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...
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...
This is a nice paragraph from Waters and Stafford (2013) on the Clovis-first paradigm for initial habitation of the Americas:
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 paper: Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., … & Krause, J. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes rev...
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:...
Guadalupe Sanchez and colleagues reported earlier this month that Clovis artifacts have been found in association with parts of two gomphothere skeletons in ...
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...
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...
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
Re: Solutrean publicity blitz:
Michael Balter last week had a news article in Science reviewing archaeological and genetic research into the origins and relationships of Aleut populations ...
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...
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?”
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...
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...
Sometimes people wonder why human genetics projects should bother to involve anthropologists.
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...
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-...
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...
This is such an incredible story about the “Clovis comet” hypothesis, I don’t know where to start: “Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth”.
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...
The initial habitation of the Americas has gotten a lot of press attention in the last couple of weeks.
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...
More evidence of dense Precolumbian habitation of the Amazon basin:
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...
Several news stories have reported on an article by Ugo Perego and colleagues, titled “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two ...
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
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...
James Adovasio is going looking for underwater early American sites off Florida, according to this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Martin Rundqvist reviews the History Channel documentary, “Journey to 10,000 BC.” The doc focuses on “Clovis-era North American archaeology and paleontology.”
On Monday’s “NewsHour”, PBS ran an interview with archaeologist Dennis Jenkins, who worked on the Paisley Caves human-DNA-containing scat.
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...
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:
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...
Chickens were brought to South America in Precolumbian times by Polynesians.
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 ...
Hmm... How will I explain this charge to Gretchen?
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
Antonio Salas and colleagues have a paper in the October American Journal of Human Genetics concerning the mtDNA affinities of African Americans within toda...
Should we return proboscids, lions and other megafauna to North America's Great Plains? Nature is running this commentary (subscription required) by Josh Do...
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...
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...
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...