A villa in Iceland

And here it is....

2007-12-11T18:09:00.001+05:30

Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution
by John Hawks, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran, Henry C. Harpending and Robert K. Moyzis

A map ahead of its time

2007-12-08T10:56:00.000+05:30

The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.
Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

More at Reuters

Inside news

2007-12-08T10:11:00.000+05:30

From Steve Sailer:

"We are those mutants"
I've been posting teasers for awhile about an upcoming big paper on evolution co-written by the Murderer's Row of Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, John Hawks, Bob Moyzis, and Eric Wang. It officially comes out Monday evening, Dec. 10, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

I'm not going to say anymore about it now so that the big boys at the NYT and The Economist can have time to write their stories without anyone jumping the gun ... other than to leave you with a Cochran quote as the title of this post.

Dying to see what turns up

Attila's capital?

2007-10-08T00:22:00.000+05:30

Google Earth has spawned up a number of 'virtual' archaeologists, and many of them are doing the discipline a good service. Here are the remains of a walled city, previously unrecorded, near Timisoara in Romania. Chances are, it's Attila's capital, which is known to have been somewhere near the Danube, but never unearthed.

Here is what fifth century Roman ambassador Priscus had to say abut Attila's court, which provides vital, and the only, clues:

The next day I entered the enclosure of Attila's palace, bearing gifts to his wife, whose name was Kreka. She had three sons, of whom the eldest governed the Acatiri and the other nations who dwell in Pontic Scythia. Within the enclosure were numerous buildings, some of carved boards beautifully fitted together, others of straight, fastened on round wooden blocks which rose to a moderate height from the ground. Attila's wife lived here, and, having been admitted by the barbarians at the door, I found her reclining on a soft couch. The floor of the room was covered with woollen mats for walking on. A number of servants stood round her, and maids sitting on the floor in front of her embroidered with colours linen cloths intended to be placed over the Scythian dress for ornament. Having approached, saluted, and presented the gifts, I went out, and walked to another house, where Attila was, and waited for Onegesius, who, as I knew, was with Attila. I stood in the middle of a great crowd--the guards of Attila and his attendants knew me, and so no one hindered me. I saw a number of people advancing, and a great commotion and noise, Attila's egress being expected. And he came forth from the house with a dignified gait, looking round on this side and on that. He was accompanied by Onegesius, and stood in front of the house; and many persons who had lawsuits with one another came up and received his judgment. Then he returned into the house, and received ambassadors of barbarous peoples.

bain damage and social interactions

2007-03-26T02:55:00.001+05:30

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/03/brain_damage_and_the.html

Wandering Minds

2007-03-25T16:47:00.000+05:30

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2007/03/20/wandering-minds/

wonder why ...

2007-03-25T16:46:00.001+05:30

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/02/learning_about_plasticity.php

Reducible Complexity

2007-03-25T16:45:00.000+05:30

Great post at evolving thoughts

Gut Reaction

2007-03-25T16:42:00.000+05:30

I didnt know the gut was so nerve rich! This post at the science blogs explores the relations between the brain and the gut

clock for the old brain?

2007-03-25T16:33:00.000+05:30

at science blogs

Cannabis, Marijuana and Schizophrenia

2007-03-25T14:00:00.000+05:30

I always wondered about this one: Do drugs have a link to Schizophrenia @ Current Psychiatry?

What is it Like to Have Schizophrenia

2007-03-25T13:59:00.000+05:30

At BBC News

Origin of the Slavs

2007-03-21T00:55:00.000+05:30

Dienekes speaks at length on the paper 'Y-STR variation among Slavs: evidence for the Slavic homeland in the middle Dnieper basin' by Krzysztof Rębała, Alexei I. Mikulich, Iosif S. Tsybovsky, Daniela Siváková, Zuzana Džupinková, Aneta Szczerkowska-Dobosz and Zofia Szczerkowska

Nicholas Wade on the origins of morality...

2007-03-21T00:47:00.000+05:30

...among primates, in his NYT column.

The good life

2007-03-21T00:37:00.000+05:30

More news from Greece and around.

Archaeologists have discovered mashed grapes that could have been used to make wine 6,500 years old at a neolithic site in Dikili.

Meanwhile, archaeologists in Cyprus have stumbled upon the oldest perfume making factory in the world.

How the Anasazi disappeared

2007-03-21T00:30:00.000+05:30

A review of Craig Childs' book 'House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest'.

Not a family blog....

2007-03-20T23:59:00.000+05:30

After all.

