The methodology of dating these things is really not very reliable, making these big numbers they slap on these things not particularly meaningful.

But I’ve always found prehistory interesting.

Science News:

Scientific debate about the most controversial archaeological site in the Americas has entered rocky new territory.

In 2017, scientists reported that around 130,000 years ago, an unidentified Homo species used stone tools to break apart a mastodon’s bones near what is now San Diego. If true, that would mean that humans or one of our close evolutionary relatives reached the Americas at least 100,000 years earlier than previously thought, dramatically reshaping scientists’ understanding of when the region was settled (SN: 4/26/17).

Critics have questioned whether the unearthed stones were actually used as tools. And other researchers suggested that supposed tool marks on the bones could have been created as the bones were carried by fast-moving streams or caused by construction activity that partially exposed the California site before its excavation in 1992 and 1993.

But new analyses bolster the controversial claim, says a team that includes some of the researchers involved in the initial finding. Chemical residue of bones appears on two stones previously found among mastodon remains at the Cerutti Mastodon site, the scientists report in the December Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The two Cerutti rocks also show signs of having delivered or received hard blows where bone residue accumulated, the team says. The larger stone may have served as a platform on which the bones were smashed open with the smaller stone, possibly to remove marrow for eating or to obtain bone chunks suitable for shaping into tools.

“Many repeated blows are likely to have created the concentrations of broken [mastodon] bones” found at the site, says Richard Fullagar, a geoarcheaologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia who was also part of the original research. Hominids — perhaps Neandertals, Denisovans, Homo erectus or Homo sapiens — battered the large creature’s remains on one or possibly several visits to the site, Fullagar contends.

In the new study, Fullagar, Wollongong geoarchaeologist Luc Bordes and colleagues used microscopes to determine that the chemical and molecular structure of residue on the two stones matched that of bones in general. That residue must have been acquired by pounding apart mammoth bones that were found scattered around the stones, the team argues. Since microscopic remnants of bone appeared only where stones showed signs of wear and hard impacts, it’s unlikely that the stones accumulated the residue by accidentally coming in contact with mastodon bones after being covered by sediment, the scientists say.

This is the rock they’re claiming is a prehistorical tool:

It’s a little bit hard to buy that.

Frankly, the entire paradigm of primitive man running around in buck skins smashing things with rocks is hard to buy. Assuming they had the same basic biology as modern man (which they claim has been static for about 200,000 years), including our intelligence, then it just doesn’t make sense that they would spend multiple generations, let alone thousands of years, in a primitive state.

Furthermore, it doesn’t make any sense that while in a primitive state, they were building megalithic stone structures.

Stonehenge is dated as having been built in 3000 BC. Again, that’s a totally arbitrary date.

But in 3000 BC, we’re told that people were roughly the same as in 100,000 BC – running around in buck skins smashing things with rocks.

Göbekli Tepe, found in Turkey, is supposedly 12,000 years old.

It features art that is shockingly similar to art found in prehistoric Mexico.

There are massive stone structures all over the planet, in fact, which they give various arbitrary dates to.

Frankly, I think the entire narrative of prehistory is a lie.

Danielle Bradford, 21

This is what women do after violating men’s spaces.

Daily Mail:

A young Cambridge University academic, given an award for researching sexual harassment during fieldwork, says she was laughed at for her work by a ‘large group of older men.’ 

Danielle Bradford, 21, was being honoured at the Marsh Archaeology Awards in London on November 22 when she said she was driven to tears by the laughing in the audience.

‘As I was being introduced, they said ‘she’s been researching sexual harassment in archaeology’, to which a large group of older men laughed. Fully laughed – to the point that the presenter had to say ‘it isn’t funny’.

Ms Bradford is researching sexual misconduct that occurs during archaeological fieldwork.

In a thread on Twitter, Ms Bradford expressed her shock at what had happened during the event.

She isn’t even doing anything remotely related or useful to archaeology itself, she’s just making it about vaginas because that’s what women do: they make everything about their vaginas.

Her research is pointless and literally doesn’t contribute anything to either archaeology or anthropology, yet she’s nominated for awards, given awards, and made to believe that she’s doing something.

