Archaeologists have discovered Britain’s oldest house. I know, it doesn’t seem on the surface to be a terribly interesting story, but there’s lots going on there, so bear with me here. I saw it on Science Daily, and thought it was worth passing on.
The house dates back to 8500 BC, which makes it half a millenium older than the previous oldest house in Britain, and it sounds a lot like how people would have lived for many, many years to come. The evidence suggests that this might not have been an isolated house, but a part of a community of many. That’s pretty wild to think about. That’s potentially an early prototype for a city dating back more than ten thousand years.
And they had puppies!
Actually, the domestication of dogs would have been in full swing at that point. As I learned recently in this fascinating Neurologica post, we’ve been shacking up with dogs for about 14,000 years. The article’s an interesting one that talks about how the domestication of dogs was an integral part of our recent evolution.
I find the whole thing quite interesting. We talk about recorded history and how it doesn’t go back that terribly far, but archaeologists are finding some fantastic things like this house that may well serve us just as well. We won’t have any idea about the specifics of the lives of these early humans, but we can tell a lot about where they had come from and what sorts of social and survival traits they had developed. For example, the article states that they weren’t agrarian per se, but “the inhabitants did burn part of the landscape to encourage animals to eat shoots”.
Jim
When I first heard about mapping the human genome, I must admit I felt a bit concerned. True, I was intrigued by the possibility of our decoding humanity and understanding at the deepest level how we were put together, but the much-touted image of scientists programming the genome to produce humanity in vats a la 
I know, you’re a hardcore science buff and you understand evolution perfectly. Well, that may or may not be true. But if you want to know for sure if you’ve got the theory down correctly, I’d suggest reading PZ Myers’ recent blog post, 
I’ve always believed that the notion of race was irrelevant. I was raised by liberal Christians who felt that everybody should be equal, and to this day I take a same-but-different stance. My opinion, honestly, is that there are a lot of adjectives to describe a person. Race is one of them. Gender another. I am apathetic to the sum total of those adjectives. If I was hiring a person for a job, I would base my opinion on those adjectives, looking for the combination that best suited the job in question. Race very rarely comes into this equation, unless the job was something that actually related directly to qualities possessed by a particular race. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one. without really stretching, like pretending I had to hire someone to perform experiments on for a study on sickle cell anemia, a disease that is statistically more common in people who’s ancestors lived in malaria-ridden tropical and sub-tropical climates. But that’s a weak example at best, as race wouldn’t be the issue, presence of sickle cell anemia would be.
Back when I was a lad, I had a thing for horror novels. In fact, I imagined that one day I would write horror novels as a career. It wasn’t until years later that I published two short stories in a horror magazine and then read the other entries in the magazine that I changed this opinion. Horror, it dawned on me, was lame. However, in those formative years I read a tremendous amount of horror fiction from a variety of sources. One of my favorite sets of books was The Exorcist, and later Legion, by 
I just thought I’d share a link I found quite interesting from ScienceDaily. The article is called 
Each and every one of us is a transitional creature. That’s one of those thoughts that changes how you think about evolution. As a kid I understood as most do that we had evolved from apes, but I didn’t, as I think most don’t, understand that the process wasn’t finished. Its easy to look at the wonder of human society and believe that we are the end product of everything; evolution, culture, understanding, you name it, we do it best. Or at least we do from our perspective. But as with all things, we can always do it better.
Today, I am going to do something I never ever ever do. I’m going to talk out of my ass. Not literally, of course. I’ll be typing rather than talking, and typing out of my ass would cause a rather unpleasant effect on my keyboard. No, the talking out of my ass I intend to engage in is me pontificating on something I know nothing about, which probably makes up the lion’s share of my articles. So you’re used to it.
I just read the most interesting thing over at the Myrmecos web site about how the 
I just finished reading