Male-biased operational sex ratios and the Viking phenomenon : an evolutionary anthropological perspective on Late Iron Age Scandinavian raiding

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Laura Whitehouse, John Carman, Oliver Grimm, Julie Lund, Bjørnar Olsen, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. We also thank Alex Woolf for providing us with a copy of his forthcoming article on the Vikings in Ireland. Lastly, we are grateful to Luke Glowacki, Shane McFarlane, and Ryan Schacht for their insights about raiding and OSRs. Needless to say, all remaining errors are our own. Funding BR and MC are supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Partnership Grant (895-2011-1009) awarded to the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (www.ubc/hecc/cerc). MC is also supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and Simon Fraser University. NP is supported by a Swedish Research Council grant for "The Viking Phenomenon" project (2015-00466).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Cultural Historical Context of Qwu?gwes (Puget Sound, USA): A Preliminary Investigation

Recent research at the Puget Sound site of Qwu?gwes indicates that it contains a Late Period component of stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts, as well as a waterlogged section containing basketry, cordage and wooden artifacts and associated manufacturing debris. In order to place Qwu?gwes into the culture historical context of the Central Northwest Coast, we have applied cladistic tree-building methods to data derived from these artifacts and from artifacts commonly found in the northern part of Puget Sound, the Gulf of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington State, and Vancouver Island. The tree derived from the stone, bone-antler and shell data differs from the trees derived from the basketry data. This suggests that there was a difference in the transmission of information regarding the manufacture and use of the two groups of artifacts. Ideas pertaining to the artifacts made of stone, bone-antler and shell seem to have been shared widely, whereas ideas associated with the artifacts made of basketry were not. There are several possible explanations for this difference, but ethnographic evidence suggests that it is probably primarily a result of the basketry artifacts playing a role in ethnic identity signaling in a way that the stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts did not

Spondylolysis and Spinal Adaptations for Bipedalism: The Overshoot Hypothesis

Background and objectives The study reported here focused on the aetiology of spondylolysis, a vertebral pathology usually caused by a fatigue fracture. The goal was to test the Overshoot Hypothesis, which proposes that people develop spondylolysis because their vertebral shape is at the highly derived end of the range of variation within Homo sapiens. Methodology We recorded 3D data on the final lumbar vertebrae of H. sapiens and three great ape species, and performed three analyses. First, we compared H. sapiens vertebrae with and without spondylolysis. Second, we compared H. sapiens vertebrae with and without spondylolysis to great ape vertebrae. Lastly, we compared H. sapiens vertebrae with and without spondylolysis to great ape vertebrae and to vertebrae of H. sapiens with Schmorl’s nodes, which previous studies have shown tend to be located at the ancestral end of the range of H. sapiens shape variation. Results We found that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis are significantly different in shape from healthy H. sapiens vertebrae. We also found that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis are more distant from great ape vertebrae than are healthy H. sapiens vertebrae. Lastly, we found that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis are at the opposite end of the range of shape variation than vertebrae with Schmorl’s nodes. Conclusions Our findings indicate that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis tend to exhibit highly derived traits and therefore support the Overshoot Hypothesis. Spondylolysis, it appears, is linked to our lineage’s evolutionary history, especially its shift from quadrupedalism to bipedalism. Lay summary: Spondylolysis is a relatively common vertebral pathology usually caused by a fatigue fracture. There is reason to think that it might be connected with our lineage’s evolutionary shift from walking on all fours to walking on two legs. We tested this idea by comparing human vertebrae with and without spondylolysis to the vertebrae of great apes. Our results support the hypothesis. They suggest that people who experience spondylolysis have vertebrae with what are effectively exaggerated adaptations for bipedalism

Risk of Resource Failure and Toolkit Variation in Small-Scale Farmers and Herders

Recent work suggests that global variation in toolkit structure among hunter-gatherers is driven by risk of resource failure such that as risk of resource failure increases, toolkits become more diverse and complex. Here we report a study in which we investigated whether the toolkits of small-scale farmers and herders are influenced by risk of resource failure in the same way. In the study, we applied simple linear and multiple regression analysis to data from 45 small-scale food-producing groups to test the risk hypothesis. Our results were not consistent with the hypothesis; none of the risk variables we examined had a significant impact on toolkit diversity or on toolkit complexity. It appears, therefore, that the drivers of toolkit structure differ between hunter-gatherers and small-scale food-producers

