The '"gay" caveman

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/communication/gay-caveman-prague-2011.html


The "gay caveman" 
I am just about to go crazy today. I just can't seem to escape the "gay caveman" 
story.
No, I don't mean the Geico caveman who likes mango duck breast and  who has 
Talia Shire as his therapist. His sexual orientation I don't  know. 

I mean this story in the Telegraph (UK) ("First homosexual caveman found") which 
claims: 

The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC –  was discovered 
buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the  Corded Ware culture in 
the Copper Age.
The story is based on a press conference with archaeologists in  Prague, who are 
involved in excavating and analyzing a series of burials  found at a site in the 
city. PressTV has put a televised report online (HT Eric Michael Johnson). The 
work is newsworthy, but there is no  publication immediately forthcoming. The 
burial in question, one of  many, is interesting because the archaeologists have 
perceived a  mismatch between the sex of the skeleton (they assess as male) and 
the  grave goods and positioning of the skeleton (they assess as female). 

I have few comments, and really none at all about the archaeology in  question. 
All they did was outreach for their ongoing work, talking  about its possible 
scientific importance. Good for them!
My criticism is limited to the Telegraph and the (at this  count) hundreds of 
press outlets all over the world who have  breathlessly repeated the "gay 
caveman" story. Heck, they've even raided Wikipedia. 

Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a "gay caveman",  you need a 
skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't  either!
Corded Ware burials are pre-Bronze Age farmers, not anywhere near  cavemen. 
These are scientifically very informative, I should know as  I've measured many 
European skulls of equal age. But the Telegraph may just as well have said that 
Stonehenge was built by cavemen. 

Er, well, given the quality of their science coverage, I shouldn't  speak so 
soon -- maybe they actually do think that cavemen built  Stonehenge...
Kristina Killgrove is ahead of me on the story ("So, what we've learned is that 
this skeleton was neither a caveman  nor necessarily gay."). She pointed me to 
Rosemary Joyce's post on the  story ("'Gay Caveman': Wrecking a perfectly good 
story").  Joyce is an expert in sex and gender in archaeology and points to the  
problems that inevitably arise in sexing skeletal remains in these  contexts: 

We need to know the age and possible lifeway of this  individual to avoid what 
Lori Hager called “the sexism of sexing”. She  used as her example a burial at 
Çatalhöyük of an older woman whose  pelvic anatomy had been remodeled and 
diverged from the expectations for  female skeletons.
It would also help to know what criteria are being used  to assess sex. In 2000, 
Chris Meiklejohn and colleagues published a  discussion of Mesolithic Europe 
that noted the difficulty using  robusticity, for example, to identify males, as 
some females were more  robust than some males in the samples they examined.
Then there is the question of intersexed individuals–  those persons whose 
chromosomal sex may vary from the dichotomous grid  of two sexes that is assumed 
by the reporters writing about this story,  and apparently, by the 
archaeologists involved as well. Contrast this  with the work of Rebecca Storey, 
who identified a royal burial at Copan  as likely a genetically intersexed 
person.
On the topic of transgender, third gender or homosexuality in  skeletal remains 
-- I agree entirely with Joyce. My only further comment  is that we don't have 
any scientific report about the skeleton. From a  photograph it does not look 
like an obvious male to me. If there are DNA  results or a more systematic 
survey of features, we'll just have to  wait for them. Based only on skeletal 
features there is a substantial  chance of sex misassignment (a female skeleton 
that looks more male than  typical). From a Bayesian perspective, the chance of 
a misassignment is  higher than the chance that the burial is truly unique among 
known  Corded Ware burials. 

So, maybe gay but not clearly so, definitely not a caveman.  Absolutely bad 
science reporting. Bad, bad, bad. Miserably awful. No  links, no indication of 
affiliation of sources, no background  information. No photo (the Daily Mail, of 
all places, came up with a photo of the burial, while the Telegraph illustrates 
their web story with generic stock photo of African rock  art). No indication of 
whether the work is pre-publication or whether  there's a forthcoming paper. 
Yuck.

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