This week’s news roundup includes a Bronze Age discovery that calls into question existing ideas of gender representation from the period. More research confirms that bonobos are actually nice. Plus: Actual good climate news?
It’s simply a fact that when science writers use ellipses as extravagant drama dots, it’s always with the phrase “… until now.” Here’s an example: Bronze Age relics can reveal a lot of information about the conditions and lifestyles of ancient people, but the lack of written records has inhibited specific knowledge about prehistoric social and gender roles… until now.
A multi-institutional team of archaeologists working in the 3,000-year-old funerary complex of Las Capellanías, in Cañaveral de León, in Spain, excavated a funerary stela depicting a human figure with a detailed face, hands and feet, a headdress, necklace, two swords and male genitals—the exact headstone I want after I die.
Prior to this find, stelas depicting headdresses and jewelry had been interpreted as depicting a female form, but the new find challenges these assumptions.
It’s pretty easy to lapse into fatalism about climate change if your job entails reading an avalanche of research on a daily basis, so I have a tendency to latch onto any good news like a baby monkey clinging to a wire mother in a cruel behavioral experiment from the 1950s.
2023-11-18 11:41:03
Post from phys.org