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Glynn Llywelyn Isaac
Isaac (right) with J. Desmond Clark in 1967
Born(1937-11-19)19 November 1937
Died5 October 1985(1985-10-05) (aged 47)
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fieldsarchaeologist
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Glynn Llywelyn Isaac (19 November 1937 – 5 October 1985) was a South African archaeologist who specialised in the very early prehistory of Africa, and was one of twin sons born to botanists William Edwyn Isaac and Frances Margaret Leighton. He has been called the most influential Africanist of the last half century, and his papers on human movement and behavior are still cited in studies a quarter of a century later.[1]

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  • At home with the Neanderthals: Excavations at La Cotte de St Brelade

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>> Beccy: Good afternoon, and thank you very much for turning up. It's a great personal pleasure for me to welcome Matt to talk today. And Dr. Matt Pope is a senior research fellow and lecturer at UCL, and his work largely focuses on the archeology of hunter gatherers, early humans in northern latitudes, how they moved around their landscapes, their behavior, how they hunted, used stone tools, and something I find particularly exciting, ways in which symbolic landscapes emerged, how people started to leave their traces around these landscapes and then recognized the traces of others in them, so very much in a lot of ways, the origins of the earliest archeology. Matt's directed a number of projects where he's very much engaged in looking at material culture, the stuff that people leave behind in these banished landscapes, the Valdoe, at Boxgrove and Beedings. But I'm lucky enough to be involved with research with him now on the Channel Island of Jersey where we've been working as part of the Quaternary Archeology and Environments of Jersey Project. Matt's take on hunter gatherer archeology is always exciting and thought provoking, and I hope you'll enjoy his talk today on At Home with the Neanderthals. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Matt Pope: Thank you, Beccy. It's a real pleasure to be invited here today to represent UCL in our Lunchtime Lectures on tour and also to represent the Institute of Archeology, which this year is celebrating its 75th anniversary. And this week, we have our anniversary celebrations. So given that the British Museum is such a close neighbor and given that we have so many years of fruitful collaboration right down to the project I'm lucky enough to be working with Becky at the moment, it's a real pleasure to be invited here. I'm going to be talking today about developing ideas that we have relating to Neanderthal occupation through investigations we're currently undertaking on the Island of Jersey in the English Channel, one of the Channel Islands. This is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving researchers from a number of different institutions, including the British Museum, including Manchester University, including University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Southampton University and so far is being funded by the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project and the National Environment Research Council as well as other sources. So the ideas I'm going to be talking about are coming out of the discussions that we're having as we're developing this project, and they're very much a group collaboration, discussions that we're also having in Southampton with Professor Clive Gamble, he's one of the trustees of the British Museum, in developing this project along a number of lines forward as a major significant research project. I'm going to be talking about Neanderthal archeology, and yet, judging by, you know, the sellout here, Neanderthals really do capture the public imagination, and they're a great way in for explaining the work of Paleolithic archeologists. Neanderthals are constantly being reinvented. They have a long history of research. And within the past decade, that research has accelerated, usually along scientific lines, great developments in genetics, in redating, isotope studies allowing us to understand their diet, and understanding the anatomy in ever more refined details. But however much Neanderthals are rediscovered, reinterpreted, Neanderthals still occupy a place in our popular culture as a kind of last vestige of the evolutionary [inaudible] by which we measure our own sophistication and development. And this last refuge is sort of dangerous evolutionary thinking I don't think we're ever going to shrug off because it's so enmeshed. You know, I can't...I've lost count of the times where I've turned up at a place, probably populated by very well-educated, liberal, free-thinking individuals to say I'm about to talk about Neanderthals to be told I've come to exactly the right place, there's plenty of them still around here, and we giggle. One of the discoveries recently that we're still trying to absorb is the publication in 2010 that amongst European and West Asian populations there may be as much as 4% of Neanderthal genes still surviving in us, which at a basic head count maybe means, maybe as much as ten of us here in the auditorium might carry Neanderthal genes. I think with each...and this is paradox, I think each would be very proud and excited to find out that we had a Neanderthal lineage, and we'd equally be quick to poke fun at our neighbor if we discovered that it was them and not us. So Neanderthals kind of exist there as a parallel species, a parallel human development, and I'm hoping in today's lecture to bring you a little closer to an understanding of them, not through science-based investigations, but through my discipline, through archeology, which is the study of their behavior, how they acted, how their material traces can tell us about how they moved in space, how they interacted with their environment, and how they interacted with each other. Archeology is a discipline, which is slightly more slow burn in the way it develops its findings. It's not so great at creating paradigm shifting revolutions and understanding, but it's a fantastic discipline for building up a slow equational understanding of the sophistication of day-to-day behavior, and it's something that takes place in the present as a discipline that's a fusion between physical activity and intellectual thought. Archeology is undertaken by groups of people operating in space, trying to understand those spaces as they lived in the past and as they're