The Caveman’s Corner

The employment of anthropologists in time of war is a subject that has become deeply controversial since World War II, in lock step with the application of greater ethical scrutiny to all sciences. The essential conflict is between an anthropologist’s duty to her country and her government, her duty to her discipline and humanity as a whole, and her duty to the subject peoples she studies and who have subjected themselves to study by researchers before her.

Bomb it back to the stone age from the… iron age?

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The Anthropoid Origins series is taking longer than I anticipated, largely because I’m lazy and rediscovered Civilization IV there briefly (ironically, while taking a break from working on my paper on Adapoid Theory), which destroyed a few days of my life. I’ve also made a few false starts at blog posts that never ended up getting published. But, because I’m feeling guilty about neglecting my poor blog, I bring you a review of the book I just finished, Lucy’s Child: The Discovery a Human Ancestor.

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I finished Amir Aczel’s The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man today, and I decided to write up a review/reflection sort of thing. I haven’t decided exactly which yet. I’ve thought about adding a feature like this before and I enjoyed doing it, so you might conceivably see more reviews.

From Amazon, obviously

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I had to read Book XI of The Epic of Gilgamesh tonight for my Western Lit class. What really struck me was the depiction of the Flood. For those who aren’t familiar with The Epic, it is a Sumerian myth about a semi-legendary king and his travels, culminating in a journey to visit Utnapishtim, an immortal man who survived a great Flood with destroyed the rest of humanity. The story was the inspiration for the Biblical one in Genesis.

Now this is how to depict a Flood

We, or I at least, tend to have this Sunday school image of the Flood, with Noah’s Ark and all the little animals, two-by-two, all of that, and we really forget the awe of the story. It’s a powerful notion; all that is in the scope of human experience is destroyed in a great catastrophe before the eyes of the passengers of a single ship entrusted with the future of all humanity. It’s a singular and striking narrative, and I think a lot of what keeps us from really appreciating it is how geographical we are in the modern age.

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This is (abridged) a 2 year old essay that I wrote for fun. (That’s what I used to do in lieu of a girlfriend. Now I mostly just cry. And blog!).

The Kow Swamp series consists of the fossilized remains of at least 40 individuals recovered from Kow Swamp, a lake near the Murray River in Australia (Johanson & Edgar, 1996). The finds vary slightly in age, from around 9,000 to 13,000 years old (Larsen, Matter, & Gebo, 1998). Of this series, only two individuals posses crania complete enough to be of significance here, Kow Swamp 1 and 5 (Larsen et al., 1998).

What is striking about the Kow Swamp crania is the fact that they seem to posses a mix of traits characteristic of both Indonesian Homo erectus (the Sangarin series) and modern Australian Aborigines. The two crania both possess the long, low foreheads typical of erectus, as well as thick cranial bones and a rounded lacrimal. However, the large cranial capacity, relatively gracile jaw, and fully modern post-cranial skeletons of the two finds are all typical of Homo sapiens (Johanson & Edgar, 1996). Multiregionalists claim that this population is an example of a transitional form between Indonesian H. erectus and Australian H. sapiens.

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