study archaeology

There are a lot of companies that sponsor working vacations for archaeology enthusiasts. All of them are in the $2-3k/wk/person range though, and after air fare and food it would blow the travel budget to try and do this with one of my kids. Combine that with the fact that many of them don’t accept 14 year olds, and I don’t think they’ll work for me this year.

Ok, maybe this chicken didn’t actually change the world so much as settle a debate that goes back, literally, centuries.

There was contact between Polynesia and the Americas after 8,500 BCE, and before Columbus. The proof is in the chicken.

The Araucana, or easter egg chicken, comes from south America. Chile, specifically, and the Arauco peninsula. But chickens were domesticated in Southeast Asia, after the dawn of agriculture. So they had to come from Asia at some time. Scientists recently used DNA testing to prove that, in fact, some bones found there recently are pre-Columbian, and yet are directly related to Polynesian chickens.

Linguists have been arguing about the fact that most modern Amerindian languages seem to emanate, not from the Bering straits area, but from a point in northern Chile. Could it be there was a Polynesian invasion in the time of the vikings, or during the Chinese golden age? Kind of neat, when you think about it. The chickens made it over, but records of the cultural connection has been lost.

It occurs to me that I can actually do both these tasks “archaeology” and “oceanography” with a single action; participate in the fledgling field of underwater archaeology!

There’s some really cool stuff about 30 feet down in the black sea, for instance…

I just finished the 36 lecture series called “the Prehistory of Man” by Professor Brian M. Fagan.

Wonderful series. I feel like I just finished “Intro to Archaeology” at the college level. Some tidbits for you fellow amateurs:

3 Million years ago – Proto-humans were walking erect and using simple tools

1.5 Million years ago – Proto-humans used fire.

150,000 years ago – Homo sapiens sapiens, genetically identical to us to first order, began living in Sub-saharan Africa

70,000 years ago – Man becomes articulate; Man-in-groups becomes the Uber Predator

15,000 years ago – The Americas are settled. Man becomes “sedentary hunter-gatherers” in Southwest Asia.

14,000 years ago – The Younger Dryas event plunges Europe into a mini-Ice Age. Man forced to adopt agriculture to prevent famine.

12,000 years ago – Agricultural civilization and the Nation-state as we know it (complete with tyrants, slaves, inequality, etc) is born in southwest Asia, for the benefit of the elite. It is re-invented or propigates throughout the world over the next 10,000 years or so.

From 12,000 years ago to the 20th century, we have watched the gradual rise and fall of pre-historic civilizations all over the world)

I’ve been doing some reading in this area lately. My favorite resource so far is the archaeological news page of www.archaeologia.org. It is a collection of hotlinks to the latest articles in the fields of archaeology and anthropology.

http://www.archaeologica.org/NewsPage.htm

Yesterday’s favorite was an article on the liklihood of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Modern Humans during the period of co-occupation of Europe about 35,000 years ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/29/AR2007042901101.html

By the time the Neanderthals were dying out, the fossil record indicates that some 10-20% of the modern human genetic material was from Neanderthals.

It seems increasingly likely that everything we have taught our children about Neanderthals as ignorant cavemen and human evolution is inaccurate and in some cases exactly wrong.

Neat.

I love the steel breeze of knowledge that is blowing through the internet and into human consciousness at last…