This is a set of bone sewing needles found in the Cave of Courbet near Toulouse, France, dating to around 13,000 years ago. Trace the history of the sewing needle and you will trace one of the key technologies that enabled Homo sapiens to migrate around the planet, and to outlast our closest human relatives, […]
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The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence. The control of
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I’ve done loads of posts on human cannibalism, which might bring about some self-disgust for our species. Would it cheer you up to know, then, that it’s not just us moderns who’ve a legacy of eating each other?. Turns out, humans have a very long history of self-consumption, stemming back a million years to the
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This is a mouflon, a type of mostly wild sheep that is a likely ancestor of all the domesticated sheep on earth today. Even if most of our clothing isn’t made of wool and most of our food isn’t lamb, human life wouldn’t be the same without this animal. Sheep and goats were the first
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In the US, Mother’s Day is this Sunday, so I thought it appropriate to introduce this fine specimen, representative of what many Paleo-anthropologists consider the earliest known mother of all hominids (including us Homo sapiens). This is the Ardipithecus ramidus, and she lived about 4.4 million years ago in what is now modern Ethiopia. Her
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The Luray Caverns in northern Virginia are one of the most touristed cave systems in the world, drawing about a half a million people a year. They are adorned with striking rock formations of stalagmites, stalactites, and columns, all made from white calcium carbonate, red-toned iron oxide, and grey magnesium oxide. These permeate the limestone
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As per my usual holiday tradition, I wrote an historically themed Christmas carol! This one is to the tune of “I Saw Three Ships”, and it’s called “I saw three hominids”. I had been lacking a tune about prehistory! I saw three hominids come inNeanderthal, Den’snovianGenus Homo all are kinHurray for evolution I spoke with
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One of the joys about cutting-edge studies that merge scientific data with the discipline of history is the chance to answer questions that we never thought we’d be able to. This photo of Greenland’s ice sheet gets at the way that climate scientists are trying to understand one of the most transformative aspects of earth
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This is a photo of The Cave of Hands in Argentina, which is about 10,000 years old. The crowding of the hands is reflective of the way that humans for a long time have formed large communities. What is fascinating is that many anthropologists think they know just how large these average societies were. And
Things very old and very new feature prominently in this newly-released image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Going by the catchy name “Cosmic Cliffs,” this is an edge of a section of a nebula (the Carina Nebula, to be exact, appearing in our southern hemisphere) known as NGC 3324, first identified by James Dunlop
See the tiny flat rock out in the distance, supported by two vertical slabs? They made up part of a dolmen in Ardeche, France. These particular dolmens were structures created 3,000 years ago by neolithic peoples. They are megalithic tombs (meaning pre-historic and made of rock) and were originally much larger — their purpose was
The Chauvet Caves in Ardeche, France, contain some of the oldest artwork made by Homo sapiens. 36,000 years ago, during one of the last ice ages, the people who adorned Chauvet did so with extreme sophistication. They really thought about how viewers would perceive their paintings in light of the curvature of the cave walls
The limestone rocks that form the bedrock of the Bois Païolive come from the Jurassic Period, 180 million years ago. Aeons of erosion created unusual rock outcroppings, which the French government back in 1934 declared to be an ecologically protected area. There is incredible biodiversity in the Païolive, but the most notable trees are the
The Robledo Mountains lie to the north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and to the east of the Rio Grande continental rift. Much of the exposed rock is from about 280 million years ago (Paleozoic), and the geological footprint is obvious and amazing. You can see a slot canyon in most of these pictures, when
Between 1582 to 1589, the British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelly claimed to have received multiple messages from angels. Writing these transmissions up, they formed the basis of the Enochian magical system, which was re-discovered and popularized over 300 years later by Alistair Crowley, a controversial (and free-love promoting) spiritualist. Pictured here is a
An ancient bristlecone pine over 5,000 years old is the oldest living thing on earth (at least, as far as scientists could document in 2016). That means it was contemporary with the first urban civilization in Sumer! The tree grows in the White Mountains in California in the Inyo National Forest. The location of the
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Rocks! But wait, there’s more: the technology heralded by these Acheulean hand-axes that you see (noted for their pear and oval shapes) signify not just the very cutting-edge (groan) way to cut into bone developed between 2 and 1.6 million years ago, but also, the formation of human language and maybe even the genesis of
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The Tyrannosaurus Rex had arms so small that paleontologists debate whether they were merely evolutionary leftovers. But research by Sara Burch, one of the world’s few leading experts on dinosaur anatomical structure, suggests that these puny extensions still functioned – the T-Rex held their prey while using their colossal necks, jaws, and teeth to do
Big history post here (big history meaning all of history, not just human), about the fabulousness of how evolution works. This is about the ways bees created the colors we see on flowers. We know that bees are super-pollinators critical for much of earth’s plant life. And we observe how bees are drawn to sweet
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Happy Indigenous People’s Day in the United States! And what could be more appropriate to acknowledge the holiday than the study published just this month in _Science_ that confirmed the dating of these fossilized footprints — the oldest we have of Homo sapiens on North American ground? Using two new different dating methods, geologists Jeffrey
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