presented to us in the present. In developing my own approach to archeology, I'm strongly influenced by Glynn Isaac, who passed away in 1985, but his approach is, by looking really in detail at fine residues, the meager datasets that we're left with, scatters of stone tools, fragmented bones, these are our raw materials for developing a very sophisticated and complex understanding of the past and contributing to grand narratives. So all the time, we go through the minute, the intimate, the personal to populations and evolutionary time and the entire human career. But before we look at Neanderthals, I want to shift your focus first back to half a million years ago and to a different species, to Homo Heidelbergensis, which is a species that's found in Africa, maybe Western Asia, and Europe, and it's been seen by Professor Chris Stringer and others as being a good candidate for being the last common ancestor between our own species and the Neanderthals. Because what I want to encourage you to develop is an idea of Neanderthals not just seen through the lens of their last few 10,000 years of existence on the earth leading to their extinction but as part of a process of a longer evolutionary development almost as long in its development as our own species. Now Heidelbergensis is the last common ancestor, so roughly as tall as modern humans, was quite powerfully built, had a relatively large brain, and, in fact, was a lot more modern looking than the Neanderthals which developed specializations anatomically on from this original ancestor, ancestor condition. The archeology of Heidelbergensis can be best seen from the fantastic side of Boxgrove in Southern Britain, also in the Institute of Archeology Excavation, directed by a colleague of mine at the Institute of Archeology, Mark Roberts. Boxgrove in the 1980's and 1990's, a number of localities of perfectly preserved archeology, including things like this, perfectly [inaudible] gases of lithic material left entirely preserved for half a million years, exactly where they were left behind. We can tie it to the species because we have anatomical remains there, a gnawed chin bone and two incisor teeth. A lot of the archeology, a lot of the tool-using behavior that we see at the site is directed towards the manufacturer of these, hand axes, which were used, we know were used at meat knives to process carcasses and cut bones, the bones of which animals like elephants, deer, and horse are found butchered within this landscape. The part of the intimate understanding comes from dealing with the chips of flint that were left behind you in the manufacture of these hand axes. At this particular site, we were able to refit together hundreds of pieces of flint from one of these scatters to create the original block of flint from which the tool was made. And in this case, you can see the void within this block, a void that we cast using latex and came out exactly the same size and shape as a hand ax. So we can reconstruct from sites like this on a second-by-second basis how humans were living in the past. But getting back to what archeology does best, the excitement for me with these open landscape situations, is in the very acts of excavating them. We, as the excavators, we as the archeologists, place ourselves into these land surfaces. This excavator here is stood on a land surface that was part of a tidal lagoon area half a million years ago. He's providing the human scale. He's squatting over this collection of debris in exactly the same position, perhaps, as the hominin that created it. When he looks across to the colleague three or four meters away, we know he's sharing glances and perspective with other individuals that would have been there in those same positions in the past. It allows us to, for a brief time, inhabit a shadow world between the past and the present, using our own experience of being human to unlock an understanding of what it is to be one of our ancestors. But the realization that really comes to us, and the thing that's really different about the landscapes of Heidelbergensis, and here's a very dramatic reconstruction of one of these butchery sites where a rhinoceros is being killed, is that these are landscapes in which we find the discarded stone tools, we find the bone, but we find no traces of structures. We find no postholes. We find no fires, no hearths. We find no evidence of windbreaks. We find no structure. Wherever these people are living, it's not at these sites. These are sites where they're hunting. These are sites where they're killing. These are sites where they're butchering. It's not sites where they're bedding down for the night. They seem to be archeologically invisible at this time. They're very separate. [ Noise ] >> Matt Pope: Okay. Excitement over. Everyone happy to continue. Okay. So as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, the most distinguishing feature about these [inaudible] landscapes is that they are landscapes in which humans were operating and butchering and making stone tools. They weren't sites of habitation. Anyone who spent any time living in the wilderness would know, you don't sleep in close proximity to your food. And a site like this with blood, awful bone marrow, hides, open carcasses will become an absolute magnet for every carnivore on the block, and at Boxgrove, these included wolf, bear, hyena, even lion. Now we're a daytime species and probably for most of our evolution, you know, we occupy a daytime niche. We have a great sense of sight in the day. We have a 1.5 to 2 meter high perspective, but we don't have great senses of smell and great senses of hearing. These sites would become very dangerous once it became dark, and the dark is full of lots of unknown very scary creatures. So keeping in mind this ancestral state, one that's shared by us and Neanderthals, I want to bring you forward 250,000 years, looking in Europe, covering a period that's been covered in great detail by Dr. Beccy Scott in her book, Becoming Neanderthals, which is still on sale at the moment. In this book, Beccy gives us the perspective we need, seeing Neanderthals developing from half a million years ago through to 250,000 years ago within Europe developing new responses to the challenges that living in Northern Europe throws up. Some of these new developments we see very early on. They may have been spear hunting at Boxgrove, but we know by 400,000 at sites like [inaudible] or [inaudible] we've got good evidence of wooden spears, of javelins. There's traces of fire at Beeches Pit and East Anglia, potentially also at [inaudible]. There's new ways of