Associate Professor Tiina Manne. Credit: Supplied
Part 2 of a 4-part series on women in STEM.
If you see someone bagging a dead wallaby on a dirt road out in the Australian Bush – another roadkill victim – and if that person is wearing a sturdy, broad-brimmed Akubra and a colourful tee-shirt, it might be zooarcheologist Associate Professor Tiina Manne.
She’ll be picking up that ‘skippy’ for her reference collection – using the bones to work out what she has found in ancient cave deposits.
Although it seems a little bizarre, fieldwork can be like that to the uninitiated. Dirty, often smelly, but ultimately fascinating.
Bones have been a source of fascination to Manne for a very long time.
Home was St Lawrence, a small, dry, historic country town of around 240 souls, 186 km up the coast from Rockhampton, Queensland. Still a quiet little place in the bush with one main street.
St Lawrence was a formative place for Manne. Their place backed onto St Lawrence Creek – the large estuarine inlet to the north of town.
She and her dad would go kayaking there and often pull over to the bank to go for a walk. Once “my dad pointed a nest of an eagle and said, if we go to the base of it, we can find what it’s eaten. And I was like, what, really?”
“But, sure enough, there were these little bones under there. And that to me, for some reason, just totally got me. I was amazed that we could get these little fragments of bone and then tell the story of what this animal has been eating, but also what other animals were on the landscape that we wouldn’t see.”
“That’s kind of what started it.”
Between lessons she would sometimes collect dead fruit bats that had hit the powerlines outside her house.
“I would collect them and bury them and wait six months. I had a whole technique, and then I would exhume them again. And my mum kindly gave up a pot she wasn’t using so I would boil them and then try to put them together. And luckily, I became an archaeologist.”
Manne’s dad was squeamish, says Manne, but “he [once] found a rotting fox, and kayaked several hours to get it back to me, even though he was completely disgusted by it.”
At school, a.k.a. the kitchen table, Biology, Ancient History and English were her favourite subjects. Ancient Roman politics was boring, but she was enthralled by microscopic pond life, and well supported, from afar, by enthusiastic Biology and English teachers.
“I knew that I wanted to do something with skeletons and loved learning about animals and animal behaviour”, she says.
Rock shelter secrets revealed
After high school, Manne dove into a Bachelor of Science in archaeology, with a double major in archaeology and zoology, at James Cook University in Townsville.
Honours followed in 1998, supervised and mentored by archaeologist Associate Professor Peter Veth.
Her project explored animal remains from Noala Cave, a shallow rock shelter on Montebello Island, 50 km off the Pilbara Coast, Western Australia.
Manne worked on a faunal (animal) assemblage that had been excavated by Veth.Manne worked on a faunal (animal) assemblage that had been excavated by Veth. “It was very lucky that he had it, because I’ve had a wonderful relationship with Peter ever since. He’s been very supportive, and I still work with him today.”
Associate Professor Tiina Manne (second from the left) and collaborators excavating a new rock shelter in Cape Range in Western Australia as part of the Desert Project led by Professor Peter Veth (back right). At North Cape Range, the team is continuing the work on the Montebello Islands and Barrow Island to understand regional use of landscapes during the last 50,000 years. Credit: UQ
Radiocarbon dating revealed that most of the bones were 9,000 to 13,000 years old, with an early date of 30,000 years, she says.
Sea levels were about 120m lower back then, as the Pleistocene Ice Age (2.6 million – 11,700 years ago) had locked up most of the world’s water in ice.
This meant Montebello was joined to the mainland, and Australia, Tasmania and Papua New Guinea were connected forming the paleocontinent called ‘Sahul‘, until about 8,500 years ago. Sahul was about 30% larger than the individual landmasses today.
Bone fragments were identified with the help of Dr Ken Aplin at the Western Australian Museum.
Wallaroos, spectacled hair wallabies and bandicoots all came to life under their scrutiny. Surprisingly, she also found northern nail-tail wallabies which are found in much wetter parts of the country these days.
Manne was able to follow the change in shoreline through its effects on the fauna in the shelter.
The last ‘glacial maximum’, the time of the most ice during the Pleistocene Epoch, was about 20,000 years ago. That meant that the distance from the rock shelter to the shore would have been about 60km she says, reducing on both sides of that peak with changes in ice and thus sea level.
The bones in the shelter – the animals the people using the shelter were hunting or gathering – typically inland species, gradually began to include marine shells as the sea level rose and the coastline approached. Changes were rapid, she says, but people were still able to forage successfully.
She also found that they moved from Noala to nearby Haines Cave, possibly because the prevailing winds changed direction as the sea level rose, she says.
Manne achieved a first-class honours for that project. Research was clearly her niche. She’d felt like an imposter during undergrad, she told Cosmos.
“Maybe I can do this, maybe I do want to do a PhD”
Archaeologist abroad
So, she did, via a geology Masters on 512-million-year-old fossil sponges with Professor Hal Wanless at the University of Miami.
Then it was off to the University of Arizona (UA) for her PhD, supervised by Professor of Anthropology, Mary Stiner.
It had been a tough choice. She had been considering going back to Australia for the doctorate but says that would have limited her opportunities to work overseas afterwards.
This country’s fauna is so distinctive that getting work elsewhere would have meant a huge learning curve in bone identification, she says.
“If you specialise in Australia, you’ll have a really hard time convincing somebody outside of Australia that that you could do the work there.
“I really do believe that you need to see versions of you, in order to feel that, okay, maybe I can do this. And so having Mary as a mentor was, she was quite tough, but she, was really someone to aspire to.”
Manne’s PhD field site was a collapsed rock shelter in southwestern Portugal, in Vale de Boi, the ‘Valley of the oxen’. Home to humans (Homo sapiens) between 16,000 and 28,000 to 30,000 years ago during the Pleistocene ice age.
With perhaps some Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) at the base of the deposit, she says.
Associate Professor Tiina Manne looking through specimens on Mithaka country in western Queensland. Credit: UQ
The site was close to the coast, with sea levels probably no further than 5 to 10km at the lowest point, during the glacial maximum.
It was full of bones. She identified close to 22,000 fragments of mainly rabbit, red deer, horse and aurochs, an extinct giant wild ox from which modern-day cattle are probably descended.
What where the people doing that fragmented all these bones? Grease-rendering, perhaps? Making the most of the resource would have been essential.
She explored the ‘taphonomy’, which is “everything that happens to an animal, even sometimes before it dies, … to the point when you excavate it and bring it to the surface”.
“You look for traces on the bone to understand the history of it.”
She remembers vividly the day she found the cave lion’s toes. “I remember the moment when I realised what it was, and I actually got lightheaded. It’s amazing. So, we think that it they might have done that to create a skin, because often when you skin an animal, you leave the ends, the bones on there.
Strangely, the red deer she found had been either pregnant or newborn. “It’s unusual to think that you’re targeting a population of pregnant animals. I often wondered — is this like a ritual thing?” We’ll never know.
After her PhD graduation and a spell in California, Manne took up a lectureship in Archaeology at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland, in 2012.
It’s been quite a journey for the girl from St Lawrence. Now Associate Professor, her lab is thriving, her focus on motivations behind the initial colonisation of Northern Australia and New Guinea as those early people dealt with large-scale shifts in climate and environment
Bucking the stereotype comes naturally, she says. “It’s about visibility and also, being supportive when you’re in academia, trying to because there’s this sort of stereotype that meant women of the generation of my supervisor [Stiner] did it so tough.
“I think we’re becoming a bit more aware of ourselves. Trying to be encouraging of both male and female students. Of course, I have wonderful male students as well but just trying to make females feel like they have a place with us.”