The John Batchelor Show

Friday 9 November 2012

Air Date: 
November 09, 2012

 

Photo, above: Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site in the Bradsot mountain, Zagros Mountains in Erbil Governorate, Kurdistan Region, Iraq. It was excavated from 1957–1961 by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University and yielded the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60–80,000 years BP.   . . .  Shanidar 4, the "flower burial"    Reconstruction of a Neanderthal male at Zagros Paleolithic Museum   Of all the skeletons found at the cave, it is Shanidar IV which provides the best evidence for Neanderthal burial ritual. The skeleton of an adult male aged from 30–45 years was discovered in 1960 by Ralph Solecki and was positioned so that he was lying on his left side in a partial fetal position. Routine soil samples which were gathered for pollen analysis in an attempt to reconstruct the palaeoclimate and vegetational history of the site from around the body were analysed eight years after its discovery. In two of the soil samples in particular, whole clumps of pollen were discovered in addition to the usual pollen found throughout the site and suggested that entire flowering plants (or at least heads of plants) had entered the grave deposit. Furthermore, a study of the particular flower types suggested that the flowers may have been chosen for their specific medicinal properties. Yarrow, Cornflower, Bachelor's Button, St. Barnaby's Thistle, Ragwort or Groundsel, Grape Hyacinth, Joint Pine or Woody Horsetail and Hollyhock were represented in the pollen samples, all of which have long-known curative powers as diuretics, stimulants, astringents as well as anti-inflammatory properties. This led to the idea that the man could possibly have had shamanic powers, perhaps acting as medicine man to the Shanidar Neandertals. Recent work into the flower burial has suggested that perhaps the pollen was introduced to the burial by animal action as several burrows of a gerbil-like rodent known as the Persian Jird were found nearby. The jird is known to store large numbers of seeds and flowers at certain points in their burrows and this argument was used in conjunction with the lack of ritual treatment of the rest of the skeletons in the cave to suggest that the Shanidar IV burial had natural, not cultural, origins.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave   See also: Dr Ralph Solecki, Shanidar: The First Flower People,1971 

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Friday 905P Eastern Time: .Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re:  second terms of president, what is to be done; foreign policy adventurism: Grant, Ike, Nixon, Clinton.

Friday 920P Eastern Time:  .continued: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re:  second terms of president, what is to be done; foreign policy adventurism: Grant, Ike, Nixon, Clinton.

Neandertal male, museum reconstruction.  "It’s been barely two years since a breakthrough study found that people living outside Africa shared up to 4% of their DNA with Neanderthals, prompting speculation that there had been quite a bit of, shall we say, interspecies intimacy during the 15,000-year period when the two species co-existed in Europe. Now, scientists at the University of Cambridge have proposed that these genetic similarities might instead stem from both species sharing a common ancestor.

Friday 935P Eastern Time: Michael Balter, Science , in re: the debate about Neanderthals and symbolic acts of burial.

Until now, that is. New excavations at La Ferrassie, co-directed by archaeologists Alain Turq of the National Museum of Prehistory in nearby Les Eyzies-de-Tayac and Harold Dibble of the University of Pennsylvania, are in part designed to reexamine this question, which many researchers had long thought was itself dead and buried. “People are starting to talk about Neandertal burials again,” Dibble says. “It's getting heated.”

Neandertal female, museum reconstruction.

Friday 950P Eastern Time:  .continued: Michael Balter, Science , in re: the debate about Neanderthals and symbolic acts of burial.

 

The North Americans say their point of view was bolstered by the team's excavations at the nearby Neandertal site of Roc de Marsal. There, a complete skeleton of a Neandertal child found in 1961 was long considered to be strong evidence for burial. But Dibble and his colleagues, including geoarchaeologist Paul Goldberg of Boston University, applied micromorphology—a relatively new approach that puts entire archaeological sites under the microscope to find clues to how bones and artifacts were deposited—and concluded that Roc de Marsal may not have been a deliberate burial after all (Science, 20 November 2009, p. 1056, and 9 December 2011, p. 1388). In a paper published last year in the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), Goldberg and some other team members argued from a microscopic and macroscopic study of the sediments in and around the burial site that the pit in which the child was found was a natural depression, and that its body, which was lying face down, may have slid down into the pit from above.

Friday 1005P (705P Pacific Time):  Joshua Greene, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re: Fiscal cliff resolution?

Friday 1020P (720P Pacific Time):  . Craig Unger, author, Boss Rove, in re: the fall of Karl Rove, or the next rise of Rove?

Friday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):  . Devin Nunes (CA-22), in re:  the GOP struggle in California against Democratic agents; the fiscal cliff and the unlikely resolution; Boehner and no change with Obama

Friday 1050P (750P Pacific Time):  . Dino Falaschetti, PERC, in re: global fisheries and the solution for exhausted catches and beggared fishers

Friday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): . Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen; 1 of 4

Friday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): . Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen; 2 of 4

Friday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): . Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen; 3 of 4

Friday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):  . Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen; 4 of 4

Friday/Sat 1205A (905 Pacific Time):  .Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re:  second terms of president, what is to be done; foreign policy adventurism: Grant, Ike, Nixon, Clinton

Friday/Sat  1220A (920 Pacific Time): . continued: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re:  second terms of president, what is to be done; foreign policy adventurism: Grant, Ike, Nixon, Clinton

Friday/Sat  1235A (935P Pacific Time):  .Michaal Balter, Science , in re: the debate about Neanderthals and symbolic acts of burial.

Until now, that is. New excavations at La Ferrassie, co-directed by archaeologists Alain Turq of the National Museum of Prehistory in nearby Les Eyzies-de-Tayac and Harold Dibble of the University of Pennsylvania, are in part designed to reexamine this question, which many researchers had long thought was itself dead and buried. “People are starting to talk about Neandertal burials again,” Dibble says. “It's getting heated.”

Friday/Sat  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt. Continued: Michael Balter, Science, in re: the debate about Neanderthals and symbolic acts of burial

'Rhino Wars': An anti-poaching team guards a northern white rhino, part of a 24-hour watch, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya last July. The park is home to four of the world's remaining eight northern white rhinos.

 

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Music (using New York City broadcast times)  

9:00 hour:   Hatfields and McCoys; 10,000 BC

10:00 hour:   Hatfields and McCoys; 1408

11:00 hour:   The Thing

midnight hour:    Hatfields and McCoys; 10,000 BC  

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