Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, is announcing the discovery of a very old hominid footprint found in the Western Desert of Egypt, near Siwa.
BBC News broke this news to me, but Yahoo News is also covering it.
“This could go back about two million years,” antiquities council chief Zahi [...]
Entries from August 2007
August 21, 2007
A Three Million Year Old Hominid Footprint Found in Siwa, Egypt
August 20, 2007
Student Finds 5,000-Year-Old Chewing Gum
I love little archaeology news bits like the following, because such findings are like a time machine to me. They give us a window into how humans lived daily life back in the day.
The story starts off with Sarah Pickin, a student who was helping excavate a site called Kierikkikangas in Finland. While digging, she [...]
August 19, 2007
SciVee: YouTube for Science!
From Slashdot, is news of new upcoming science 2.0 hotness called SciVee. Think of it as YouTube for Science. It comes by way of a partnership between the National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.
This is such an awesome idea, and I hope it will revolutionize the way we [...]
August 18, 2007
Papua New Guineans are, “Sorry we ate your forefathers…”
Cannibalism is a pretty hot topic in three of the sub-disciplines of anthropology. Physical anthropologists and forensic ones love to find evidence of cannibalism in human and hominin remains. Why? Because it rocks our understanding of ‘normal’ human behavior. One example that comes to mind is White’s book about cannibalistic practices 1,000 years ago [...]
August 18, 2007
Mauricio Antón’s Paleonathropological Illustrations
Yesterday and today have been slow days as far as anthropology news.
But no worries, I’ve been scouring the internets for content and came across Mauricio Antón’s portfolio of paleontological illustrations. He’s drawn up some entertaining but run-of-the-mill representations of humans and their ancestors, such as these Ergasters on a hunt, this antecessor collage, and a [...]
August 16, 2007
Ultraselected & Ultraconserved Regions of the Human Genome
This Science paper just came out from my alma mater, UCSC, and it should be a very interesting read:
Human Genome Ultraconserved Elements Are Ultraselected
Ultraconserved elements in the human genome are defined as stretches of at least 200 base pairs of DNA that match identically with corresponding regions in the mouse and rat genomes. Most ultraconserved [...]
August 16, 2007
Spanish paint found on Egyptian mummy
By way of the Discovery Channel, I’ve got some cool Egyptology news to share with you. The Brooklyn Museum is planning to extensively analyze its collections of Egyptian mummies in the coming weeks. One of the first mummies they analyzed, known as Demetrios, died sometime around 94-100 AD, and is already revealing some interesting results. [...]
August 16, 2007
13,000 year old Mammoth engraving found in Cheddar caves
For those of us into prehistoric art, the University of Bristol is running a press release announcing a possible Palaeolithic engraving discovered at Cheddar Caves and Gorge by members of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society (UBSS).
The engraving, appears to be an outline drawing of a mammoth. The image on your right, is all I [...]
August 16, 2007
Four Stone Hearth #21
The most current issue of the Four Stone Hearth is up at Archaeolog, and I’ll be honest… I’m a little curious about what’s going on with our anthropology blogging carnival.
This current issue has six entries, five from the same blog, and I know there shoulda been at least one more post. I submitted an entry [...]
August 15, 2007
New York Times reviews Kenneally’s The First Word
Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, is actually no stranger to me. She has linked up Anthropology.net before, and ever seen then I’ve subscribed to her site’s RSS feeds.
When I caught news that the New York Times is running a book review of her new title, I [...]
