When archaeologists find buried human skeletons in an excavation they are usually able to identify them as male or female according to their bone structure and DNA. The Black Trowel Collective of American, a group identifying themselves as “anarchist archaeologists,” are now claiming that “archaeologists must centre the fluidity of gender in their archaeological practice”. […]
Stone tools show lush green Arabia, according to Science (AAAS) News 1 September 2021 and Science Alert 2 September 2021 and Nature 1 September 2021, 10.1038/s41586-021-03863-y. An international team of researchers have studied two sites in the Nefud Desert in northern Saudi Arabia and found thousands of stone tools, along with many animal fossils. The […]
Undersea Aussie aboriginal artefacts found, according to reports in ABC News, The Conversation and James Cook University News 2 July 2020, and PLOS ONE 1 July 2020, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233912. Archaeologists have found hundreds of stone tools and grinding stones at two sites on the seabed near the Dampier Archipelago, off the northwest coast of Western […]
Caveman astronomy found, according to ScienceDaily 27 November 2018, and Athens Journal of History 2018, arXiv:1806.00046. Scientists at Universities of Edinburgh and Kent have studied cave art in multiple sites in Europe and Turkey and concluded “they all display the same method for recording dates based on precession of the equinoxes, with animal symbols representing […]
Daily bread before farming, according to reports in Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 16 July 2018 and BBC News 17 July 2018, and PNAS 16 July 2018 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1801071115. A team of researchers from UK and Denmark have found charred remains in the fireplaces of an archaeological site known as Shubayqa 1, located in the […]
Neanderthals were artists, according to reports in BBC News, Nature News, Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 22 February 2018, and Science doi: 10.1126/science.aap7778, 23 February 2018, and Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar5255, 22 February 2018. Over the past few years scientists studying rock art and artefacts in several caves in Spain. Some of it is just […]
Stone tools increase Hobbit age, according to reports in ScienceNOW 17 March 2010 and ABC (Australia) News in Science 18 March 2010. In 2004 the bones of a creature nicknamed the Hobbit were found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Even though it had a chimp sized brain and ape-like body size […]
Stone age pyrotechnology described in ScienceNOW 13 August 2009, and Science Daily and ABC News in Science, 14 August 2009. Archaeologists collecting stone tools at a site called Pinnacle Point in South Africa have long been puzzled by stone tools made of a fine grained rock named silcrete. The tools showed evidence of much working […]
Sophisticated, fearless Neanderthals described in an article in AlphaGalileo and ScienceDaily 14 May 2009. Neanderthals are usually portrayed as brutish muscle men who were unable to compete with smarter modern men in the struggle for existence. Gerrit Dusseldorp of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has analysed archaeological sites of Neanderthals and concluded they were […]
Cavemen better than modern artists, according to a report in Fossil Science 9 December 2012 and PLoS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049786. Anyone who has tried to draw running animals has found it is not easy to accurately depict the relative positions of their moving legs, so what has modern man done to fix this? In the 1880s […]