Twisty little passages. Churchyards and private farmlands throughout the German state of Bavaria are perforated from below by "more than 700 curious tunnel networks" whose "purpose remains a mystery. " [Image: Photograph by Ben Behnke courtesy of Der Spiegel]. As Der Spiegel reports, "The tunnel entrances are sometimes located in the kitchens of old farmhouses, near churches and cemeteries or in the middle of a forest. The atmosphere inside is dark and oppressive, much as it would be inside an animal den. " Although the subterranean networks are considered an "extremely unusual ancient phenomenon," other "small underground labyrinths have been found across Europe, from Hungary to Spain, but no one knows why they were built.
" [Image: Diagram courtesy of Der Spiegel]. Small might actually understate the case: indeed, "the tunnels are often only 20 to 50 meters long. [Image: Photographs by Ben Behnke courtesy of Der Spiegel]. [Image: Reasons to be cheerful; photo by Ben Behnke, courtesy of Der Spiegel]. Day of Archaeology » Archaeology is digging up, not things, but people -- Mortimer Wheeler. Forensic entomology - History and Archeology. Fig.3. "Memento Mori" representing an open grave, Germany ca. 1520.
The skeleton shows signs of advanced decomposition, the thin soft parts of the skull are missing, shreds of skin covering the rib cage, the organs of the belly were also decayed - and the body is infested by various animals, snakes, lizards maggots and adult flies - especially the abdominal cavity (figure from WIECZOREK et al. 2009). Only in the 18th, and especially 19th century naturalists and physicians become interested in the process of decay of a body.During exhumations it was noted the presence of different arthropods associated with the bodies, based on these occasionally observations, first tentative death time estimations were undertaken.In his work "La Faune Cadavres" (1894) the French physician Jean Pierre Megnin summarized his and others knowledge, and established a time dependant sequence of colonization "waves" by various insects.
The book also greatly popularized the subject. Fig.4. Fig.5. Fig.6. Map Explorer | Field Expedition: Mongolia, National Geographic. Four Stone Hearth #101 – The Phoenix Edition | Sapien Games. This is the Phoenix edition of the Four Stone Hearth. It’s 100th installment saw the relinquishing of power of the original editor in chief, Martin Rundkvist of aardvarchaeology. I want to extend my thanks to Martin for turning the Four Stone Hearth into the shining example of what is possible with a Blog Carnival.
We now have a new head-honcho, Aferensis. Most readers will know him, and know he’ll do a great job at keeping the flame burning for a long time coming. We’re heading into a new age, and it seems like it is appropriate that this is the 101’st edition. It’s been speculated that Blog Carnivals are going out of fashion – as evidenced by the demise of a few great ones like The Tangled Bank and The Skeptics Circle. I think, however, that the blog carnival has an important place in the dissemination of science information to the general reading public. So, with that in mind here’s the 101’st collection of great blog posts in anthropology: Them sounds like fightin’ words!
Help! Four Stone Hearth - The Anthropology Blog Carnival. Tim Taylor. The Artificial Ape. The Artificial Ape How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution [UKH+] (5/7) Serpentine Gallery: Map MarathonSaturday and SundayOctober 16 & 17. Hey Gilbert Lewis: Has life evolved a use for deuterium? Or does it just tolerate it? Andy Maloney in our lab has been studying solvent (water) isotope effects on kinesin and microtubules in the gliding motility assay. He has data showing a speed slow down from both heavy-hydrogen water (D2O; deuterium oxide) and heavy-oxygen water (H218O; oxygen-18 water).
The preliminary results are very exciting to me, because I think varying the water isotopes may be a useful new knob for studying kinesin, molecular motors, and other biomolecular systems such as protein-DNA complexes. In particular, I think oxygen-18 water may be a neat way of probing the kinetics of large surface area binding/unbinding events. Hopefully soon, I will blog about those results either here, or on our kochlab research blog. If you want more info now, you can see our presentations and posters on nature precedings. But that's not what I want to talk about tonight. So, while I was naive in 2009 (and likely continuing 2010->), Gilbert Lewis was amazingly prescient in 1933. 0.03% does sound trivial. 2. 3.
