Digging for early humans in Kent's Cavern

According to an article you can read here:

 

http://www.thisissouthdevon.co.uk/localnews/Cave-dig-hopes-signs-modern-man/article-653881-detail/article.html

there is going to be a dig at Kent's Cavern, UK, in March, and a "follow-up{ dig in September.  The reason?  There is an ambiguous fossil of a jaw there.  If I remember correctly, the tools found previously at Kent's Cavern, seemed to indicate the presence of "modern" humans some 38,000 years ago, which would have made them the oldest "modern" remains in the UK.  Well and good.  Except that analysis of the jaw seems to suggest that its owner might have been a Neandertal!  Well, that wouldn't be so bad, either, if it weren't for the fact that the diggers seem to be trying to show that "modern" humans somehow "caused" Neandertal extinction.  In a way, they did, I suppose, but the news story -- which probably has garbled the intent of the archaeologists involved -- suggests that Neandertals  couldn't "cope".  Some people believe this is true, and try to show this in their work, if they are doing prehistoric archaeology or related field.  Is it? I don't know.  I have a feeling, though, that just like the "ambiguous" jaw, the results won't point to anything definite, in the way of the appearance of "modern" humans and the disappearance of Neandertals.

Anne G

Devolution

The John Hawks weblog  has a link to a site where you can "devolve" yourself, if you want to see what you might like if you were, say, a Homo heidelbergensis.  Looks like it's kind of fun.  Heck, what did a Homo heidelbergensis look like, anyway?

 

Here is the link:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog

The photo is interesting, too.

Anne G

For those interested in the medieval, the Irish, and our new president(among other things)

First, let me warn you, gentle blog reader:  this is not going to be anything political!  I said I wasn’t going to put any political stuff on this blog, except under the most momentous circumstances, and I’m sticking to that.  However. . . .I got an interesting tidbit from this site .  It claims both President Obama and ex-President Bush are descended from that great Irish hero Niall of the Nine Hostages!  I read last week that the town the Obama ancestor came from, had a huge celebration on Inauguration day, and they even made something called “brack”(guess why, hint, hint), which is apparently an Irish version of fruitcake, for the occasion.  I didn’t remember seeing anything about the Niall of the Nine Hostages connection, but that’s all right.  Heck, Obama is also related to the unlamented Vice President Cheney, too.  But since half of Ireland seems to be in some manner related or descended or connected with Niall of the Nine Hostages, one way or another, I’m probably related in some way to Obama too.  I’m of Irish descent, you see, although I don’t make a lot of this connection.  I can’t say I’m related to anybody Kenyan, though, unless you want to go back all the way to whoever the ancestor of all “modern” humans was.  But then, even some of the descendants of that ancestral “Eve” wandered themselves out of Africa around 100,000 years ago and proceeded to end up everywhere, and probably mixed themselves up with whatever “nonmoderns” they encountered along the way, from time to time, and place to place(yeah, that means Neandertals, too, sorry about that, even if the genes don’t obviously show up in “modern” humans).  So if you go far enough back, I’m related to an awful lot of people.  That’s nice.  I don’t mind.  Their stories are all interesting, and I’m writing some of them.

Anne G

Self-publish?

I know someone who has self-published a book, which was kind of a pet project of the author’s.  It’s not a bad book, but it’s rather odd in some ways, and it’s easy for me to see why the author couldn’t find a publisher.  And lots of people in the book business don’t think much of self-publishing.  Robert Sawyer(unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the link in my blog) thinks it’s a terrible idea, and told one aspiring writer that in so many words. My recollection is, that he essentially told the would- be author to “trash” that book and write a lot of short stories.  Personally, I thought this was a bit harsh, but  there is still an attitude in the book business, that self-published books are badly written “vanity” pieces

 

On the other hand, I was at a wedding a couple of years ago, and one of the relatives – the groom’s family – I don’t know how this guy was related – got me in a conversation about my writing.  He kept trying to “sell” me on self-publishing.  I was leery at the time, and still am, somewhat, but at that stage, I was not about to try to peddle a “half-baked” Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, in any  form!  Besides which, if you self-publish, everything falls on you!  This includes marketing and distributing the thing, which many writers simply do not have a talent for.  So I held firm and essentially, after I got back from the wedding, which was out of town, I went back to writing. 

 

On the other hand, there is an interesting article about self-publishing in the current Time Magazine, which told several stories about authors who “did everything right”:  they wrote the proper queries, carefully submitted their works to as many agents as they could, in the genres they were writing, and still remained unpublished.  One of them simply got frustrated, plunked down $450 or some similar amount, and got her book published.  She then peddled it around herself, and a few people, including some agent, picked it up.  The end result was, the agent liked what he or she saw, picked it up, and it was published by a respectable publishing house.

 

I don’t know exactly what to make of this, since most authors don’t sell that many books anyway, published or not.  Some get their start, for instance, by writing books that sell only to libraries.  I’ve read some of these, and the writing is decent, but they are awfully short and sweet.  But on the other hand, perhaps that’s all a lot of library patrons want.  And the author can then say, somewhere down the line, “Yes, I’ve published (insert title) and  so-and-so liked it”.  Which can add to the person’s writing credibility.  Unfortunately, unless the agent is fairly open, if it’s self-published, the old attitudes may persist. 

