oldowan:

This summer, Aldenderfer, mountain climber Pete Athans, and a group of other researchers will depart to the Himalayas to continue to excavate and find answers to questions that remain unanswered from a long-term research project that began in 2008. They’ll venture to the Upper Mustang region of Nepal to continue to their cave excavations.

The goal of this project is to look at the migration of people from the Tibetan Plateau, across the Himalayas from the South Indian Plain up into the Himalayas and perhaps beyond, Aldenderfer explained. Researchers have some knowledge of the initial stages of the movement of people into the region, but the population’s history is a lot more complicated, Aldenderfer said.

oldowan:

One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published today in Science¹, also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce.

The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal’s impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls ‘coercive citation’, and shows that this is “uncomfortably common,” according to authors Allen Wilhite, an economist, and Eric Fong, who researches management, both at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

archaeologicalnews:

Former State Archaeologist Kevin Jones is appealing his firing from the state last June in a major restructuring. But the state is fighting him all the way, saying — to start with — that he retired and has no appeal available.

Bob Thompson, administrator of the Utah Career Service Review…

Burning down the experimental wikiup on the campus of Western State College.

https://www.western.edu/news/burning-down-the-wsc-wikiup

Stiched 1x1 meter photos showing completed excavation block C at the Mountaineer Folsom site, Colorado.  The block contains the remains of a stone lined structure - the foundation of which is indicated in the photo by orange colored rocks.  The elongated doorway can be seen in the southeastern portion of the block.  Bison bone collagen dates the structure to approximately 10,400 years BP.

The many talents of brewer’s yeast:  Single yeast cells ”evolved” into multicellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment — in essence, precursors to life on Earth as it is today.

carolinafrica:

eLucy – http://www.elucy.org/

eLucy is a website that will help you to learn about the world’s most famous fossil, Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived 3.2 million years ago. Lucy was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, and she is unique because over 40% of her skeleton was recovered, making her one of the most complete australopithecine fossils ever found. This website provides activities and lessons that will help you to learn about Lucy’s place within the history of human evolution. Some activities are online, but others can be completed offline. After studying Lucy, you can investigate other aspects of human evolution at eFossils.org. You can learn more about the human and primate skeleton at eSkeletons.org.

The University Of Texas At Austin - Department of Anthropology

(via theolduvaigorge)

Lower Paleolithic Blades (c. 400,000 ybp), Qesam Cave, Isreal.

100,000 year old abalone shell ochre pigment production tool from Blombos cave, South Africa.

http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/dn21046-oldest-artists-workshop-in-the-world-discovered.html

deconversionmovement:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2012) — Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?

UCLA biologists working as “evolutionary detectives” studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published Jan. 11, in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years, they report.

“If you look at New World primates, you’re immediately struck by the rich diversity of faces,” said Michael Alfaro, a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and the senior author of the study. “You see bright red faces, moustaches, hair tufts and much more. There are unanswered questions about how faces evolve and what factors explain the evolution of facial features. We’re very visually oriented, and we get a lot of information from the face.”

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(via alphacaeli)