The Queen of Sheba - Ep 172

It's another January Hiatus episode--this time a cleaned-up excerpt from Dirt After Dark. Amber drags Anna back to Arabia, where we discuss possibly its most famous inhabitant of all time: the Queen of Sheba. We look at the source material and the archaeology before really getting into it to discuss racism, misogyny, and--of course--camels.

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Links

• 1 Kings 10: The Queen of Sheba Visits Solomon

• 2 Chronicles 9: The Queen of Sheba Visits Solomon

• Surah an-Nami

• The kingdoms of ancient South Arabia

• In search of the real Queen of Sheba

• Camel bones challenge the timing of some Bible stories

• How black women were whitewashed by art

• The Queen of Sheba’s Hairy Legs

• Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam

• Bilquis, Queen Of Sheba, And American Gods

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

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The Dirt Caves In: LIVE! - Ep 126

If you were a pre-Homo sapiens hominin, the place to see and be seen was Africa in what is today colloquially known as the Cradle of Humankind. True to form, we're late to the party, but come along with us anyway for a tour of the cave sites that revolutionized paleoanthropology.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the live show!

Links

• When Did Homo Sapiens First Appear? (Discover)

• Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story (The Guardian)

• Scientists discover the oldest Homo sapiens fossils at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco (Phys.org)

• Caves of Hercules (Atlas Obscura)

• The Caves of Hercules – The Map of Africa (Barclays Travel)

• Skull Fossils in Cave Show Mix of Human Relatives Roamed South Africa (The New York Times)

• Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in South Africa (Science)

• Newly discovered fossil documents small-scale evolutionary changes in an extinct human species (Washington University in St. Louis)

• ‘Little Foot’ hominin emerges from stone after millions of years (Nature)

• World’s oldest camp bedding found in South African cave (Science)

• Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 thousand years ago at Border Cave, South Africa (Science)

• 200,000 years ago, humans preferred to kip cozy (Science Daily)

• First Use of Poison (Archaeology)

• When the Sea Saved Humanity (Scientific American)

• Early Tools Were Born From Fire (Science)

• Ancient hominins used fire to make stone tools (Phys.org)

• South Africa’s Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human (The Convo)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

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Green Sahara: The African Humid Period - Ep 85

The grass is always greener on the other side (of the Holocene). What is today a vast and inhospitable home to many people and creatures was, between ten and five thousand years ago, a lush environment replete with lakes, forests, and grasses. We examine the first clues that suggested a Green Sahara to researchers, explore the technologies and societies that lived there, and contemplate what the Sahara’s past might suggest about its future.

Links

• Megalakes in the Sahara? A Review (Quaternary Research)

• Saharan Dust Blows Across the Atlantic (NOAA)

• The emergence of pottery in Africa during the tenth millennium cal BC : new evidence from Ounjougou (Mali) (Antiquity)

• Ounjougou

• Technological and Cultural Change Among the Last Hunter-Gatherers of the Maghreb: The Capsian (10,000–6000 B.P.) (Journal of World Prehistory)

• Capsian (Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology)

• The 8,000-year-old dugout canoe from Dufuna (NE Nigeria)

• Africa’s oldest boat set for exhibit in Nigeria (Africa Times)

• First dairying in green Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC (Nature)

• History of the Domestication of Cows and Yaks (ThoughtCo)

• Chad Genetic Diversity Reveals an African History Marked by Multiple Holocene Eurasian Migrations (American Journal of Human Genetics)

• End of the African Humid Period (NOAA)

• End of the African Humid Period (Nature)

• Climate Change in North Africa: The Past is Not the Future (Climatic Change)

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• Email the Dirt Podcast

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