Link: A new field season of the Deep Roots project at Victoria Falls
Larry Barham of the University of Liverpool and international collaborators have a field project in Zambia examining the “Deep Roots of Human Behavior”, inve...
All posts tagged with MSA
Transport distance in MSA Botswana
Two years ago, I wrote about the archaeological assemblages and evidence of symbolic behavior at Rhino Cave, Botswana (“Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills,...
Bead styles in MSA
Michael Balter covers a new paper on MSA shell beads by Marian Vanhaeren and colleagues: “Human ancestors were fashion-conscious”. The study involves beads f...
Early Stone Age hafted spear points from South Africa
This week in Science, Jayne Wilkins and colleagues report on part of the lithic assemblage from Kathu Pan, South Africa, which includes 210 points Wilkins:ha...
Chris Henshilwood profile
Nature News has an article written by Jeff Tollefson, which profiles archaeologist Chris Henshilwood and his work at Blombos, South Africa: “Human evolution:...
Blombos pigment workshop
I know that some readers are starting to wonder if I’ve forgotten about paleoanthropology lately. Let’s just say that the Neandertal and Denisova genomes hav...
Shellfish gathering, paleoanthropological strawman
We have known for many years that Lower Paleolithic people were using shellfish, fish, and littoral resources at sites across the Old World, from Trinil Joor...
Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset and Nick Walker Coulson:2011 (doi isn’t working yet, so here’s a PDF link, 12 MB) have published a long summary of findings ...
Neandertal stories on parade
Long-time science journalist Robin McKie has a long article in The Observer about the Neandertals this weekend: “Neanderthals: how needles and skins gave us ...
MSA ochre "factory"
Jennifer Viegas covers the recent discoveries at Sibudu Cave, South Africa: “Stone Age color, glue ‘factory’ found”.
Misinformation about brain evolution
Due to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore: “Colin Blakemore: How the human brain got bigger by accident and not thr...
Return of the "amazing" Boskops
Oh, good grief!
Seeds of MSA diet breadth
Julio Mercader reports in a short Science paper that the MSA stone artifacts from Ngalue cave, Mozambique, preserve thousands of grains of sorghum starch, al...
Middle Stone Age bed and breakfast
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
Paleoclimate in southern Africa
The Tswaing Crater is around 40 km from Pretoria, South Africa. It was created by an asteroid impact some 200,000 years ago, which released roughly the energ...
There's Stone Age, and then there's….
Another chapter for Man the Hunted: 200,000-odd year old human hairs in hyena feces.
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...
Modern humans older than thought?
I can understand that National Geographic wants to promote news from researchers who take National Geographic money. It’s only natural, and as a publicity or...
Dating of Howieson's Poort and Still Bay industries
Zenobia Jacobs and colleagues have a paper in this week’s Science that provides age estimates for two of the MSA industries of Southern Africa: the Howieson’...
Did humans face extinction 70,000 years ago?
That was the headline of many of last week's stories about the paper by Behar and colleagues, drawing upon the Genographic Project African mitochondrial DNA...
The "amazing" Boskops
I've gotten a couple of e-mail questions from readers about this new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence. The authors are Gary Lyn...
D'Errico on Neandertal language
Edmund Blair Bolles is reporting from the Evolang conference in Barcelona. Unfortunately I had to cancel my presentation there, but it has been great to rea...
Early ochre mining in Southern Africa
I was reading back through Bednarik's "Concept-mediated marking in the Lower Palaeolithic," for some background on the ochre-shellfish post, and I ran acros...
Links that won't waste your time, Oct. 29 edition
Am I really going to wait a week to write about the red-haired Neandertals? No, not quite -- but I'm taking some time to add detail to the story. Meanwhile,...
The amazing talking Neandertals
This week, Johannes Krause and colleagues from the Max Planck Evolutionary Anthropology institute announced that they had tickled FoxP2 out of two Neanderta...
Tools of the hobbits
Julien Riel-Salvatore figures the Liang Bua "hobbit" tools aren't so complicated after all:
At last, the death of the Toba bottleneck
It is no secret that I really don't like the hypothesis that the massive ancient eruption of Mt. Toba, Sumatra, wiped out much of the worldwide human popula...
Shell beads at three corners of Africa
Bouzouggar et al. (2007) report on a series of perforated Nassarius shell beads found in a layer dating to ca. 82,000 years ago in Grotte des Pigeons, Moroc...
Over coffee
JOHN: Now, that's a frightening headline.
Looking for MSA rock art in Botswana
The Research Council of Norway has issued a press release about Sheila Coulson's work in the MSA of Botswana:
MSA projectile weapons
Brooks and colleagues (2005) describe evidence for distance weaponry from late MSA contexts in eastern and southern Africa. They discuss the size of points ...
Introgression and microcephalin FAQ
Considering the paper by Evans and colleagues, I've come up with a list of questions and answers:
Trade in MSA Africa
I was looking through some MSA literature, and ran across a paper earlier this year by Negash and Shackley (2006) concerning long-distance movement of obsid...
Shellfish use by Neandertals
I got the Neanderthals on the Edge volume by interlibrary loan to follow up the Barton shellfish consumption reference. Here is the relevant passage from th...
And then there was Levallois
Noble and Davidson (1996:200-201) have a great passage on the lack of relevance of the Levallois technique to interpreting ancient cognition. It has an atte...
Acheulean endings
There is no hard endpoint to the Acheulean; its tool types -- in particular the handaxe -- last well into the MSA/Middle Paleolithic. Here are some notes on...
How monolithic was the Acheulean?
I'm taking some notes on change and stasis during the Acheulean, and they're not entirely complete, but in the interest of clearing my desktop I'm going to ...
Canalization
Yesterday I ran across this paper by Thomas Flatt in Quarterly Review of Biology, which is a really thorough review of the concept of canalization from its ...
Biology of mind :: course schedule
September 5 Course introduction: biology, evolution, brains, and minds.
Why it's good to be Zilhão
Because being at the end of the alphabet gets you the last word.
More assimilation, genetic-style
Daniel Garrigan and colleagues (2005) have an article in press in Genetics, titled "Deep haplotype divergence and long-range linkage disequilibrium at Xp21....