The Dirt Podcast

In this episode, we conclude our journey along the human timeline with a look at the genus Homo, of which we are all card-carrying members. Amber also contributes a brief study of human butts-- what's up with them?

To learn more about our closest relatives, and ourselves:

Human Evolution Timeline Interactive (Smithsonian Institution)

Human Fossils (Smithsonian Institution)

Exploring the fossil record: Homo habilis (Bradshaw Foundation)

Homo erectus (Smithsonian Institution)

Homo erectus (Bradshaw Foundation)

Homo neanderthalensis (Smithsonian Institution)

Why do we have butts? (Gizmodo)

Ask evolution: Why do we have butt cheeks? (SBS)

We all do it. We've done it for millions of years. It's the Poopisode, a Very Special Sponsor pick! Anna and Amber discuss coprolites (archaeological poo), and some of the surprising things we've learned from it. Anna's pun game has rarely been stronger, and Amber...well, Amber survived this episode.

If you want to learn more (and admit it, you do), check out:

To Truly Know an Ancient Society, One Must Analyze Its Feces (Atlas Obscura)

Paleoscatologists dig up stools 'as precious as the crown jewels' (The Guardian)

What is the Maillard Reaction? (Science of Cooking)

Divining Diet and Disease From DNA (Science)

Archaeological coprolite science: The legacy of Eric O. Callen (1912–1970) (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, via ResearchGate)

Biomolecular and micromorphological analysis of suspected faecal deposits at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Journal of Archaeological Science, via ResearchGate)

What Discovery of Oldest Human Poop Reveals About Neanderthals' Diet (National Geographic)

Recovering parasites from mummies and coprolites: an epidemiological approach (Parasites & Vectors)

The control of defecation in humans: an evolutionary advantage? (Techniques in Coloproctology)

Probable human hair found in a fossil hyaena coprolite from Gladysvale cave, South Africa (Journal of Archaeological Science, via ResearchGate)

How the Remnants of Human Poop Could Help Archaeologists Study Ancient Populations (Smithsonian)

Paleomicrobiology: Revealing Fecal Microbiomes of Ancient Indigenous Cultures (PLOS ONE)

Lewis and Clark expedition left a trail of heavy-metal laxatives (Offbeat Oregon)

The Poop on Lewis and Clark (Sarah Albee Books)

How to Reconstruct Lewis and Clark’s Journey: Follow the Mercury-laden Latrine Pits

Archaeologists Test Feces From Roman Latrine, Find Roundworm And Dysentery (Forbes)

Poozeum

'Poop Talk' Cuts to the Evolutionary Roots of Shame With Toilet Humor (Inverse)

Groom of the Stool (Wikipedia)

Nearly a Billion People Still Defecate Outdoors. Here’s Why. (National Geographic)

Life without toilets: the photographer tackling a global taboo (The Guardian)

Farmworker Housing Linked to Consumer Demand for Safe Food (Food Safety News)

Every year, the American football season ends with the Big Game, but this week, Anna and Amber are superfans of a much bigger game: the 3500-year-old Mesoamerican ballgame. From its Olmec origins to the athletes keeping it alive today, learn all about how to play, why you might not want to (ouch), and what makes it so significant to past and present communities.

To learn more about this week’s topic, check out:

Scarborough, V. L., & Wilcox, D. R. (1991). The Mesoamerican ballgame. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Whittington, E. M., & Mint Museum of Art. (2001). The sport of life and death: The Mesoamerican ballgame. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Ballgame (NEH Summer Teachers Institute)

The Mesoamerican Ballgame (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Brutal and Bloody History of the Mesoamerican Ball Game, Where Sometimes Loss Was Death (Atlas Obscura)

Early evidence of the ballgame in Oaxaca, Mexico (PNAS)

Maya Ritual and Myth: Human Sacrifice in the Context of the Ballgame and the Relationship to

the Popol Vuh (OpenSIUC)

Popol Vuh (Mesoweb)

Glyphs for “Handspan” and “Strike” in Classic Maya Ballgame Texts (The PARI Journal)

Death Ball (National Geographic)

Tlachtli (Polymer Science Learning Center)

Valentine's Day is upon us, and love is in the air-- love for relative and absolute dating methods, that is! Anna brings the science with C14 dating and its gang of radiometric friends, boggles minds with flipped magnetic poles and the last time archaeological material saw the sun, and finds some hot tree-ring takes in California. Meanwhile, Amber goes on a bit of a jag about ancient imperialism, makes a lot of jokes that even she hates, embraces the nihilism of climate change, and attempts to explain the law of superposition via cake. So, the usual— but that’s why you love us!

Dating in Archaeology (The Canadian Encyclopedia)

10 Chronometric Methods in Paleoanthropology (Handbook of Paleoanthropology, downloaded via ResearchGate)

Everything Worth Knowing About ... Scientific Dating Methods (Discover)

Redwood Cross-Section of Time (Roadside America) more like RUDE-side America, amirite?

