HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in November 2006
Science Daily is reporting that evidence has been found for the world’s oldest ritual. Archaeologist Sheila Coulson has uncovered a stone artifact shaped to look like a python in the Tsodilo hills region of Botswana (known for glorious rock paintings). The python was surrounded by more than 13,000 other artifacts, many of which were spearheads. It appears that these spearheads, were brought to the location and ceremonially burnt. This find pushes the dates of early ritualistic and religious behavior back 30,000 than previously thought.
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Someone’s finally worked out how the Antikythera Mechanism works – this 2,000 year old Greek machine predicts lunar motion following the theories of Hipparchus
The original Nature paper is here and more commentary here and the research groups website is here
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From the Onion:
Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life….The new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from any willful adaptation to changing environmental conditions.
The excellent Bibliodyssey has posted a collection of bas relief pictures from the ruins of the Mayan city Palenque
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A paper by Cote & Clobert in Proc. Roy. Soc is arguing that population dispersals (in lizards, Acerta vivipara) is affected by the personalities of said lizards:
For example, an increased density should promote the departure of individuals with less social tolerance. Therefore, we hypothesized that dispersers from high-density populations should primarily be asocial individuals, whereas [...]
In 1804 Alexander von Humboldt brought back a parrot from his five-year expedition to Central and South America. Apparently the parrot was the only remaining speaker of the Atures language Humboldt subsequently recorded 40 words from the parrot that belonged to the dead language. More from SFGate here
Nice story, but my urban legend detector is [...]
Thanks to reddit, I re-found an article I read a few years ago on the Last Cargo Cult by Mike Jay from 2002. It’s a wonderful look at the rapid evolution of a “cargo cult” religion in Vanuatu. There’s also a nice article on the same here from the Smithsonian magazine.
Remember John Frum day on February 15th!
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