The Razors and Tweezers Culture

From a comment by Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology:

Just look at Late Bronze Age graves. Full of razors and tweezers, of all the bizarre things they could have chosen. And those things are hallmarks of their culture. People are strange.

Update on Sat 2008-07-05 by Tristram Brelstaff

After my recent experience with a tick, I have to say that I now understand why some people might hold razors and tweezers in high esteem.

Neanderthal Language

John Hawks commenting on this account of a talk by Francesco D'Errico:

Given the confluence of the recent evidence from genetics, archaeology, and anatomy, I do not see how anyone can maintain the hypothesis that Neandertals (and presumably, other Late Pleistocene humans) did not have language.

Update on Sun 2008-03-16 by Tristram Brelstaff

There is a very good interview with John Hawks here which provides a nice introduction to his work on the evolution of the human genome.

What I changed my Mind about in 2007

Over at Edge.org, John Brockman asked over 160 scientists and other intellectuals what they had changed their mind about and why.  Though not explicitly restricted to 2007, some people seem to have interpreted it that way.

My biggest change of mind during 2007 was brought about by reading Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of  the British. Before then I had more or less accepted the traditional view that the English people were mainly descended from Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian immigrants who arrived in the centuries following the departure of the Romans.  However, Oppenheimer describes recent genetic work which indicates that most of the genes in present day English people have been in England since well before the Romans arrived.  Indeed, most of these genes probably came with the first people to recolonize England after the ice sheet retreated around 10,000 years ago. 

Last summer I stood on one of the  Bronze-age burial mounds on the moors above Guisborough and looked out over the town that I, my father and his father had grown up in.   For the first time, it occurred to me that we might actually be related to the people buried in those mounds.

Multi-Track Hollow Ways on Kempswithen

Kempswithen is a hill near Kildale in the North Yorkshire Moors.  It is crossed by the old road that runs from Guisborough to Westerdale and at several places alongside this road there are traces of earlier routes that the road took.  The section shown above is only about a kilometre north from the Little Hoghrah Moor hollow ways mentioned here and the latter is very probably where the road used to cross Baysdale Beck (instead of further down-stream at Hob Hole). 

As I said in my earlier post, I like to think that these multiple tracks were formed by the road meandering over time: people used one track until it became too muddy and rutted, then they moved over to one side and took a slight different, less muddy and rutted, route.  However, I suspect that it is more likely that most of the parallel tracks were in use at the same time, as herds of cattle and sheep were driven along them in the middle ages.  If that was so then they would have appeared as broad gashes in the landscape, much like motorways do nowadays.  The North Yorkshire Moors, which are nowadays so quiet, must have once been much busier.

Ancient Tracks on the North Yorkshire Moors

About 400 metres west of Hob Hole, a set of tracks descend from Little Hograh Moor to cross Baysdale Beck.  Old tracks can be found all over the North Yorkshire Moors.  Often they form intertwining braids like this, as if the line of a single road has meandered from side to side over many years.  I suppose it is most likely that they were made in mediaeval times by  sheep and cattle being driven to and from moorland farms owned by the many abbeys and priories in the area.  However, I like to think that their origin is much older, dating back to the Bronze Age and the beginnings of agriculture in the area, but this is just speculation on my part.  (Image from Google Maps.)