The object featured here – a box carved out of whale’s bone – comes from Britain in the early 700s, which was an age of fragmented states and political destabilization. The scene shown is a rendering of the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans, but to the onlooker the most obvious activity is that of […]
British Carved Whale Bone Box Read More »
This little beauty is an artist’s rendition of a Placoderm – an extinct fish from close to 500 million years ago which had a significant feature that has played out into the lives of all humans today. Early fishes from this geological period had jaws, and evolutionary scientists have recognized jawed vertebrate fish as the
The Extinct Placoderm and Adaptive Immune Systems Read More »
Human evolution shows that Homo Sapiens evolved physical features suitable to long-distance running. About two million years ago, the east African landscape entered a drying period, and many forested lands turned into grasslands or patchy open woodlands. These conditions would have favored our ancestors’ development of characteristics that could run after animals and scavenge prey
Human Evolution for Long Distance Running Read More »
Wait: this looks like a science post, but it is really history! Very long-time ago history, like 160 million years ago. But, due to the science of evolutionary genetics, we know this very old story is of immediate relevance to every human, as well as to a very special virus that made our lives possible.Our
Genomes of Our DNA Read More »
Here come two points about human evolution – the first is one that I imagine is not surprising to you, but the second may be, and might make you wince.First, the animal in this photo is not an ancestor of us Homo Sapiens. We did not evolve from apes but share a common progenitor that
Junk DNA and Our Common Ancestors Read More »
Dreams are universally experienced, but take on different meanings across time. In the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, “the Dreamtime” or “Alcheringa” in the Arandic central Australian language, refers not to an individual’s dreams, nor even to the images or narrations that come in sleep. Rather, it signifies an eternal space out of which comes creation,
Dreams in the Aboriginal Cultures of Australia Read More »
Evolution brings a sense of humility like nothing else can. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to our ancestors? Featured on the first slide is “Kimberella,” probably the oldest of the “protostome” fossils, dating 255 million years ago – from before the pre-Cambrian explosion.“Aha,” you might be thinking. “That doesn’t look like even the
Kimberella – the Oldest Protostome Fossil Read More »
“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind,” wrote Charles Darwin, in his famous _The Descent of Man_ in 1871. And evolutionary biologists still agree. So then what makes the mental capacities of Homo Sapiens and other hominid apes so different?Two
Brain Size in Homo Sapiens Read More »
Evolutionary history is the focus of my posts for a while, and what better place to start than CRISPR? Last week, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna’s work in using CRISPR for gene editing made news headlines – this is the first time the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two women. The future
CRISPR Gene and The Nobel Prize in Chemistry Read More »
It doesn’t look like much now, but this is one of the oldest stone buildings in all of history. It is the Tower of Jericho. It stands on the West Bank of Palestine, and it is 11,000 years old.Now it is dwarfed by the layers of earth that have built up around it in the
This is the super cool Nebra Sky Disk, which most archaeologists think is the oldest picture of an actual astronomical scene. Looking at the bronze (the blue-green patina might have been deliberate) background with the gold ornamentation, ancient peoples could have been able to figure out when it was time to put an extra month
Ancient Nebra Sky Disk Read More »
Here’s a reconstruction of the oldest European mummy, called Ötzi, named for a region where he was found in the Alps back in 1991. His body had been preserved by his glacial environment for 5,300 years, and has been extensively studied by scientists who have put together a fascinating picture of the Iceman and his
Here you see the Spider, one of the most important geoglyphs that form the Nazca Lines amid the arid coastal plain of southern Peru. The Nazca peoples constructed this and other shapes and lines between 500 BCE and 500 CE, in one of the world’s driest regions. Today the Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World
The Spider of the Nazca Lines Read More »
These rocks from the northern shore of Lake Superior are from the dullest period in our planet’s history, apparently. Most of us humans of the early twenty-first millennium do not do well with being bored. Imagine, then, one billion years of it. From 1.8 to 800 million years ago, Earth’s life forms remained relatively
The Boring Billion Read More »
Yesterday I did a post about the “boring billion”: a period of Earth’s history when very little changed. Today I offer the exact opposite, which is the most exciting two minutes in all of existence. And those in fact were the first two minutes of everything, at the start of the Big Bang. We
To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
This skeleton is a photo montage of a very decorated burial. The man was between 35-45 years old when he died, but his remains date back to about 34,000 years ago — one of the earliest human interments in the historical record. This man’s grave, found in the region of Sunghir, Russia, reflects a vastly
The Paleolithic Burial in Sunghir Read More »
I love how scientific technologies are helping us understand the earliest millennia of human history ever better. This drawing, for instance, features an artistic re-creation of skull fragments dated in 2017 that have helped to overturn our understanding of human evolution. Basic questions, such as “how long have Homo Sapiens been around?” And “where
Appearances of Homo Sapiens Read More »
It’s pleasant, from where I write this post in my ice-bitten and wintery grey state of Pennsylvania, to look at this lovely plant. Here is _Indigofera tinctoria_ the most important plant to make the dye colored indigo — a color that meant beauty to some, but misery to many others. Indigo is one of
Might I introduce to you Monsieurs and/or Madames skulls “D 111” and “D 112”? For such boring names, these heads – carefully plastered, tended to (de-mantibled), and decorated (check out the eye shells) — are some of the best evidence we have for how some early cultures thought about death, ancestor worship, and property.
Neolithic Death Rights Read More »
