Pansani et al. (2023) recently published an interesting update on some giant ground sloth osteoderms possibly modified by humans about 27ky ago at the Santa Elina site in central Brazil. If these osteoderms really were perforated and used as pendants by humans at Santa Elina twenty seven thousand years ago, it would make them the…
Rimrock Draw Rockshelter: Do we now have a solid 18ky old archaeological site in the Americas?
In my view, the oldest securely dated archaeological material in the Americas so far is about fifteen thousand years old, which places it squarely after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). But while some of the poorly supported claims coming out of the Cave of Bones have been monopolizing media attention and getting a Netflix special,…
The narrative threads of the naledi Cave of Bones story
The central claims that initially got the naledi story much media hype, including the recent Netflix program Cave of Bones, have been strongly criticized by peers. In my view, they are not well supported at the moment. It isn’t certain at all that naledi buried their dead in the Rising Star cave system, or that…
Review of Netflix’s Unknown: Cave of Bones
Let’s get a few things out of the way. Cave of Bones is well worth watching. The entire team at the Rising Star cave system has been doing incredible and incredibly valuable work in a very difficult context. They are heroes of science, no doubt about it. The discovery and the recovery of naledi remains…
A quick note on Indiana Jones, the Dial of Destiny, and the power of archaeology
Ancient objects have power. In our real world, their possession gives us the power to tell stories about how the past relates to the present, and about how we got here. People who can show things in their museums have an advantage when it comes to telling a story their own way, for their own…