Utah is Considering a Bad Archaeology Bill

As is well known Utah is currently considering a bill promoting creationism. But they also have a bill affecting archaeology in the works. This is HB 139. I haven’t had a chance to digest the entire thing yet but it looks kind of goofy. An alert Reader sent me a link to this story on [...]

Common Misperceptions About (or In) Anthropology

Chad Orzel over at Uncommon Principles has assigned more home work. He wants to know your least favorite misconceptions about your field. When I signed up with ScienceBlogs I didn’t realize there were going to be mid=terms! My first annoying misconception actually concerns the uncertainty pricnciple. You see it is often invoked, within the field [...]

African-Americans in the Americas by the end of the 16th Century

The above is a picture of Africa-American remains discovered in Campeche, Mexico. According to a story in the Wisconsin State Journal: Tiesler discovered the slaves’ remains buried in a colonial- era graveyard that was unearthed in 2000 during a remodeling of Campeche’s public square. The remains are from the late 16th century and the mid-17th [...]

Egyptian Queens and Mourning Babboons

The above is a recently discovered (at Luxor) statue believed to date to between 1391 and 1352 B.C.E.: “The statue, however, when it was removed, revealed itself as a queen of Amenhotep III, whose name appears repeatedly on the statue’s crown,” Bryan said. She said she theorizes that perhaps this statue is of the great [...]

Interesting 3,000 Year Old Iranian Skeleton

Via Anthropology in the News comes this interesting story. What is so interesting about it you ask? Note his posture, in particular the posture of the arm holding the dagger – raised as if attacking or defending. From the article: “He is holding a 26-centimeter dagger and appears to be making a forward thrust,” said [...]

Sequencing Plankton DNA

According to this from the NSF have been sequencing DNA from a range of planktonic microbes living at depths from 40 to more than 13,000 feet: The interdisciplinary research team sequenced a total of 64 million base pairs, or subunits, of DNA from microbes and viruses they collected at each depth. In the process, they [...]

ID “Survey”

Added Later: krauze is claiming some sort of conspiracy about the poll he sent out. So let me clear it up for him, we did not receive marching orders from Elsberry. The response was the same because we all recognize a poorly designed survey (you didn’t mention choice H: ‘Intelligent design’ is a subset of [...]

Recent Changes in the Human Cranium: Reprise

As I wrote in a recent post an article was recently published in the British Dental Journal comparing skulls from people who died from the black plague in 1348 (13 males and 17 females) to skulls of people who died in the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1545 (53 males, 1 female) and with [...]

Seed Magazine and Challenger

Seed Magazine’s retrospective on the 20th anniversery of the Challenger explosion can be found here

Missouri Creationism: The Silly Season has Begun

Added Later: Pat Hayes at Red State Rabble provides hi own unique take on this bill. Can’t say I can argue with his characterization of the MO legislatures modus operendi. According to Missouri Citizens for Science (a new blog I just stumbled across) a new creationist bill has been introduced in the Missouri House of [...]

Scorpion Lives Inside Plaster Mold of Fossil

From ABC News: Don DeBlieux, a paleontologist for the Utah Geological Survey, said he was sawing open the plaster mold when the scorpion wriggled from a crack in a sandstone block. DeBlieux is still chipping away at the 1,000-pound rock to expose the horned skull of an 80-million-year-old plant eater a species of dinosaur he [...]

Recent Changes in the Human Cranium

According to a story on BBC News the human cranium has undergone some interesting changes over the last 600-700 years: The two principal differences discovered were that our ancestors had more prominent features, but their cranial vault – the distance measured from the eyes to the top of the skull – was smaller. Dr Peter [...]

New Species of Crocodile Discovered

The above is a picture of a new species of crocodile, named Effigia okeeffeae, that walks on two feet. According National Geographic News: Despite the reptile’s resemblance to an ostrich dinosaur, or ornithomimid, Effigia is actually some 80 million years older. Effigia roamed North America in the Triassic period some 210 million years ago. “This [...]

Transitions

I will be picking a new Site of the Week for Transitions soon. Be sure to check out my new blog at ScienceBlogs

Google Has Me Conflicted

Fresh off telling the feds to stick it Google is now helping the Chinese government engage in censorship. If they help the Chinese government censor searches how long will it be before they help the US government. It’s a slippery slope…