bensozia

Pictures taken yesterday at lunch.

Yesterday I noticed several online headlines with the tone, "Did Neanderthals Believe in an Afterlife?" This piqued my curiosity a...

Great article by Chip Brown at Smithsonian about El Mirador, the greatest city of the early Maya: We were hovering now over the heart of th...

This British hoard of bronze axes, found in 2007, dates to around 800 BC. As you can tell, by the late Bronze Age axes had become a sort of ...

Where does altruism come from? Why do animals regularly risk or even sacrifice themselves for the good of others? It is a hard problem for e...

The latest : The French government said Wednesday it would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support t...

The bones of Australopithecus sediba were uncovered in South Africa in 2008. They date to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years ago. Detailed...

Northwestern Europe is dotted with earthen constructions that our medieval ancestors called "castles," but were re-christened by V...

One of the examples sometimes used by creationists to attack evolution is the eye, as in, "what good is 10% of an eye?" Actually, ...

Besides writing Dilbert, Scott Adams has ideas about education. In this post he wonders why our school system is so mismatched to the educa...

Ben, Clara, Coraline and I just took a walk down to the tadpole ponds by the Patapsco River on this glorious spring day. The leaves are just...

Republicans are on a mission to cut the budgets of environmental agencies at the both the federal and state levels. The budget just agreed t...

Africa has become the land of recycling, where poor people dress in donated western clothes, wear sandals made from old truck tires, build ...

In the category of "Too Much Like a TV Movie" : The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for cent...

This is normally my big gardening weekend. Our expected last frost date is April 15, so I usually spend the next weekend buying tomato and p...

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise ...

A Roman pendant recently found by a metal detector enthusiast in Norfolk, England, and announced to the press under the title, "The Gol...

Charles Blow gives what I think is the only possible moral response to the Ryan budget: outrage. Wall Street is rolling in cash. C.E.O. bonu...

In New York right now a woman is suing to have her mother's husband's name removed from her birth certificate, because he was not, ...

From Science News: Orangutans living in Borneo scavenge fish that wash up along the shore and scoop catfish out of small ponds for fresh mea...

Woodcut by Hartmann Schedel. Click to enlarge.

Clara and I walked along a little stream near our house today. It's quite lovely in the spring, despite the trash, but in the summer it ...

The British Tories' tough guy approach to their own economic and fiscal problems -- raise taxes, cut spending, reduce debt, and hope the...

The swirling, interlacing style of Viking art, expressed in wood and metal.

One of my favorite things that I have learned about teaching Celts to Vikings this year is the Ingvar Stones. In 1036, a Swedish Viking name...

The first stage of spring is enacted under barren trees, and then, overnight it seems, the leaves start to come out and suddenly the world i...

As a businessman (of sorts) who never even took an economics course in college, let alone one on management or accounting, I have spent some...

Ta-Nehisi Coates calls attention to the persistent myth that thousands of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy, quoting this from Tony...

The Montreal Gazette covers an experiment carried out by political scientist Dietlind Stolle: First, daycare kids were given clickers and a...

Ryan Malan reviews three books on the steadily deteriorating situation in southern Africa. He begins: The central problem of writing about ...