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…
Environmental instability and habitat choice in a simple agent-based foraging model: Agents prefer diversity in rates of environmental change
Note: This is a follow up to my SAA2018 paper Some very interesting recent work has focused on the role of environmental instability in human evolution (Potts 2013, Grove 2014) and the development of cultural complexity (Fogarty et al 2017). This work has tended to look at adapative responses of populations of learning agents in…
Preview of my SAA2018 paper : Environmental instability, habitat choice, and mobility : An agent-based simulation
The Problem The work my team and I did in James Bay, Northern Quebec, shows that archaeological sites in the region tend to be located in places that are relatively environmentally stable, but are surrounded by areas with relatively high degree of variability in rates of environmental change. The region is characterized by rapid land…
ArcheoThoughts 