using lithic technology, something that Beccy has looked at in detail in her book in the development of a new technique for manufacturing flakes of a predetermined size and shape, a prepared core technology known as [inaudible]. And through this period, we see very early on insipient features in the [inaudible] skull, perhaps we saw [inaudible] starting to look like Neanderthals in terms of morphology and certainly Britain by the time we get to a warm stage around 250,000 years ago and the cold stages, either side, we are probably getting morphology that we would recognize as Neanderthal. We've got teeth here from the site of Pontnewydd in North Wales that had the characteristic root grouped together known as taurodontism. Around this time for 238,000 years ago, the cave site of the La Cotte de St. Brelade on the Island of Jersey is occupied. The La Cotte de St. Brelade is a mega site in all senses of the word. It occupies a headland on the southwest corner of the island, a ravine system, which is the remains of a collapsed sea cave system that was probably opened up deep into antiquity but was occupied from around 238,000 years ago. And you can see here one of the ravines with archeological deposits here and the remains of the sea cave just here on the left, and there's the arch, all that remains today of a cave system on the island. It has a long history of investigation stretching back until the 1880's with significant excavations undertaken by the Societe Jersiaise, the island's learned society in 1910, excavations by [inaudible] from Oxford University from 1914, Fr. [inaudible], a Jesuit priest in the 1930's and 1950's, the Institute of Archeology's own Frederick Zeuner also in the 1930's, but most significantly, excavations by Professor Charles McBurney from Cambridge University from the 1960's and through to the 1970's. The collection of material that was gathered together during this time is staggering in terms of its proportions, and just list you some stats. Over 200,000 artifacts probably in total were excavated from this site from up to 16 different archeological levels. From McBurney's excavations alone, 94,000...that's right, isn't it, Beccy? 94,000 artifacts were excavated from this site. Over 4500 cubic meters have been excavated and almost as much still remains at the site to be excavated. If you put the artifacts that have been found there, they still contain as more artifacts from there than from the confined sum total of artifacts for the lower Paleolithic from the rest of the British Isles alone. If you divide the assemblages of lithic material from the site up into its 16 different groupings, then of the top 20 largest collections of lithic material from the British Isles, ten come from this individual site, and it contains the only late Neanderthal remains from the British Isles. And yet this site hasn't been properly readdressed in a generation, and part of the reason for this, with the incredible collections which were written up by Paul Callow and Jean Cornford and Dr. Kate Scott in the early 1980's and then stored fantastically by the Jersey Heritage Trust on the island was stored according to a system that we no longer use, and when we investigated it, we couldn't understand. When we looked for the records of it, found they were stored on an antique Cambridge mainframe, and when we tried to find a key for what the different recording systems meant, we couldn't locate one. And this is a problem that researchers come up against again and again in getting to the site. But over the past three years, we've been bashing our head against this problem. We've been slowly, gradually building up an understanding of the archive and of the site. And then last year, at Cambridge, they managed to download the files. Our own researcher, Dr. James Cole, managed to convert them into an Excel spreadsheet. And then finally, Beccy Scott found our Rosetta Stone, a single faded piece of paper that had the key to what all the classifications meant, and suddenly we unlocked it. This site couldn't have been looked at properly in the 70's or the 80's because there wasn't the computing power to do it. Paul Callow was a pioneer of computing technology. He would have pushed the envelopes, and did push the envelopes at the time, but now on a desktop, on a laptop, we've got the computing power that wouldn't have been available to them now, and we can start to crunch these large numbers. And the first product of that is over the past six weeks, and at some cost to their sanity and supported by the Jersey Heritage Trust financially, Beccy Scott, Dr. Andy Shaw, and a team of intrepid postdocs have undertaken a resorting of all 94,000 artifacts from the system where they were stored back into a new system based on where they came in the cave. So now we have at our disposal one of the best collections in the world spanning 200,000 years of Neanderthal occupation ready and going to be studied. The archeology is fantastic. One of the things that's really captured the public imagination and being essential academically to discussions of Neanderthal behavior from the site have been two bone heaps. There may have been a third one that didn't preserve. These bone heaps are the remains, in this case, of mammoth and other bone heap largely of woolly rhinoceros that are found in particular levels, great jumbles of skull, of tusk, of other parts of the body. Now Dr. Kate Scott has interpreted this as being the result of a game drive, Neanderthals grouping together, organizing together to heard mammoth off the cliff into the ravines where, of course, they died and they could be butchered. And this was a real game changer in understanding Neanderthal behavior. This suggested Neanderthals coordinating themselves together, obviously needing language, needing foresight, preplanning, understanding terrain, understanding animal behavior and affecting the dramatic result on the population. But when you look in the literature, this is the only way the site is usually referenced, and it's become a cornerstone for understanding of Neanderthal hunting behavior because of these spectacular signatures. Our project is now looking again, reinterpreting this behavior, but also now can bring into play really the lithic material, the stone tools from the site and other aspects. And the thing I want to talk about today for the rest of the lecture, and I seem I can carry on, can I? Yeah? Beyond where I meant to finish, yeah? What I want to talk about today is how we interpret this site as a feature in the landscape and how Neanderthals use this site to give a new perspective. We carried