Earlier this week, a short piece by Ian Sample, Science Editor of The Guardian, caused my Twitter, Facebook, and email inbox to simultaneously blow up with concerned inquiries from friends and family about whether exploding stars really had caused human bipedalism. The story spread quickly. As of this writing, the title alone gets me 3180…
Comment on Christopher Golding’s hypothesis that the Avesta’s Vara of Yima is a description of Angkor Wat
A few weeks ago, following a post on different approaches to pseudoarchaeology, I was contacted on Twitter by Christopher Golding, who asked what approach I would recommend to fellow archaeologists for working with “members of the public who believe they might have discovered something interesting”. I replied that “we should do archaeology with them. That…
The transition to Open Access is not up to publishers, it is up to scholars, a reply to Inchcoombe
In his recent A faster path to an open future, Steven inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Spring Nature, describes the publisher’s ideas for “the fastest and most effective route to immediate open access (OA). He wants commercial publishers to become drivers of the transition to OA. Comically, we are invited to give feedback on this…
The jury is still out on moralizing gods, but the initial response by Whitehouse and Francois is not encouraging
The latest salvo in the saga of the moralizing gods comes from Whitehouse and Francois. Following two critiques of their recent Nature paper on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of large, complex societies, one by Beheim et al. and one by Slingerland et al., they have posted a preliminary response on co-author…
Complex societies and moralizing gods: Is cultural evolution Darwinian or Lamarckian?
Whitehouse et al. ignited a bit of a controversy with their recent Nature paper which concludes that “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history”. Their argument is that “belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies”. They use a very large database to suggest that moralizing…
ArcheoThoughts 