I saw these two characters hanging out in a cottonwood near the South Platte while driving into work this morning. I wish I’d had my bigger telephoto lens with me.
Author: Reid Farmer
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The New York Times has an interesting piece on the discovery of a trove of artifacts from the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg. I really enjoyed this article on the development of dendrochronology and bristlecone pines the oldest living things on the planet. A team of Turkish, Australian, and New Zealand archaeologists has just completed …
Indiana Jones is Denied Tenure
I have seen this several times over the years, as archaeologists like to chuckle over it. I ran across it again recently here and thought I’d put it up for the enjoyment of any who hadn’t seen it. January 22, 1939 Assistant Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr. Department of Anthropology Chapman Hall 227B Marshall College …
Well-Traveled Kennewick Man
We’ve posted many times here about Kennewick Man, whose 9,500 year-old remains were found on the banks of the Columbia River, and the subject of a famous court case which allowed scientists to keep them for study rather than repatriate them to tribes under NAGPRA. Most of this Seattle Times article is devoted to a …
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I didn’t want anyone to miss this rather awesome image of a spider and its prey trapped in amber. This spider and wasp encounter occurred in what is now Myanmar about 100 million years ago. Another exciting find is this mammoth carcass found preserved in permafrost in Siberia. An 11 year-old boy found it after seeing …
Migration
Starting yesterday afternoon and continuing on this morning, we’ve been passed over by a number of large flights of Sandhill Cranes, wending their way south to visit Steve at the Bosque del Apache. I have always loved their creaking croaky cries that you can usually hear long before you can spot them high in the …
A Find
I was out walking with the dogs around the south side of the house yesterday afternoon and came across this nice chalcedony interior flake a few yards southeast of the garden. In the five years we’ve lived here I have found a number of pieces of stone that looked almost like artifacts, but in every …
Smoky Sunset
Luckily we haven’t had any more major wildfires for the last couple of months. Last week though, we had a lot of haze in the air from smoke that had blown in from fires in Idaho and Oregon. That made for some beautiful spooky sunsets like this one.
California Fieldwork
I spent last week in California doing a survey for a project we have in the San Diego area. The picture above shows the inland scrub environment of the area. If you look closely you can see an old landslide in the middle of the hillside. Believe me, it was plenty hot there last week. This …
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Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have completed the reconstruction of the Denisovan genome. It still blows me away that the entire collection of physical remains of this group of ancient humans (as different from modern humans and Neanderthals as they are from each other) consists of one finger bone fragment. Underwater …