Archaeology of Childhood - Ep 129

Amber and Anna examine how different ancient cultures viewed children and childhood. We’ll also discuss how the archaeological interpretation of the lives of children in the ancient past has shifted as we’ve gained more and more evidence.

Links

• Children Are Not Small Adults: Significance of Biological and Cognitive Development in Medical Practice (Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine)

• Childhood – an historical perspective (Good Childhood Blog)

• Cultural Relativism (Cultural Anthropology)

• Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men (Vox)

• Role and Importance of Children in the Middle Ages (ThoughtCo.)

• Childbirth, Childhood and Adolescence in the Middle Ages (ThoughtCo.)

• Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today (The Conversation)

• The composition of a Neandertal social group revealed by the hominin footprints at Le Rozel (Normandy, France) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)

• Neanderthal children's footprints offer rare snapshot of Stone Age family life (ABC News

• Neanderthal children shivered and suffered in ancient Europe (Science)

• Neanderthal children grew and were weaned similar to us (EurekAlert)

• What ancient footprints can tell us about what it was like to be a child in prehistoric times (The Conversation)

• Prehistoric children as young as eight worked as brickmakers and miners (Nature)

• 400,000-year-old 'School of Rock' Found in Prehistoric Cave in Israel (Ha’aretz)

• These Miniature Tools Taught Ancient Children How to Hunt and Fight (Smithsonian)

• Archaeology and Developmental Psychology: A Brief Survey of Ancient Athenian Toys (American Journal of Play)

• What prehistoric toys can tell us about human evolution (ABC News)

• Why Ancient Toys Are Elusive Artifacts (Discover)

• Is It Ritual? Or Is It Children? Distinguishing Consequences of Play from Ritual Actions in the Prehistoric Archaeological Record (Current Anthropology)

• Discovering Childhood: Using Fingerprints to Find Children in the Archaeological Record (American Antiquity)

• Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema (Antiquity)

• Make your own version of a Palaeolithic Toy and a Thaumatrope (Beanie and J's Creative Adventures)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

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• TeePublic

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March Madagascarness - Ep 128

This week, Anna and Amber journey to the island of Madagascar. Yeah, sure, there were once man-sized lemurs there, but we’re talking about the people of Madagascar, how and when they arrived on the island, their history, archaeology, and more! Plus, Anna discovers that maps are super useful.

Links

• Malagasy? Or is it Madagascan? Our research provides the answer (The Conversation)

• Indian Ocean: Five Island Countries (Library of Congress)

• Madagascar: Precolonial Era, Prior to 1894 (via the Wayback Machine)

• Researchers confirm timeline of human presence on Madagascar (Phys.org)

• Ancient Madagascar Shows Humans Make New Places Suit Them (Futurity)

• Genomic landscape of human diversity across Madagascar (PNAS)

• What are single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)? (MedlinePlus)

• Ancient rice 'first evidence' Madagascan ancestors crossed Indian Ocean from South-East Asia (ABC)

• Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion (PNAS)

  The culture history of Madagascar (Journal of World Prehistory)

• Chapter 15 - The Austronesian Expansion and the First Malagasy Cultures (The Worlds of the Indian Ocean)

• Time and the ancestors: Landscape survey in the Andrantsay region of Madagascar (Antiquity, via ResearchGate)

• Toward a just and inclusive environmental archaeology of southwest Madagascar (Journal of Social Archaeology, via ResarchGate)

• Madagascar / The Great Island: Contemporary Artists from Madagascar (Google Arts + Culture)

• Madagascar of to-day (Internet Archive)

• Situating Madagascar: Indian Ocean dynamics and archaeological histories (Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, via ResearchGate)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

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Anna's Birthday Podcastle - Ep 127

This episode happens to fall within Anna's birthday week, so Amber has very kindly indulged Anna's childhood love of knights, castles, magic, and adventure. This week, we're exploring Arthurian legend, and some of the...unique legacies it has left behind. We firmly establish that Arthur had TWO different swords. We also confirm that no, Robin Hood was not a Knight of the Round Table. Plus, the Yelp review that made Amber laugh until she cried.

Links

• Guide to the classics: the Arthurian legend (The Conversation)

• King Arthur: Myth-Making and History

• Was There A Real King Arthur? (Archaeology)

• King Arthur’s Ancestor, the Legendary Brutus of Troy, Is Focus of New Biography (Children of Arthur)

• The Literary Development of the Arthurian Legend (World History Encyclopedia)

• The Legendary King: How the Figure of King Arthur Shaped a National Identity and the Field of Archaeology in Britain (via Digital Commons)

• Great Riddles in Archaeology: King Arthur, Camelot, and the Quest for a Holy Grail (Penn Museum)

• Archaeologists Have Uncovered a Massive Palace at The Legendary Birthplace of King Arthur (Science Alert)

• How Medieval Times survives in the digital age (Toronto Star)

• Zounds, Milady! (Slate)

• Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture

• The Utopian Vision That Explains Renaissance Fairs (Bloomberg CityLab)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

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

Affiliates

• Wildnote

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DNA: The Dirt, uh, Finds a Way - Ep 125

This year is the 20th anniversary of the first publication of the Human Genome Project, and the 10th anniversary of the Neanderthal Genome Project. Since both of these projects began, DNA research has changed what we know about the human story more than we could ever possibly have imagined. Come learn about a tiny fraction of this knowledge with us, and listen to our brains explode.

Links

• Protein Synthesis: an Epic on the Cellular Level (Internet Archive)

• Human Genome Project Information Archive 1990–2003 (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

• Human Genome Project FAQ (National Human Genome Research Institute)

• Game of chances: inheritance is a question of probability, not destiny (The Guardian)

• Why Race Is Not a Thing, According to Genetics (National Geographic)

• How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference (The Experiment Publishing)

• The Neanderthal DNA you carry may have surprisingly little impact on your looks, moods (Science)

• Neanderthal DNA highlights complexity of COVID risk factors (Nature)

• Neanderthal DNA in Modern Human Genomes Is Not Silent (The Scientist)

• Multiple lines of mysterious ancient humans interbred with us (National Geographic)

• Denisovan DNA in the genome of early East Asians (Max Planck Gesellscheft)

• The complete genome sequence of a Neandertal from the Altai Mountains (Nature)

• The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans (The American Journal of Human Genetics)

• Evidence found of Denisovans interbreeding with humans in Southeast Asia more recently than thought (Phys.org)

• The CRISPR-baby scandal: what’s next for human gene-editing (Nature)

• In a possible step forward for gene therapy, Stanford researchers made mice glow like fireflies (Stanford News)

• Neanderthal-like ‘mini-brains’ created in lab with CRISPR (Nature)

• 3 Human Chimeras That Already Exist (Scientific American)

• This Woman Is Her Own Twin: What Is Chimerism? (Live Science)

• The Case of the Woman Who Was Her Own Twin (Genetics Illustrated)

• Disputed Maternity Leading to Identification of Tetragametic Chimerism (New England Journal of Medicine)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular