the corners, and rows of holes carved into cold, Italian marble slabs.</p><p>Roman toilets didn't flush. Some of them were tied into internal plumbing and sewer systems, which often consisted of just a small stream of water running continuously beneath the toilet seats.</p><p>In the same way that we use an American-style toilet, a Roman user would sit down, take care of business, and watch number two float blissfully away down the sewer system. But instead of reaching for a roll of toilet paper, an ancient Roman would often grab a <em>tersorium</em> (or, in my technical terms, a "toilet brush for your butt"). A tersorium is an ingenious little device made by attaching a natural sponge (from the Mediterranean Sea, of course) to the end of a stick. Our ancient Roman would simply wipe him- or herself, rinse the tersorium in whatever was available (running water and/or a bucket of vinegar or salt water), and leave it for the next person to use. That's right, it was a shared butt cleaner. (And of course, there were other means of wiping as well, such as the use of abrasive ceramic discs called <em>pessoi</em>.)</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzE3MjUyMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyOTM0NTQ5OX0.hedae2TUN24MRrAFzor5MP36hjPlsuzgF-0pIWhjzy0/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C104%2C0%2C11&height=700" id="4679a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="639d2407c87ae6f2cef5d1de71542934" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="ancient roman toilets" />
Wikimedia Commons
<p>OK, so ancient Roman pooping habits seem strange, but what about their customs around pee?</p><p>As best we can tell from historic and archaeological data, ancient Romans peed in small pots in their homes, offices, and shops. When those small pots became full, they dumped them into large jars out in the street. Just like with your garbage, a crew came by once a week to collect those hefty pots of pee and bring them to the laundromat. Why? Because ancient Romans washed their togas and tunics in pee!</p><p>Human urine is full of ammonia and other chemicals that are great natural detergents. If you worked in a Roman laundromat, your job was to stomp on clothes all day long—barefoot and ankle deep in colossal vats of human pee.</p><p>(Frankly, I wonder why we haven't emulated this aspect of Roman culture in our age of green, eco-friendly, and sustainable businesses. I'm thinking of opening a chain called Urine-Urout All-Natural Laundromat. It's a sparkling business opportunity!)</p><p>As peculiar as personal hygiene practices in ancient Rome may seem to us, the historical fact is that many Romans successfully and sustainably used tersoria and washed their clothes in pee for several centuries—far longer than we've used toilet paper. Indeed, toilet paper is not a universal technology even today, as any trip to India, rural Ethiopia, or remote areas of China will make abundantly clear.</p><p>The memorable stop we made for my son in rural Colorado will always remind me of our culture's widespread dependence on toilet paper. We've become so accustomed to the stuff that we are loath to consider widely used alternatives. (Heck, even the elegant bidet gets short shrift in our society.)</p><p>As an archaeologist, this is surprising to me, especially because toilet paper was formally introduced in this country only in 1857, a comparatively short time ago. At that time, New York entrepreneur Joseph Gayetty first <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/23210/toilet-paper-history-how-america-convinced-world-wipe" target="_blank">created commercial toilet paper</a>; each individual paper sheet bore his name. He claimed that, in addition to their novel utilitarian function, they were medicinal and prevented hemorrhoids.</p><p>In 1890, Clarence and E. Irvin Scott developed the first toilet paper on rolls; their brand thrives today. (It happens to be <em>my</em> favorite. Too much information?) Like Gayetty's sheets, Scott tissue was originally marketed as a medicinal product. In the late 1920s, Hoberg Paper Company marketed Charmin brand toilet paper to women, with an emphasis on softness (thank goodness) and femininity, rather than medicinal properties that didn't actually work.</p><p>Today, toilet paper is ubiquitous in Western cultures; it's a <a href="https://mic.com/articles/127961/what-toilet-paper-is-doing-to-the-planet#.rUcJgqBEz" target="_blank">US$9.5 billion-a-year industry</a> in the United States. Americans, in their typical excess, use more than 50 pounds per person per year! About <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/spring-2015/articles/price-of-toilet-paper-for-the-planet" target="_blank">1.75 tons of raw fiber</a> are required to manufacture each ton of toilet paper. That doesn't seem sustainable, and frankly, I'm surprised that people haven't protested more as a result.</p><p>Given these numbers and the marketing efforts behind them, it's hard to argue that the use of toilet paper is somehow natural. On the contrary, toilet paper is nothing more than a technology. So the next time you're enjoying a morning constitutional, think about the fact that defecation and urination are more than biological functions; they are cultural activities that involve artifacts and technologies that change through time.</p><p>Speaking of which, it's high time that we consider changing how we clean ourselves after we use the toilet. Tersorium, anyone?</p><p><em>Correction: April 6, 2018</em></p><p><em>An earlier version of this piece used the term "tersoriums" for the plural form of "tersorium." After scrubbing for more information, we confirmed that "tersoria" is the correct plural form of the term. The text has also been updated to clarify that the butt-brush "cleaning" ritual varied and to note that tersoria were certainly not the only means ancient Romans used to clean themselves after defecation. We don't mean to be abrasive, but it's impossible to convey all the minutiae of personal hygiene practiced by the ancient Romans. (And would you really want to know more?)</em></p><p>This work first appeared on <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/" target="_blank">SAPIENS</a> under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-ND 4.0 license</a>. Read the <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/ancient-roman-bathrooms/" target="_blank">original here</a>.<img src="https://www.sapiens.org/track/7783-1588058903680/?dt=What+Did+Ancient+Romans+Do+Without+Toilet+Paper%3F&dl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sapiens.org%2Fcolumn%2Fcuriosities%2Fancient-roman-bathrooms%2F" alt=""><span></span></p>
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