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…

The problem with the naledi burial saga is not that it involves preprints

The claim that Homo naledi buried their dead and created art on cave walls recently made a lot of noise in the media. The claims appeared in the form of preprints, one detailing the claimed burials, one examining the proposed engravings, and one discussing the evolutionary implications of all this if true. The papers were…

Reading archaeology headlines: 0.7 million year old stone tools in Greece

It’s not unusual to see Greece featured in the archaeology headlines. Last weekend, a team of researchers released a claim about 700ky old archaeological remains near Megalopolis in the Peloponnese, which would nearly double the age of the oldest archaeology in the country, and which would be among the oldest archaeology in all of Europe.…

Creationist article retracted in Springer’s International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology : Where the Open Access rubber hits the scholarly publishing road

A minor kerfuffle has recently developed around the retraction of “a straight-up creationist paper” published in Springer’s International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology last year (Umer, 2018). There are many interesting and thought provoking aspects of this incident for those interested in Open Access, and beyond the narrower scope of Open Access journals, for those…

Is the proposed 2.1 MY old hominin occupation at Shangchen, China, an eolithic location?

Zhu et al report a find of 2.1 MY old stone artefacts in the Lantian area of central China. This would make it the earliest well attested evidence of hominin presence outside Africa and therefore has important implications. Unfortunately, they report finding only stone tools. Is this yet another Eolith location? That is, is it…