Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
The first: the European fallow deer bears the Latin binomial name Dama dama. And this Dama has nothing whatever to do with the word dame, "woman". Dama was used in ancient Rome for small hoofed animals that grew easily accustomed to people, and is thought to go back
Archaeology · Science · Education · Nature
An international team led by Eslem Ben Arous and Eleanor Scerri describes stone tools of Homo sapiens, 150,000 years old, found at the Bété I site in Côte d'Ivoire. The layer has been dated by two independent methods, and the pollen, phytoliths and plant waxes in the
Archaeology · Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature
The 17th-century "Whalers' Cemetery" on Spitsbergen, by the Likneset station, has begun to thaw after 400 years. And now Norwegian archaeologists are examining knitted woollen stockings, finely woven woollen trousers, blue silk neckerchiefs, fragments of blue-striped linen shirts, caps and blankets found in remarkably well-
Archaeology · Science · Nature
Nine people in ten are right-handed. Other primates show no such picture: chimpanzees and gorillas may also prefer one hand, but far less often and far less markedly. Scientists have long been trying to work out why humans, specifically, have gone so far. There is no shortage of hypotheses:
Science · Palaeontology · Nature
The discovery casts doubt on the hypothesis that complex, mobile animals were widely active before the celebrated "Cambrian explosion". The findings became possible thanks to micro- and nanotomography at a state-of-the-art beamline of Sirius, the Brazilian particle accelerator. The technology made it possible to study
Cinema · People · Nature
Tippi, whose full name is Natalie, is the mother of the actress Melanie Griffith and the grandmother of Dakota Johnson. In 1969, with her second husband, Noel Marshall, she made the film Roar, which became one of the most dangerous productions in the history of cinema. In the plot, the
Geography · Nature
Photo by Viktor Voronin, 1980s
Cinema · London · Society · Nature
Hugh Thomson has made a documentary about it, Our Land, the premise of which is that in England and Wales 92% of the land is closed to public access, and local residents often cannot freely walk through the woods around their own village. In Scotland, a reform of 2003 opened
Observations · Science · Nature
I have two pieces of news for you. The first. The age of sharks is determined by the annual rings on their vertebrae. Sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton, but the vertebrae are mineralised with enough calcium to lay down visible annual layers. In a cross-section of a vertebra, concentric
Archaeology · Heritage · Society · Nature · Ethnography
The Las Playas Intaglio is a sacred geoglyph in the shape of a fish, laid out on the desert surface in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in south-western Arizona. The full length of the figure is about 83 metres. The contractor's heavy construction machinery ran across
Cinema · Science · People · Nature
On 8 May David Attenborough turns one hundred. No one in history has shown the whole world for so long how life on this planet is put together. At 99 he managed, last year, to make one more film, Ocean, in which for the first time he spoke openly of
Archaeology · The East · Science · Nature
On the hills of Shulaveri and Gadachrili in Georgia, archaeologists led by David Lordkipanidze have found charred grains, impressions of ears in mudbricks and seeds of wild goat grass some eight thousand years old. A laboratory at the Weizmann Institute has confirmed the radiocarbon dating: 5800-6000 BC. The point