Kenneth Collerson and Marshall Weisler the University of Queensland, Australia have been studying 19 2,000 year old adzes which were excavated in the 1930’s from coral atolls in the Tuamotus, in the Pacific. Adzes are type of stone tool that function like a pick and resemble an axe. Their research, “Stone Adze Compositions and the [...]
The 24th edition of this blog carnival is now up and running, and with well over a dozen articles contributed by a similar number of people, there’s a very good mix of material covering a wide variety of topics, so head on over to Paddy K’s, and check it out for yourself.
As I mentioned earlier [...]
A new Nature study will report on the earliest known evidence of rice paddies in China. We’re talking almost 8,000 years ago.
Cheng Zong of Durham University lead the excavation at the Kuahuqiao site in the Zhejiang province. After analyzing sediments of ancient swamp beds at the site the team found signs that the dirt was [...]
The next edition of Four Stone Hearth is due out this Wednesday, courtesy of Paddy K’s Swedish Extravaganza, so there’s still time to get those submissions in, if you haven’t already done so.
The following 4SH will be the 25th, and as far as I can tell, this is, despite a slight calendrical discrepancy, being treated [...]
I’ve done so much flip flopping on whether or not Homo floresiensis is in fact a new species of human over the last 3 years that I sometimes forget what opinion I currently hold. The only consistency in my debate has been the call for analysis of the other remains. It seems like I got [...]
Coming up in the September 2007 issue of PLoS Genetics will be a unique study that reports on using a new computer algorithm to help trace the genetic ancestry of thousands of individuals in minutes, without any prior knowledge of their background. I reported on how Ancestry.com will be providing DNA tests for sale last [...]
In preparation for today’s Nature paper on Dmanisi, yesterday I went over some of the hot Homo fossils that have come from Dmanisi. But I focused only on remains of the head. And of those remains, what I went over was a whole range of features, proportions, and sizes, that showed a lot of variation [...]
Tommorrow, Nature will be publishing a new study of the Dmanisi fossil specimens. In preparation, I’m gonna introduce you to the importance of the Dmanisi site, overview the human fossils that have come out of it, and the related debates.
Firstly, Dmanisi is a rich paleoanthropological and archaeological site in Georgia. Multiple lines of evidence date [...]
The University of California Press is holding their annual book sale. There are some awesome books offered for really cheap. The range of selection is pretty impressive as well, everything from anthropology to wine and viticulture. Here’s a round up of books I want to buy.
Frans de Waal’s “My Family Album: Thirty Years of Primate [...]
According to the the New York Times and National Geographic, there is an alarming report on the rate of extinction of languages,
“Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them never yet recorded—will likely disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge [...]