Explainer: what is radiocarbon dating and how does it work? (The Conversation)

What is OSL? (Utah State University)

K-12 Resources about Radiocarbon Dating (C14Dating.com)

Research illuminates inaccuracies in radiocarbon dating (Phys.org)

Radiocarbon, The Calibration Curve and Scythian Chronology (Impact of the Environment on Human Migration in Eurasia, downloaded via Wayback Machine)

Correlating the Ancient Maya and Modern European Calendars with High-Precision AMS 14C Dating (Scientific Reports)

The bible and radiocarbon dating: Archaeology, text and science (via ResearchGate)

The Iron Age Architecture at Hasanlu: An Essay (Expedition)

East of Assyria? Hasanlu and the problem of Assyrianization, in Imperial Peripheries in the Neo-Assyrian Period (via Academia.edu)

Global Warming Could Make Carbon Dating Impossible (The Atlantic)

Dating Methods in Historical Archaeology (Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology)

A Comparison and Review of Window Glass Analysis Approaches in Historical Archaeology (Technical Briefs in Historical Archaeology)

It's another sponsored episode! This week, we bring you the fascinating (and sometimes delicious) topic of evolutionary anachronisms. What happens when two species co-evolve to support one another, but one goes extinct? What's up with that obscure, hipster fruit, the paw-paw, and why is Amber mad at NPR? What can blue jays tell us about human impulsivity? All this and more!

Gallery of Megafauna Fruits

Forgotten fruits: Or, megafaunal dispersal syndrome and the case of the missing herbivores (Scientopia’s Guest Blog)

Zerega, N.J.C., D. Ragone, and T.J. Motley. 2006. Genetic diversity and origins of domesticated breadfruit. In Darwin’s Harvest: New Approaches to the Origins, Evolution, and Conservation of Crops, ed. T.J. Motley, N.J.C. Zerega, and H.B. Cross. Columbia University Press, New York.

Barlow, Connie. 2000. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and other Ecological Anachronisms. Basic Books, New York, NY.

This Once-Obscure Fruit Is On Its Way To Becoming PawPaw-Pawpular (NPR)

Human diets drive range expansion of megafauna-dispersed fruit species (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Impulsive behavior may be relict of hunter-gatherer past (EurekAlert!)

Mischel, Walter; Ebbesen, Ebbe B.; Raskoff Zeiss, Antonette (1972). "Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 21 (2): 204–218. doi:10.1037/h0032198. ISSN 0022-3514. PMID 5010404.

Here at The Dirt, we talk a lot about the things that people leave behind, but we’ve not spent much time talking about what’s left behind of the people themselves. That changes this week, when Anna and Amber discuss excavating, storing, studying, and selling archaeological human remains, and take a look at some of the legal and ethical challenges involved. Content note: this episode contains descriptions of violence done to deceased people and discussion of trafficked human remains.

To learn more about the topics discussed this week (and be advised that there are a lot of images of archaeological human remains included), check out:

They Sell Skulls Online?! A Review of Internet Sales of Human Skulls on eBay and the Laws in Place to Restrict Sales (Journal of Forensic Sciences)

Human Skulls Are Being Sold Online, But Is It Legal? (National Geographic)

FAQ (Pandora’s Box UK)

The Long Ethical Arc of Displaying Human Remains (Atlas Obscura)

Human Remains: The Sacred, Museums And Archaeology (Public Archaeology)

Prof. Bob Muckle on Twitter

Mourning an Aboriginal death (Creative Spirits)

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Wikipedia)

Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA

NAGPRA as a Paradigm: The Historical Context and Meaning of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 2011 (Proceedings of the Ninth Native American Symposium)

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (via National Parks Service)

Repatriation and Traditional Care (Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology)

Repatriation Office (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Give Me My Father’s Body (1986), and the Dollop episode about Minik

The Basics of Section 106 Review (National Trust for Historic Preservation)

NAGPRA: Section 3 vs. ARPA vs. NHPA: Section 106 (National Parks Service)

Full Text of National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

A Citizen’s Guide To Section 106 Review (Advisory Council on Historic Preservation)

How the archaeological review behind the Dakota Access Pipeline went wrong (The Conversation)

Israeli Law, Jewish Law and the Archaeological Excavation of Tombs (International Journal of Cultural Property)

Israeli Archaeologists Dodge the Law to Study Human Remains (Ha’aretz)

Inside India's Underground Trade in Human Remains (Wired)

Bones of contention: The global trade in archaeological and ethnographic human remains (Saving Antiquities for Everyone)

This Archaeologist Uses Instagram To Track The Human Skeleton Trade (Forbes)

The Insta-Dead: The rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram (Internet Archaeology)

Meet the Living People Who Collect Dead Human Remains (Vice)

Kick off Women's History Month with a show all about some of the earliest representations of women in art! Anna introduces us to the Venus of Willendorf and her curvy comrades, and shares a research study with very modern take on ancient art. Meanwhile Amber bursts our bubble about the matriarchy and goddess religions in Old Europe, and discusses goddess worshippers of past and present at Çatalhöyük in present-day Turkey. Or, as Amber would insist we call it this month, Her-key.

