My current book is Michael Grant's The Etruscans, self-published in 1980. His view of urban development is very organic, seeing it as a disorganized collection of little steps rather than a tidy, straight-line shift. Unlike other writers, who have the Etruscans pop fully-developed from the head of the Alps, Grant describes how the Etruscans ( Read more... )

As part of my study of the development of religion and culture, there is a lot I'd like to know about how things got to be the way they are. Unfortunately, many of the most important decisions were made way back in the hidden mists of unrecorded, prehistoric times. We'll never know exactly which tribes followed which totems, or when or how they ( Read more... )

Researchers found three hallmarks of modern life at Pinnacle Point overlooking the Indian Ocean near South Africa's Mossel Bay: harvested and cooked seafood, reddish pigment from ground rocks, and early tiny blade technology. Scientific optical dating techniques show that these hallmarks were from 164,000 years ago, plus or minus 12,000 years.
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