My bright idea: Timothy Taylor | Technology | The Observer. Timothy Taylor is an anthropologist and archaeologist based at Bradford University. In his new book, The Artificial Ape, he argues that the moment our apemen ancestors began chipping at lumps of stone to create their first tools, they released a force – technology – that has played a pivotal role in shaping the human species. Such innovations have altered the way we nurture our offspring, prepare our food, use our strength and establish cultures. We did not invent technology, this 50-year-old scientist argues. Technology invented us. So what insights do we get into human nature when we look at the role of technology in our evolution? There is a perception that technology – from the industrial revolution to the computer age – has suddenly put us into a new world, one that is a bit scary. When did this process begin? We can see from the archaeological evidence that by 2.6m years, our australopithecine apemen ancestors had learned how to chip at stones and make tools.
In what way? Archaeology 101: Chronology, or, How Can I Get A Date? : Aardvarchaeology. Archaeological chronology aims to answer the question “When did this or that event happen?”. This question can usually be re-phrased as “When was this or that thing made?” , where the thing under study may be anything from a bead up to the Great Wall of China. Most dating evidence is based upon similarity: people are almost incapable of doing anything in exactly the same way for any long stretch of time, and when they try to return to an old way of doing something, they never get all the details right.
Such similarities (again on all scales of evidence) are dealt with in a more or less formalised way by means of a tool kit called typology. Collect a group of similar pots / house foundations / Great Walls, note explicitly the details that unite them and separate them from their peers, and you have a type definition. The very birth of archaeology as a scientific discipline is reckoned from the first chronological and typological breakthrough: C.J. Heritage board’s course on Historic Landscapes day 1 « Testimony of the spade. August 16, 2010 Oxhagen in Rimbo First day of the National Heritage board’s course on Historic Landscapes (Landskapshistorisk utbildning) we visited Oxhagen (the Ox pasture) in Rimbo, some miles north of Stockholm.
I’ve been there a few years ago but had more or less forgotten about it, it situated in a rural landscape and we got some friends tagging a long for the ride. Within the pastures are the remains of an late Bronze Age/early Iron Age landscape with clearing cairns, small fossilized fields, cairns of fire cracked stones, a grave field with stone settings and so forth – these remains is in part “disturbed” by newer features, such as younger fossilized fields and clearing cairns, military buildings etc. An interesting area with gave cause to lots and lots of discussions – where why and how are important words. Location – where is it situated, form – does it have the right shape and material - is it built by the right material. Magnus Reuterdahl Like this: Like Loading...
On The Genetic Similarities & Linguistic Diversity Of The People From The Bismarck Archipelago & Bougainville, Melanesia. A new paper in the open access journal PLoS Genetics reports on a comparison of genetic, geographic, and linguistic patterns of the diverse populations found on the major islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and Bougainville, Melanesia. The paper is titled, “Genetic and Linguistic Coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia.” I think that Simon Greenhill of HENRY may know a bit more about these populations, languages and region than I, but I’m gonna still try and summarize the paper and briefly discuss the results. The earliest inhabitants of the area arrived around 40,000 years ago, but there was an additional migration into the region about 3,300 years ago. We know that primarily because of the linguistic diversity. Genetic, Geographic & Linguistic Distances Of Melanesian Popultions The study sampled 776 individuals from 33 linguistically based populations, which averages to about 23 individuals per population.
Like this: Like Loading... Where in the hell am I? AlunSalt « Aardvarchaeology. Scalpels and skulls point to Bronze Age brain surgery - opinion - 31 August 2010. Önder Bilgi talks about his discovery of a razor-sharp 4000-year-old scalpel and what it was originally used for Where are you digging? At an early Bronze Age settlement called Ikiztepe, in the Black Sea province of Samsun in Turkey. The village was home to about 300 people at its peak, around 3200 to 2100 BC. They lived in rectangular, single-storey houses made of logs, which each had a courtyard and oven in the front. You have found what appear to be scalpels. That's right. News Reporter - New Scientist, Boston, MA or London, UK.
