Archaeologica.org

Greetings...

Looking ahead in my PBS TV schedule, I see that on 31 March Nova will present "The Last Extinction", on the controversial claim that bad things were caused "by the massive breakup of a comet over the Great Lakes region".

AD
http://www.daysknob.com

Hi again, Min... Could it have really been that much warmer on the Nubian side of the border than the Egyptian? Excellent question. As you said earlier, it's complicated. Clearly the classic ancient Egyptians (ca. 5000 BC onward, supposedly "Hamitic") were ethnically quite distinct from Nu...

Hi Minimalist... If I remember correctly (not taking the time to research this right now), the favored hypothesis is that as humans migrated from sunny to northern climes natural selection produced lighter skin (less UV-attenuating melatonin) in response to the need for sunlight to synthesize vitami...

"...rather the archeologists know the site was deliberately covered in ancient times." Right, weasel wording, basically, without explanation, leaving the impression of process of elimination. And "know" in any language tends to raise a red flag with me, particularly in the conte...

Hi RS... The most intrigueing thing the voice-over said, imo, is that the site appeared to have been covered on purpose! I wonder how they conclude that. My understanding of the voice-over narrative is that the stratigraphy overlying the site "was not laid down by erosion or earthquake" (&...

Manystones e-mailed from work saying his home PC suffered a hardware failure, so he may be off for a while.

Sam, get well. I just recovered from a case of head rot that messed me up for a week - apparently not as dramatic as your plague, though. Good luck!

AD

Hi Manystones et al ... Your website is very well done, and the huge amount of effort that went into it is quite evident. I certainly need to restructure my own and provide a concise and cogent statement of the hypotheses with arguments pro and con. Mine started in 2003 with a simple presentation of...

Good luck, Digit!

Hi RS and Beagle... Thanks for that posting! Dmanisi is certainly one of the more important finds in recent years - hominins in an apparently sizeable community quite a distance from Africa about a million years before they were supposed to be anywhere else. So they are thought to have returned to A...

Greetings... Reverting to the original discussion topic, here is a very limited reconstruction, from some 2005 e-mails and copies of e-mails, of what happened to Dr. Robson Bonnichson's determination/documentation of apparent human agency in the Pedra Furada lithics. Rob Bonnichsen had, as is eviden...

Greetings... I just received an interesting blurb from ACM TechNews on an evolution simulation at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The headline: A Computer Simulation Shows How Evolution May Have Speeded Up Weizmann Institute of Science (08/28/07) Here's the URL: http://wis-wander.weizma...

Hi War Arrow et al ... It's a common theme sure enough. There was a thread around here about a year ago with some pretty interesting discussion of the 'human emerging from (or being devoured in) a serpent maw' imagery in Mexico and Colombia. Can't remember quite who posted it. Was it you AD? Yeah, t...

Greetings... I'm a bit confused now - thought this thread was on Pedra Furada, and having looked back through some 2005 e-mails, I think I will post an expansion of my observations on the disgraceful treatment of this project by North American archaeologists. But for the moment, let me comment on th...

Actually, I meant how long would it take to oxidize metal down to the point when it lost virtually all of its magnetic properties Depending on where it landed and spent its time between its deposition and your recovering it, an iron artifact may have survived relatively intact for thousands of year...

Hi Beagle... I sure don't pretend to know much about the finer points of use wear analysis, but my impression here is that the silica is not plant residue. (I think plant silica typically appears in the form of tiny fragments.) The "linear tracks of plastically reformed silica" here seem t...