A pre-Clovis tradition from the Gault site, Texas
The Gault site, on Buttermilk Creek near Austin, Texas, is one of the most significant early American archaeological sites. The whole site covers an enormous...
All posts tagged with America
Quote: Looking back at Clovis-first
This is a nice paragraph from Waters and Stafford (2013) on the Clovis-first paradigm for initial habitation of the Americas:
Link: A deep dive into Cahokia
Annalee Newitz has a detailed and fascinating story in Ars Technica about the Cahokia site, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis: “Fi...
Notable: New World tuberculosis came from seals
Notable paper: Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., … & Krause, J. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes rev...
A look at early South American sites
Nature last week carried a great article by Barbara Fraser about the growing research into the earliest peoples of South America: “The first South Americans:...
Clovis gomphotheres
Guadalupe Sanchez and colleagues reported earlier this month that Clovis artifacts have been found in association with parts of two gomphothere skeletons in ...
Ghost populations and ancient DNA
The rapidly changing field of ancient DNA has settled into a kind of normal science, as several teams of researchers have coalesced around a set of approache...
Of Jamestown and Neandertals
About why cannibalism is a widespread human behavior in times of stress, new evidence emerges from a trash pit at Colonial Jamestown: “Evidence of Cannibalis...
Coprolite microbial ecology
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
Mailbag: Boas and "unconventional models" of American prehistory
Re: Solutrean publicity blitz:
Aleut origins and relationships
Michael Balter last week had a news article in Science reviewing archaeological and genetic research into the origins and relationships of Aleut populations ...
Dusk monkeys
Donald Prothero on Skepticblog gives a history of one of the exceptional finds in the history of North American paleoanthropology: “A tooth, a myth, and crea...
Mailbag: Denisovan in China and New World habitation
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?”
A story behind Manis
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed to new research dating a mastodon kill site from Manis, Washington, to around 13,800 years ago (“Bone of the victim mastodon...
Potato sack race
Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, “How the Potato Changed the World”, focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Eur...
Watch who you call "extinct"!
Sometimes people wonder why human genetics projects should bother to involve anthropologists.
Bone of the victim mastodon
Michael Waters and colleagues Waters:Manis:2011 report on the date of a mastodon kill site from Manis, Washington. At 13,800 years old, it’s not the earliest...
"First Americans" article
Scientific American’s November issue has a cover story on the peopling of the Americas, by Heather Pringle, and it has gone online for free: (UPDATE 2006-10-...
Charles Mann interview
Razib Khan posts an interview with author Charles C. Mann, whose new book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created is an account of the social and eco...
"I would run screaming away"
This is such an incredible story about the “Clovis comet” hypothesis, I don’t know where to start: “Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth”.
Quote: Adovasio on Clovis
In John Noble Wilford’s article about the new pre-Clovis archaeological site, Buttermilk Creek, Texas, James Adovasio gets the last word about advocates of t...
Early New World archaeology news
The initial habitation of the Americas has gotten a lot of press attention in the last couple of weeks.
Quote: Boyd on New World pigmentation clines
I’m using some statistics out of William Boyd’s 1956 printing of Genetics and the Races of ManBoyd:1956. It gives a good accounting of blood group data known...
Amazon structures
More evidence of dense Precolumbian habitation of the Amazon basin:
The Younger Dryas impact fizzle?
In 2007, R. B. Firestone and colleagues published evidence of an extraterrestrial impact, roughly coincident with the onset of the cold climate event known a...
Double the migrations, double the fun
Several news stories have reported on an article by Ugo Perego and colleagues, titled “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two ...
Columbus, smallpox and global cooling
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
Original landscape of American East
This New Scientist story is from January, but it’s interesting – streams and rivers across the eastern US were much more extensively terraformed by damming t...
Underwater search for early Americans
James Adovasio is going looking for underwater early American sites off Florida, according to this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Aardvarchaeology reviews "Journey to 10,000 BC"
Martin Rundqvist reviews the History Channel documentary, “Journey to 10,000 BC.” The doc focuses on “Clovis-era North American archaeology and paleontology.”
Paisley Caves Jenkins interview
On Monday’s “NewsHour”, PBS ran an interview with archaeologist Dennis Jenkins, who worked on the Paisley Caves human-DNA-containing scat.
Chaw joins poop in archaeology arsenal
Well, archaeology is set to receive a once-in-a-generation influx of interest from teenagers drawn to the allure of the past. I mean, from the new Indiana J...
Taking the "re" out of repatriation
Writer Rachel D'Oro of the Associated Press reports on the repatriation of human remains from On Your Knees Cave, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska:
Pig extinctions in Polynesia
I happened across an interesting article from last year by Christina Giovas that looks at pigs in Polynesia. People carried pigs with them to most of the is...
Nobody but us chickens
Chickens were brought to South America in Precolumbian times by Polynesians.
Indigenous peoples and the Genographic Project
New York Times science writer Amy Harmon has penned an article about the trials of the Genographic Project. The piece focuses on opposition from indigenous ...
Registering for the meetings
Hmm... How will I explain this charge to Gretchen?
Make it work!
RPM points to a really clever editorial by Michele Pagano in Cell, titled "American Idol and NIH Grant Review." I'm going to quote the same part, because it...
Prostate risk allele differs in Europeans and Africans
Thanks to an enterprising student, I have an AP story about the discovery of a risk allele for prostate cancer that has different frequencies in different g...
New news in New World settlement
Afarensis has a post on Brazilian evidence relating to the origins of Native Americans (via Gene Expression). It's a good summary of recent work by Neves an...
Your leaf-point or your life!
A whole story on Dennis Stanford's theory (the one where Clovis points in North America are made by the descendants of Solutrean people from Europe who cros...
Mexican footprint media
The BBC reports on a BBC program covering Silvia Gonzalez and the Cerro Toluquilla "footprints". (I have a roundup of stories from the initial announcement....
Mitochondrial ancestry of African Americans
Antonio Salas and colleagues have a paper in the October American Journal of Human Genetics concerning the mtDNA affinities of African Americans within toda...
Pleistocene Park, USA
Should we return proboscids, lions and other megafauna to North America's Great Plains? Nature is running this commentary (subscription required) by Josh Do...
Oldest New World ancient DNA
Nature is running a short piece (subscription required) on work by Brian Kemp (UC Davis) sequencing DNA from a 10,000-year-old mandible from Prince of Wale...
Footprints of migration into the Americas
The story is all over the web, as confirmed by Google and Technorati searches, but few details are available. The best story I've seen yet is at Nature news...
Number of New World founders
Jody Hey (Rutgers) has a paper in the current (vol 3, no 6) PLoS Biology providing estimates of the number of founders of the initial New World human popula...