Anthropology
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…
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
The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain
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.
Stephen Oppenheimer’s extraordinary scientific detective story combining genetics, linguistics, archaeology and historical record shatters the myths we have come to live by. It…
Hank |
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.
The language called Koro is so unknown even its speakers, about 1,000 people, didn't know it was distinct. Linguists say the addition…
Hank |
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.
With 500 million users…
New research by archaeologists from the University of York says that Neanderthals were a lot more compassionate than their reputation as brutish cavemen.
How do you chart the 'compassion' of early humans?They examined archaeological evidence for the way in which emotions began to be seen in our ancestors six million years ago(!) and then developed from earliest times through Neanderthals and then to modern people like ourselves. From that, they proposed a four stage model for the development of human compassion, beginning million of years ago when some common ancestor of humans and…
There are only some science subjects if you go by the word science
i.e. social science , political science, military science which have science word attached to them . Clearly they deal with society but they actually deal with science of society.
What makes a society , Why people follow social norms,
Why people like to stick to their tribes, castes or clan or national identities. What has led to evolution of ruling systems in the world King and Queen have vanished from the scenes of some nation but they still are there in some in different form.
Why people go to listen to one leader in huge…
Since the man came to present form the countries originated around the globe and within a span of 50 years the number of member of United Nations has increased in several dozens in a span of 40 years only. Boundaries of societies have become boundaries of nations but nations have almost dissolved their boundaries to progress faster and made unions while some nations are fighting for boundary dispuptes as some are trying all means to grab whatever they can. Human being are suffering in some regions because of political conflicts though they have nothing to fight at individual level but their…
Did Neanderthals develop `modern' tools and ornaments solely through contact with Homo sapiens, or could they adapt, innovate and evolve technology on their own?
A new anthropology study challenges a half-century of conventional wisdom that Neanderthals were primitive `cavemen' overrun and out-competed by modern humans arriving in Europe from Africa.
The research in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, was based on Neanderthal sites throughout Italy, with special focus on the vanished Uluzzian culture. About 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacian culture, attributed to…
Multidisciplinary collaborative research teams are essential in modern day science - climate scientists need to make more accurate numerical models and genome data in biology can be overwhelming and that means working with experts in other fields – but working as part of a team with experts outside a researcher's discipline can create its own problems so a group of researchers has published a commentary outlining a new field of study that could help resolve problems facing interdisciplinary research teams.
The new area of study, which they called the "science of team science," or SciTS…
The soon-to-be-published and complete Danish translation of all the Icelandic sagas, a literary cornerstone of the Western canon, will fundamentally change our perception of the Viking heroes that populate the stories.
Saucy poems, supernatural creatures, explicit violence and emotional outbursts are an integral part of the Icelandic sagas, says assistant professor Annette Lassen from the Department of Scandinavian Research at the University of Copenhagen, but Danish translator N.M. Petersen, whose translations have been the standard for the past 170 years, left passages out and even…