The Crow Creek Massacre

I just finished reading University of Illinois archaeologist Laurence Keeley's fantastic War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. I will write a full review soon, but I wanted to mention an incident Keeley discusses that rather surprised me: the Crow Creek Massacre. Keeley's main argument in the book is that archaeologists have artificially "pacified the past" by overlooking evidence of warfare, murder, cannibalism and genocide in prehistory. Despite my rather Hobbesian view of human nature - which makes it pretty easy for me to accept Keeley's conclusions - it surprised me that such clear evidence of Native American brutality existed. I suppose all those Hollywood films with eco-pacifist Indians had a subconscious effect on me after all.

The Crow Creek massacre occurred around 1325 AD (that is, long before Columbus) in South Dakota, along the Missouri River. The victims were from a group of agriculturalists known as the 'Initial Coalescent people' who are thought to have migrated from the plains due to drought. There is evidence that the victims were malnourished and that several individuals had previous war wounds (healed scalpings, arrows embedded in bone, etc.). Additionally, they clearly felt threatened: a defensive ditch was under construction when the massacre occurred. The total number of victims is estimated at 486 people, which included men, women and children:


Disturbingly, many of the victims were tortured (including "tongue removal, decapitation, and dismemberment"), at least 90% of the people were scalped and their village was burnt. The victims were left to rot where they fell, and were apparently only buried some months later.

This event is quite possibly due to ecological stress but nonetheless serves as a clear existence proof of genocide and abject cruelty among prehistoric societies. Native Americans had clearly tasted evil before Europeans arrived; which is obvious, of course, except that recent intellectual history and popular opinion has denied such a thing was possible. This evidence, though, is incontrovertible.

Homo floresiensis update II

See also my earlier pieces: "The floresiensis mess" and "Homo floresiensis update".

Yet more about whether the Flores specimens discovered in 2004 constitute a new species, this time on the positive side. In an upcoming article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleoanthropologists Adam Gordon, Lisa Nevell, and Bernard Wood of George Washington University argue a statistical analysis of one of the skulls (LB1) reveals the Flores specimens cannot be shrunken Homo sapiens. Intriguingly, they say the skull most closely resembles Homo habilis, a very primitive hominid indeed. Says Gordon: "This is particularly exciting because ... it suggests that we really do have a hominin lineage that split off from our own as much as 1.7 million years ago, yet persisted up until the time when modern humans started peopling the Americas. That's pretty cool."

When the study goes online, I'll update this entry with a link to it.

Update: the article can be found here.

Homo floresiensis update

The other day I blogged about the continuing debate over Homo floresiensis, the possible species of Homo. I mentioned two recent papers that challenge the proposition that the Flores specimens constitute a new species: Obendorf et. al.'s suggestion that the specimens are Homo sapiens who suffered from cretinism and Berger et. al.'s report on a new find of small-bodied remains on Palau that suggests the Flores specimens might have been Homo sapiens who exhibited physiological dwarfism. The anthropoligist John Hawks has now examined the Berger paper (which he peer-reviewed for PLoS One) and written a detailed blog entry on it. I can, by the way, highly recommend Hawks, he certainly knows what he's talking about.

See also: SciAm Observations Blog's piece on Berger et. al.'s paper and National Geographic's article.

The floresiensis mess

The debate over the status of Homo floresiensis, the possible species of Homo that survived until about 12,000 years ago that was discovered in 2003 on the Indonesian island of Flores, just won't go away. Two separate much-publicized studies that challenge the notion that floresiensisis is a distinct species emerged this week. First, Peter Obendorf, Charles Oxnard, and Ben Kefford argued in their study in Proc. Roy. Soc. B that the purported floresiensis skeletons were actually Homo sapiens who suffered from congenital hypothyroidism, or cretinism. The anthropologist John Hawks, for one, disagreed with this finding on his blog, arguing Obendorf et. al. got it badly wrong.

More recently, University of Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and colleagues describe a new set of small-bodied human skeletons that were found in Palau, Micronesia. Berger et. al. conclude that their specimens are Homo sapiens who exhibit physiological dwarfism that regularly emerges in island contexts. They also suggest that the characteristics of the Flores specimens "may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity. Under any circumstances the Palauan sample supports at least the possibility that the Flores hominins are simply an island adapted population of H. sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities."