Todd's Blog

At the start of this year, I fully intended to write up some thoughts and reflections on the centennial of the Scopes Trial, which took place right here in Dayton, TN in July of 1925.  I also agreed to give a presentation on the history of creationism for the Scopes Centennial symposium "Evolving Conflict," so it wasn't just a matter of writing up some thoughts.  I had a deadline! Now, I've lived here in Dayton for 25 years, always less than five miles from the courtroom where the trial took place.  I've read more about the trial than I can even remember.  I met people who were there and descendants of people who were there.  Core Academy has its own historical archives related to the trial.  I've given more tours of the courthouse than I can count.  To say I'm familiar with the trial is kind of an understatement.  Surely I would have something thoughtful to say about it after all these years! Then I found myself quite simply at a loss.  I wa...

It was a big week last week, but you might have missed the news amidst all the other troubles of the world at the moment.  A fifteen-year mystery was finally resolved thanks to a bit of DNA recovered from some dental tartar on an old skull from China.  The story of this discovery began years ago hundreds of miles away in southern Siberia at a place called Densiova Cave. Just a small cave, as far as caves go, Denisova Cave opens to roughly the southeast, just above the right bank of the Anuy River.  The main chamber today is defaced with recent graffiti, but the sediments excavated from the floor of the cave yielded remarkable discoveries from ages past.  Stone tools and hundreds of bone fragments have been recovered.  The bone fragments testify to the enduring use of the cave by predators, but the stone tools hinted that people had been there too. With the advent of ancient DNA technology and molecular archaeology, the first really startling report came of a com...

Longtime readers will remember my obsession with the discoveries in the Rising Star Cave in South Africa, where thousands of bones of a hominin dubbed Homo naledi have been recovered over the past dozen or so years.  By itself, that's not terribly shocking (there are lots of hominin fossils), but various features of the cave where they were found led researchers to suggest the bones were deliberately placed there.  More recently, there have been a series of claims and pre-prints that have introduced some fascinating new dimensions to the work ( fire , burials, tools, and engravings ), but there has also been criticism of these findings that reflect some of my own misgivings about a few of the claims .  Some of my concerns:  The claims of fire evidence remains undocumented, and it's been nearly two and a half years now.  I know in archaeology that it's somewhat common to make big announcements about discoveries with the research articles coming much later, but I...

  They're not dire wolves.  Not even close. Time magazine has a cover story this week on Colossal Biosciences' latest research progress in de-extinction.  They claim repeatedly in the article that three recently born wolf pups are dire wolves, even as the article itself gives enough information to unequivocally dispute that claim.  I acknowledge that this is a cool research project and that these animals will exhibit traits that might resemble dire wolves and even that the technology they're developing will have important future applications.  But these animals they've produced are not dire wolves. Dire wolves are extinct canids that lived in North America, known from all over the continent, especially from the famed La Brea Tar Pits in California.  They were big animals, maybe twice the mass of the gray wolf, and they went extinct along with other big American predators like the American lion and the giant shortfaced bear.  And they were common....

  This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, which took place right here in the historic Rhea County Courthouse, not two miles from the Core Academy offices. It's definitely a strange event all the way around. Part media circus, part legal showdown, part religious debate - and everyone's understanding of it is warped by Inherit the Wind .  Beneath all the mythology, though, the trial's issues are just as relevant today as they were then.  The prosecution argued that it was within the rights of the states citizens to decide what state employees were allowed to teach in the classroom.  The defense argued that the majority could not trample on the rights of the minority.  The trial devolved into a personal grudge match of agnostic Clarence Darrow vs. fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, and the case of creation vs. evolution was hardly even litigated.  But the historical significance of the trial is enormous, as it set in motion a series of e...

My last post elicited comments that some of the sites I included in my map were dubious or debatable.  And you know what?  That's true.  What's more, the mere fact that stone tools and cut bones occur together does not by itself indicate that humans were once present there.  We've known for a long time that other creatures can make tools that look kind of like Oldowan flake tools (like chimpanzees ).  In fact, I would expect that some early human traces would have a sort of dubious quality to them, where they just don't stand out enough from the background to be conclusively recognized. As I went down the Google Scholar rabbit hole looking up papers on the sites from my last post, I stumbled onto the fascinating world of automatic identification of tool marks on bones.  I've known about this new field for a while, but reading about some of the recent applications really grabbed my attention.  The techniques are fairly straightforward.  Researcher...