Spooktober: Feral Children - Ep 157

SPOOKTOBER HAS BEGUN! This week, we discuss the trope in myth, legend, horror, and adjacent genres of feral children. We won't be directly discussing actual cases of trauma, neglect, or child abuse, but rather the place of the bestial feral child in the mythology of different ancient cultures all the way up to a more recent timeline. Why do these stories interest us, spook us, and who's the real monster here?

Links

• Register for our International Archaeology Day Live Show on October 16!

• Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Center for Hellenic Studies)

• How Young Children Learn Language (Scholastic)

• Flint Dibble on Wolf’s Milk and More

• Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh (The Conversation)

• Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic (Aeon)

• The History of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated by Simon Ockley

• Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne" (Eighteenth-Century Studies)

• The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster (via WorldCat)

• Why Sasquatch and Other Crypto-Beasts Haunt Our Imaginations (Anthropology of Consciousness)

• Feral Disorders and Colonial Exclusions: Animal Reared Feral Children, Discourses of Animality, and the Treatment of Animals in Colonial India (via Academia.edu)

• Wild stories: why do we find feral children so fascinating? (The Guardian)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Disability in the Ancient World With Andrew Gurza - Ep 156

This week, Anna and Amber are joined by Andrew Gurza, disabled content creator and fellow podcaster, to talk about disability and care in the ancient world. We talk with Andrew about the need for disabled voices in archaeology, his path to podcasting, and some archaeological case studies that show that humans have always taken care of one another.

Links

• Andrew Gurza's website

• Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion (NY Times)

• Ancient Bones Offer Clues to How Long Ago Humans Cared for the Vulnerable (NPR Goats and Soda)

• Follow Andrew on Twitter: @AndrewGurza_

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

School of Rocks with Dr. Danielle Macdonald - Ep 155

Dr. Danielle Macdonald specializes in the prehistory of Western Asia and the stone tools that people made and used in their everyday lives. That’s right, three years in, we’re finally doing an episode on lithics! We’ll also talk about Danielle’s path to anthropology and her ongoing work at the site of Kharaneh IV in what's today Jordan.

Links

• Follow Danielle on Twitter!

• Danielle Macdonald (University of Tulsa)

• Kharaneh IV Website

• Convergent Evolution in Stone-Tool Technology (MIT Press)

• Eccentric flint (Wikipedia)

• Flint Knapping a spear head from English Flint with Will Lord (YouTube)

• Knapping a Blade Core using a Rocker Punch by Craig Ratzat!

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Who's the New Guy? - Ep 153

Remember that time we did a whole series on the human family tree and then finished talking about evolution forever because we were all done? HA! OF COURSE WE AREN'T DONE! There have been some amazing new discoveries in the human fossil record since that series dropped, so we're here to update you on what our family shrubbery looks like now. We journey to Siberia, the Philippines, China, and other places, and our story gets a whole lot more complicated! We love to see it.

Links

• Human Evolution Interactive Timeline (Smithsonian Museum of Natural History)

• Are Homo sapiens and Neanderthals the same species? (Stefan Milo, via YouTube)

• ​Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) (National Human Genome Research Institute)

• First portrait of mysterious Denisovans drawn from DNA (Nature)

• Biggest Denisovan fossil yet spills ancient human’s secrets (Nature)

• New clue to human evolution's biggest mystery emerges in Philippines (CNN)

• Indigenous Filipino Group Has Highest Known Denisovan Ancestry (The Scientist)

• Ancient tools and DNA discovered in a Tibetan cave shed unprecedented light on humans' most enigmatic ancestor, the Denisovans (Business Insider)

• Denisovans: The ancient humans who share our ancestry (New Scientist)

• Philippine Ayta possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world (Current Biology)

• A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines (Nature)

• Homo luzonensis: New human species found in Philippines (BBC News)

• New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines (National Geographic)

• Homo naledi (Smithsonian Museum of Natural History)

• Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa (Evolutionary Biology)

• The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa (Evolutionary Biology)

• Homo naledi is only 250,000 years old – here’s why that matters (New Scientist)

• New type of ancient human discovered in Israel (BBC News)

• Israeli fossil finds reveal a new hominid group, Nesher Ramla Homo (Science News)

• A new type of Homo unknown to science (ScienceDaily)

• A Middle Pleistocene Homo from Nesher Ramla, Israel (Science)

• Homo longi: extinct human species that may replace Neanderthals as our closest relatives found in China (The Conversation)

• 146,000-Year-Old Archaic Human Cranium Represents New Species: Homo longi (Sci-News)

• Homo Longi: Extinct Human Species That May Replace Neanderthals As Our Closest Relatives Found in China (Discover)

• 'Dragon man' claimed as new species of ancient human but doubts remain

  (New Scientist)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Back to School: Stratigraphy - Ep 150

It's our 150th episode! Wow! This week we're starting our Back To School series with a short primer on stratigraphy. How do archaeologists divide a site into time periods? How did people first figure out that layers of sediment accumulate over time through different processes? How many dirt/soil/sediment puns is Anna capable of making in roughly forty minutes? We’ll find out.

Links

• Stratigraphy: Earth's Geological, Archaeological Layers (ThoughtCo)

• Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology (WGBH)

• About Sir Charles Lyell (University of Edinburgh)

• Charles Lyell (Encyclopedia Britannica)

• The Blasphemous Geologist Who Rocked Our Understanding of Earth’s Age (Smithsonian)

• Harris Matrix (Wikipedia)

• The Harris Matrix Tool for Comprehending the Archaeological Past (ThoughtCo)

• How to Read a Munsell Color Chart (Munsell Color)

• Atapuerca (Don’s Maps)

• Chicken Bones May Be the Legacy of Our Time (Smithsonian)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular