Sixteenth Century Spanish Ship in Florida

The Navy has found what appears to be a Spanish colonial ship that could date as early as the mid 1500s. It is very interesting as it is located somewhat inland covered by 75 feet of sand. The Navy is moving its construction project to avoid the wreck.

The King of Baby Carrots

Robert Grimm, president of Grimmway Farms, who did more than anyone else to popularize baby carrots, has died of a heart attack in Bakersfield. I had no idea how big a business carrots are until I lived in Kern County, where Grimmway is the largest private employer. It also came as a shock to me …

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Lost Airman Laid to Rest

The WWII airman found frozen in a Sierra Nevada glacier last October is being buried in his hometown in Minnesota today. I posted on this several times, most recently when his identity was announced last month. The New York Times has an interesting piece with much detail on how the DoD forensics lab solved the …

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Sadie Discovers the Pacific

Dogs love the beach. Mine have been telling me that for years. So after we got our new Australian Shepherd, Sadie, we knew we had to take her down and introduce her. It was great for her to go with our Lab, Maggie, who could show her the joys of the rotting kelp, stinking crab …

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Our Minds are in the Pleistocene II

Jackson Kuhl attempts to take on his fellow TCS Daily contributor Max Border’s assertion that humans have an instinct for egalitarianism due to our long period of evolution in band societies, something that I posted on here. Kuhl does us a service by pointing out a quote from one of my favorite archaeologists, Kent Flannery …

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Overhunting in Prehistoric California

I want to thank Chas Clifton at Natureblog for reminding me of this story with his post. Jack Broughton, an archaeologist at the University of Utah, has conducted a detailed analysis of faunal remains from the Emeryville Shellmound. This was a significant prehistoric site in the San Francisco Bay area. The turn of the century …

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Clive’s Tortoise

News comes from India that a tortoise believed to be 250 years old has died in a zoo in Kolkata. A good “paper trail” exists to document this long life span as the animal was the pet of Robert Clive (1725-1774) British military commander and founder of the British Empire in India. We know that …

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Pigeons of the Middle East..

.. and North Africa. Janet Jones, the archaeologist who was one of my companions on my Turkish Kurdistan trip in December, has been in Egypt, where she photographed these adobe dovecotes. The dovecotes are the “beehives” on the roofs. The birds I saw in Turkey, especially in and around the city of Urfa, fascinated me …

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Catchup

A roundup of bloggish news, brief but I hope interesting. “Wild Play”: Alpha Enviros don’t grow in front of computer screens. When John Craighead and Jane Goodall are on the same page, maybe we’d best listen. (John must be ninety now– we should all be that tough). Go to Matt’s blog for an important post …

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