Posts tagged Palaeolithic
Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation
Dec 30th
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 found this on Fora.tv. Fora.tv is a bit like TED, but longer.
Prof Sander van der Leeuw at the Long Now FoundationChapter 6 has a easily overlooked problem. Why did things stay so similar during the Pleistocene? Change in the climate, and presumably the local environments, didn’t spur any significant change in tools. van der Leeuw pulls that problem apart by looking at the development of short term working memory and shows there’s actually a lot of really complex cognitive processes to look at if you want to understand the manufacture of Palaeolithic hand-axes.
Chapter 12 and 13 are also thought-provoking. I like the explanation that to be social you need someone to be social with. van der Leeuw’s analysis shows that you can’t have a lone city. A city requires a community of cities. I’m more wary of collapse models of societies. It’s definitely not a brain-dead model More >
If you put a snail shell to your ear can you hear the sound of your thoughts?
Dec 18th
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 one field and miss half of the potential audience. That’s a major drawback if you see publication as an iterative process with one paper building on another. An example is this paper, Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind’s Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene? by Teske et. al. in PLoS one. It’s a bit of clever work on the use of snail shells as ornaments in Middle and Late Stone Age Africa. I think there’s one or two problems with the conclusions, but it’s a valuable contribution to the study of human use of snail shells. That’s a much more important subject than it sounds, because these shells might be very important evidence about how your mind came together. (more…)
How Art Made The World – Revisited
Oct 23rd
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, so it’s good to have the opportunity to watch it again.
I had to flip back to my original comments, because I remembered feeling quite negative about it. Yet looking at that clip it seemed that Nigel Spivey was an engaging presenter. It is an interesting topic and a change from the chronological histories and disaster porn which make up a lot of is history television.
The other clips available online made it clear what I disliked about the programme. It was the disjointed connection between prehistory and history, which can be seen in the clip below. (more…)
Art in the eye of the Beholder?
Sep 10th
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, which is odd because regardless of the archaeology the site is beautiful.
The gorge was formed millions of years ago, but the archaeological interest comes from occupation during the Ice Age. There’s evidence of Neanderthal settlement around 40kyr from the tools found in several caves in the gorge. The people would have been following animals to the summer grazing grounds. These could have been long migrations as Great Britain was still connected to the European mainland. There is some slight evidence for modern humans around 29kyr or so. This came to a halt when the climate became colder. The polar ice cap grew down to within 20 miles to the north of the caves, which suggests the tundra in the area was barren.
Around 13kyr the climate eased enough for modern humans to return. The tools of the period made Creswell the type-site for an Upper Palaeolithic culture. More >
Earliest Occupation of Britain Earlier than Previously Thought
Dec 14th
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 thrust of the argument was that 680,000 was a Very Big Number, which made the otherwise dull looking blades Very Old Things. Fortunately there are more interesting things to say than that.
The finds at Pakefield aren’t simply old, they also are a lot further north than other known occupations of the same time. We know of populations of Homo Antecessor living in Spain. The date of these finds would suggest that Homo Antecessor had a much wide range than previously thought. This means we may have to rethink our ideas of how intelligent earlier hominins were and what it takes to be able to colonise new territories.
It’s in the news at:
Update: and also now the BBC with some nice maps. No doubt many more will appear shortly.
Mexican Footprints II
Dec 2nd
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 footprints is proving to be a problem. This week in Nature the footprints are the subject of a Brief Communication Geochronology: Age of Mexican ash with alleged ‘footprints’. I’ve added two recent press release from Berkeley and Texas A&M on re-dating the prints. They tackle quite a problem, how do you sample an absence of something to get a date?
I printed out the article, which was really clever as I don’t have access to it from home. However I’ve just discovered I left it on the printer, which is really stupid. I’ll try and reconstruct the argument as best I can. (more…)
Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought
Dec 2nd
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 Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the United States and Mexico. (more…)
Texas A&M anthropologist studies ancient human footprints
Dec 2nd
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 ago.
But whether humans really made the marks found in the rocks in Mexico is controversial, says Michael R. Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans and an anthropology and geography professor at Texas A&M. (more…)
Neanderthals more like Modern Humans than we thought?
Sep 20th
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 are markings in teeth that show how the tooth grew, a bit like rings in tree trunks.
Previous work suggested that Neanderthals grew up to 15% faster than modern humans. Thus they reached maturity faster and this meant less time was necessary for guiding them to maturity. This is a handy thing, as evidence of age of death suggests that a Neanderthal was doing well to reach thirty. In addition they were martyrs to arthritis, so it would be an advantage to have rapidly growing children.
However Debra Guatelli-Steinberg, an anthropology professor, at Ohio State has gone back and examined what yardstick was used to measure the Neanderthal growth against. Teaming up with academics from other universities she’s examined teeth from a wide variety of modern people and found that Neanderthal growth actually falls within a comparable range.
This is potentially very exciting. If Neanderthal children did take a More >
Is the Secret of Britney Spears Success Hidden in the Locomotion?
Aug 8th
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 make sense to call Britney Spears lucky.
Confused by the Britney Spears Pictures?