One of the objects on display at a sex-related exhibition at the Tyrolean County Museum in Austria is this re-usable condom made of pig's intestines (like sausages??) from the 1640s, discovered in Lund in Sweden. The instructions, in Latin, tell the user to dip it in warm milk before use to avoid infection.

(Hat-tip to Archaeoblog)

Talking about sex-related stuff, here's an interesting article on the history of pornography from the archives of Der Spiegel.

160,000-year-old jawbone redefines origins of the species

2007-03-20T15:56:00.000+05:30

Modern humans were living in northern Africa far earlier than previously thought, according to scientists. A new analysis of a 160,000-year-old fossilised jawbone from Morocco shows that the homo sapiens in the area had started having long childhoods, one of the hallmarks of humans living today....
The latest find shows that the key time in the development of a complex human society came much earlier than previously thought. The longer people had to learn and develop their brains as children, the more sophisticated their society could become. The new study pushes the date that modern humans emerged back by more than 100,000 years.

Philistines no more

2007-03-20T15:51:00.000+05:30

In recent years, excavations in Israel established that the Philistines had fine pottery, handsome architecture and cosmopolitan tastes. If anything, they were more refined than the shepherds and farmers in the nearby hills, the Israelites, who slandered them in biblical chapter and verse and rendered their name a synonym for boorish, uncultured people.

Archaeologists have now found that not only were Philistines cultured, they were also literate when they arrived, presumably from the region of the Aegean Sea, and settled the coast of ancient Palestine around 1200 B. C.
At the ruins of a Philistine seaport at Ashkelon in Israel, excavators examined 19 ceramic pieces and determined that their painted inscriptions represent a form of writing. Some of the pots and storage jars were inscribed elsewhere, probably in Cyprus and Crete, and taken to Ashkelon by early settlers. Of special importance, one of the jars was made from local clay, meaning Philistine scribes were presumably at work in their new home.
The discovery is reported in the current issue of The Israel Exploration Journal by two Harvard professors, Frank Moore Cross Jr. and Lawrence E. Stager.

Painted inscriptions on ceramics

Read more

And read Dienekes on The Script of the Philistines

Roman village found at Silbury Hill

2007-03-20T15:48:00.000+05:30

The Romans did more than stop and stare in wonder at the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe - they built a substantial village at the foot of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire.....

German finds

2007-03-20T15:30:00.000+05:30

Lots of catching up to do as I was out of action for more than a week.

Two significant finds have been announced in Germany in the last two months. The first, near Inden in North Rhine-Westphalia, is of a stone age hunting camp said to be 120,000 years old.

"We'll never find such a camp ever again," archaeologist Jürgen Thissen from the Rhineland Commission for Historical Sites said in Bonn Monday. "There isn't another one in the whole of Germany."

He added that the find was the first of its kind in the region, and was of European importance.

Thissen and his assistants came across postholes of three shelters in the open-cast mine last August. Two fireplaces with traces of fires were also found, as were over 600 stone tools and the stone chips left over from their production. Among the stone tools found were a stone knife, serrated blades, and so-called "blanks" (pieces of stone ready to be shaped into tools).

Read the full story here at De Spiegel.

German archaeologists have also announced the discovery of a stone age dwelling mound, the first of its kind in Western Europe. Such mounds have been found before in the Middle East and the Balkans.

the discovery of a dwelling mound near Oberröblingen in Saxony-Anhalt has caused something of a stir in the German archaeological establishment. Thought to be 7,000 years old, the oval-shaped mound, which is roughly 100 meters long, 60 meters wide and 1.8 meters high, consists of the clay remains of centuries of previous structures.
"This is a unique find in Germany," Robert Ganslmeier of the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle told the news agency DPA. "People have been living and building here since the early Stone Age."

Read the story here at De Spiegel

Picture courtesy: De Spiegel

Previous assumption of higher prevalence of schizophrenia in developed regions challenged

2007-03-16T10:17:00.000+05:30

Research by the World Health Organization had suggested that schizophrenia is relatively more prevalent developing societies. However, a new study from Current Anthropology challenges this assumption, comparing biological and cultural indicators of schizophrenia in urban, Western societies with study data from the island of Palau, which has one of the highest rates of schizophrenia diagnosis in the world today.

The regional differences in epidemology has been traditionally attributed to cultural and genetic factors. However, differences in diagnosis and in recognition and reporting of symptoms could also be a contributing factor for the imbalances in distribution found.

Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto' - some observations

2007-03-11T04:31:00.000+05:30

I got round to seeing this movie.

Now, pre-Columban new world history is nowhere near my strongest point but I am TOLD that it is historically innacurate. That the city and civilisation depicted are more like 900 AD than 16th century, that the architecture and rituals are a post-modern mishmash of mesoamerican cultures 300 AD to 1200 AD. All I can say is that it was a jolly good ride, and a violent one to boot.

