Trees that have stood for thousands of years may soon collapse due to climate change. If they do, they'll take irreplaceable aboriginal art with them.
Tag - Archaeology
Alun Salt
Eurekalert
Reverse archaeology reveals new insights into global warming
Often archaeologists will examine differences in vegetation to gain information on buried sites. Now, some botanists have reversed this and are using archaeological sites to learn about the effect of nutrient...
Studying plant remains at the entrance and the exit of a chimpanzee
A chimp's diet can be studied through microscopic opals.
Dale Maylea
Is Holey Bread, Holy Bread or Wholly Bread?
A 'bread-like object' with a hole in it illustrates a gap in our knowledge of prehistoric cuisine.
Bread’s birth bested by 4400 years
Like many of you reading this item I suspect, I was taught that agriculture was ‘invented’ about 10,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an ancient territory that corresponds to much of the modern-day Middle...
Nigel Chaffey
Dark soils are the shadow of hidden agriculture
Stains left in the soil from past farmers, and the plants they cultivated, are helping illuminate prehistoric inhabitants of the Amazon.
Illuminating work on bean domestication
What can you do with a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun? One thing you can do is examine 4000 year old seed coatings.
Farming in the DNA
Archaeology shows that farming spread across Europe from the Middle East. For Europeans, farming started in the Fertile Crescent in the Levant, Turkey and Iraq around 8-9,000 BC. It spread into SE Europe around 6,500 BC...
Say it with flowers?
Dani Nadel et al., have unearthed possibly the oldest example of the decoration of graves with plants.
New plants for a dimmer future?
As anyone who merely glances at the titles of scientific articles will tell you, when ‘new species’ and ‘China’ are seen together it is usually a tale of ‘yet another’ extinct missing-link fossil from that amazing...
Nicotine: an ancient addiction?
It must be terribly depressing if you don’t have plants in your life to give you purpose and a reason to get up in the morning, put digit to keyboard, or whatever. Still, for those who are intellectually botanically...
Does rain forest grow back? Archaeology might have the answer
Most international archaeological work in South America has concentrated on the Andes for various reasons. It’s more accessible, the ruins are more visible, there’s a better ethnohistorical record from the...
How old is my meadow?
I was a bit fed up after hearing the UK government announce further cutbacks to the science budget today, so I thought I’d delve into the recent Free Access issue of Annals of Botany from Sept 2009 to see...