Tortoise banquet: Remains of the oldest feast found - life - 30 August 2010. By Michael Marshall In a cave 12,000 years ago, a group of people settled down to a dinner that has rarely been matched: 71 tortoises that had been roasted in their shells. The discovery of the shells shows that feasting occurred 2500 years earlier than previously thought, at a critical stage in the transition from hunter-gathering to settled farming. The remains of the feast were found in Hilazon Tachtit cave (see picture) in Israel by Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It is a burial ground that contains the bones of 28 people. The tortoise shells (see picture) were buried in 12,000-year-old pit lined with limestone slabs, along with the body of an elderly woman (see picture). In a second pit of the same age they found another burial, this one accompanied by the bones of three wild cattle (see picture).
Old Armenian Shoe Raises Hope for Archaeology in PLoS ONE : Aardvarchaeology. The Public Library of Science publishes a number of peer-reviewed Open Access research journals, most of which specialise in some specific field within the natural sciences. But PLoS ONE has a much wider remit within the sciences. When it first opened a few years ago, I looked for archaeology in it and was disappointed. But now you get 121 hits when you search the journal for “archaeology archeology”. This means that PLoS One might be a potential publication venue for research in my discipline. So, what sort of archaeology does PLoS One publish? Well, just because a paper mentions the word, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the archaeology is a central concern. Ron Pinhasi et al. titled their 2010 paper “First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands“.
The other 29 papers mentioning archaeology mainly treat research in other fields where archaeology is touched upon only briefly or used to support work with other goals. 'Sensational' Discovery: Archeologists Find Gateway to the Viking Empire - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Their attacks out of nowhere in rapid longboats have led many to call Vikings the inventors of the Blitzkrieg. "Like wild hornets," reads an ancient description, the Vikings would plunder monasteries and entire cities from Ireland to Spain. The fact that the Vikings, who have since found their place as droll comic book characters, were also avid masons is slightly less well known. The proof can be seen in northern Germany, not far from the North Sea-Baltic Canal.
There, one can marvel at a giant, 30-kilometer (19-mile) wall which runs through the entire state of Schleswig-Holstein. Archeologists have now taken a closer look at part of the construction -- a three-meter-thick (10 feet) wall from the 8th century near Hedeby (known as Haithabu in German). A Customs Station, an Inn and a Bordello At a press conference Friday, Tummuscheit's team announced a further find -- one that they are calling a "sensation. " Known for their Pillaging Ways But why make such an effort? Overland Trade. Do artefacts belong in museums?
Collecting tribal artefacts in the late 19th century, Harvard University's Peabody Museum sought to preserve a span of American history that 18th-century frontiersmen had tried to obliterate. By the end of the 20th century, the tribes wanted their things back. Thousands of ceremonial objects were returned before curators realised that earlier conservators had doused them with arsenic to repel insects. Saving the artefacts had rendered them deadly. This is just one of the fascinating and morally fraught tales told in Finders Keepers, a book about archaeology and its implications.
Craig Childs is a superb storyteller, expertly recounting Aurel Stein's 1906 pan-Asian pursuit of the Diamond Sutra - the world's oldest printed book - for the British Museum, and his own search for pre-Columbian artefacts in the American Southwest. "In no other field of research have I encountered so many people who have wanted the other party dead," Childs writes. (Image: Kenneth Garrett/NGS) Your Circadian Rhythm Is Recorded in Your Hair… or Your Beard | 80beats.
The problem: Scientists want to study our circadian rhythms, our bodies’ internal clocks, and they can do so on the genetic level by examining how gene expression changes throughout the day. But ordinarily that would require sampling a person’s blood or skin multiple times a day, an ordeal few of us would want to endure. The solution: hair. Makoto Akashi’s team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that hairs, be they from the beard or head, contain the telltale signature of RNA activity that shows when we humans are at our peak activity level for the day.
At the base of every strand of hair is a follicle of living cells, which clings to the hair when plucked. Akashi and colleagues didn’t just grab tweezers and follow people around; they also used their volunteers to experiment. That was especially true for workers who frequently change shifts. Image: flickr / johnath.