out very limited field work at the site. We've been just trying to test exactly what's left behind, what remains to be preserved, and also last year in October, we carried out some stabilization work of an unsafe pass to the site where archeology was going to be last funded by the National Environment Research Council. But our excavations at the site have been very surgical, very limited. We're carrying out a redating project at the moment. Most of our work, as I've said, is being focused on the archive, and this is where we're pushing forward for funding and looking for support now to develop an understanding. One of the things I think La Cotte offers and the reason why it's worthwhile going through all this effort to bring the site back into play, to bring the site out of being mothballed for so long is because of the record it provides in Neanderthal occupation. As I've said before, we've got over 16 different levels. We have an enormous amount of material in one place. Here's all the different layers as they are preserved at the site. They cover warm periods like the one we're in now, interglacials. There's at least two interglacials within the record here and two prolonged cold stages with a whole different range of environments from open arctic, tundra, where we have very little evidence of Neanderthal occupation, to fully warm conditions where they island and the surrounding landscape must have been wooded or forested and the Neanderthals are there throughout. So here's a population that manages to occupy a place, perhaps not continuously, but certainly coming back are periods right the way through under a whole range of different environments, Neanderthals meeting a whole range of environmental, climatic challenges. In each case, in each scenario, the animals, the plants, the environment, the temperatures around them would have been dramatically different. From forested animals when Jersey would have been a peninsula or even an island to cold stage with mammoth, with horse, again, and woolly rhinoceros and low sea levels in which the English Channel plain would have been an open system of valleys and undulating hills and a fantastic hunting area. This occupation is an entirely different signature to what we saw at Boxgrove. Here are people in place coming back again and again within a structured environment. This is starting to look like something like a home base. Now there's evidence that Neanderthals created structure in their living spaces, something we don't see in the archeological record before. Just a couple of possible examples here. From La Folie, in France, a system of postholes and activity areas that may represent a small windbreak or a hearth, and even something as simple as a windbreak transforms local environmental conditions hugely reducing wind chill and making habitation far more sustainable in the open. At Moldova in the Ukraine, arrangements of mammoth bone associated with Neanderthal tools may represent a similar hearth structure here created out of bone presumably in an environment that was very low on wood and other organic materials out of which to make the shelter. Within cave sites, you get a [inaudible] evidence like that from [inaudible] of structure within the sites, areas where you have localized hearths, tool production, butchery, and, in this case, little arrangements of stone which may represent internal structures. So sometimes even within a cave, they are creating structures. This is starting to look like a home. And I'm going to just run you through five conceptual thinkings about what constitutes a Neanderthal home that should get us thinking about what does home actually mean for us as well. And the five things I want to talk about are convergence, prospect, refuge, transformations, and connections. I'll go through each one in turn. Convergence is the concept of activities that reflect being taken place in the wide landscape of the Acheulean of Boxgrove and other comparable landscapes coming together into single sites. So these are sites where artifacts are being made, where people are living, where food is being consumed, things that were taking place around the landscape coming together. And at this particular Neanderthal site in the near east, we have individual hearths, bedding areas identified by proliferations of plant final lithics and then specialized areas of tool production. There's structure here. This is a place where people are behaving socially together developing a very structured signature within a very tight spatial area and giving life to a far more complex signature than you would find in earlier archaic landscapes. Prospects and refuge are two concepts that were suggested to me by a student of landscape garden design, and they come from a landscape garden academic, Jay Appleton, who in the 70's showed how these two concepts of prospect and refuge combine in a lot of architecture and landscape design. And these are two features that we see in Neanderthal and other human living spaces and translate exactly into how we occupy space in places we feel at home in. Here we've got, you know, two examples of modern architecture where the sites have definite views. They also create a sense of security as well. And we've got two cave sites here, Shanidar in Iraq and the [inaudible] in the Vezere Valley in France that also combine these features. And at La Cotte, we can see these features as well. Refuge is provided by the overall structure of the cave site and the ravines itself creating its own microclimate and sense of security. Outside of cave sites, even rock shelters, which create a fantastic wall, a back surface where we only have to manage 180 degree line of site, a great sense of security as well as a microclimate in itself. But in terms of prospects, from La Cotte these were really spectacular, today occupies a headland with spectacular views over the English Channel. For large parts of this occupation, this was overlooking landscapes and valleys and granite bluffs. Last year, as part of our project, Dr. Richard Bates from the University of St. Andrews undertook a seabed floor survey, and this is the seabed floor survey of the landscape immediately in front of La Cotte. La Cotte de St. Brelade is situated here, and this is the seabed. All of the survey is the seabed, and you see how that relates to the Island of Jersey here in this graphic. That's the area of seabed we surveyed, and everything in green here is the island itself. But, of course, in the past, it was continuous land surface. One thing we identified by focusing in on this area here is the La Cotte de St. Brelade, which