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...
Larry Barham of the University of Liverpool and international collaborators have a field project in Zambia examining the “Deep Roots of Human Behavior”, inve...
Two years ago, I wrote about the archaeological assemblages and evidence of symbolic behavior at Rhino Cave, Botswana (“Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills,...
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...
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...
Nature News has an article written by Jeff Tollefson, which profiles archaeologist Chris Henshilwood and his work at Blombos, South Africa: “Human evolution:...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
Jennifer Viegas covers the recent discoveries at Sibudu Cave, South Africa: “Stone Age color, glue ‘factory’ found”.
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...
Oh, good grief!
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...
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
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...
Another chapter for Man the Hunted: 200,000-odd year old human hairs in hyena feces.
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...
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...
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’...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
This week, Johannes Krause and colleagues from the Max Planck Evolutionary Anthropology institute announced that they had tickled FoxP2 out of two Neanderta...
Julien Riel-Salvatore figures the Liang Bua "hobbit" tools aren't so complicated after all:
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...
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...
JOHN: Now, that's a frightening headline.
The Research Council of Norway has issued a press release about Sheila Coulson's work in the MSA of Botswana:
Brooks and colleagues (2005) describe evidence for distance weaponry from late MSA contexts in eastern and southern Africa. They discuss the size of points ...
Considering the paper by Evans and colleagues, I've come up with a list of questions and answers:
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
September 5 Course introduction: biology, evolution, brains, and minds.
Because being at the end of the alphabet gets you the last word.
Daniel Garrigan and colleagues (2005) have an article in press in Genetics, titled "Deep haplotype divergence and long-range linkage disequilibrium at Xp21....