Anthropology
In preparing my series on Ancient Astronauts, I encountered a few problems I hadn’t anticipated, though maybe I should have looking back now. Mainly the problem is a lack of understanding of the terms being and ideas being used.
Things like why a myth is a myth, or why Archaeologists except certain views over others. If you’re not well versed in these reasons, it can seem a little biased and possibly lead to confusion, like in what the term “quantum” means. So, when I saw Von Daniken and his ilk using the term “Cargo Cult” to describe the Nazca lines, I realized many people may not understand what he’s saying.
Ah, the good old days, where everyone in the neighborhood had kids named John and Mary (or Juan and Maria, or Jean and Marie, etc). But all of the warm fuzzy melting pot of same-name-ness started to disintegrate in the
1960s, when diversification of baby names started in the US, "at the same time that Americans started placing more emphasis on individuality and less on collectivity and fitting in," according to the Live Science article.1
It's common belief that Vikings visited Newfoundland, therefore reaching the New World from Europe before Christopher Columbus, but a new genetic analysis claims not only did Vikings visit North America, they brought natives back to Europe with them. And had babies.
The report in the latest edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology says researchers sequenced the complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome of 11 people with haplogroup C1, a lineage that was involved in the settlement of North America over 12,000 years ago, from four different families. No problem, they moved there recently, right?
From Neuroanthropology blog
Review article
Tunnel vision Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature.London: Penguin. 509 pp.
One of a three part series on epigenetics, transhumanism, and future human evolution.
Dr. Bruce Lipton: The Biology of Belief
Sharpening tools is no easy task. If you've ever tried to do it yourself you know that prehistoric man had to have developed real skill to sharpen stone tools - using pressure flaking, no less.
Pressure flaking is a technique where implements shaped by hard stone hammers strikes and then softer wood or bone strikes are carefully trimmed by directly pressing the point of a tool made of bone on the edges of the tool. A new study says pressure flaking was being used at Blombos Cave in South Africa during the Middle Stone Age by anatomically modern humans and involved the heating of silcrete (quartz grains cemented by silica) used to make tools.
At the dinner held 10 days ago for those who had retired as our department finally closed the day before, my previous PI (until 2002) recommended me to read
by
Stephen Oppenheimer (ISBN 9781845294823), the product description of which goes
British prehistory will never look the same again.' Professor Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge.
I had no idea there were entire languages left to discover. Then again, I had no idea there was a group called the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages either, but exist they both do.
The linguists, doing a project for
National Geographic, thought these people
in the northeast corner of India were speaking a dialect of the Aka culture of the Himalayas - but it turns out they have a different vocabulary and linguistic structure.
Some of the most pressing questions in science aren't how to better treat cancer or solve global warming, they're instead practical things like why a stranger on the Internet takes you off of a pretend friend list.
In the old days, email lists had filters, so when your brother-in-law sent you the 50th forwarded list of lawyer jokes, you just sent them right into the trash. On Facebook, it is not so simple - okay, actually it is, there is a hide feature built right in so you never see some things. But people still unfriend someone, which can lead to drama.