 

I think the Time Magazine article is right about one thing, though.  And that is, that the nature of reading, and publishing, is changing considerably.  The reason for this is partly economic – though not the reasons the author of the article has listed, I think.  The author of the article accuses publishing houses of being kind of uneconomical and old-fashioned about the way they do business with writers, but in fact, one problem writers have, is that book publishing, while always interested in making money by selling books, used to be fairly “writer-friendly”.  If you had any degree of writing talent at all, they would nurture you, and you would stay “midlist” for a while, but if you were lucky, gain a following through word of mouth and the like.  But in the last twenty years or so(if not longer), publishing houses have become increasingly “bottom line” oriented; they are looking for the next blockbuster of a book – a Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter to  carry them to the next profit margin.  But in these tight economic times, people may be less likely to actually buy a book that costs nearly $30.00, especially when they may be able to get it out of the local library system(which I actually encourage, for many books, because I’m a huge supporter of libraries), or trade it with some friend, or get it second-hand.  And that’s hard on authors, too.  This is something the author actually pointed out, in the article.  Furthermore, once you pay the fee for Kindle, which is becoming increasingly popular, and again, I can see why, because I’m acquainted with a lady who actually owns one, it is far cheaper to download some book onto a Kindle and read it that way.  So people may actually end up being less reliant on bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble or Borders(which is rumored to be in considerable financial trouble anyway), and more so on Kindle-like devices.  And, in turn, this may allow a lot of authors to simply put a book on file and have it carried by Amazon.com and sold to anyone who is interested, without intermediaries.  There would probably be some fee or percentage of sales going to whoever carries these electronic books, but it is likely that an author would get a larger share of any profits.  Which, of course is nice for writers, sine few of them make a whole lot of money. 

 

In the end, I think the article may well be right, that this is the future of book publishing.  But at the present, it seems to me that everything is still in a state of flux, and it will take some time before things in the book publishing business to settle into any new pattern.  So should an author self publish?  I have mixed feelings.  I would say, “It depends”. . . .

Anne G

Now back to prehistoric things – some of them really, really prehistoric

Maybe this item won’t seem to relate to my writing, but. . . family and friends were having dinner tonight, and people were discussing body types.  One lady said her doctor told her at one point, she had a “Rubensesque” figure.  I guess she does, in the sense that the painter Rubens liked to paint what would now be called “full-figured” women, which were then fashionable, but now are less so(though you don’t have to go back to the 17th century to find an era when “full figures” were fashionable).  In any case, at that point, I just couldn’t resist. . . .I told everyone, back in the time when my hair wasn’t gray, that I had a “Venus of Willendorf” figure. 

This is the “Venus of Willendorf”, so named because the figurine was found in or near Willendorf, Austria, in the early 1900’s. Don’t worry.  Even when I was pregnant with my daughter, I never, ever, looked like that.  Though she was supposedly a fertility figure, the reference was a joke. 

 

Then, oddly enough, I remembered an even older figurine, one of the oldest ones on recorded – it came from a place called Berekhat Ram, in the Golan Heights. 

The “Venus of Willendorf” is about 15,000 years old, mad by “modern” humans.  But the interesting thing about Berekhat Ram is, it’s about 230,000 years old!  And was probably not made by “modern” humans.  Possibly it was made by Neandertals.  Whoever made it, it was made from volcanic rock. It’s cruder in some ways, because it wasn’t carved in anything like the detail that the Venus of Willendorf was.  But nevertheless, it’s exciting, because if it’s not the earliest attempt at  deliberate modification of something for “artistic” purposes, it is one of the earliest(there are one or two others, somewhat earlier, I believe.  The piece of rock evidently suggested a woman’s profile, to the person who modified the rock, and, while this picture is not particularly good, on some photos, you can see the suggestions of arms.  There is a sort of neck, which was apparently deliberately carved in.  And because Berekhat Ram was not apparently, created by a “modern” human, it is of great interest, since this leads to the inevitable conclusion that the “esthetic sense”, for lack of a better description, very early became part of the repertoire of behaviors, along the line that eventually led to “modern” humans.

 

Perhaps, then, I should have said that I had a”Berekhat Ram” figure.  But neither I, nor anybody else at the time, knew Berekhat Ram existed. . . .

Anne G

I never thought I’d see this day

I interrupt my usual writing oriented blog for something I consider extremely significant in the history of the United States.  Today, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated 44th President of the United States. I took the trouble to watch the inauguration ceremony earlier today, because this moment is historic. I never thought I’d see a day, in my lifetime,when someone of African(or any other nonwhite) descent, would be elected President of the United States. But I have seen it.  And because of this, I am very proud of the people of this country on this day.  After eight dark years, perhaps, I’m hoping, there is a dawn breaking for this country. I know.  I realize that our new President will have to face a pile of problems as high as Mount Everest, perhaps even higher. But his inaugural speech suggests that he is going to roll up his sleeves and offer to tackle them, and he is inviting all of us to tackle them along with him. I will find  a way to pitch in, sooner or later. I feel this is my duty as a citizen. But that is for the future – though not a distant future. For now, I feel nothing but joy and pride at what has been accomplished so far. 

 

Yes we can, yes we did, yes we will,

Anne G

More medieval bits’n’pieces

The Elizabeth Chadwick blog  has a new post about medieval seals and how they were made. I found it quite fascinating. I didn’t know, for example,that the higher up you were on the medieval food chain, the bigger your seal was, nor did I know that women had oval-shaped seals of their own(as did ecclesiastics), and the reason for this. Elizabeth Chadwick’s blog often has lots of useful material,and I learn something there each time she puts something up.  But this is a “something” I might be able to weave into my book, in some way.

Anne G