‘For people to be living in Texas 15,500 years ago, it means they had to be in other parts of North America even earlier’
Archaeologists at a Central Texas site have unearthed artifacts that the first humans arrived in North America roughly 2,500 years earlier than previously thought, raising questions about how they made it to the New World and what route they took to get here.
The artifacts found along a creek bed west of Salado by a Texas A&M University-led team date back as far as 15,500 years, more than 2,000 years before the Clovis people who were long believed to be the first humans in North America. The so-called Clovis people were named after a site found in 1930 near Clovis, N.M.
Known for their unique spearhead artifacts, the numerous Clovis artifacts were found over the last 80 years and showed they lived as far back as 13,100 years ago.
The article includes speculation about how people got here and the types of tools found.
for posterity
Unfinished London
The second video, about the London highway system, was just posted:
Read more
on becoming human
Premodern humans—often described as “archaic Homo sapiens”—were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” If you need a mental image here, close your eyes and conjure a picture of a stereotypical caveman. But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past.
(via @longreads)
Historic Property for Sale
Old Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas.
Ten-plus bedrooms. Seven-plus bathrooms. Twenty-five thousand square feet.Three-plus acres.
Kinda pricey for the likes of us, though. Listed at $975K.
But maybe we could bargain ‘em down. The seller is described as “very motivated.”
Oh, and there’s this: “The fort sits on the banks of the Rio Grande River across from Ciudad Juarez.”
Spelled Cuidad Juarez in the listing. Indeed.
Pete Shelley: “Homosapien” (1981)
Nova, Becoming Human
I watched these Nova episodes on the origins of Homo sapiens — you know, us — over the weekend.
Bath in 100 Objects
A serendipitous notice (in light of Phil’s recent post) from one of my archives/museum conduits.
A possible 400,000-year-old human
Israeli archeologists have found what they believe to be a 400,000-year-old human tooth — doubling the age of modern humans.
The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.
Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human.
“Based on the evidence they’ve cited, it’s a very tenuous and frankly rather remote possibility,” Mellars said. He said the remains are more likely related to modern man’s ancient relatives, the Neanderthals.
The comments on the article are pretty good too.
Father Christmas fucked my pussy (Christmas pussy song)
(thanks, Aaron)
New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis
Jeffrey Rose, of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham, suggests archeological studies of submerged areas of the Persian Gulf may yield a lost history of human migration out of Africa and of the origins of human culture.
The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia suggests that early modern humans were able to survive periodic hyperarid oscillations by contracting into environmental refugia around the coastal margins of the peninsula. This paper reviews new paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and genetic evidence from the Arabian Peninsula and southern Iran to explore the possibility of a demographic refugium dubbed the “Gulf Oasis,” which is posited to have been a vitally significant zone for populations residing in southwest Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. These data are used to assess the role of this large oasis, which, before being submerged beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, was well watered by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Batin rivers as well as subterranean aquifers flowing beneath the Arabian subcontinent. Inverse to the amount of annual precipitation falling across the interior, reduced sea levels periodically exposed large portions of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, equal at times to the size of Great Britain. Therefore, when the hinterlands were desiccated, populations could have contracted into the Gulf Oasis to exploit its freshwater springs and rivers. This dynamic relationship between environmental amelioration/desiccation and marine transgression/regression is thought to have driven demographic exchange into and out of this zone over the course of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, as well as having played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of local human populations during that interval.
There was probably an easier way to say that.
Werner Herzog: What I saw in the cave
Werner Herzog discusses his 3D documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” As recorded by Roger Ebert at the 2010 Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO.
Werner Herzog, 3-D
Werner Herzog’s new documentary was filmed in 3-D.
Werner Herzog gains exclusive access to film inside the Chauvet caves of southern France, capturing the oldest known pictorial creations of humankind in their astonishing natural setting. He puts 3-D technology to a profound use, taking us back in time over 30,000 years.
I almost can’t sum this up properly.
(via kottke)
Boy Warriors of the Militia
Half in love with easeful death
Over on Facebook, I just glanced at a gallery of photos taken at the fortieth reunion of an LA friend’s Beverly Hills High School class.
One photo was tagged “Front Lawn.” I swear that when I first glanced at the tag, I read “Forest Lawn.”
Dear Clusterflock,
What is this thing?
