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   clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 11:51:09 JST clacke

   Sommetimes, to do archaeology, you have to do archaeology on the archaeologists!

   [ . . . ] Frank Huffman, from the University of Texas at Austin, had tracked down the descendants of the Dutch researchers who excavated the Homo erectus remains back in the 1930s.

   [ . . . ]

   "He was able to tell us exactly where to dig," [Prof Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa] said of [Huffman].

   bbc.com/news/science-environme…

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 12:33:03 JST clacke

     in reply to

     The story that revealed this metastory is fascinating in itself:

     Homo Erectus is observed to have disappeared from Africa around 500 ky ago, from China around 400 ky ago, but in Indonesia on Java, they seem to have been around until around 100 ky, perhaps even later. Sapiens didn't arrive on Java until around 50 ky ago, so there was nobody around to push them out.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 15-Aug-2024 13:13:58 JST clacke

     in reply to
     I guess to be accurate, if you're studying the bones of erectus rather than sapiens, you're in paleontology rather than archaeology. But archeology archaeology sounds more fun than paleontology archaeology.
   • Embed this notice
     Marc (marc@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 16-Aug-2024 05:21:24 JST Marc

     in reply to

     @clacke
     #Indonesia climate is not great for preservation, but the date of extinction of #homoerectus and #erectus descendant species may be pushed closer and closer to the #Holocene.

     Right now, only the dead know.

     Reading through the article now.

     clacke likes this.