Let's Call It a Ritual Object - Ep 161

Thanks to everyone who came out to our virtual live show! This is the edited audio of that event. We talk about the role of ritual in daily life, how our big round human brains have evolved the ability to think about abstract meaning and ritual significance, and the theory underpinning all of this. We also take a trip to two incredible archaeological sites to think about how the people living there might have thought about the unknown and unseen in their lives. Whoa.

Links

• Emile Durkheim: religion – the very idea, part 3: ritual, ancient and modern (The Guardian)

• Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

• ‘Materiality, Belief, Ritual – Archaeology and Material Religion’. An Introduction (Material Religion)

• Materiality: An Introduction (UCL Anthropology)

• Materiality (Society for Cultural Anthropology)

• How Did Belief Evolve? (Sapiens)

• The evolution of modern human brain shape (Science Advances)

• A Shocking Find in a Neanderthal Cave in France (The Atlantic)

• Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles (National Geographic)

• Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France (Nature)

• Athens in Pieces: What Really Happened at Eleusis? (New York Times)

• The Psychedelic Cult That Thrived For Nearly 2000 Years (Gizmodo)

• mysteries, Eleusinian (Oxford Classical Dictionary)

• Mystery Cults in the Greek and Roman World (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History)

• The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries (Rosicrucian Digest)

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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Archaeo Mad Libs With The Dirt - BONUS

We took paragraphs from two very out-of-date archaeology papers and took out lots of key words. Then, listeners sent in their own word lists, with which we filled in those paragraphs! The results were very silly, and we had a lot of fun!

Stay tuned for upcoming live events, and come hang out with us on our stream!

Links

• twitch.tv/thedirtpodcast

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast

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