Recent Posts
- Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation
A couple of years ago I came across the Long Now Foundation on the web. I was planning to blog on it, particularly some of the bets, but haven’t so far. If there’s one subject which shouldn’t be affected by a delay of a few years it’s the Long Now Foundation. I remembered, because I [...]
- If you put a snail shell to your ear can you hear the sound of your thoughts?
You’ll be seeing a lot of this button around the web today as it’s part of the celebrations for PLoS @ Two. It’s certainly something worth celebrating as PLoSOne is bringing a lot of good science to a wide audience. That’s particularly important with interdisciplinary papers because it’s very easy to publish them in just [...]
- How Art Made The World – Revisited
While looking for something else I found this snippet from How Art Made the World. It deals with the exaggerated features of the Ice Age Venuses. Yes they’re unrealistic images of women, but why do they look unrealistic? The answer might be found in the actions of gulls. This segment filled me with ambiguous feelings, [...]
- Art in the eye of the Beholder?
It’s a deer. This is the most easily seen of the carvings.
I went up to Creswell Crags on the bank holiday weekend to see the Ice Age art which had recently been discovered. As a trip I can highly recommend it. Even though it was a Bank Holiday weekend, there weren’t that many people there, [...] - Earliest Occupation of Britain Earlier than Previously Thought
Nature tomorrow will feature a paper describing the oldest artefacts found in the British Isles. The thirty-two blades would be pretty dull by themselves, but they’ve been dated with what sounds like a reasonable degree of success to around 680,000 years ago. I have to admit I found ITV’s news coverage a bit poor. The [...]
- Mexican Footprints II
I know I’ve had some sleep recently because last night I dreamt I was in a sleep-deprivation experiment, but I haven’t had much. Therefore you should also visit the other sites listed at the end for more intelligent comment.
A foot and an ancient footprint. Photo from the Mexican Footprints media section.
The dating of the Mexican [...] - Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought
Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old – more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere – or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature.
The study was conducted by geologists at the [...] - Texas A&M anthropologist studies ancient human footprints
An article published in the prestigious science journal Nature and co-authored by a Texas A&M University researcher places the age of rocks found in Mexico containing possible human footprints at over 1.3 million years. The generally accepted date for the arrival of humans in North America, across a northern land-bridge from Asia, is 11,000 years [...]
- Neanderthals more like Modern Humans than we thought?
There’s an interesting press release below the fold. Examination of Neanderthal teeth suggests that their childhood phase was a lot longer than previously thought. It is currently thought that Neanderthal children grew up a lot faster than their modern counterparts. A big bit of the evidence in favour of this is examination of perikymata. These [...]
- Is the Secret of Britney Spears Success Hidden in the Locomotion?
Photo from Sita
Britney Spears is well-known as an artiste of unmatched calibre, but how did this singing and dancing sensation become such a success? Recent research by archaeologists suggests it could be due to a very distant grandmother, Lucy, an Australopithecus Afarensis. By being decended from her, or a creature very like her it would [...]
- Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation
