![[A monkey looking into a mirror.]](https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/files/2023/03/pexels-andre-mouton-1207875.jpg)
Primate archaeology is a fast growing field. While archaeology usually refers to the study of the human past through the excavation of past tools, remains, and civilizations, primate archaeology unearths the technological (tool use) past of our primate relatives as well as observes tool use by primates in real time. Each year, scientists make new discoveries about primates and their behaviors that prompt questions about the full extent of our primate relatives’ cognition and how it relates back to our own cognitive evolution…
Tag: archaeology
An Archaeological Introduction to Coding in Python
Programming skills are not only becoming more in demand in industry jobs, they’re also becoming a required skill in academia as well. Programming is now used in almost every discipline for tasks such as data collection, organization, and analysis. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how some basic programming in Python can be used… Read more »
Dead people are people too: online trafficking of archaeological skeletons and artifacts
This is a ScIU guest post by Krystiana Krupa, a Ph.D. candidate in IU’s Department of Anthropology and Research Associate for IU NAGPRA, and Molly Mesner Bleyhl, a Ph.D. student in IU’s Department of Anthropology and Graduate Assistant for IU NAGPRA It seems that once a deceased person is skeletonized, our society overall tends to… Read more »
Back to the Stone Age: Why study primate archaeology?
This is the first installment of the Primate Conversation Series. You can read parts two and three here! In 1960, Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee, whom she named David Greybeard, deep in the Tanzanian jungle using a stick to fish for termites. This discovery was the first documented observation of a chimpanzee using tools in… Read more »
Collection is not curation: artifact hunting and personal collections
This is a ScIU guest post by Krystiana Krupa, a Ph.D. candidate in IU’s Department of Anthropology and Research Associate for IU NAGPRA, and Molly Mesner Bleyhl, a Ph.D. student in IU’s Department of Anthropology and Graduate Assistant for IU NAGPRA It is common practice for hikers to pick up artifacts that they find on… Read more »
Hands, tools, and words, oh my!
It is relatively easy to list things that make our species, Homo sapiens, unique. From modest biological traits like hairless bodies and walking on two feet, to amazing things like culture, technology, and language, it is quite clear that we became some pretty quirky animals over the course of our evolution. Exactly how and why… Read more »