Geometric Morphometric Analyses Support Incorporating the Goshen Point Type into Plainview

Recent work has demonstrated that Goshen points overlap in time with another group of unfluted lanceolate points from the Plains, Plainview points. This has raised the question of whether the two types should be kept separate or consolidated into a single type. We sought to resolve this issue by applying geometric morphometric methods to a sample of points from well-documented Goshen and Plainview assemblages. We found that their shapes were statistically indistinguishable, which indicates that Goshen and Plainview points should be assigned to the same type. Because Plainview points were recognized before Goshen points, it is the latter type name that should be dropped. Sinking Goshen into Plainview allows us to move beyond taxonomic issues and toward understanding both the spatiotemporal variation that exists among Plainview assemblages and what it can tell us about the adaptations and social dynamics of Plainview groups. El trabajo reciente de citas ha demostrado que Goshen apunta se superponen en el tiempo con otro grupo de puntos lanceolados sin fluir de los puntos Plains, Plainview. Esto ha planteado la cuestión de si los dos tipos deben mantenerse separados o consolidados en un solo tipo. Buscamos resolver este problema mediante la aplicación de métodos morfométricos geométricos a una muestra de puntos de los bien documentados ensamblajes de Goshen y Plainview. Encontramos que sus formas fueron estadísticamente indistinguibles, y sugerimos que los puntos de Goshen y Plainview se asignen al mismo tipo. Debido a que los puntos de Plainview se reconocieron antes que los puntos de Goshen, es el último nombre de tipo el que debe abandonado. Sumergir a Goshen en Plainview nos permite ir más allá de los problemas taxonómicos y tratar de comprender la variación espaciotemporal que existe entre los conjuntos de Plainview y lo que puede decirnos acerca de las adaptaciones y la dinámica social de los grupos de Plainview

Population size does not explain past changes in cultural complexity

Acknowledgments We thank three anonymous reviewers and our PNAS editor, James O'Connell, for their generous feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. K.V. acknowledges support from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (VIDI Grant 016.144312). M.C. is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and Simon Fraser University. R.C. and W.R. acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Grant DP120100580).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Projectile Point Sequences in the Puget Sound Region

The research area discussed in this chapter encom­passes what is considered to be the traditional territory of the Lushootseed speaking Coast Salish People, who are sometimes referred to as the Puget Sound Salish (e.g., Thompson and Kinkade 1990:38; Suttles and Lane 1990:485-502).1bis area begins at Samish Bay, east of the San Juan Islands, and extends southward to the head of Puget Sound, and includes the watersheds of numerous streams and rivers that drain from the Cascade Foothills into Puget Sound (Figure 1). Comparatively speaking, few systematic ar­chaeological investigations have occurred in this part of the Pacific Northwest, so this paper should be considered a preliminary but much needed syn­thesis of over 4500 square miles of sheltered "inside" areas between the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges. The chipped stone projectile point sequence we will present covers the known sequence of lithic traditions in the study area, ranging from the Clovis period (approximately 11,000 BP) through to the time of European colonization

Radiocarbon Dating Uncertainty and the Reliability of the PEWMA Method of Time-Series Analysis for Research on Long-Term Human-Environment Interaction

Statistical time-series analysis has the potential to improve our understanding of human-environment interaction in deep time. However, radiocarbon dating—the most common chronometric technique in archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research—creates challenges for established statistical methods. The methods assume that observations in a time-series are precisely dated, but this assumption is often violated when calibrated radiocarbon dates are used because they usually have highly irregular uncertainties. As a result, it is unclear whether the methods can be reliably used on radiocarbon-dated time-series. With this in mind, we conducted a large simulation study to investigate the impact of chronological uncertainty on a potentially useful time-series method. The method is a type of regression involving a prediction algorithm called the Poisson Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (PEMWA). It is designed for use with count time-series data, which makes it applicable to a wide range of questions about human-environment interaction in deep time. Our simulations suggest that the PEWMA method can often correctly identify relationships between time-series despite chronological uncertainty. When two time-series are correlated with a coefficient of 0.25, the method is able to identify that relationship correctly 20–30% of the time, providing the time-series contain low noise levels. With correlations of around 0.5, it is capable of correctly identifying correlations despite chronological uncertainty more than 90% of the time. While further testing is desirable, these findings indicate that the method can be used to test hypotheses about long-term human-environment interaction with a reasonable degree of confidence