is here, sits at the head of this very pronounced valley that's funneling out onto the landscape. And, indeed, the south entrance to the site, which is just here, looks out directly down this valley, isn't a bleak view. This is all that remains of one valley wall, the eastern wall, and these little specks here just poking out from the sea is the very tips of the western wall, fanning out. So in this reconstruction, looking up the valley, you can see how these walls funnel in with La Cotte de St. Brelade right at its head. These were some of the prospects from La Cotte. They allow control and command of landscapes. If you see a threat or an opportunity, a distance, distance translates to time, time for preparedness, time to make a plan. It becomes, in effect, like a time machine that allows you to really control your local landscape. And, of course, in this situation, this dead-end valley creates a perfect killing ground for hunting, and I think probably allowed for really good control. And this is something our project is going to try to get to grips with. And it's not just a living site but also controlling a killing ground for large mammals during the period it was occupied. The next concept I want to talk about is transformation. Homes are places in which materials are transformed. And La Cotte de St. Brelade, we have a whole range of activities that relate to transformations. First of all, there's transformations of material for the kind of place [inaudible] that Beccy Scott has been undertaking already on this material. We understand that flint is being provisioned from a long way away, is being turned into a variety of tools for a variety of different techniques and then resharpened and recycled in really intricate and very economic ways, constantly undergoing modification. These tools are used to transform other materials, scrapers for transforming hides, meat knives for cutting bone and sinew and meat. And one of the big things being transformed are large mammals like the mammoth and the rhinoceros and other mammals that we find throughout the sequence. There's other transformations taking place, the transformations of raw materials like wood and bone, which is probably more prolific during the cold periods as fuel for fires. And one thing we find at this site is abundant evidence to the use of fire, again, something not available in the archaic world. And fire transforms, but it's not just a transformation of materials itself, it transforms space. It increases temperature, reduces humidity. It creates light within a contained area that's transforming the very environment that they're living in. They're creating living areas that allow sustained occupation in environments that wouldn't be able to be occupied otherwise. And there may be hints that they're transforming the structure of the inside of the site itself. These bone heaps, we're going to look a lot more closely. Dr. Geoff Smith is currently undertaking a reexamination of these bones. There were hints that Dr. Kate Scott picked up with structure within these piles, ribs that seemed to be driven on end into the sediment, one rib which had been driven through a placed skull, piles of stacked up shoulder blades, structured, organized placement of these bones. And we need to tease out all of these signatures to understand the activities that are taking place there. The other thing that makes a home is connections with other places, and this is something else we can look at, the networks of Neanderthals within the local area. I've got one day and one week traveling circles away from the Island of Jersey here, remember the large parts of sea level would have been lower, and this would have been the territory, the Gulf of Somalia off the French coast. They could have made it to the current coastline of France very easily within a week, maybe even [inaudible] within a week. And we know that there's other Neanderthal occupation sites here. We got a nice cluster around Somalia, and there's another cluster on the northern edge of the Cotentin Peninsula. These may be contemporary occupations. They may be other sites as occupied by the same group, moving more widely in the area, but there are going to be connections to raw materials, particular stone sources to other groups. These sites, homes can never exist in isolation. But once you have a settled place, once you have a place that you can defend, that you can make secure, you can start leaving elements of your group, the young, the elderly, the sick, the infirmed, the pregnant, the nursing, you can leave them safe while other more active members of the group go out, engage in far more mobile, dangerous, risky behavior, bringing resources back to a central area to be redistributed. A home creates an entirely different way of unlocking landscapes and of organizing yourself in time and space. Just to finish, I want you to think about all of these ideas in relation to how we live today. Archeology is never going to be relevant unless we take an understanding of the deep past and use it to understand and better develop ways that we're living today. If we look at the fantastic satellite image of modern cities, what we're seeing here are the networks. We're seeing the communications and the nodes between lines of communication, lines of information between specialized places like a museum, like a business district. But most of all, we're seeing the connections between homes. Homes are still the fundamental unit of our experience of organizing ourselves in space. Cities are dramatically complex. They're resource hungry. They're energy hungry. The past gives us an understanding of the building blocks on which this great complexity, this fragile complexity is built. Understanding concepts like prospect and refuge helps us explain not only how we build mass housing, which combine exactly these features, but also in our architectural design, aspirational houses and our aspirations for living are lived out in hard architecture, bringing together concepts of convergence, prospect, refuge, and transformation within the home. So I hope this perspective, this perspective which these Neanderthals are engaging in behaviors, engaging behaviors which allowed an unlocking of landscapes in very different and radical ways, how to kind of align them more closely with our own evolutionary path. And from this perspective, it becomes largely irrelevant whether they apparently went extinct, say, 45, 35,000 years ago, because for most of this evolutionary trajectory, the mapping developments we see in our own species and other hominin groups around the world, their paths of the shared experience of human evolution, and they undertook some of the innovations that we share and we benefit from today. And so, you know, I think it's time that we recognize these innovations, we see them as part of the shared human experience, and we finally welcome Neanderthals home. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Matt Pope: I'd like to thank a lot of people who are really supporting our project at the moment on Jersey, the Societe Jersiaise, who are the owners of the site and whose kind permission we're carrying out work there, the Jersey Heritage Trust, who is supporting our work on the archives, and the State of Jersey Planning Department, who are arranging permissions with us and working very closely on the future management of ice age archeology across the whole island. Great friends on the island, John Renuve [phonetic spelling], Dr. Ann Best, Peter Funk, Dr. Ralph Nichols, Jersey Digimap who kindly has given us data, Deliberation Brewery, who supports our project in a very meaningful way, [inaudible], who have supported us financially, our students, without who we couldn't carry out the excavations, Dr. John McNabb, Professor Clive Gamble, Professor Chris Stringer, Dr. John Luke [inaudible], Dr. Kate Scott, Margaret Callow, Dr. Ruth Charles, and Dr. Tim Reynolds, all of whom have been extremely generous in helping us and supporting us and nurturing the project through its first three years. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Beccy: Thank you very much, Matt, and fascinating as always. We do have time for questions and answers now, so if anybody has any questions they'd like to put to Matt, there are ready microphones, I believe, walking down the sides somewhere. Yes, please? >> Is there any evidence... >> Beccy: Microphone coming. >> Is there any evidence of barter between the different groups, please? From the materials, has there been any...is it...has there been any work done to analyze the data to see if it's coming from different sites to support barter? >> Matt Pope: Well what we can see is certainly materials moving in landscapes. With Neanderthals, if we compare it to the kind of distances that we see materials moving with the appearance of our own species in Europe after the Neanderthals have effectively disappeared, the distances there are huge, you know, tens, hundreds of kilometers. There's definitely exchange of movement of materials occurring with our own species. It's far harder to see with Neanderthals where raw material transport distances are tens of kilometers in scale. There may be individuals and group contact, but it's very hard to actually distinguish that from the record. And, generally, the fit seems to be far more closely to relatively small populations with relatively large territories. [ Background conversation ] >> Can you tell us something about the comparative sizes of Neanderthal groups with homosapien groups? >> Matt Pope: Yeah, group size is very difficult to get at. What we're dealing with is not only the effective group size, the group size of groups as they operate at the same time, but the bigger picture, how these groups translate into wider populations, which may have some kind of affiliation, may have some kind of movement of people and genetics within a wider population. Now with Neanderthals, the archeological record is suggesting, as I've mentioned earlier, much smaller groups. Now we envisaged that you're not going to be able to support group size at the top of the food chain being a key apex predator on a very large scale. They seem to have quite a restricted resource space, and the best fit there seems to match with carnivores. And certainly, when you look at the areas of landscape over which raw materials are moving, it's a far closer fit in terms of distance to the kind of territories the carnivore groups occupy within a yearly round. So we might be dealing with smaller groups than anatomically modern humans, far less linkages between the groups, and because of a less diverse resource space, overall less population there. Putting numbers on it is really difficult. We sort of work at a baseline model looking at ethnic graphic examples of hunter gatherer groups, which are rarely more in terms of effective day-to-day movements and cohesion. Rarely more than 50 individuals and more likely 20 to 35 individuals, that kind of extended family group. >> Beccy: Gentleman right to the front there, I think you had your hand up earlier? >> I have a quick question, and I think this has probably been answered already with the question on bartering. But one of the distal causes for the extinction of Neanderthals was the lack of evidence of their ability to communicate between one group and another. They're very isolated, and that facilitated their extinction when the end of the ice age came. Is there any broader evidence for interactions between groups? You mentioned the one week distance of the group in the [inaudible], does that...is there any evidence of anymore exchanges between groups in the locality of [inaudible]? >> Matt Pope: I think that makes compelling evidence from that comes if you take a kind of wider perspective on Europe and cultural behavior in Europe, especially in the 50,000 years from the end of the last interglacial through to the extinction where you see within Europe in different distinct regional areas, particular ways of making tools. So, for example, in Britain and Northern France, we get a very distinctive form of hand ax being manufactured by these groups. It's very distinctive to other hand ax forms being made at the moment. And, you know, this is evidence potentially for cultural groupings. So they're sharing ideas. If they're sharing ideas, there must be some kind of contact beyond the initial effective group, the extended family. There must be linkages of ideas and some sense of shared culture that you can see distributed regionally. >> I wonder if you could say something about the relationship with the sea. Was there any evidence that there were any remains of fish in the sites? >> Matt Pope: No, no. >> And did they ever move by sea at all, and how did they do that? >> Matt Pope: No, there's absolutely no recorded evidence so far of the use of marine resources at La Cotte de St. Brelade. It's possible that in some locations, and certainly in Gibraltar, there's evidence now the Neanderthals were using marine resources, but none of the excavated former remains from the La Cotte de St. Brelade are indicating use of marine resources at all. And this goes for large parts of the archaic world as well. We have evidence, you