Four Stone Hearth: Volume 110

Welcome to the first Four Stone Hearth of 2011! I have compiled some of the best anthropology writing on the web and I hope you like them.

First up are a couple of posts that are only tangentially related to anthropology. Magnus Reuterdahl tells us how an insect closed a museum in Attack of the silverfishes.

Next up John McKay compares the ability of the internet’s ability to endlessly recycle untrue information with the mainstream media’s ability to endlessly recycle untrue information. He also provides a cautionary tale about how even competent scientists can be sucked into that recycling in Zombies of the Mammoth Steppes. Also, there are mammoths!

Daniel Lende talks about Anthropology and Publicity. Something we all should think about.

Brian Switek is thinking about publicity and anthropology and you can read about it in A Fistful of Teeth – Do the Qesem Cave Fossils Really Change Our Understanding of Human Evolution?

Carl Zimmer looks at this question as well in Oldest Homo sapiens fossil? Journalistic vaporware.

Changing pace for a moment, Ronald Kephart tells us Why Anthropologists Are Special. He also uses the Aymara to demonstrate why Science is not that hard.

This next item isn’t a blog post, but is about linguistics, specifically the study of a contemporary language closely related to ancient Greek.

Time Traveling teaches us about Shaving with Obsidian Blade.

A tasty item is over at Eldrimmer where we learn about Creating Viking age recipes and pondering reconstructions in general.

Anna’s Bones has a two part entry with Road to Rudabánya and Anatomy of a Square.

John Hawks has an interesting and cautionary post about artistic reconstructions in Pod Pimping (as in Sauropod – not Ipod).

This is serious monkey business looks at the ethics of habituating primates in Is habituation ethically permissible from a biocentric perspective?

Chris O’Brien looks at how creationists mislead each other and the public when the talk about Lucy in Correcting Creationists Redux…Was Lucy’s Pelvis Reconstruction A Fraud?

Finally, Carl Feagans reviews the year in Pseudoarchaeology in, what else, 2010: The Year in Pseudoarchaeology

The next edition of the Four Stone Hearth will be at The Prancing Papio on January 19th. If you are interested in hosting future dates please drop me a line.