It’s for sale at The Cure, an East Village thrift store, but nobody seems to know what it is. Suggestions include
- a samovar
- a microwave from ancient Egypt
- a very, very old fashioned water cooler
- the top half of Lady Gaga’s next outfit
- a Dalek incubator
- a charcoal grill
Other notable items from among The Cure’s offerings include Ellen and Arthur’s lovely wedding album, a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanny pack, a drag-queen-sized excellent silver gown, a cool little bookcase, and this, for Cindy.
from the comments
We tried to communicate with their tribe, but in a society where advancement is the only currency, we found ourselves unable to cope with the increasingly stressful demands of staying au courant. After a few months in the presence of the Hipsters, they had acclimated to us, allowing us into their most sacred rituals involving the brewing of limited runs of alcoholic spirits that they would then trade with one another for tapes and other trinkets. Many of the hipsters would spend their days recording sounds out in nature, and these sounds would then be played back during the communal gatherings at night. They smoked a lot of weed in those days, and xochinanácatl was present at nearly every gathering as they searched for ascendancy and yet still seemed to value the grounded world. The writings from this period are difficult to track as written communication became more dependent upon communicating less in general, with many of the speakers for the culture becoming bound by fear that their words wouldn’t be taken properly, speaking either with deception (for laughter) or sincerity (with great trepidation.)
They seemed to us in those days to be a people without vision, and without vision a people perish.
headline of the day
Horniest dinosaur ever discovered found in Utah
Ice Giants Thaw
Unprecedented ice-thaws are uncovering artifacts at rates faster than archeologists worry they can be cataloged.
Patrick Hunt, of Stanford University in California who is trying to discover where Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy in 218 BC with an army and elephants, said there was an “alarming rate” of thaw in the Alps.
“This is the first summer since 1994 when we began our Alpine field excavations above 8,000 ft that we have not been inundated by even one day of rain, sleet and snow flurries,” he said.
“I expect we will see more ‘ice patch archaeology discoveries’,” he said. Hannibal found snow on the Alpine pass he crossed in autumn, according to ancient writers.
2,000-year-old wall paintings restored in Petra
Conservation experts almost gave up when they first saw the severely damaged wall paintings they had come to rescue in the ancient city of Petra.
Cloaked for centuries in grimy soot from bedouin camp fires, the blackened murals appeared beyond repair.
But three years of restoration revealed intricate and brightly-colored artwork, and some of the very few surviving examples of 2,000-year-old Hellenistic wall painting.
The carved rock Petra is known for was originally painted as well.
The lightly built defensive enclosure, which emerged from parched barley fields, provided basic protection for Roman soldiers on maneuvers in the first century AD
Dry conditions in England this summer have left the outlines of historic sites in fields like Etch A Sketches from the air.
Known as crop marks, the faint outlines of unseen buried structures emerged because of the length of the dry spell, leading the national conservator to label 2010 a vintage year for archaeology.
The outlines show up when crops grow at different rates over buried structures. Shallower soils tend to produce a stunted crop and are more prone to parching, bringing to light the new features.
“It’s hard to remember a better year,” said Dave MacLeod, a senior investigator with English Heritage.
submarine is my Sean Connery gateway word
I always forget about the Confederate submarine.
On Friday, scientists announced one of the final steps that should help explain what happened after the hand-cranked sub and its eight-man crew rammed a spar with a powder charge into the Union blockade ship Housatonic off Charleston in February, 1864.
Lost Army Found?
According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.
After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.
“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.
A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.
The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.
Dear clusterflock: Today’s Dilemma
Can I do this unobtrusively?
This being: return to the roadside motel where I lived for the past three months, dive into the dumpster to retrieve a garbage bag, open it and retrieve a small trashcan liner filled with vomit and other detritus, and swirl through it in search of a diamond ring that belonged to my mother.
I don’t think I can do this unobtrusively.
Update: I need a step stool or an accomplice to boost me up and over.
Read more
Stonehenge’s wooden sister
The timber henge — a name given to prehistoric monuments surrounded by a circular ditch — would have been constructed and modified at the same time as its more famous relative, and probably had some allied ceremonial or religious function, Chapman said in a telephone interview from Stonehenge.
Exactly what kind of ceremonies those were is unclear. The new henge joins a growing complex of tombs and mysterious Neolithic structures found across the area.
