Episode 231

Old News, May 2020

This month, we've got ancient diets, sticks and bones, and too! many! mammoths! And so much more:

A 300,000-year-old throwing stick from Schöningen, northern Germany, documents the evolution of human hunting (Nature Ecology & Evolution)

A Short, Pointy, 300,000-Year-Old Clue to Our Ancestors’ Hunting Prowess (The New York Times)

Archaeologists Discover Ancient Stone Turtle in Drained Angkor Reservoir (Smithsonian)

Bones in a Bulgarian cave prove Homo sapiens came to Europe much earlier (RFI)

Early African Muslims had a halal – and cosmopolitan diet - discovery of thousands of ancient animal bones shows (University of Exeter)

Beneath the Houston Arboretum Are the Ruins of a World War I Training Camp (Houstonia)

From fish to rat: how early humans' tastes changed on long trip to Australia (Sydney Morning Herald)

‘There are too many’: bones of 60 mammoths found in Mexico (The Guardian)

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The Dirt Podcast

Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.