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 […]
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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
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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
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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
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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 »
This fleshy female figure, found facing frontal with felines (haha say that ten times fast) comes from one of the earliest human civilizations that developed agriculture, the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. The ruins are wonders, spanning thousands of years from 7,500-6,400 BCE, built up layer upon layer of 18 levels. Çatalhöyük gives lots of evidence
This is a book that of which I am not a fan. _The Alphabet Versus the Goddess_, by Leonard Shlain, argues that the development of the written word allowed patriarchy to flourish. Sigh. Shlain’s background was in surgery, and the premise of his thesis is rooted in physical claims. “Alphabet literacy,” he asserts, gains
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When you were a kid, did you learn that the first humans in the Americas crossed over the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago? Scholars have overturned this chronology completely, but it held away for many years in part because of this type of spear- or knife- head technology featured here, which is the
Clovis Culture and Migration Read More »
This is a drawing of the prehistoric species Plesiosaurus, discovered by the paleontologist Mary Anning in 1823. Anning was a working-class, uneducated person who became one of England’s premier fossil scholars, but struggled her whole life — financially and professionally — because of her gender and class. Anning grew up on the southern coast
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This lovely creature was a Dinogorgon, one of many types of animals known as “Gorgonopsia,” the apex predators in the Permian Period. When I learned about how boss these creatures were, the nine-year-old paleontologist in me felt cheated because of all the front stage play that dinosaurs get. But these animals were amazing and thrived
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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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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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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