The Time of the Willendorf Figurines and New Results of Palaeolithic Research in Lower Austria (Anthropologie)

The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (via Google Books)

Venus Figurines of the European Paleolithic: Symbols of Fertility or Attractiveness? (Journal of Anthropology)

Das Mutterrecht (auf Deutsch via Archive.org, English translation WorldCat entry here)

The Marija Gimbutas Collection (Opus Archives and Research Center)

The World of the Goddess - Marija Gimbutas (Youtube)

The Myth of the Mother-Goddess (World Archaeology)

Goddesses, Gimbutas and New Age archaeology (Antiquity)

Catal-huyuk: A Neolithic Town (via Archive.org)

Archaeologists and Goddess Feminists at Çatalhöyük: An Experiment in Multivocality (Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion)

It's almost officially springtime in the Northern Hemisphere, and the vernal equinox brings with it another reason to celebrate: Nowruz! Commonly known as Persian New Year, Nowruz has its roots in a millennia-old religion founded by a man named Zartosht whose ideas had a profound impact on the world. Anna introduces fire temples and what ancient writers had to say about Zoroastrianism, while Amber hypes the Bronze Age in Central Asia and suggests some ways in which Zoroastrian ideas have affected other religions.

Nowruz: Traditions for Persian New Year (United States Institute of Peace: The Iran Primer)

What life was like when Zoroaster lived? (Zoroastrian Kids)

Avesta (Livius.org)

Zoroastrians of Central Asia: Evidence from Archaeology and Art (FEZANA Journal via Academia.edu)

Records of the General Conference, 31st session, Paris, 2001, v. 2: Proceedings (UNESCO)

Ancient Sogdiana: A ‘Zoroastrian Stronghold’ (Avesta.org)

Parsi Woman Excommunication Case (Supreme Court Observer)

Early Chahar-Taqi Fire Houses and Temples (Heritage Institute)

The culture and social institutions of ancient Iran (WorldCat.org)

Ātaškada (Encyclopedia Iranica)

Fire Altars and Fire Temples in the First Millennia BC/AD in the Iranian World (via ResearchGate)

Zoroastrians in East Africa (The Zoroastrian Diaspora)

The Obscure Religion that Shaped the West (BBC Culture)

An Archaeology of Religion (via Google Books)

A Rare Glimpse Inside A Zoroastrian Temple In New York (HuffPost)

Anna and Amber rummage around on the floor of history's closet to bring you a brief history of shoes from around the world! Learn why caves in the southwestern USA are full of shoes. Find a shoe museum near you for some sole-searching. Enjoy a description of Anna's favorite goofy historical fashion statement. All this and more!

To learn more about this week’s topic, check out:

First Shoes Worn 40,000 Years Ago (LiveScience)

Why Are Some Caves Full of Shoes? (Sapiens)

King Den's sandal label (Google Arts & Culture)

Taking a Closer Look at an Odd Pair of Very, Very Old Socks (Smithsonian.com)

All About Shoes (Bata Shoe Museum)

A boot from Tønsberg (Museum of Cultural History)

Shoes and Pattens. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London: 2 (via Google Books)

Feet and Footwear: A Cultural Encyclopedia (via Google Books)

The Chopine (Helibrunn Timeline of Art History)

Tour These Nine Top Shoe Museums (Footwear News)

Join Anna and Amber on a tour of third millennium BCE Mesopotamia, where they explore the Royal Tombs of Ur. It has everything: musical instruments, very extra jewelry looks, a Great Death Pit (!), a famous excavator with a flair for the dramatic, even a surprise find nearly a century later in a museum basement. Who was buried there? What makes these tombs so special? What did Sumerian music sound like? How great was that death pit?

To learn (and see!) more, check out:

Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (via Worldcat)

Art of the Ancient Near East: Resources for Educators (via Worldcat)

The Royal cemetery : a report on the predynastic and Sargonid graves excavated between 1926 and 1931 (via Worldcat)

Assyrian King-Lists, the Royal Tombs of Ur, and Indus Origins (Journal of Near Eastern Studies)

Woolley's Excavations (Ur Online)

The Musical Instruments from Ur and Ancient Mesopotamian Music (Expedition)

Musician's Recreation of Ancient Sumerian Songs Will Haunt You (io9)

Queen Puabi jewellery (Nasvete)

Jewelry from the Royal Tombs of Ur (Sumerian Shakespeare)

Scanning the Deadheads (Penn Museum)

What Do We Know About the People Buried in the Royal Cemetery? (Expedition 20)

Human sacrifice and intentional corpse preservation in the Royal Cemetery of Ur (Antiquity, via Academia.edu)