This game of pretending women can contribute something valuable other than their wombs is getting out of hand.

Men should be the ones filing sexual harassment complaints after being followed by random nagging women into most places.

Everything would be more productive and less stressful if men could be alone doing men stuff while women did the womb stuff.

According to Ms Bradford The Council for British Archaeology (CBA), which hosted the event, were ‘angry at the reaction’ and had been ‘amazingly kind and supportive.’

She thanked people for their kind words and said she was going to be fine.

Dr Mike Heyworth, CBA’s executive director, told the BBC that the CBA was shocked at the reaction to her award and ‘condemns anyone who treats these issues lightly and does not give researchers in this area the respect they fully deserve’.

He added the organization hadn’t been able to identify exactly who was laughing in the audience but said the organisation was writing to those who attended the event to condemn ‘the completely inappropriate reaction.’

Imagine being an actual academic doing actual work in the archaeological and anthropological fields and not laughing when witnessing some random womb receiving an award for “researching” women’s feelings and alleged interactions with men.

She even uses the famous “we are losing female talent because men are mean” argument.

The reality is that no woman in any field can make up for the talent that is lost by having her do the work instead of a man.

This incident has proven that laughter, as a reaction to these things, can have a pretty hilarious effect on these delusional women.

Deep down, they know that they’re not to be taken seriously.

Ten million is a lot of gosh-darn years.

These estimates of fossil age… it’s like they’re the reverse of the estimates of ancient temple age. They say the megalithic structures across the planet are only a couple thousand years old, when they could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years old, then they say any bones they find are millions or billions of years old.

I’m calling bullshit, because, you know, there is no objectivity to most of the literature on this stuff (let alone the news bits).

But yeah – no interesting stuff was getting dug up in Crimea when it was a part of the so-called “independent state” of “The Ukraine.”

RT:

The skeleton of an ancient whale was unearthed by archeologists in Crimea, Russia as they were examining a future railroad site. The animal lived in a sea which disappeared 10 million years ago.

The spine and ribs of a Cetotherium (Latin for ‘whale beast’), an extinct relative of modern whales, were discovered on the Kerch Peninsula as archeologists were examining land designated for railroad construction, local media reported on Friday.

The prehistoric creature was about five meters (16.5 feet) long. The discovery is not surprising, considering that the site was once deep underwater, at the heart of what was the Sarmatian Sea. “The sea eventually became land,” Sergey Yazikov, a researcher at the Archeology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences told local media.

“The geological layers have gone up, and the whale’s skeleton appeared on top, although it used to rest on the seabed.”

The past is something that interests me much. And most of it is something they are lying to us about.

I guess the whale could be ten million years old. I have no evidence that this isn’t the case. But if you look into the evidence they have to make the claim that it is, you’ll find that they could just as easily be making up random numbers, and effectively are doing exactly that.

British researchers from Aberdeen are going to dig in Spain in search of confirmation that Scandinavian Vikings once built a colony along the Northern coast of Spain.

The Local:

Dr Irene Garcia Losquino, who is hoping to secure funding for the research, aims to undertake a comprehensive archaeological examination of possible Norse communities in Iberia after a number of stone Viking anchors were washed ashore in Galicia following a storm in March.

Dr Losquino, who works in Aberdeen University’s Centre for Scandinavian Studies, said despite the existing written accounts of Viking raids along the northern coast of Spain, so far there was no academically accepted evidence of Norsemen living there permanently.

“I don’t believe in fate but I had been writing about Galicia at the time of the storm, and when I read that these anchors had washed up I dropped everything and went to investigate for myself.

“While there we found what looked like the remains of a longphort, which was a kind of Viking building that was quickly made as a defensive base of operations when raiding,” she told Scottish daily newspaper, The Press and Journal.

The location of the possible longphort, or shore fortress, led Dr Losquino to believe that there would have been more permanent settlements close by, because Vikings would commonly only settle near a population nucleus or wealthy areas.

The area where the anchors were discovered is close to an old gold mine and religious settlements.

Dr Losquino explains that “Vikings made their mark on northern Spanish culture, people take part in three-day pilgrimages inland from the shore, which is what their ancestors would have to do to flee the raiding Viking hordes”.