55). The primary aim was to understand the subsurface distribution of artifacts and fan deposits across the larger landscape. Artifacts are typically deeply buried within the Chitimwe Beds in all places except at the margins, where erosion has begun to remove the top part of the deposit. During informal survey, two people walked across Chitimwe Beds that appear as mapped features on Government of Malawi geological maps. As these people encountered the shoulders of Chitimwe Bed deposits, they began to walk along the margins where they could observe artifacts eroding from the deposits. By placing excavations slightly (3 to 8 m) upslope from actively eroding artifacts, excavations could reveal their in situ locations relative to their containing sediments, without the necessity of laterally extensive excavations. Test pits were emplaced so that they would be 200- to 300-m distant from the next-nearest pit and thus capture the variation across Chitimwe Bed deposits and the artifacts they
Study cements age and location of hotly debated skull from early human Homo erectus
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Is combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder unique to industrialized warfare?
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Is combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder unique to industrialized warfare?
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Credit: Jacob Harris
In the last 60,000 years, humans have emerged as an ecologically dominant species and have successfully colonized every terrestrial habitat. Our evolutionary success has been facilitated by a heavy reliance on an ever-advancing technology. Understanding how human technology evolves is crucial to understanding why humans have enjoyed such unprecedented evolutionary success.
ASU doctoral graduate Jacob Harris, working with ASU researcher Robert Boyd and Brian Wood from the University of California Las Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, are interested in the role of causal knowledge in the manufacture, transmission, and ultimately, the evolution of technology. Causal knowledge is the ability to predict the effect of an intentional modification of a system, like the design and manufacture of traditional bow-and-arrow technology the focus of their investigation.