Taphonomy of ungulate ribs and the consumption of meat and bone by 1.2-million-year-old hominins at Olduvai Gorge,Tanzania

The phenomenon of equifinality complicates behavioral interpretations of faunal assemblages from contexts in which Pleistocene hominins are suspected bone accumulators. Stone tool butchery marks on ungulate fossils are diagnostic of hominin activities, but debate continues over the higher-order implications of butchered bones for the foraging capabilities of hominins. Additionally, tooth marks imparted on bones by hominins overlap in morphology and dimensions with those created by some non-hominin carnivores, further confounding our view of early hominins as meat-eating hunters, scavengers or both. We report on the manual/oral peeling of cortical layers of ungulate ribs as taphonomically diagnostic of hominoid/hominin meat- and bone-eating behavior that indicates access to large herbivore carcasses by hominins at the site of BK, Olduvai. Supporting these inferences, we show that certain types of rib peeling damage are very rare or completely unknown in faunas created by modern carnivores and African porcupines, but common in faunas modified by the butchery and/or consumption activities of modern humans and chimpanzees, during which these hominoids often grasp ribs with their hands, and then used their teeth to peel strips of cortex from raggedly chewed ends of the ribs. Carnivores consume ungulate ribcage tissues soon after kills, so diagnostic traces of hominin butchery/consumption on ribs (i.e., peeling and butchery marks) indicate early access to ungulate carcasses by BK hominins. Tooth marks associated with the peeling and butchery marks are probably hominin-derived, and may indicate that it was not uncommon for our ancestors to use their teeth to strip meat from and to consume portions of ribs. Recognition of rib peeling as a diagnostic signature of hominoid/hominin behavior may also aid the search for pre-archaeological traces of hominin meat-eating.     

Reviews

The Irish Ringfort Matthew Stout, 1997 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp. 160, ISBN 1.8518.1200.X, £19.95 (hb)

A Shorter Illustrated History of Ulster Jonathan Bardon, 1996 Belfast, Blackstaff Press pp. 336, ISBN 0.8564.0586.8, £14.99 (pb)

Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century Jean Agnew, 1996 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp. 256, ISBN 1.8518.2251.8, £25.00 (hb)

The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651 Martyn Bennett, 1997 Oxford, Blackwell pp.472, ISBN 0.6311.9154.2, £55.00 (hb); ISBN 0.6311.91550, £15.99 (pb)

Parties, Patriots and Undertakers: Parliamentary Politics in early Hanoverian Ireland Patrick Mcnally, 1997 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp.240, ISBN 1.8518.2255.0, £30.00 (hb)

Edmund Burke: His Life and Legacy Ian Crowe (ed.), 1997 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp. 228, ISBN 1.8518.2306.9, £35.00 (hb)

The Irish Charter Schools, 1730–1830 Kenneth Milne, 1997 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp. 450, ISBN 1.8518.2232.1, £35.00 (hb)

The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760–1830 Kevin Whelan, 1996 Cork, Cork University Press pp. 240, ISBN 1.8591.8060.4, £14.95 (pb)

The Royal Irish Constabulary: A Short History and Genealogical Guide Jim Herlihy, 1997 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp.256, ISBN 1.8518.2337.9, £39.50 (hb); ISBN 1.8518.2337.9, £14.95 (pb)

Unionist Politics and the Politics of Unionism since the Anglo‐Irish Agreement Fergal Cochrane, 1997 Cork, Cork University Press pp.440, ISBN 1.8591.8138.4, £45 (hb); ISBN 1.8591.2, £17.95 (pb)

Bonfires on the Hillside: An Eyewitness Account of Political Upheaval in Northern Ireland James Kelly, 1995 Belfast, Fountain Publishing pp. 229, ISBN 0.9525.5650.2, £2.95 (pb)

The New York Irish Ronald H. Bayor & Timothy J. Meagher (eds), 1996 Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press pp.744, ISBN 0.8018.5199.8, £37.00 (hb); ISBN 0.8018.5764.3, £21.50 (pb)

The Irish Experience in New York City: A Select Bibliography Ann M. Shea & Marion R. Casey, 1995 New York, New York Irish History Roundtable pp. 130, ISBN 0.8156.8121.6, US$ 29.95 (hb)

Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition Nina Auerbach & David J. Skal (eds), 1997 New York, W.W. Norton pp. 492, ISBN 0.3939.7012.4, £6.95 (pb)

The Un‐Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula Peter Haining & Peter Tremayne, 1997 London, Constable pp. 199, ISBN 0.0947.5430.6, £16.95 (hb)

