Monthly Archives: August 2012

Featured Articles
Lucy
August 30, 2012 0 Comments

Palaeontology and Evolutionary Biology

24 November is a great day for palaeontology and evolutionary biology. Not only was it on this date in 1859 that Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” as it is commonly known, was published (it sold out on its first day and had to be re-printed), it was also the day, in 1974, when paleoanthropologists discovered Lucy, a 3.2 million year old skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, an extinct species of hominid.

Archaeology
Petralona skull covered by stalagmite
August 29, 2012 0 Comments

The Greek Crisis: Palaeoanthropology and Archaeology

Greece has been in the grip of a financial crisis for the last few years now and Greek heritage sites are hit the worst. There is however, an unseen, less well known crisis and it involves Greek palaeoanthropology – the study of hominin evolution. It is not so much a crisis as a metaphorical drought of artefacts and fossil evidence, which remains the best way to understand human evolution in Greece.

Archaeology
Clovis points
August 27, 2012 0 Comments

In the footsteps of the first American

The exploration of the origins of the civilizations undoubtedly constitutes a fascinating adventure, but also a demanding one; it indeed takes us to fields uncertain and troubled by passion. On the subject, the history of investigations on the initial human settlements of the American continent is revealing…

Archaeology
Elisegs pillar
August 23, 2012 0 Comments

Enigmatic Eliseg reveals its secrets

An Open Afternoon between 2-5 on Saturday 8 September will give the public an opportunity to find more about the third season of excavations at the Pillar of Eliseg, a ninth-century AD stone monument which stands on a prehistoric mound near Valle Crucis Abbey Llangollen, in north-east Wales. Archaeologists from Bangor and Chester Universities are returning to carry out a third season of excavations at the site between 26 August -16 September 2012.

Palaeontology
Mollusc
August 23, 2012 0 Comments

Ancient fossils reveal how the mollusc got its teeth

The radula sounds like something from a horror movie – a conveyor belt lined with hundreds of rows of interlocking teeth. In fact, radulas are found in the mouths of most molluscs, from the giant squid to the garden snail. Now, a “prototype” radula found in 500-million-year-old fossils studied by University of Toronto graduate student Martin Smith, shows that the earliest radula was not a flesh-rasping terror, but a tool for humbly scooping food from the muddy sea floor.

Archaeology
Slavey Wiki Commons
August 22, 2012 0 Comments

African Origins website launches vast expansion

The African Origins website at Emory University, launched last year with the names of 10,000 Africans who were liberated from the slave trade in the 19th century, has added the names of more than 80,000 African captives to the site, making it the largest and most comprehensive record of the identity of individuals caught up in the slave trade to the Americas.

Palaeontology
NASA
August 22, 2012 0 Comments

Cretaceous Footprints Found at Goddard

About 110 million light years away, the bright, barred spiral galaxy NGC 3259 was just forming stars in dark bands of dust and gas. Here on the part of the Earth where NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center would eventually be built, a plant-eating dinosaur sensed predators nearby and quickened its pace, leaving a deep imprint in the Cretaceous mud.

Archaeology
The ancient fortified site of Becan in the heart of the Central Maya Lowlands abandoned with the collapse and never repopulated
August 22, 2012 0 Comments

Multiple factors, including climate change, led to collapse and depopulation of ancient Maya

A new analysis of complex interactions between humans and the environment preceding the 9th century collapse and abandonment of the Central Maya Lowlands in the Yucatán Peninsula points to a series of events — some natural, like climate change; some human-made, including large-scale landscape alterations and shifts in trade routes — that have lessons for contemporary decision-makers and sustainability scientists.

Archaeology
The researchers found skull fragments that date to 63000 years ago
August 21, 2012 0 Comments

Lao skull earliest example of modern human fossil in Southeast Asia

An ancient skull recovered from a cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos is the oldest modern human fossil found in Southeast Asia, researchers report. The discovery pushes back the clock on modern human migration through the region by as much as 20,000 years and indicates that ancient wanderers out of Africa left the coast and inhabited diverse habitats much earlier than previously appreciated.

Uncategorized
Mars
August 20, 2012 1 Comment

The Inca City

Mars, the distant fourth planet from the sun, and our closest yet estranged friend in this infinite mass of possibilities we call the universe. Christened after the Roman god of war, and dubbed the “Red Planet”.