know, at Boxgrove of people very close to the sea, the large parts of the occupation level there. No clusters of sea food. No concentrations of fish bones. The La Cotte de St. Brelade, which we know would have been very close to the sea during at least two phases of its occupation, I think is a good place to really go back and test whether this is really the case, undertake very detailed sampling of the sediments, to look for fish bones, to look for also elements because a lot of the shells and things were just going to rot there, but maybe look for the elemental traces of seafood collection. This will certainly be a place to test that hypothesis, but generally, no, seafood resources were ignored by Neanderthals. >> Have the excavations at the La Cotte de St. Brelade or other Neanderthal sites actually revealed anything about their death rituals? Are there any burial sites, for example? >> Matt Pope: Something that...yes. One thing that I did want to mention today, but it was very limited time, is the cave sites, these home bases are, in many cases, also where we find Neanderthal burials. And certainly during their later stages, Neanderthals do start regularly disposing of their dead within the ground, sometimes with the addition of material culture, sometimes with the addition of animal bones. How we want to interpret this, whether we want to interpret this as simply disposal, or if we want to interpret it as symbolic engagement with the dead and ritualized disposal of the dead, well that's something that, you know, we can discuss. But certainly, it looks like a very organized, very carefully considered behavior in relation to the dead that is largely archeologically invisible prior to this period. So, certainly, we did not find no evidence of burial in this manner in the archaic world, and I think it's really telling that one of the places that they're choosing to dispose of the dead are some of the same sites that they're inhabiting. We don't know how necessarily got the resolution to know that they're inhabiting these sites at exactly the same time they're burying their dead, but there is something, you know, quite fitting about that, that as soon as these home bases develop and emerge in the archeological record and become very visible, the dead start to become visible to us as preserved individuals as opposed to the scattered, scavenged, and carnivore-gnawed remains that we usually have to deal with from earlier periods. So it's certainly, you know, a fantastic subject for investigation directly relevant to the issues that we're looking here about the emergence of the idea of home. >> Beccy: There's a gentleman back there, please. [ Silence ] >> Okay. I wonder if you found any evidence as the circumstances with the site of deceased to be occupied. It makes you wonder why such a site, the occupation, what it should come to mean. I wonder what evidence you come across, if any, right at the end of the occupation site? >> No, sir. That's a really really good question, and there is two parts to this. I talked about continuous occupation at this site, but one thing that we're exploring at the moment for a fine reading of the stratigraphy and for a fine reading of where the artifacts are, and this is something we'll be able to do now, we've got this fantastic collection to work on, is they do seem to be points where the site isn't occupied. And these may be times where it just got too cold, the conditions were too harsh, the Neanderthals were abandoning the site, and that's something that we want to explore. So they have this incredible tolerance of interglacial warm periods and cold periods, but there's a limit to their tolerances. And in archeological terms, it's like they go locally extinct. In reality, they're probably moving, populations are probably moving south as the cold conditions come on. Now in terms of maybe what you were more thinking about, when do they disappear from this record here at La Cotte completely, well that's more difficult to answer. Because when the site was first discovered in the 1880's, there was up to 40 meters of sediment preserved at the site. Presumably, the [inaudible] levels of that sediment related to our own [inaudible], to the past 10,000 years. And I haven't seen any record of late prehistoric archeology from the site. Potentially, there would have been deposits from, say, 40,000 years ago through to 10,000 years ago, that crucial period we really want to look at that would have had maybe the last distinctive Neanderthal behavior and what we call the early upper Paleolithic, the archeological signatures are associated with our own species. But unfortunately, those deposits are being removed, and we've seen no evidence of early upper Paleolithic archeology from that site indeed from the island. That's one of the things that we really wanted to find on the island. But we are bringing into focus those deposits now from the last stages of Neanderthal occupation at the site, and who knows, there are parts of the site which are unexcavated. There's one part of the site I've got my focus and attention on, which is unexcavated, and if we project the deposits as they were excavated originally down, they should pass through this preserved area. So there is a research question, when did Neanderthals disappear? Is there any evidence of modern humans there? That's a key research question and a secret that La Cotte has yet to give up. >> Beccy: Perhaps time for one final question. Yes, gentleman here. >> I recently heard a lecture by Steven Mithen about Neanderthals singing and human speaking. Do you have any comments or any observations to make on any of that? >> Matt Pope: I'm sure the answer is no. Neanderthals, I believe, must have been capable of language. If nothing else, the types of activities that they're engaging in require a degree of sophisticated planning and sophisticated communication of ideas. The concepts that we see cognitively in the way that they're making stone tools, which are very compartmentalized, very intricate, require manipulation in lots of dimensions, show a very sophisticated thought, very sophisticated concepts. They're even quite difficult to grasp yourself and teach to students, requiring a lot of language as well. So whether Neanderthals were singing, well, probably, but, you know, if there was an opposition to language, the Neanderthals were definitely speaking to each other. >> Beccy: I think we pretty much ran out of time, but I just wanted to say, thank you very much to you all for coming, and thank you to Matt for such interesting thoughts. >> Matt Pope: Thank you. [ Applause ]

