Wednesday Wiki: Decipherment of rongorongo
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo script of Easter Island since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. As with most undeciphered scripts, many of the proposals have been fanciful. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, comprising only 15,000 legible glyphs; the lack of context in which to interpret the texts, such as illustrations or parallels to texts which can be read; and the fact that the modern Rapanui language is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets—especially if they record a specialized register such as incantations—while the few remaining examples of the old language are heavily restricted in genre and may not correspond well to the tablets either
_edit1.jpg "Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.")
Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.
The BBC “Meads” Anuta’s Noble Savages.
Awww. The BBC Meads Anuta, where "Harmony thrives in Pacific Isolation". I can't believe we're seeing "Noble Savage" rhetoric in 2008.
When I asked Joseph what the biggest changes have been in the last 20 years he said "young people playing ukuleles".
Was this a problem? I asked rather jokingly.
"Well," he replied more seriously, "before the ukuleles the younger generation would dance every evening. Now it is rare."
I got the same response from at least half a dozen other adults.
As trivial as this sounds it does make one think about our own, supposedly advanced, society.
We worry about our children getting in with the wrong crowd, taking drugs, drinking, teenage knife crime. Anutans worry about their kids playing homemade ukuleles.
Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat
In the latest PNAS, Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat (doi):
The pristine island ecosystems of East Polynesia were among the last places on Earth settled by prehistoric people, and their colonization triggered a devastating transformation. Overhunting contributed to widespread faunal extinctions and the decline of marine megafauna, fires destroyed lowland forests, and the introduction of the omnivorous Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) led to a new wave of predation on the biota. East Polynesian islands preserve exceptionally detailed records of the initial prehistoric impacts on highly vulnerable ecosystems, but nearly all such studies are clouded by persistent controversies over the timing of initial human colonization, which has resulted in proposed settlement chronologies varying from ~200 B.C. to 1000 A.D. or younger.
Such differences underpin radically divergent interpretations of human dispersal from West Polynesia and of ecological and social transformation in East Polynesia and ultimately obfuscate the timing and patterns of this process. Using New Zealand as an example, we provide a reliable approach for accurately dating initial human colonization on Pacific islands by radiocarbon dating the arrival of the Pacific rat.
Radiocarbon dates on distinctive rat-gnawed seeds and rat bones show that the Pacific rat was introduced to both main islands of New Zealand ~1280 A.D., a millennium later than previously assumed. This matches with the earliest-dated archaeological sites, human-induced faunal extinctions, and deforestation, implying there was no long period of invisibility in either the archaeological or palaeoecological records.
See also: ScienceNews' coverage which over-hypes the controversy angle.
Beyond the Blue Horizon: how ancient voyagers settled the far-flung islands of the Pacific
National Geographic has a fantastic special edition on the Lapita culture and the settlement of Polynesia:
Much of the thrill of venturing to the far side of the world rests on the romance of difference. So one feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he "discovered" Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it.
Imagine Cook's surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited. Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: "How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast ocean?"
Continued at: How ancient voyagers settled the far-flung islands of the Pacific. Don't miss the videos of Jared Diamond and Pat Kirch either.
Tourism and the modern Kayan
There's a rather fascinating article in Marie Clare (!?) about Kayan refugees in Thailand being forced to show off their native dress in a "human zoo":
Zember, a quick-witted young woman with a cheerful, oval face, doesn’t want to be a human exhibit. Ever since she was 5, she has worn brass rings around her neck and smiled at foreigners who tromp through her rural village in Thailand. For tourists, it seems like the adventure of a lifetime — riding in a jeep through the snake-infested jungle to see the exotic “long-neck women” of the Kayan tribe. But now Zember has removed her coil — in protest of her captivity. She no longer wants to keep Thailand’s shameful secret: that the long-neck women are Burmese refugees who are being prevented by Thai authorities from taking up asylum overseas. As a lucrative tourist attraction, the women are forced to live in a virtual human zoo.
