A Very Remote Period Indeed

Videos as visual aids in presenting experimental archaeology

2012-02-02T23:46:00.002-07:00

For reasons that should become clear fairly soon, I've had experimental archaeology videos on my mind lately. In many cases, actually seeing segments of an experimental study play out can convey so much more of the experience itself than summary tables and graphs, which really take the human element out and often don't do justice to some of the phenomena observed as they unfold. I saw a couple

Is Academia.edu decreasing scholarly communication?

2012-02-01T17:44:00.000-07:00

I love Academia.edu - I think it's a fantastic way for papers to reach the broadest possible audience, and it's made me aware of many studies I wouldn't have otherwise heard of. While I'm not necessarily the best Academia citizen myself (I really should start following some people), it's really been a tremendous help in tracking down some papers published in obscure sources that might have

Quote of the day: Matt Cartmill on evolutionary laws

2012-01-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

From the inimitable Matt Cartmill: "The trick in discovering evolutionary laws is the same as it is in discovering laws of physics or chemistry-namely, finding the right level of generalization to make prediction possible. We do not try to find a law that says when and where explosions will occur. We content ourselves with saying that certain sorts of compounds are explosive under the right

Archaeology and pepper spray

2011-11-21T01:17:00.001-07:00

Pepper spray has been in the news for all the wrong reasons these past few days, after being used unnecessarily on UC Davis students protesting tuition hikes and income inequality. Several professors have already bravely denounced this chilling excessive violence by police, and Rosemary Joyce (a Berkeley archaeologist) gives us a bit of context on the long history of how chili by-products have

Write, and write right!

2011-09-26T01:57:00.001-06:00

This piece from a couple of years ago and entitled "Righting your writing" has been making the rounds in my FB network. It provides a pretty good series of tip/strategies for scientists to write more clearly. One that stood out to me was the one about developing daily writing habits Write daily for 15 to 30 minutes During your daily writing sessions, don’t think about your final manuscript.

Neanderthals shellfishing 150,000 years ago

2011-09-15T13:21:00.000-06:00

The news is out: the site of Bajondillo, in southern Spain, has yielded clear evidence of Neanderthals collecting and eating shellfish as far back as 150,000 years BP, and pretty much continuously, though at different intensities, after that. One obvious thing to point out: this is almost as old as the earliest evidence of modern humans collecting shellfish (Marean et al. 2007), and the way

A Mousterian wooden spade from Abric Romani, Spain

2011-09-14T00:04:00.000-06:00

A group of researchers from the IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social) reports on the discovery of a handheld wooden implement from Mousterian deposits at Abric Romaní, Spain. The tool was found in Level P which dates to about 56,000 years BP, and its morphology suggests that it might have been a small spade/shovel, or perhaps a poker, given its association to a hearth

Svante Pääbo lecture on his recent genetic work

2011-08-31T13:50:00.000-06:00

TED has a video up of Svante Pääbo discussing his (team's) recent research on the genetics of Late Pleistocene human populations. It's a good primer on the latest work on Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, and their implications for the relationship of these populations to early modern humans.

Multimillennial Neanderthal occupation at La Cotte de St. Brelade

2011-08-30T15:59:00.000-06:00

The BBC has a brief news story about some of the results of new excavations conducted at the site of La Cotte St. Brélade (Jersey, Channel Islands). The site is perhaps most famous for having yielded clear evidence for the systematic slaughter of mammoths and wooly rhinos by Neanderthals, which prompted a reevaluation of their hunting abilities (Scott 1980). That analysis, however, suggested that

170,000 year-old human skull fragment found at Lazaret

2011-08-25T17:30:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago (Aug. 13, to be precise), part of a hominin frontal skull fragment was found during excavations at Grotte du Lazaret, near Nice, France. The find was first reported in a series of French media outlets, but it wasn't removed until just a couple of days ago, after it was apparently given time to dry, as reported in the first English-language report I've seen about the find.

Hear, hear!

2011-08-25T14:19:00.000-06:00

There's a great op-ed piece by Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post, where he excoriates politicians that are ignorant of evolutionary theory and milk that fact for political gain. The best quote? "... a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where

Stay classy, Kellogg!

