Wu Anai’s life, like the lives of so many rice farmers in central China, afforded few options for entertainment. He awoke, farmed rice, went to sleep, and repeated the process. However, like many of his Western cousins, he found relief from this looping circle of productive boredom in the exciting and honorable sport of fishing….
1. Ancient men were just people, and people haven’t changed. Exhibit A: Doodle made by a child over a thousand years ago when he should have been doing his schoolwork. Here, ancient man exhibits classic signs of humanity: as with any modern child, Onfim (he signed it) has made himself the victor. On the top right…
What would happen if we assumed ancient man was intelligent? One man did just that, and I haven’t been able to stop talking about it since, which, incidentally, is a substantial reason to have 10 children, all of which you homeschool. Captive audience. Professor John O’Shea is an archaeologist with the University of Michigan, who…
She slipped now and then, the cold, slick mud oozing between her toes, switching the child from one hip to the other. Several times she tried letting him walk on his own, but never for more than a few steps. Perhaps the toddler cried and refused to walk, or maybe he wouldn’t walk fast enough. Either way, she picked him up again and struggled on, making her way across the broad, windswept valley that divides the Sacramento Mountains from the San Andreas Mountains.
Once upon a time, two brothers landed on an island in the Pacific, and convinced the thousands of people who lived there to forsake their relatively peaceful, low-maintenance life, and devote their energy and time to building Nan Madol, a megalithic city. (Or we can believe the local legend that they built it with the help…
What would induce you to live on a cliff, like the Mesa Verde cliffdwellers did? I’m talking a 600ft drop on one side, and rise of 50-100ft above you. Your family lives in a crack in the stone face, with no water source and no room for a garden. To reach your home, you have…
Have you ever noticed that our expectations for ancient man are similar to those for toddlers? Hear me out:1. They aren’t allowed to use power tools.2. They can’t be motivated by practicality.3. They must believe in Santa Claus and bogeymen under the bed. Yes, I know, it sounds weird, but let’s look at Gobekli Tepe. Discovered in 1994, this site…
Late in the fall of 1896, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, scholars fresh from Oxford took the steamer to Cairo. They wanted to become Famous Archaeologists during a period when the British were fascinated by ancient Egyptian artifacts. So fascinated that said artifacts were disappearing from Egypt like sliced grapes from a toddler’s plate. They decided to dig…
When you think about ancient technology, how often does potting soil come to mind? Well, it should. The soil of the Amazon is generally poor, acidic, and leaches nutrients like a sieve. Growing food there is a nightmare—unless you happen upon, or go looking for, some of the intensely fertile, beautiful black gold put there…
You and I know he wasn’t actually the last person, but he didn’t know that. He had every reason to believe he was the only human left, and he knew what extinction meant. After all he’d seen several species that once inhabited his barren little island go extinct. On the Pacific Ocean’s Henderson Island lies a heap…