THE CUTTING EDGE OF ARCHAEOLOGY. The current talk about ancient human migrations is all about tools and rests on reports published last Friday in Science.
First, it now appears that people didn't head to India only a mere half-million years ago, which has been conventional wisdom. The migration date now looks to be a million years earlier, give or take. That's ultra significant because they took off with their tools soon after the date for early tools in Africa, about 1.6 million years ago.
It now appears that, more or less right after Homo erectus invented the tools we call Acheulean (or, some spell it, Acheulian), East African members of that adventurous species took the opportunity, like Huck Finn, to light out for the Territory. (And not just India, several territories. H. erectus fossils of about the same age were long ago found in Java.) See John Hawks, who tackles dating questions and, more important, points out how the find will revise ideas about who brought early tools to India.
Call it jingoism, but I was more intrigued by the other paper, which detailed far more recent events in a far different hemisphere: this one. We're talking thousands of years here, not millions. The paper described the find at a site near Austin, Texas, known variously as Buttermilk Creek or the Debra L. Friedkin site. The high point is a small mobile kit of 56 tools at what appears to be a seasonal campsite that lies in the lowest layer. The layer looks to be 16,000 years old. Assuming the dating holds up, it's the oldest firm evidence of North American occupation.
What makes these tools so particularly intriguing is that they are not Clovis tools. "Clovis" doesn't designate a people or a culture. It's a particular (and particularly beautiful) tool technology found in several places in North and Central America (including near Buttermilk Creek, but in a layer above this one.) We don't know who made them, but the sites date to around 12,000 years ago.
News stories tended to present the Buttermilk Creek find as a shocking dethroning of the Standard Version of American archaeology, which is that the Clovis toolmakers were the first to arrive here 12,000 years ago. But that theory has been falling out of favor for well over a decade.
Good evidence dates the Monte Verde site in Chile at about 13,000 years ago, older than Clovis. Some North American sites appear older too. The idea that people have been here for at least 15,000 years, and probably more, has not been terribly controversial in American archaeology for quite a while now. K. Kris Hirst, the About.com Archaeology Guide who dissects the site's dating carefully, notes dryly:
I would argue that Friedkin doesn't put the nail in the coffin for Clovis-First theories, because I suspect that theory is already dead anyway.
At a press conference on the paper, first author Michael Waters argued that the preClovis Buttermilk Creek date implies that people were here even earlier because it would take some time to get to Texas. He said it lent credence to the idea that the earliest settlers came along the West Coast.
That was deeply gratifying for me. It strengthens the possibility that at least some of the initial human migrations to the Americas were not, as the party line would have it, by foot across the Bering land bridge and down a hypothetical but dubiously ice-free Canadian corridor to the sunnier South.
But maybe Asians seeking the New World used their heads instead of their feet. Maybe they came by boat. As I detailed in the last century in a long feature laying out the evidence — there was a lot of it even then — for aquatic settlement of the Americas.
The article appeared, ahem, in 1999. (Although I wrote it first a year earlier. It went through one of those everyday boring horror stories we science writers know so well: the mag I originally wrote it for folded just before the piece ran. Worse, it had been scheduled to be the cover story. Sob.) Read "The Riddle of the Ancient Mariners" here
ENERGY POLICY AT SCIENCEINSIDER. "President Barack Obama's speech to Georgetown University on energy policy, delivered yesterday, forges a new direction on energy policy after big failures in his first two years ... " Eli Kintisch declares at ScienceInsider. I don't think there's universal agreement on that point, but you may be interested nonetheless in this transcript of the speech. That's because the transcript has been annotated by physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary and Kintisch himself. (Keith is less bullish than Kintisch.)
I call your attention to the post in large part because it's another way in which news on the Web can add value. Print publications have done this sort of thing occasionally, but it strikes me as a potentially powerful approach to policy and technical analysis of official statements and transcripts online.