2011-08-23T21:47:00.000-06:00

In face-palm news for the day: The Maya Archaeology Initiative, a nonprofit that supports education for Guatemalan children, is challenging a claim by Kellogg’s, the maker of Froot Loops and other sugary breakfast products, that its use of a toucan image infringes on the cereal giant’s Toucan Sam character. I think this one doesn't even need any extra snark. I really hope

Back in Denver!

2011-08-19T16:11:00.000-06:00

I'm back from the field and getting ready for the new term which starts on Monday at UCD! I'm teaching Introduction to Archaeology (ANTH 1302) and Lithic Analysis (ANTH 4330/5330) this term. It should be an interesting semester - I'm moving into my new lab space, revamping Intro, and working on a bunch of different (and exciting!) projects, some of which I'll be discussing on this blog in the

The Arabian Middle Paleolithic and the southern route of human dispersal

2011-06-01T11:40:00.000-06:00

In a comment on my last post, Maju who's a regular commenter on this blog, pointed out that recent finds in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf suggest that modern humans might have been present in the Middle East by the time Shanidar 3 was killed. Some of the specific evidence in support of this that has come out in the past year include that presented by Armitage et al. (2011) and Rose (

Who really killed Shanidar 3?

2011-05-30T16:53:00.000-06:00

Fun with footnotes, today at AVRPI!! You'll remember that a couple of summers ago, a study by Churchill et al. (2009) tried to argue that the cut marks on a rib from the Shanidar 3 Neanderthal were the result of a wound inflicted by a modern human on that poor sap. Naturally, the science press had a field day with this, although several commentators argued that the evidence presented by Churchill

Feelgood Friday feature

2011-05-06T15:00:00.000-06:00

How's this for an inspirational story? A professor suffering from terminal cancer insisted on giving his current students their last lecture, even though he'd be hospitalized, so he did it via Skype, hospital gown, tubes and all. Hard not to be moved moved by Prof. Kielhorn's dedication to his students and his teaching. At 79, Kielhorn was just one class short of finishing 45 years of teaching

Scientists of the world, unite!

2011-05-06T00:02:00.000-06:00

Last week, I mentioned that scientists - in this case, specifically anthropologists - need to develop strategies to better control the narratives about their research that get circulated in popular media. To me, the need to do so is spurred by both the public interest in anthropological research as well as the need to make science relevant, interesting and exciting to a broader swath of society

The raw and the cooked, caveman redux

2011-05-04T22:59:00.000-06:00

A few months ago, Henry et al. (2011a) published a truly remarkable study that analyzed the phytoliths and starch grains that had gotten encrusted in the dental calculus (i.e., plaque) of three Neanderthal individuals, two from the site of Spy (Belgium), and another from the site of Shanidar (Iraq). Their study provided the first direct evidence that plant foods were an integral part of the

Osama bin Laden, sasquatch and human biogeography

2011-05-03T23:35:00.001-06:00

Science has a post on their website about a little study (Gillespie et al. 2009) that came out a couple of years ago that applied some Editor's Selection Iconkey biogeographical principles to provide a prediction of where Osama bin Laden might have been hiding. The paper was discussed in Scientific American when if first came out, but now has received a ton of attention because the authors'

Things to kill when you're original, affluent and social...

2011-05-02T17:31:00.002-06:00

I have to admit this made me laugh. © http://www.quickdraw.me/1169 So, it's kind of a silly comic, definitely good for a few chuckles. Yet, when you take a second to think about it, there's a lot packed into it. In two little panels, the cartoonist manages to bring up two of the biggest misconceptions about prheistoric hunter-gatherers: 1) that hunter-gatherers spend only a small amount of

Neanderthal use of coal

2011-05-01T00:30:00.000-06:00

A little while ago, someone contacted me asking if there was any evidence that Neanderthals had ever used coal. This is an interesting question, and one about which there is only little available information. In fact, there is almost no evidence of Neanderthals using coal, but the proof that does exist is very intriguing. The single instance comes from the Mousterian site of Les Canalettes,

Stone Age ≠ Caveman!!! Archaeology, science, the media, and some tangential thoughts on the 'gay caveman' story

