Early Americans used Oregon's Paisley Caves for, among other things, a toilet. Little did they know that scientists would be picking through what they left behind.

The scientists extracted DNA from dried-up feces in the cave, known politely as "coprolites." And they've got something more — four projectile points, flaked from stone and presumably used for weapons. They're broken; their makers probably trashed them.

And the scientists now have reliable dates for all this stuff. Some of the coprolites appear to be 14,500 years old. They say it's the oldest direct evidence of people in America, because it's based on carbon dating of actual human "remains," the gold standard for dating ancient cultures.

And those stone points? They tell a new story, too. Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon says the shape of the points looks quite different from other stone points from around that time.

"It looks like you've got a separate group of people on the landscape, and these people are making different kinds of arrowheads or spear points," Jenkins says.

The stone points from Paisley Caves are called "western stemmed." Jenkins says they appear to be as old or older than Clovis points, which were thought to be the first in the Americas.

Archaeologist David Meltzer at Southern Methodist University says finding a different group with a different technology is surprising. But the next question is: Who came first? The Western Stem people or the Clovis? Were they related?

"We have contemporaneous groups," Meltzer says. "They are doing different stylistic things on the landscape. What is the relationship? Dunno."

Writing in the journal Science, Jenkins and his group suggest that whether the two groups were genetically related or not, one probably moved to the interior of the continent and used the Clovis technology. And the other stayed in the west and developed its own tool kit, as well as the continent's oldest known toilet.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

 
Greater Boston has partnered with the Boston Globe to bring you a weekly feature called "From the Archives." Each Wednesday on Greater Boston, we will show one to two photos from the newspaper's archives. This weekly feature offers a glimpse into Boston's past.
 
This week, we look at … a key transportation artery.

In 1934, the Sumner Tunnel opened beneath the harbor, connecting East Boston and eventually Logan International Airport to the rest of the city. In this photo, automobiles enter the Sumner on April 24, 1958. Almost exactly a year after this picture was taken, on April 30, 1959, more than 1,000 people attended a groundbreaking ceremony for construction of a second tunnel to run parallel to the then–25-year-old Sumner. The Lieutenant William F. Callahan Tunnel opened on Nov. 11, 1961. And finally the third harbor tunnel, the Ted Williams Tunnel, opened in 2003, a substantial outcome of Boston’s Big Dig. 

The news of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s bankruptcy has struck me as especially relevant in looking at the journey of the Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra. SPO founder Yoshikazu Katoaka was correct in his theory that the first necessary component to building an orchestra was money; he believed that if he came up with the money, the musicians would come to him. He was right.

Thanks in large part to substantial financial assistance from donors such as Sendai department store owner Saburosuke Fujisaki (left), Kataoka managed to pay two players (first oboe and first clarinet, both of whom are still in the orchestra today) an official “salary” (Suzuki’s was the highest at 11,000 yen, just over $500!) for the 1978 season.

Once the assembled personnel started to resemble the skeletal structure of a professional orchestra, and word got out that salaries - however meager - were in the picture, performing invitations increased, as did public and private funding, higher quality players, and consequently the overall operational web of the orchestra. The story of the orchestra’s prodigious growth over just a couple decades involves a couple of key figures.

In addition to giving the orchestra its name in 1989, Yasushi Akutagawa brought the Sendai Phil a well-known conductor, Yuzo Toyama (right), who served the orchestra for fifteen years. Toyama in his prime was known as having some of the best ears of any Japanese conductor. Orchestra members reported that during his “golden years” (the 1990's) with the SPO, his rehearsals were both meticulous and efficient - a rare and precious combination of skills in an orchestra trainer.

The Toyama years saw the addition of a second night for each subscription concert, the execution of the standard audition procedures that involve the entire orchestra voting on the auditioner, the experimentation with open rehearsals (250 people showed up for the first open rehearsal in September 2003), and the commencement of lasting gems such as the Sendai Youth Orchestra and the Sendai International Music Competition. Toyama conducted the orchestra on its first and only international concert tour to Austria and Italy in 2000. His tenure also spanned the orchestra’s most dire period of financial struggle after Japan’s economic collapse in the early nineties, and the tragically short-lived plan to build the SPO its very own hall.

The completion of Sendai’s Youth Culture Center (YCC) in 1990 was one of the most important pivotal points in the orchestra’s history, although this hall was not originally built solely for the SPO. It was intended as a venue for school band concerts, competitions, theater productions, and the like. Even though the stage of the 804-seat concert hall is on the small side and limits programming to some degree, the players reveled in the luxury of rehearsing and performing in the same space.

Schools could now come to the YCC, enabling more frequent educational concerts. Undeterred by limited parking space and inconvenient transportation options to and from the hall, SPO used the space so often that the city started receiving complaints that the Center was not serving its original purpose. Perhaps this served as the catalyst for Mayor Toru Ishii’s plan to build a hall devoted specifically to the performing, research, and outreach activities of Sendai’s own professional orchestra.