I say this without knowing anything about the software that accomplished this cute (color-coded!) trick, which on the surface looks similar to commenting in Word. But assuming it's technically fairly easy to do, it would be good to see more of it. It is perhaps impolitic to say so, but I'd rather read Keith's brief annotations of the speech itself than a couple of short quotes from him, which is the most I'd get in a news story.
The annotated document is certainly more coherent than the live-blogging and tweeting of events that have become so intensely fashionable. Kintisch brings us an example of that, too. This week he also live-blogged a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on regulating greenhouse gases with the help of NASA's Gavin Schmidt and Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Kintisch and ScienceInsider get a big hand and a pat on the back for seeking new ways of exploiting the Web to bring us news. But I gotta say I hope the rage for tweeting and live-blogging events dies down soon. Nothing personal.
THE NEW YORK TIMES HITS THE WALL. The really big news for many of us this week was the advent of the New York Times pay wall. It's the Gray Lady's second experiment in charging for online access, the first one, some years ago, having tanked.
Charging for substantial online access may have effects other than on our own personal bottom lines. At the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, Lisa Palmer speculates on the possible effect on coverage of science news in general and climate issues in particular.
Palmer begins with a dispiriting survey of the present state of science news, and this bad news will be no news to you. She reports that DotEarth's Andrew Revkin is concerned about how the pay wall will affect the kids who are assigned to read Science Times. And what about access from developing countries?
She says the amount of money the move will raise (the Poynter estimate is $58 million per year) won't cure the Times's financial difficulties, and she's doubtless right. But considering only the impact on circulation revenue is, I think, missing a pretty crucial point. By making it relatively attractive to subscribe to the paper paper in order to get unlimited online access, the Times is certainly hoping to impress advertisers, which is where the real money is — if any real money is to be had.
There are a number of ways around the pay wall if you choose. You're allowed 20 free articles a month, and that may be enough for some. Or you can subscribe to the paper paper, not necessarily daily, and get nearly all the digital content for free; I believe the only exception is the e-reader version.
Or access what you want from Google searches or from links on Twitter, blogs, and the like. The Times is letting readers who come through links in for free, and apparently these clicks don't count against your 20/mo limit. The Times itself has some free Twitter feeds from various departments, although I have found coverage to be spotty.
And then there's freeUnnamedNews, a Twitter feed that is said to be every single article posted. I'm prepared to believe that claim; it's an unselected firehose of headlines, or partial headlines. That means it can be cryptic and isn't very searchable, in addition to being more about the state of every teeny aspect of the world than even exceptionally well-informed you wants to know. You can turn the tap down a bit, subscribing to individual news categories by clicking on department links that appear on freeUnnamedNews, such as #businessday or #sports.
In this office, we're writers who expect to be paid, and so paying something for what Times writers produce seems not unreasonable. We settled on a compromise of sorts. I took advantage of an offer of free access I got from Lincoln. (The cars, not the logs. A mystifying — not to say risible — offer, I must say, if Lincoln thinks it might sell me a car. I drive a 4 year-old Prius, and gas prices do not incline me to change.) My IT department subscribed to the Sunday paper, so he has full digital access too.
We may regret (and even rescind) this decision in the financial future. But it's kinda pleasant to get the Sunday Times delivered again, although it has now arrived just once and already I realize that it's the idea of the Sunday Times delivered that's appealing. The reality, of course, is that it's just a large lump of wood pulp decorating the coffee table all week. I have no time to actually read it.
And yet there was a time, long ago in NYC, when I read two (2) newspapers, the Times and the multi-merged but lively hybrid my IT department called the WorldJournalTribugram. How on earth? Well, I expect I read faster then. And, of course DARPA (and Al Gore) had not yet invented the Internet, where, like you, I now spend many hours every day.
Some of it reading newspapers.
SCIENTIFIC APRIL FOOLISHNESS. OMG, April Fool's Day caught me unprepared to be hilarious. So here's a crib, Jennifer Carpenter's ScienceNow roundup of the best of the best fake science stories on the Web today. We are amused.
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