The Out of Eden Walk
Found via a post on Bluesky, but this is a delightful graphic showing how humanity has spread mostly across the globe.
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"Fossilized footprints reveal 2 extinct hominin species living side by side 1.5 million years ago"
This is the first time ever that scientists have been able to say that Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei – one our likely ancestor and the other a more distant relative – actually coexisted at the same time and place. Along with many different species of mammals, they were both members of the ancient community that inhabited the Turkana Basin.
Not only that, but with the new tracks as references, our analyses suggest that other previously described hominin tracks in the same region indicate that these two hominins coexisted in this area of the Turkana Basin for at least 200,000 years, repeatedly leaving their footprints in the shallow lake margin habitat.
Very exciting and interesting stuff as a discovery.
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Video announcing rock engravings by Homo Naledi approximately 300k years ago
Dr. Lee Berger's announcement of evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead in the Dinaledi Chamber of Rising Star Cave as well as his discovery of cave etchings attributed to Homo naledi.
Presented at Stony Brook University on June 5th 2023 as part of the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference.
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Evolution of birds thrown a major curveball
Archaeology is fascinating because they are a field where an occurrence quantity of one is hugely important, far more impactful than a singular example is in any other field. I am hesitant to jump too far into this with a singular example, but we'll see what comes of this until more is known.
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(2019) Man fights German museum to release 3d scan of the bust of Nefertiti
Cosmo Wenman (his name is rad) fought from 2016-2019 to get the German museum to release their highly detailed 3d scan of the Bust of Nefertiti. Seeing it embedded in the linked article it is fascinating to see.
The freedom of information laws of Germany required them to release it, sort of. He fought through the process and ultimately prevailed. But they put up a fight. Here are my selected excerpts from the article:
The Louvre, for example, has 3D-scanned the Nike of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo. The Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence 3D-scanned Michelangelo's David. The Bargello has a scan of Donatello's David. Numerous works by Auguste Rodin, including the Gates of Hell, have been scanned by the Musée Rodin in Paris. The Baltimore Museum of Art got in on the Rodin action when it scanned The Thinker. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has scans of works by Bernini, Michelangelo, and many others. But instead of allowing them to be studied, copied, and adapted by scholars, artists, and digitally savvy art lovers, these museums have kept these scans, and countless more, under lock and key.
In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws, which grant everyone an unconditional right to access official information from federal agencies. That goes for any official record—conventional files, electronic records, drawings, graphics, plans, and sound or video recordings.
...[I]t also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.
In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."
While the law required it to grant me access to the scan, it also gave SPK discretion over the mode of that access. The foundation offered to let me "inspect" the data in a controlled setting, either in its offices in Berlin or, since I live in southern California, at the German consulate in Los Angeles.
The organization was treating its scan of Nefertiti like a state secret.
It goes on from there, ultimately showing that SPK appears to have been defending the data for no reason other than the belief they had to. Ultimately they send him the 3d model data on a USB drive but also etch into its virtual underside a Creative Commons license which isn't ultimately relevant as it applies to creations and not copies.
It ends up reading like an institution defending their data out of a belief they have to, but also not prioritizing it as a project or revenue stream, and thus not staffing for that purpose.
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Amazing medieval necklace from 1,300 years ago found
A 1,300-year-old necklace beaded with gold and semiprecious stones has been discovered in an early-Anglo Saxon burial site under a construction project in central England. The location is being hailed as the most significant female burial site from the era discovered in Britain.
"We know about these people from deeds, from literary sources, from hagiographies, but very often we don't have much material evidence for their existence," he said, adding that these aristocratic women played a central role in spreading new religious practices: "There is a form of soft power exercised by these queens."
Experts have hailed the find as particularly significant evidence of the role played by elite women at the time. "This woman probably belonged to the first generation of English Christians in this part of England," Francis Young, a historian of religion who was not involved in the excavation, told The Post. "This is people wanting to show off their newly acquired identity as Christians."
The buried woman's identity is not known, but she is thought likely to have been either an abbess or member of Saxon royalty — if not both.
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The oldest sentence ever written: "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
Inscribed on a beard comb in Canaanite over 5,200 years ago.
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Egypt has the pyramids, Iraq has the Ziggurat of Ur
I had no idea! I knew the term ziggurat because of gaming, but fascinating to learn about this historic site.
"In Mesopotamia, every city was believed to have been founded and built as the residence of a god/goddess… who acted as its protector and political authority," Rumor said. In Ur, that was Nanna the moon god – for whom the ziggurat was constructed as an earthly home and temple. "The cult of Nanna developed very early around the lower course of the Euphrates (at the centre of which was Ur) in connection with the herding of cows and the cycles of nature that increased the herd," she said.
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"Pompeii: Ancient Roman who died in volcanic eruption has had their genome sequenced"
The hot volcanic ash that buried the ancient Roman town of Pompeii killed many of the town’s inhabitants – but it didn’t destroy their DNA. The first complete genome from Pompeii reveals genetic markers that haven’t been seen before in ancient Roman DNA.
[...]
“There was the expectation that the high temperatures would make our effort in DNA sequencing in Pompeii fruitless,” says Gabriele Scorrano at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “Cremated bodies, for example, show no sign of DNA preservation according to multiple studies.”
But Scorrano and his colleagues decided to look for ancient DNA anyway. They focused on the skeletal remains of two people discovered in a building called the Casa del Fabbro, which translates to House of the Craftsman. The pair – a man in his 30s and a woman who was at least 50 years old – seem to have been lying on a low couch in what may have been a dining room at the moment they died.
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"The Sanaa Palimpsest: A truly fascinating Quranic manuscript"
First, a reminder (for some) on what a 'palimpsest' is:
a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
So it's when you write something, then the paper gets reused and simething new is written over it.
The most unusual feature of the Sanaa manuscript is that both texts – the original and the newer, superimposed text – are fragments of the same text, the Quran, and were separated by several decades apart.
According to tradition, the canonical Quran is an irreproachable record of the words revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by God in the mid-seventh century CE. In which case, the obvious question is why the original underlying text was erased only to be replaced a few decades later.
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Dinosaur Diets May Help Explain Dramatic Diversity
If you traveled across what is now North America around 75 million years ago, you would see vastly different dinosaur species everywhere you went. The dramatic variation in this period's fossils, found throughout the western half of the continent, has long puzzled paleontologists. Some have proposed that mountains or rivers might have isolated evolving dinosaur populations, leading to greater diversity. But a new study suggests a different possibility. Part of the answer, researchers report in the journal Palaeontology, rests in what herbivorous dinosaurs were munching on.
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The Story of George McJunkin, a Hidden Figure in North American Archaeology - Atlas Obscura 3/4/2022 10:05 pm
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