The morning begins. I’ve been awake a good hour but I’m not really, truly awake until I reach the woods with my husband and our dog Max. In the dappled light of late spring, with soft green leafdom almost enveloping us, we slip him loose from the leash. Max lifts his head. He catches a […]
Paleo
Even the dead kept watch. They sat upright in their graves, men and women, and faced the river, waiting, it seemed, for the waters to roil again with massive, steel-grey fish. The sturgeon, barbeled giants with rows of bony scutes down their backs, appeared each spring in Serbia’s Danube Gorge, after battling the current all […]
Each July, along the dappled stream banks of Kodiak Island, just off the Alaska coast, a weedy looking wildflower produces a few dark-blue hooded blossoms. There is nothing particularly memorable about the appearance of Aconitum delphinifolum. Its leaves are thin and rather spiky. Its scrawny-looking stem cannot hold the weight of its flowers: its neighbors […]
A few days ago, while I was out hiking in southern Arizona’s early morning heat with Jason De Leon and his students, I heard mention for the first time of Mexico’s Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. Our destination for the day was a small archaeological site hidden away in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, but De […]
Sometime in the winter of 1907 and 1908, an American researcher found a curious assortment of objects lying in a small pit in the Valley of the Kings. Theodore Davis, like many Egyptologists of the day, was looking for large, grand things, preferably royal tombs. So when he and his workers dug up several jars filled […]
In 2008, I published a book about the evolutionary origins and cultural development of warfare throughout human history. John Horgan, about as distinguished a science writer as one is likely to find, graciously invited me to share my thoughts on war’s deep past and possible futures on a web video show he hosted. It was […]
A few years ago, one of my Scottish cousins decided to delve into the murky waters of family history. For a time, I received regular emails from him, dispatches containing faded photos of long-dead relatives; biographies pieced together from birth and death certificates, and short sad notes on the lives of the working poor in […]
A few weeks ago, driving across Navajoland in northeast Arizona, I stopped to see some dinosaur tracks just west of Tuba City. As I pulled into the parking area, on the north side of highway 160, a Navajo man got up from a group sitting in lawn chairs by a hand written “Dino Tracks” sign. […]