Biography

He took his first degree from the University of Cape Town in 1958 before studying for his PhD at Peterhouse, Cambridge which he completed in 1969. He was also Warden for Prehistoric Sites in Kenya between 1961 and 1962 and deputy director of the Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology at the National Museums of Kenya from 1963 to 1965. Working with Richard Leakey, he was co-director of the East African Koobi Fora project.

In 1966 he joined the anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley and in 1983 he was appointed Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University where he was developing new research projects at the time of his death. He was survived by his twin brother, Rhys Isaac, an historian, based at La Trobe University.

He died in 1985 in Yokosuka, Japan due to illness, at the age of 47.[2]

Contributions

Glynn Isaac is best remembered for a series of papers and ideas which attempted to combine the available archeological record with models of both human behavior and a human activity from the standpoint of evolution.[1] In the early 1970s Isaac published on the effect of social networks, gathering, meat eating and other factors on human evolution, and proposed a series of models to examine how groups of humans in the paleolithic would have engaged in acquiring the necessities of life, and interacting with each other. Isaac's models focused on a "home base" and the importance of sexual division of labor on hominid social organization.

Works

  • The Archaeology of Human Origins, Cambridge University Press.
  • Olorgesailie: Archaeological Studies of the Middle Lake Basin in Kenya, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
  • The food-sharing behavior of protohuman hominids. Scientific American 238:90-108, 1978.
  • Koobi Fora Research Project: Plio-Pleistocene Archaeology, Glynn Ll. Isaac (Editor), et al., Clarendon Press, 1997.
  • Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence, Glynn Ll. Isaac, Elizabeth Richards McCown, WA Benjamin, 1976.

See also

References

  • Darvill, T (ed.) (2003). Oxford Concise Dictionary of Archaeology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280005-1.
  • Jeanne Sept and David Pilbeam, Eds., "Casting the Net Wide," Oxbow Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84217-454-8.

Notes

  1. ^ a b Jeanne Sept and David Pilbeam, Eds, "Casting the Net Wide," Oxbow Books, 2011.
  2. ^ Dean R. Gerstein and R. Duncan Luce (1988): The Behavioral and Social Sciences

External links

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