this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Archaeology

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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Archaic human 'hobbits' were even shorter than we thought, 700,000-year-old teeth and bone reveal (www.livescience.com)
submitted 3 months ago by recreationalplacebos@midwest.social to c/archaeology@mander.xyz
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Early hominins known colloquially as "hobbits" may have been shorter than scientists thought, a new analysis of teeth and bones has revealed.

The 700,000-year-old fossilized remains belonged to Homo floresiensis, an extinct species of exceedingly small humans that once inhabited Flores, an island south of mainland Indonesia, according to a study published Tuesday (Aug. 6) in the journal Nature Communications.

The new research may shed light on when H. floresiensis first evolved its diminutive height.

"Acquiring a large body and large brain and becoming clever is not necessarily our destiny," lead author Yosuke Kaifu, a professor at the University Museum at the University of Tokyo, told Live Science in an email. "Depending on the natural environment, there were diverse ways of evolution not only for animals in general but also for humans."

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[โ€“] Sanctus@lemmy.world 28 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Imagine being alive with all these other hominids so closely related to us. It sounds like a fantasy world.

[โ€“] NegativeInf@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It was. And then we murdered or fucked them all until we get the mostly homogeneous form of humanity we see now.

All that separates modern humans, even across races, is a fraction of a fraction (0.1% variation) of the total amount of genes. It would be so fascinating to see full comparisons of genome variation across all the extinct species and how it affected cognition, behavior, and digestion.

[โ€“] Sanctus@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It makes me wonder what has been lost to the tides of history. We will never truly know the stories that unfolded between all these older than ancient peoples. Time is the great void that swallows us all.

[โ€“] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago

I do often daydream about what magical stories were told around campfires for those tens of thousands of years.... How many Odyssian struggles did people endure? How many wars and conquests will we never even know the combatants existed, let alone what they were fighting about or how they did so.

There is endless mystery in our past and I wish we could see even a glimpse of it.

[โ€“] Plopp@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Given the amount of hatred and racism humans have for out-groups within that tiny variation of 0.1%, I'm not surprised we murdered everyone else. Except for the individuals we fucked.

[โ€“] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

I'm not surprised that we fucked them to extinction.

[โ€“] Deceptichum@quokk.au 4 points 3 months ago

I dunno, we already have so much diversity to offer on our own and we treat it as a mundane world.