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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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 reconstruction of a Swedish woman from 7,000 years ago (using DNA as well as bone and archaeological burial remains) tells us she died when she was between 30-40 years old. Despite this relatively young age by modern standards, it is likely the female members of her community were healthier than many of her global
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
This statue of a worshipping man is from the third millennium BCE is from Ancient Sumeria, and I like the way his lips are pursed, almost like he has a half-smile. Judging his age by the long beard, I think his IRL corresponding figures would have had good reason to smile: they, unlike most other
The Medieval city of Bourges in France is known for its many half-timber framed houses. The layout of the town’s streets is circular, with the cathedral at the epicenter. Typical of these wooden structures is that they get wider on top, so that they make use of more space even as the ground floors have
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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
Today (September 16, 2023) several students from Shippensburg University’s history department travelled with Dr. John Bloom and me to the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, an American Indian site in eastern Pennsylvania. The first slides you see come from the sandstone overhang that made a natural roof for the Meadowcroft encampment, as well as the main area
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These figures painted in the Manda Guéli Cave in central Africa in prehistoric times show humans amidst animals they have domesticated. They illustrate the importance of pastoralism in human history, which isn’t just something that changed some people’s food supply (instead of foraged plants and animals, pastoralists focus on the nutrients from their domesticated beasts).
Pre-History Lactose Tolerance Read More »
My science feeds are abuzz with the story behind an article published this month of November 2022 in _Nature Ecology & Evolution_ that redates a human invention — deliberate cooking of food — to 780,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens evolved. The species Homo erectus (see first image) is the likeliest human ancestor that
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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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These six images of animals depicted in cave art come from an ice age dating up to 20,000 years ago, when hunter-gathering Homo sapiens created many vivid paintings such as the famous ones at Lascaux (15,000 BCE). This month in an article in the _Cambridge Archaeological Journal_ a team of researchers argue that they have
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Ringing Rocks County Park contains a 7-acre boulder field with an unusual feature: about a third of these rocks clang with a metallic ring when struck. The boulder field reached its current position about 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age melted the great Wisconsin Glacier away from this part of Bucks County Pennsylvania.
Here’s a giant ground sloth skeleton, unearthed from the modern state of Missouri. Sloths like this would have stood up to ten feet tall, which was typical of many of the enormous charismatic vertebrates that populated our planet up until the great megafaunal extinction which killed most of them off in the Late Pleistocene, about
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So here’s a provocative set of evidence from our pre-historic past: hand stencils. Among other questions, they raise a debate about whether the first artists were mostly women. The painted shadows that silhouette the hands you see in this image were frequent subjects of our paleolithic and neolithic ancestors (40,000-1,000 BCE). In 2013, archaeologist Dean
