Paleoanthropology - Tumblr Posts
Skull of Homo Naledi, printed at 50% scale
Printed a while back for my partner, I'm going through and painting a bunch of the knickknacks I've printed for some shelf displays
Fall sem starts in 2 days! Heres my schedule
Intro to Ethnomusicology (Intermediate Seminar) - MWF / 8-8:50am
Dinosaurs: A Natural History - MWF / 9-9:50am
Intro to Biological Anthropology - MWF / 10-10:50am
Intro to Cultural Anthropology - MWF / 11-11:50am
[ LUNCH BREAK ]
Intro to Archaeology - MW / 1-2:15pm
currently can’t get my textbooks because of an issue w financial aid that will hopefully be resolved in the morning. super nervous bc new school and lots of work ahead but also excited for my new major/program and hopefully making more friends :)
This (from Wiki) is a graph of Earth’s temperature over the last 450,000 years. We are, in fact, in the middle of an ice age, the Quaternary Ice Age, defined by the year-round presence of ice at the poles (for now, *cough*). (For Earth’s history as a whole, permanent polar ice is in fact not the norm.)
The Quaternary Ice Age consists in a series of glacial periods, each about 50 to 100 thousand years long, in which glaciers may come down as far south as Paris and New York, separated by brief interglacials, each less than 20 thousand years, in which the polar ice withdraws behind the Polar Circles. That peak in temperature at the right edge of the graph is our own Holocene interglacial, which began 11,700 years ago. The whole of recorded history, everything from the development of agriculture onward, happened inside it, on the trail of a glacial period ten times longer. We could expect it to end, with the onset of another glacial period, some 10 or 20 thousand years from now, but the effects of anthropogenic climate change on this cycle are not yet predictable.
The last interglacial before ours is known as Eemian (in the European nomenclature) or Sangamon (in the American one). It was a very similar period of warming – in fact, significantly hotter than our own times, with hippopotami wallowing in the Thames – lasting from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Fifteen thousand years of mild weather, well long enough to fit a story as long and complex as the one from the first Levantine wheat farmers to us (and half again).
In that time, Homo sapiens was still a strictly African species, just making short-lived forays into the Near East; Eurasia belonged to our close cousins, Neandertals and Denisovans, and possibly to the last smatterings of Homo erectus in the southeastern jungles. Our dear brothers Neandertals, whose behavior is revealed ever more complex and imaginative, until their sudden disappearence in the middle of the next glacial period.
What were they up to, in the ice-free Europe of the long Eemian greenhouse, long enough for civilizations to rise and fall a dozen times, long enough to go from the stone sickle to the Mars rover? Most traces on the ground would have been erased when the glaciers came down again, the glaciers whose stupendous weight would carve giant lakes from Erie to Ladoga. What if they had already had better places to go to, when our conspecifics showed up in a land that was already depauperated by frost?
Why would anyone think the “little grey people” in UFOs are aliens? Have you any idea how many specific contingent events made up our evolutionary history, how vanishingly unlikely it would be for the human form to arise on another planet? Those are Neandertals, homesick after thirty thousand years of exile, and they’re coming home.
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Thinking about how much of a full circle moment the Blue Marble photograph was/is.
This image was taken in 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the Moon - the last humans to ever visit Luna, to date.
And it just so happens that the approximate center of the image is the southeastern region of Africa, under bright noonday sun.
And it just so happens that the southeastern region of Africa, from the Cape to the Horn, is where our most ancient prehuman ancestors, the australopithecines, originally evolved.
Dinkʼinesh ("Lucy"), the holotype of Australopithecus and the genesis of our modern understanding of our species' origins, was not discovered until two years after this photo was taken. In this image, the bones of our most treasured ancestor still lie beneath the earth of Qadaqar, Ethiopia.
This is not just an image of our home planet. This is an image of our cradle. This is where the humanity was born, four million years ago.
What a marvelous coincidence, no?
Beautiful
good morning beautiful sun 🌞
The 2023 christmas tree 🎄
Hi beautiful miami gardens
doing what I love so much🥰🥰
doing what I love so much😍🥰
doing what I love so much😘😚
Did a project on Homo naledi– love these funky little hominins! I loved getting to draw some of my favorite relatives of ours and really getting to practice getting bones right.