Some spoilers here and there, nothing major, but still, if you plan on watching this movie and want a 'virgin' experience, you can stop reading right here.

A few observations that I could not help but make, despite my limited knowledge, are:

1. Jaguar Paw's village is a hunter gatherer community, evidently with no knowledge of agriculture. That seems a little unlikely since agriculture has been around in the new world from about 300BC.

2. It is unlikely that Jaguar Paw, and his villagers, would have been dumbstruck seeing 'houses of stone' - cities - since the Mayan, and Aztec, civilisation was a dense network of towns and cities, big and small.

3. Was pre-columban America really THAT bloodthirsty? Perhaps it was. A lot of archaeological evidence does point that way, much to the discomfort of the "noble savage" proponents. All I can do is quote Juan Pardinas here:

"The bad news is that this historical interpretation bears some resemblances with reality […]. Mel Gibson’s characters are more similar to the Mayas of the Bonampak’s murals than the ones that appear in the Mexican school textbooks."

Like in 'Passion of Christ', Mel Gibson is very particular about an authentic script, at least, and so the entire film is spoken in Yukatec Mayan, a language that a very few people today actually speak (which is slightly better than the old Aramiac and Latin of "The Passion...", languages that nobody speak today).

Historical innacuracies apart, 'Apocalypto' is a good, racy movie. Especially the first half, with its depictions of simplicity and childlike innocence in the 'hunter gatherer' villages and its contrast with the violence and decadence of urban areas. The second half is kind of like 'First Blood' set in the 16th century.

The greatest criticism levelled at this film is that of racism. That is because of the last five minutes, and honestly, I think that could easily have been avoided. I don't think it was really necessary to show the arrival of the Spaniards, presumably Hernando Cortez and his conquistadors. And Will Durant's quote at the beginning of the film: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within". And it is also innacurate to a degree because Mayan civilisation had already collapsed about 300 years before Cortez landed in what today is Mexico. What mudslingers say is that Mel Gibson is an apologist for colonialism, or worse, justifies colonialism because the colonised society was rotten to the core to begin with.

Do they have a point here? All said and done, one cannot deny what had happened. And what HAD happened is that all it took was about 600 Spaniards to beat the living hell out of five million Aztecs (and further south, 180 Spaniards to beat 40,000 Incas). Even the greatest proponents of the noble savage have no illusion about this. And one reason was that pre-Columban America was a highly stratified and hierarchical, not to mention divided, society in which the powerful held the less powerful in constant awe and terror, and they employed every means of violence known to them to keep that status quo. It's just too bad they were not familiar with the most effective methods of violence, such as gunfire and cannons, because compared to America, the stakes were considerably higher in 16th century Europe.

Therefore, although I had earlier said that director Mel Gibson could easily have done without it, I must admit that the last five minutes of the film are its most defining moments. For once, Jaguar Paw and his pursuers are equal in wonder at the sight of Spanish ships anchored at their coast. They don't know it, but in hindsight, we know, that their lives, their society, their culture, their civilisation will never be same again. Where you gonna run now? Not you, the hunted, but the hunter.

Oldest sun towers in America

2007-03-11T04:19:00.000+05:30

Image courtesy BBC

The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been found, suggesting the existence of early, sophisticated Sun cults, scientists report.

It comprises a group of 2,300-year-old structures, known as the Thirteen Towers, which are found in the Chankillo archaeological site, Peru.

An embarassing question

2007-03-11T04:11:00.000+05:30

Crabs, that annoying thing that unsuspecting people catch from random sexual escapades, apparently came from gorillas.

Humans caught pubic lice, aka "the crabs," from gorillas roughly three million years ago, scientists now report.

Rather than close encounters of the intimate kind, researchers explained humans most likely got the lice, which most commonly live in pubic hair, from sleeping in gorilla nests or eating the apes....

Humans are unique among primates in that we host two different kinds of lice—one on our heads and bodies (Pediculus), the bane of many schoolchildren, and pubic lice (Pthirus). In comparison, chimpanzees have only head lice and gorillas only pubic lice.

Read more here
and here

And what does John Hawks say?

I still think the flawed assumption is that the hominid-gorilla interaction occurred when the hominid and gorilla Pthirus diverged. The interaction works a lot better later, assuming within-gorilla parasite variation. Since there is a lot of within-human variation in the other louse genus, Pediculus, the idea of a couple million years of delay between louse genetic divergence and lateral transfer is not at all unlikely, even without invoking ancient gorilla speciations.

More here