A quick heads-up to anyone planning to be in vicinity of Santander, Cantabria this autumn, where a very interesting conference, MESO 2010, (programme) is due to be held this coming September 13th-17th, plus post-Conference excursions the following weekend, September 18th and 19th, in addition to the field trip slated for Wednesday 15th. I would strongly [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Content Type’
January 21, 2010
MESO 2010 – The Eighth International Conference on the Mesolithic in Europe, Santander, Spain
January 21, 2010
Current Anthropology – Volume 51, Number 1, Feb 2010 – Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies Edition
The latest edition of Current Anthropology has just been published, and included within is a special section referred to in the headline above – I haven’t had time to read it yet, so for now here’s a table of contents and a snippet from the introduction by editor Mark Aldenderfer, commenting on the themed papers, [...]
January 20, 2010
Going Agricultural – Farming Notes, Past, Present and Future
This is a quick note to point readers in the direction of several posts that have appeared online in recent days, on the origins and spread of agriculture, and the part language may have played in the process, in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Although I’ve recently concentrated on writing about our Palaeolithic origins, if [...]
January 20, 2010
The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior – Mcbrearty & Brooks, 1999
I’ve recently commented on the PBS documentary series opener of The Human Spark – Becoming Us, the majority of which struck me as being out of date and out of touch, with far too much emphasis being placed on looking for specious differences between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals co-habiting in Late Middle – Early [...]
January 19, 2010
Palaeolithic Radiocarbon Legerdemain, and Radiocarbon Dating Upgraded
A Very Remote Period Indeed: Paleolithic radiocarbon legerdemain Science Now: Radiocarbon Daters Tune Up Their Time Machine Two articles of note on the subject of carbon dating have appeared over the past week, the first of which looks at the way in which in which some online writers – myself included, I’m afraid – don’t [...]
January 14, 2010
SHARE Opens Fund for Haiti Quake – Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have just announced the following, regarding the catastrophic earthquake that has wrought untold devastation on the population of Haiti, where tens of thousands are estimated to have died, with another 3 million people said to be adversely affected. The Center for Inquiry is accepting disaster-relief donations through its S.H.A.R.E. program [...]
January 14, 2010
Chimpanzee and Human Y Chromosomes Are Remarkably Divergent in Structure and Gene Content – Nature Letters
Here’s the abstract of some news which John Hawks describes as “really, really weird”: The human Y chromosome began to evolve from an autosome hundreds of millions of years ago, acquiring a sex-determining function and undergoing a series of inversions that suppressed crossing over with the X chromosome1, 2. Little is known about the recent [...]
January 13, 2010
Four Stone Hearth #84 at A Primate of Modern Aspect
Previously on 4SH… The Avatar Edition, aka number 83, was published by Eric Michael Johnson, on December 30, 2009, at 8:00 AM. Although I’ve thus far omitted to post something on this edition, I’ll add a brief word here. The first few posts deal with James Cameron’s latest project to hit the cinemas in the [...]
January 11, 2010
Significant Breakthrough in Ankylosing Spondylitis Genome-wide Research
Science Daily report on recent and ground-breaking research announced in a letter to Nature Genetics by Drs. John D. Reveille and Matthew A. Brown et al that has identified two genes that are now believed to play a significant role in ankylosing spondylitis. AS is an inflammatory condition of the spine and joints, one that [...]
January 10, 2010
Mousterian Spears, Modern Projectiles and Shanidar III
In keeping with these wintry conditions, there’s a veritable avalanche of news concerning the late lamented Neanderthals this past week, including spears, teeth and decorated marine shells, with much of the debate concentrating, as ever, on the physical and behavioural differences between the Neanderthal archaic humans and the subsequent anatomically modern humans (AMH) with whom [...]
