Beyond bones & stones
Human language is thought to emerge around 100,000 years ago as an abstract symbolic system. It is very likely that humans spoke long before it they wrote. Because the nature of language is largely spoken, it has been hard to find physical evidence of when and how humans began speaking... Some argue early evidence of... Continue Reading →
In two new studies, published yesterday in Science and Science Advances, researchers Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, João Zilhão, a University of Barcelona archaeologist and Dirk Hoffmann, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who specializes in dating minerals lay out the case that 65,000 year old murals and 115,000 year old... Continue Reading →
LiDAR is a technology we outlined earlier this month in identifying Mayan ruins. It is the same technology used in self driving cars. It has applications in archaeology because it can scan geography much faster than humans can. For example, when Purépecha Empire's Angamuco city in Mexico was excavated the old-fashioned way a decade ago, it... Continue Reading →
Per Linguistic Society of America’s latest count, there are about 7,000 distinct human languages on Earth, with more becoming extinct everyday. In an effort to preserve as much cultural knowledge of our world's linguistic heritage, there are many efforts to document endangered languages, like DoBES' Tongues of Semang project. The Tongues of Semang project aims to specifically... Continue Reading →
In an article recently published in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Richard Coss, a professor emeritus of psychology, questions why there isn't Neanderthal art in the archaeological record. He seems to skip the obvious, i.e. that is it hasn't been found yet, and jumps to the conclusion that Homo sapiens has superior hand... Continue Reading →
PNAS published a new paper documenting Neanderthals wielded fire to shape wooden tools as early as 171,000 years ago. The tools, or digging sticks, are still in use today. They are useful for digging up roots and tubers. They are also useful in hunting animals in burrows or pounding and grinding herbs. They way they... Continue Reading →
What happens when you get a archaeologist, an ecologist, and a paleontologist to in the same room to look at old data with a new lens? You get, "Productivity, biodiversity, and pathogens influence the global hunter-gatherer population density," published in PNAS, where the influence of environmental conditions on the abundance of pre-industrial humans is investigated.... Continue Reading →
New research published in South African Journal of Science offers a continuation of the debate that 'Mrs Ples,' the 2.5 million year old Australopithecus africanus skull found in the Sterkfontein Caves in 1947, by paleontologist Dr. Robert Broom and his assistant, John Robinson, is actually a male. Soon after the two made their landmark discovery, Broom... Continue Reading →
After mapping over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten, Guatemala more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other undiscovered hidden features have been identified using LiDAR technology. LiDAR allows one to remove the canopy from images to identify underlying structures. These discoveries were lead by Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist, as... Continue Reading →
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