A story of Australian repatriation
The September issue of Smithsonian magazine has a feature article by Tony Perrottet recounting the burial ceremony for the “Mungo Man” skeleton, which happen...
All posts tagged with Australia
First Peoples: Asia, and Australia
First Peoples continues tonight on PBS, with two episodes that focus on the dispersal of modern humans into Asia and Australia.
Coming: ‘First Peoples’ on PBS
This month, PBS in the United States will be premiering a new five-part series on the origins and spread of modern humans around the world, called First Peop...
Notable: Ancient Australians and baobab dispersal
Notable paper: Rangan H, Bell KL, Baum DA, Fowler R, McConvell P, et al. (2015) New Genetic and Linguistic Analyses Show Ancient Human Influence on Baobab Ev...
Looking back on Mungo
In a recent article, the geologist Jim Bowler gives a retrospective on the 1974 discovery of the “Mungo Man” skeleton in Australia: “Mungo Man is a physical ...
Hunting the Denisovan belt
The other day I was having a long conversation about Denisovans and human origins. My friend suggested that “Denisovans” sound like some kind of Star Trek ci...
Denisovans and the Middle Paleolithic of India
Sheila Mishra and colleagues have a new paper discussing the antiquity of microblade industries in India, focusing on the site of Mehtakheri in Madhya Prades...
Denisova at high coverage
Science today has released the new paper on the Denisova high-coverage genome by Mattias Meyer and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s group Meyer:Denisova:2012. ...
Bones from the Torres Strait Islands
The BBC has an interesting article about the repatriation of skeletal remains from Torres Strait Islanders, held at the Natural History Museum, London: “Torr...
Denisovan DNA in the islands, and an Australian genome
David Reich and colleagues today report on the persistence of Denisova-like ancestry in island Southeast Asia and Australia (citation not yet available). Mea...
Repatriation in Torres Strait
The Guardian:
43,000-year-old assemblages from Highland New Guinea
Glenn Summerhayes and colleagues Summerhayes:2010 enter a brief report in Science this week, describing radiocarbon dates for several small archaeological as...
Genyornis in Australian rock art?
Lots of cave paintings in Europe depict animals now extinct. Australian researchers have recently identified a rock painting as a depiction of the extinct th...
What kangaroos do…
In the current issue of Heredity, Neaves and colleagues describe the results of their analysis of 12 microsatellite loci and the mtDNA of two kangaroo specie...
Food notes
I’m laughing so hard it hurts:
Extinct marsupial lion in Australian rock art
Speaking of super-predators from the past, Natural History Magazine has a short article describing Australian rock art that may depict the extinct marsupial ...
Burrup rock art to be relocated
Paul Ham reports on developments which may force the relocation of rock art in northwestern Australia:
How fast to Australia?
Science's Michael Balter reviews the recent Cambridge conference on "Global Origins and Development of Seafaring". The article begins with a suggestion th...
An Australian mid-Holocene symbolic "revolution"
Brumm and Moore (2005) review the "symbolic revolution" in the light of the Australian archaeological record.
Give those hobbits a Vegemite sandwich
From The Australian:
Australian extinctions walking on eggshells
A few weeks ago, I posted on recent work by Clive Trueman et al. (2005) that showed a prolonged coexistence of some extinct Australian megafauna with early ...
What happened to the Australian megafauna?
Australia is well known for its unique animals. It has the most extensive diversity of marsupial mammals found anywhere in the world. Together with nearby N...