Ishii, mayor of Sendai from 1984 to 1993, was famous for his love of classical music and his tremendous support of the arts. He rarely missed a Sendai Phil concert and would often accompany the orchestra on the bullet train to attend their concerts in Tokyo or Osaka. While he was in office, he secured an arrangement for half of the orchestra’s budget to come from the city of Sendai, thus making SPO members, in a sense, city employees.

Ishii ’s arrest and resignation from office as a result of a bid-rigging scandal was one of the most devastating points in Sendai Phil history. When Ishii left office, the plot for the projected Sendai Music Hall had been bought and the land leveled. The plans were far enough along that concertmaster Yumiko Shibuya had seen drawings and was familiar with the smallest details, down to the size of lockers and the location of electrical outlets underneath the stage (to enable microphones or Don Quixote wind machines).

Ishii’s hall was never completed and the Sendai Phil still uses Asahigaoka’s Youth Culture Center as its home hall. The bad news was that the dreams of many musicians and audience members for a Berlin or New York-style “night at the Symphony” environment would not be realized. The good news, perhaps, was that there was money left over for projects like the Sendai International Music Competition, which has probably brought much more world-wide focus on Sendai than a new orchestra hall might have.

In hindsight, I wonder if and how the hall, had it been completed, would have survived the quake and tsunami of March 11th, as the projected space for it was not in downtown Sendai but rather closer to Wakabayashi-Ward where much was recently washed away.

- Maureen Murchie

Next time:  an update on current conditions in Sendai and its orchestra

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Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan exhibited an all-inclusive welcoming of Western influences in the areas of medicine, military, and government. Some have suggested that this type of complete, “blanket” approach in order to achieve true healing stems from the Shinto tradition. In short, since Japan hoped to achieve the type of multi-faceted success that they perceived in the operations of Western countries, they decided that indiscriminately taking in any and all Western influences was the best place to start.

In true Japanese fashion, i.e. in a society united in the values of patience, perseverance, and productivity, the attempts to incorporate Western music were highly successful—so much so, in fact, that in modern-day Japan, a work by a Japanese composer on an orchestra concert is somewhat of a novelty item, and concerts involving traditional Japanese instruments are even more rare.

Less than 50 years after the 1926 founding of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony (Japan’s first professional orchestra), another orchestra was founded in Sendai, the largest city in Japan’s northeastern (Tohoku) region and the capital of Miyagi prefecture. In 1973, Sendai’s rather bleak musical scene consisted of a mere handful of concerts each month by local musicians.

Despite Sendai’s relatively close (226 miles/365 kilometers) proximity to Tokyo, few performers were interested in leaving the bustling city life of Tokyo to come play concerts in the “boonies” of Tohoku. The orchestra began as the Miyagi Philharmonic Orchestra, founded by Yoshikazu Kataoka (left), a Sendai native who had returned home after several years of schooling in Buddhism and music composition. (His actual home is a 300+ year-old temple near Sendai Station where I had the pleasure of visiting him for an interview in 2005.) Kataoka held a personal philosophy that the four criteria for a healthy major city were a subway, a professional baseball franchise, a sumo pavilion, and an orchestra. The orchestra would be his project.

Kataoka’s early partners in this endeavor included a couple of members of the Sendai Broadcast Orchestra (a pseudo-brass band that collaborated with university string players and choirs for sporadic performances of well-known works like Handel’s Messiah) and a pianist friend and colleague at Sendai’s Tokiwagi High School.

For the first subscription concert in October 1974, Kataoka hired a few ringers to fill out the orchestra, but most of the string players were local students or amateurs, some of whom reportedly even had trouble reading music. Violinist Katsuyuki Senoue (left, with his family) was kind enough to share with me many detailed and often humorous anecdotes from the orchestra’s early years, including an account of one concert during which he used his bow to wake up a sleeping stand partner.

During the early years, Kataoka struggled to find players, instruments, and performing engagements. Many of the gigs were school concerts which still make up a significant portion of the orchestra’s performing schedule today. Though he was far from unsuccessful in his rather mind-boggling role as recruiter, manager, composer/arranger, fundraiser, and conductor, Kataoka was savvy enough to realize his own limitations and eventually enlisted other conductors to take the orchestra to greater heights.

Hoichi Fukumura ruled the podium for a couple years as a strict disciplinarian who, while not well-liked by many of the orchestra players, still managed to help the orchestra take a large leap toward professional status by demanding higher quality playing, programming more difficult repertoire, and implementing official auditions. As one might expect, the orchestra’s growing pains included an increasing chasm between disgruntled amateurs who were there to have fun and the more serious players who wanted to strive for professional quality.