Palau bones: Caught between science and entertainment
Today's Nature covers the controversy about the recent paper Small-bodied humans from Palau, Micronesia by Berger et al. Last month, Berger and colleagues claimed that they'd found a collection of small bodied humans dating back between 940 and 2890 years (cal bp) in a burial cave in Palau:
Preliminary sampling of two burial caves in Palau, Micronesia has produced the remains of small-bodied recent H. sapiens, possibly representing a case of insular dwarfing. Individuals in this sample exhibit, in addition to small body size, reduction of the absolute size of the face, distinct supraorbital tori (in some individuals), a weakly developed mental eminence, relatively large dental dimensions, and dental dysplasias and agenesis.
Some of these features may be considered primitive for the genus Homo (or trending towards the primitive condition), thus the human fossils from Palau may provide important insights into the relationship between small body size and the expression of morphological features generally considered to be taxonomically diagnostic in our genus.
Given the scarcity of skeletal samples of small-bodied modern humans, and their importance for resolving taxonomic and phylogenetic issues in genus Homo paleontology, we provide here a brief description of the more salient specimens and a preliminary analysis of the material relative to small-bodied modern humans and to the holotype specimen of one small-bodied member of our genus, H. floresiensis (LB1).
(I'm not sure what "trending towards the primitive condition" means, so I'll ignore that).
The Nature paper by Rex Dalton (Bones, Islands and Videotape) discusses a few of the technical - and rather vicious - criticisms of the Berger paper:
“The more I read their paper, the more I am convinced it is complete nonsense and cannot be accepted as serious science,” says Michael Pietrusewsky
and:
Berger, charges Fitzpatrick, “hasn't made adequate comparisons to other skeletal material from Palau. And I don't think he understands variance in human populations".
That is - those bones aren't small people and this ain't island dwarfing. Dalton suggests that a large part of the problem is how this research is funded by the National Geographic Society. Berger features in a TV show Fossil Hunter, with the slogan “entertainment first, science second". Now, I'm not sure where I stand on the issue of entertainment-based funding and science, and certainly I think Nat.Geo. does some really good work. However, the paper does raise the issue of how science and entertainment tend to get in each other's way:
the Palau story illustrates how science can get caught up in the entertainment process. Like many palaeoanthropologists, Berger has long worked with film crews to document discoveries. But sometimes the demands to catch a significant finding on tape can clash with the slow, rigorous nature of the scientific process. The question anthropologists are asking now is: did entertainment needs in Palau overwhelm the evidence from field research
Chicken testicles and the role of humor in language change
William Thurston on the role of humor in language change in his 1987 book "Processes of Change in the languages of North-Western New Britain":
Many linguistic innovations arise in the context of humor, a common mechanism for mediating interpersonal relationships. For example, in 1978, during my second trip to work with the Anêm, but Goulden's first, we had passed weeks without eating an egg. One morning, an Anêm woman proudly presented Goulden with one, and carefully enunciated the phrase nilŋêm texik 'chicken-egg' (nil-ŋ2 'egg/testicle', texik 'chicken') for Goulden to repeat. (The Anêm apply Pavlovian principles to language teaching.) At this stage, Goulden's knowledge of Anêm was at the wordlist level. He graciously accepted the gift, but in his fluster to be polite and repeat what he thought he had heard, he uttered biŋêm texik 'chicken vulva' instead. Both bi-ŋ2 and nil-ŋ2 belong to the genital class of nouns.
No sooner had the slip left his tongue than he knew his mistake, but it was too late. Goulden's obvious discomfiture only accentuated the hilarity of the event. Acutely embarrassed, he returned to the house with the egg in hand. In subsequent weeks, Goulden was the recipient of all available eggs in Karaiai and Pudeling villages; each one was presented as biŋêm texik, a lexeme temporarily reassigned a new meaning for the duration of the gag. (pp. 66-67)