An archaeological fad

Prompted by the magazine article at reference 1. Rather stronger meat than we are used to from the magazine put out by the DT on a Saturday.

The archaeology of interest here is that spanning the last ten thousand years before the birth of our Lord. Roughly the period of the Ancient Egyptian kingdoms, but in places far to the east of Egypt and well to the north east of Australia, in particular a country now called Vanuatu, once known as the New Hebrides. In particular an island called Efate, an island about the size of the Isle of Wight, but less than twenty degrees south of the equator to our more than fifty degrees north.

The fad of interest here is the development of techniques which can recover large chunks of genome from very old bones, say up to 10,000 years old. New techniques which involve enough scientific and statistical trickery to confine full understanding to the inner circle, to the high priests of the new fad. See for example reference 2, reporting work on 69 newly analysed ancient Europeans, with 25 others reported previously making up the numbers. New techniques which ought to complement the old techniques of assembly analysis (old pots being something of a favourite here) and linguistic analysis. Not to mention navigation, about which I have failed to find anything. How did these people manage the winds and the waves? Are some islands more accessible from the west than others? One might hope that we have moved on from the Kon-Tiki, but I have been able to turn anything up.

The archaeological story starts with the discovery of some very old bones, in the course of building a prawn farm near Teouma Bay, on the south coast of Efate, visible on the map if you click to enlarge.

The subject matter of this story is the spread of prehistoric peoples from the mainland of the far east into the far reaches of the Pacific. A southern route taken by a people, some of whom stopped off at Papua a very long time ago, and a northern route from China, through Taiwan – with there being a race angle here in that the southerners were darker than the northerners. With both routes working south and east through the chains of islands big and small, roughly as far as Vanuatu, followed by a daring leap into the unknown of the open ocean, taking them to Fiji, Tonga, Somoa and beyond. Leaving a trail of mixed Papuan and Asian genomes and a rather different trail of mixed Papuan and Asian languages. It seems that some places wound up with predominantly Papuan genomes but predominantly Asian languages, a winding up which has confused and sometimes upset the heritage industries of the places concerned. Even to the point of causing problems with celebratory postage stamps.

The human story seems to be that a group of energetic researchers, whom I shall call A, got very good at ancient genomes. They published widely read papers and attracted lots of people and lots of money.

But other small groups of researchers, whom I shall call B, found it hard to get any of these good things. Furthermore, B suspected A of getting preferential access to tier one journals like Nature. Dark talk even of abuse of the review process for such journals. Dark talk of traitors in the B camp sending artefacts and samples off to the A camp – where the B camp might be just that, a camp in some hot and sweaty part of the world.

One gets the impression that A did not pay enough attention to the well established but old fashioned techniques and technology favoured by B. What they could do with genomes with machines meant that they did not have to bother with the graft of dusting mud of bits of pot or careful study of the large number of languages floating about in this part of the world. But maybe they went too far.

It seems that the politics of academe are every bit as bad as those of offices everywhere. Not a soft option at all. We have lost something in moving away from the days when academics could just potter away without regard to ratings or fundings and there are downsides to research having become so competitive.

I am reminded of the story my GP told me about the fads for promising new treatments. They carry everyone with them for a while, then go into a period of excess, eventually falling back to a more measured application. And other stories about how first AIDs research and then climate change research hogged the limelight. One had to give one’s research proposal the then fashionable spin to get a hearing. And about how some statisticians of my generation thought that shovelling lots of data into the shiny new statistical packages on computers, which were then becoming available, absolved them from actually looking at the data.

PS: reference 1 is what I have read, only having glanced at the large amount of material which can be reached from there, with references 2 and 3 being a sample thereof. All more or less open access.

Reference 1: Is ancient DNA research revealing new truths – or falling into old traps? – Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times Magazine – 2019.

Reference 2: Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe - Wolfgang Haak, David Reich and others – 2015.

Reference 3: Language continuity despite population replacement in Remote Oceania - Cosimo Posth, Kathrin Nägele, Adam Powell and others – 2018.