March 14, 2007
Happy Pi Day
March 14 --> 3/14 --> 3.14... get it?
Some links of interest:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/pi/index.html
http://www.wikihow.com/Celebrate-Pi-Day
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20070311-103835-2325r.htm
http://www.piday.org/
Technorati Tags: academia
Posted by keg at 8:56 AM
August 5, 2006
Kennewick Man
Kennewick Man is the name given to the remains of what are "believed to be the oldest and most complete set of skeletal remains in North America" and that were found in Washington State in 1996.
There has been a long legal and political debate over who gets access to the remains. Modern American Indian tribes claimed the remains for their own, and wanted to immediately bury them. Scientists, with a find this rare and important, wanted to study the remains to shed light on the earliest inhabitants of North America.
A federal judge in 2001 ruled that scientists can study the remains, mainly because there are no links between the 9,000 year old remains and modern American Indian tribes. Though many people refer to American Indians as "Native Americans", more and more scientific evidence reveals that modern tribes are hardly native to North America, any more or less than descendents of early European colonists to America. The evidence suggests there were several waves of early humans to North America - American Indians were a wave (not the first), and Europeans were another.
So the Kennewick Man was likely from a wave prior to those of American Indians and Europeans. Hopefully the scientists will continue to be allowed access to the remains for study.
From an article about the man who actually found the Kennewick Man remains:
Will Thomas was standing in knee-deep water trying to finish off a couple cans of Busch Light.He saw a roundish brown rock in the river near his foot and thought he would play a joke on his buddy Dave Deacy who was standing nearby onshore.
"I thought I could pull it off like it was a head," Thomas said.
The rock was stuck in the thick mud, so Thomas had to take a firm right-hand grip to free it while clutching his beer safely in his left hand.
Oddly, the rock wasn't heavy.
Then he saw teeth.
"It was a jaw dropper," Thomas said. "It was a human skull, no doubt about it."
As proof of the huge interest folks have in the Kennewick Man:
At 94, Warren Dexter of Elkhart, Ind., has been researching and following the story for only a year, but he's also hooked.In Kennewick Man, the retired photographer and longtime fan of early history said he's found a welcome debate about North America's earliest inhabitants and support for his belief that other peoples traveled to North America besides the Native Americans.
"A lot of our history is being covered up by not acknowledging that the waterways, rivers and lakes were used (as highways)," he said.
This last quote is particularly interesting. Because of recent scientific advances, some scientists believe that Europeans could have been some of the first visitors to North America.
Most people know that Leif Ericsson travelled to North America around the year 1000, which beat Columbus to North America by some 500 years. But even prior to the wave of modern American Indians, some think that early Europeans or their ancestors were initial North American inhabitants. Certainly the fact that a reconstruction of the Kennewick Man looks much like Star Trek's Patrick Stewart is not proof, but there are other pieces of evidence that also open this possibility.
Indeed, in order to preserve the right of scientists to investigate the Kennewick Man remains propelled some native European religion groups to support the scientists in their legal battle with modern American Indian tribes:
McNallen is glad Kennewick Man finally is being studied.He said he fought to study Kennewick Man because he thought an alternative spiritual perspective needed to be presented besides that of the Mid-Columbia Indian tribes, which want to rebury the bones.
The Asatru gave up their fight in 2000 because the lengthy legal battle was requiring too much time and money.
He and his wife said they are interested to see if future DNA testing would unravel the 9,000-year-old skeleton's ancestry.
"There are some good reasons to believe that Kennewick Man was an ancient European," said McNallen, who travels with a pewter amulet of Thor's hammer laced around his neck, a drinking horn and a bottle of mead. "I don't think that's been disproved."
The Asatru leader said there is strong evidence that early Europeans made their way to North America thousands of years before Columbus.
"Clovis points bear a striking resemblance to points found in France and Spain," he said.
He believes early Europeans may have crossed an ice bridge called the Atlantic Crescent between Europe and North America during the ice ages.
"There is enough evidence to consider this seriously," he said. "It's not a fringe phenomenon."
Finally, here is a video of an interesting interview with Stephen McNallen, the Asatru leader in the above quote.
Posted by keg at 10:19 PM