2011-04-28T00:25:00.000-06:00

By now, you've surely heard all the media hoopla about the alleged 'gay caveman' found in the Czech Republic that's been all over the news and internet for the past few weeks. Ugh! Y'know, I just got done reading Ben Goldacre's fantastic book Bad Science in which he bemoans (and entertainingly skewers!) the way medical findings are consistently distorted in the media, where flashy headlines seem

New 'lion man' fragments from Hohlenstein-Stadel

2011-04-26T12:59:00.000-06:00

Neat Aurignacian art objects keep popping up in Germany! A few years ago, the Hohle Fels 'Venus' was recovered in deposits dating to more than 30kya (Conard 2009), and now we learn that renewed excavations in the Aurignacian levels of the nearby site of Hohlenstein-Stadel have yielded new fragments of what is perhaps the most iconic piece of Aurignacian portable art, the so-called Löwenmensch,

When it rains, it pours!

2011-04-19T17:49:00.000-06:00

Get ready for a veritable feast of anthropologically interesting talks in the greater Denver area on this coming Thursday, April 21: On the Auraria campus, where UC Denver is located, Dr. Biruté Galdikas (Orangutan Foundation) is giving a talk on her research on orangs at St. Cajetans (5:30-7:00PM). The event is free, but you need to register.If you can't make that talk, she'll also be lecturing

Back from the SAAs

2011-04-04T17:18:00.000-06:00

Pretty exhausted, thought I'm actually in better shape than I am after most meetings. Don't know how I feel about Sacramento, but the meetings themselves were pretty good. Blogistically, I was really bummed out not to be able to attend the Blogging Archaeology session which ran (of course) exactly at the same time as the session I was in. On the other hand, I did get to have a nice lunch with

The Combe Capelle burial is Holocene in age

2011-03-02T14:14:00.002-07:00

So says this Past Horizons report. This is fairly important in that it joins a bunch of other modern Homo sapiens remain long thought to have been associated with the Aurignacian to recently have been directly dated and shown to be much more recent (Churchill and Smith 2000). One recent and well publicized case was that of the Vogelherd remains, which were redated to between 3.9-5kya as opposed

Obsidian blades as surgical tools

2011-03-02T03:04:00.008-07:00

In my recent post on #hipsterscience, the quote that struck closest to home was the one about the obsidian blade. See, most of my analytical work has been focused on stone tools (aka lithics) and how they were manufactured, used and managed by people in the past. Whenever it was available, obsidian seems to have been one of the preferred materials to make sharp flakes of, mainly because it is

Anthropology meets #hipsterscience

2011-03-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

I never really got the big deal about Twitter (nor do I really get how hashtags work, to be perfectly honest), but Drug Monkey has a blog post compiling #hipsterscience tweets, and they're pretty damn funny! A couple are paleo/anthropological in nature, so I figured I'd share them here: drugmonkeyblog: You get a better shave with a blade you’ve freshly knapped from fair-trade, small producer

Maggie Koerth-Baker on better scientific communication

2011-02-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

I just got done watching a video of a recent talk by Maggie Koerth-Baker (science editor at Boing Boing) entitled "Six things scientists can learn from science journalists" which she recently gave at the University of Wisconsin. It's about an hour long, and I found it to be a really lucid overview of strategies scientists of all stripes should be using when talking about their research to the

Neanderthals and ornaments, birds of a feather?

2011-02-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

© Mauro Cutrona. M. Peresani and colleagues (2011) report on the discovery of cut-marked bird bones from the latest Mousterian levels at Grotta di Fumane, located in the Veneto region of NE Italy. They interpret the fact that these cutmarks are almost exclusively found on wing bones of only a subset of the 22 species of birds found at Fumane as evidence that Neanderthals there specifically

Front Range Neanderthal Workshop - UC Denver, Dec. 11

2010-12-08T23:55:00.000-07:00

In one of my last posts, I mentioned in passing that I'm hosting a workshop on the UC Denver campus this coming Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010. The event - the Front Range Neanderthal Workshop - is to be held in the historic Tivoli Building which currently serves as the student union on our campus (but used to house the Tivoli Brewing Company and still is the only place you can get a beer on campus

Café Scientifique postmortem

2010-12-08T23:52:00.000-07:00