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Old(er) News: Decade in Review

As long as the past year has felt, nothing prepared us for the mind warp that was compiling stories for this decade in review. So much has happened! Join us on a garden path through ten years of archaeological discovery. Sound off on what we missed out!

Complete Neanderthal Genome Sequenced (National Human Genome Research Institute)

The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia (Nature)

Artifacts in Texas Predate Clovis Culture by 2500 Years (AAAS)

The age of Clovis—13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P. (Science Advances)

Confirmed! Bones of King Richard III Found (Live Science)

One mummy but three people (Nature) (pics of human remains)

Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun, Guatemala (Science)

Incredible Fossil Discovery Finally Puts a Face on an Elusive Early Hominin (Gizmodo)

Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK (PLOS One)

Ancient times table hidden in Chinese bamboo strips (Nature)

Scarp Archaeology's write up on Juukan Gorge

Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine (Guardian)

Destruction of Juukan Gorge: we need to know the history of artefacts, but it is more important to keep them in place (The Conversation)

Levantine cranium from Manot Cave (Israel) foreshadows the first European modern humans (Nature)

Bronze Age houses uncovered in Cambridgeshire are Britain's 'Pompeii' (BBC)

Earliest known cave art by modern humans found in Indonesia (Guardian)

Ancient Egyptian mummification 'recipe' revealed (BBC) (lots of pics of human remains)

The world's oldest cheese has been found in a tomb in Egypt and it might be poisoned — but people want to eat it anyway (Business Insider)

A mysterious species related to humans has been discovered (CNN)

Late Middle Pleistocene Levallois stone-tool technology in southwest China (Nature)

Medieval Female Scribe (Archaeology)

Marking the sacral landscape of a north Arabian oasis: a sixth-millennium BC monumental stone platform and surrounding burials (Antiquity)

Evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum (Nature)

And some other people's (probably more rigorously determined) greatest hits:

Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade (Archaeology)

What Is the Most Significant Archaeological Discovery of the Past Decade? Nine Historians Share Their Favorite Finds (ARTNews)

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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.