Of the early conductors, Yasushi Akutagawa (right), made the deepest and most lasting imprint on the orchestra’s history. Akutagawa was the son of the well-known author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose short stories are still studied in Japanese classrooms today. (I remember that "The Spider’s Thread" left an impression on me in elementary school, but Western audiences may be more familiar with "Rashomon," thanks to the 1950 Kurosawa film adaptation.)

Alongside Kataoka, Yasushi Akutagawa had the vision and creativity that the orchestra needed in order to grow. He possessed not only the musical skills and integrity that made him respected by the musicians, but also the charisma, connections, and public presence that made him loved by audiences and thus invaluable as a fundraiser. Kataoka could hardly have picked a better leader for the young, burgeoning orchestra.

Akutagawa is also the one who proposed changing the orchestra’s name to the Sendai Philharmonic in 1989. The Sendai Phil’s Tokyo debut concert in 1991 was Akutagawa’s brainchild but it also turned out to be his memorial concert.

Akutagawa insisted that the orchestra would be most successful if it kept its roots local but its “face” turned outward, for “that is how the world will know Sendai.” I am reminded of Akutagawa’s wise and prescient advice when I see recent scenes of Sendai Phil members, offering the healing power of music for earthquake victims (left;  photo credit: AP).

For indeed, even in the face of devastating loss, destruction, and fear for what lies ahead, the orchestra remains strongly rooted at home but also facing outward to offer people hope and consolation through music. I believe Akutagawa-sensei would be proud.

- Maureen Murchie

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Sendai, Japan is my hometown.

Though I was born in Newark, New Jersey, to American parents, we moved to Japan when I was nine years old. I attended Japanese schools from fifth grade all the way through high school and was the only non-Japanese student in my graduating class of 300 girls. Thanks to my height and my blonde hair, I always stood out in the crowd. The home video of my high school graduation shows one “yellow sun” (as the Japanese often described the back of my head) amidst the broad, dark sea of our navy uniforms and the black hair of all my colleagues.

As I was growing up, I studied violin with the concertmaster of the Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra, Yumiko Shibuya (that's her in the center of the photo at left, with my sister on the left and myself on the right), and I attended many a Sendai Phil concert with my father, who is also a violinist. My parents still live and work in Sendai, their home for over 25 years.
 
It is no secret that the Japanese today love classical music. The history of Western music in general and the role of a western-style symphony orchestra in Japan is a complex issue and one that has been dealt with extensively by other historians. It involves some key events such as a battle in 1862 when Japanese soldiers, freshly defeated by the British, first heard the strains of triumphant Western military music and decided that perhaps the music was one key to military success.

Shortly thereafter came the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan opened itself up to foreign influences after a couple centuries of strict, isolationist “foreign policies.” The story of Western music in Japan has a strong connection to Boston, through some key figures such as Shuji Isawa (below), a Japanese exchange student in Boston, and Luther Whiting Mason, a Boston schoolteacher who traveled to Japan and wrote Japanese children’s songs that incorporated those strange, exotic tonic and dominant chords.
 
Fast-forward a couple hundred years and you will find city firemen playing annual summer concerts in parks all over Japan. You will witness a strong commitment to fine arts and music education in Japanese public schools, where elementary school children sing pieces in two and three part harmony at the beginning and end of every school day. You may be surprised to learn that Tokyo has more symphony orchestras than any city in the world. You might hear arpeggios and trills as part of the “next-station” announcement on the bullet trains.

In Japan, music is treated as a necessity, not a mere cultural nicety that all too often becomes the first victim of the budgetary scalpel. Perhaps this view of music is not unrelated to the touching, organized civility of Japan that seems to shine through, penetrating even the horrors of natural disasters and the opaque labyrinth of international media.

Following the events on and since the March 11th disasters, Sendai and its recovery have remained a constant presence for me.  The tragedy there is unimaginable in a way, but I hope this short snapshot brings you a closer connection to the people there, the struggle they're enduring, and the hope that classical music brings them.  I am truly grateful to James David Jacobs and WGBH for the opportunity to share my experiences with you.

I'll have more next week about one of Sendai's cultural jewels, the Sendai Philharmonic, whose 40-year history was the topic of my recently completed doctoral dissertation.

And in the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy hearing the orchestra on Sunday mornings during May.

- Maureen Murchie

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The program examines an intriguing theory that long-distance running–our ability to jog–was crucial for the survival of these early hominids. Not only did running help them escape from vicious predators roaming the grasslands, but it also gave them a unique hunting strategy: chasing down prey animals such as deer and antelope to the point of exhaustion. "Birth of Humanity" also probes how, why, and when humans' uniquely long period of childhood and parenting began.

The other programs in the series are Part 1: "First Steps," which looks at how, for millions of years, many species of small-brained human predecessors lived, and Part 3: "Last Human Standing," which examines why, of various human species that once shared the planet, only our kind remains.