In an understandable fit of frustration, @anarchaeologist recently tweeted “HOW DO WE CONVINCE PEOPLE THE PAST IS NOT TREASURE!??!?!”. There followed an interesting discussion that ranged from the philosophical, in @HKNorton’s “And how do we convince people the past has value despite not being treasure?” to @KristeninAlmo’s practical and pedagogical “Stress the information over the…
Savage et al. (2019) have posted their response to Beheim et al.’s (2019) critique of their Nature paper (Whitehouse et al. 2019a) which argues that moralizing gods appear as a consequence of social complexification, rather than as its precursor, which the Big Gods hypothesis requires. I discussed the original controversy here and here. The Seshat…
Attitudes to change are important to the mass appeal of ancient alien theory. Aliens, ancient and modern, often appear in the context of social, cultural, and technological innovation. The contactees of the 1950s received dire warnings from our friendly Space Brothers about the mortal danger to our species of newly acquired atomic power. By the…
Sixteen thousand years seems to be the new target for earliest archaeological remains in the Americas. The team at Gault recently made the claim, along with the team at the associated Friedkin site. Now a team working at Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho have joined in. Let me start with my standard disclaimer: I have no…
A tweet recently came across my feed about an article by Pluchino et al. that generated some media interest last year, and that looks at the relative roles of luck and talent in people’s success. The paper gives some interesting empirical support to a contention that many, including me, intuitively feel is true: “The most…
