These two flowers from my neck of the woods both came out along the Appalachian Trail in May: the one to the left was from early this month and is known as a “Rattlesnake Plantain”. The other is blossoming right now at the end of the month and is called a “Pink Lady Slipper.” These […]
Evolution of Orchids (and Native Pennsylvanian Orchids) Read More »
These projectile points were discovered in a 9,000 year-old grave at Wilamaya Patjxa in southern Peru. Archaeologists immediately diagnosed the burial items as part of a hunter’s toolkit and assumed that the person they were buried with was a high-status male from an ancient hunter-gatherer community. However, DNA analysis revealed that the hunter was actually
Ancient Peruvian Weapons and Evidence for Early Women Hunters Read More »
“The Mushroom Hunters,” a poem by Neil Gaiman, is a feminist paean about science, inspired by history. Some commentary about the history behind the poem: in evolutionary human behavior, much is speculative. “The Mushroom Hunters” draws from many hypotheses made by anthropologists, several of which I have featured stories about. Here are some of them:
The Mushroom Hunters by Neil Gaiman Read More »
This reconstruction of a Homo heidelbergensis (600,000-300,000 years ago) reminds us that we H. sapiens are not the only genus of our kind to have walked the earth, and our Homo ancestors, like us, shared an interesting quality: we lack hair. Of course, we have some hair — our heads and genitals, and many of
Homo Heidelbergensis and Hair Read More »
This is Humpback Mountain, an incredibly ancient formation dating from the Alleghenian orogany — ie, when the Appalachian Mountains were formed — between 325-260 million years ago. Made up of granite with greenstone, the mountain is part of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and you can see why they are called that because of
These are the Shohola Falls, dropping a total of 200 feet in the half-mile course it makes along the Shohola Creek as it drops from Shohola Lake. Located in the Poconos Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, “Shohola” is an American Indian word that means “meek” or “faint”. This area is part of the Catskill formation and
The origin of mushrooms is ancient — in fact, a 2020 scientific paper reported the discovery of fossilized fungi found in the Democratic Republic of Congo dating from 715 to 810 million years ago! Yet there is much scientists still do not understand about these fruiting bodies of the Earth’s mycelium layer (a network of
Origins of Mushrooms Read More »