The Mammoth Book of Dracula Stephen Jones (ed.), 1997 London, Robinson Publishing pp. 512, ISBN 1.8548.7520.5, £6.99 (pb)

James Joyce: Ulysses Vincent Sherry, 1997 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press pp. 141, ISBN 0.5214.2075.X, £19.95 (hb); ISBN 0.5214.2136.5, £7.95 (pb)

The Word According to James Joyce: Reconstructing Representation Cordell D. K. Yee, 1997 Lewisburg, Pa. Bucknell University Press/ London, Associated University Press pp. 176, ISBN 8387.5330.2, £30.00 (hb)

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett James Knowlson, 1996 London, Bloomsbury pp. 872, ISBN 0.7475.2719.9, £25 (hb)

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist Anthony Cronin, 1996 London, HarperCollins pp.645, ISBN 0.2461.3769.X, £25.00 (hb); ISNB 0.5860.9076.2, £8.99 (pb)

Beckett: The Irish Dimension Mary Junker, 1995 Dublin, Wolfhound pp. 190, ISBN 0.8632.7384.X, £27.50 (hb)

Thomas Kinsella Donatella Abbate Badin, 1996 New York, Twayne pp. 226, ISBN 0.8057.7047.X

Bearing Witness: Essays on Anglo‐Irish Literature Augustine Martin (anthony Roche ed.), 1996 Dublin, University College Dublin Press pp. 259+xx, ISBN 1 9006.21 0 1.0, £25.95 (hb); ISBN 1.9006.2102.9, £15.95 (pb)

Twentieth‐Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation Christopher Murray, 1997 Manchester, Manchester University Press pp.288, ISBN 0.7190.4156.2, £35.00 (hb); ISBN 0.7190.4157.0, £12.99 (pb)

The Irish Play on the New York Stage, 1874–1966 John D. Harrington, 1997 Lexington, Ky., University Press of Kentucky pp. 179, ISBN 0.8131.2033.0, US$ 27.95 (hb)

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (Vol. 2, No. 2, 1996) Osilla Bertha (ed.), 1996 Debrecen, Kossuth Lajas University Press pp. 182, ISSN 1218.7364, US$ 15.00

Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Irish Music in the 20th Century) Axel Klein, 1996 Hildesheim, George Olms Verlag pp. 526, ISBN 3.4871.0196.3, with Music Examples, Bibliography, and Discography DM 98 (hb)

Here's Looking at You, Kid! Ireland goes to the pictures STEPHANIE MCBRIDE and RODDY FLYNN (eds), 1996 Dublin,Wolfhoundpp. 138, ISBN 0.8632.7556.7, £9.99 (pb)

Wilde Director, Brian Gilbert Screenplay by Julian Mitchell Samuelson/Polygram, 1997     

‘An entirely new land’? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.     

Competitive Location and Pricing on Networks

In this paper we consider a location and pricing model for a retail firm that wants to enter a spatial market tvhere a competitor firm is already operating as a monopoly with several outlets. The entering firm seeks to determine the optimal uniform mill price and its servers' locations that maximize profits given the reaction in price of the competitor firm to its entrance. A tabu search procedure is presented to solve the model together with computational experience and an example.     

Competitive Location and Pricing on Networks

In this paper we consider a location and pricing model for a retail firm that wants to enter a spatial market where a competitor firm is already operating as a monopoly with several outlets. The entering firm seeks to determine the optimal uniform mill price and its servers' locations that maximize profits given the reaction in price of the competitor firm to its entrance. A tabu search procedure is presented to solve the model together with computational experience and an example.     

Disproportionality and bias in US Presidential Elections: How geography helped Bush defeat Gore but couldn't help Kerry beat Bush

The 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections were closely fought contests, with in the first case victory in the Electoral College being denied to the candidate with the largest share of the popular vote. Disproportionality in the translation of votes into seats (in this case, from popular votes to votes in the Electoral College) is common to contests using a winner-takes-all electoral system. So is bias, whereby that disproportionality does not apply equally to each candidate. Analysis of the bias at those two elections shows that Bush was favoured at the first but not at the second. Identification of the bias components shows that Bush was advantaged by variations in the number of popular votes per Electoral College voter across the states, and also by variation in turnout. In 2000, his popular votes were also more efficiently distributed than Gore's; in 2004 they were less efficiently distributed than Kerry's, largely because of increased turnout – producing larger numbers of surplus votes – in states that were already safe for Bush.