Todd's Blog

  This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, which took place right here in the historic Rhea County Courthouse, not two miles from the Core Academy offices. It's definitely a strange event all the way around. Part media circus, part legal showdown, part religious debate - and everyone's understanding of it is warped by Inherit the Wind .  Beneath all the mythology, though, the trial's issues are just as relevant today as they were then.  The prosecution argued that it was within the rights of the states citizens to decide what state employees were allowed to teach in the classroom.  The defense argued that the majority could not trample on the rights of the minority.  The trial devolved into a personal grudge match of agnostic Clarence Darrow vs. fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, and the case of creation vs. evolution was hardly even litigated.  But the historical significance of the trial is enormous, as it set in motion a series of e...

My last post elicited comments that some of the sites I included in my map were dubious or debatable.  And you know what?  That's true.  What's more, the mere fact that stone tools and cut bones occur together does not by itself indicate that humans were once present there.  We've known for a long time that other creatures can make tools that look kind of like Oldowan flake tools (like chimpanzees ).  In fact, I would expect that some early human traces would have a sort of dubious quality to them, where they just don't stand out enough from the background to be conclusively recognized. As I went down the Google Scholar rabbit hole looking up papers on the sites from my last post, I stumbled onto the fascinating world of automatic identification of tool marks on bones.  I've known about this new field for a while, but reading about some of the recent applications really grabbed my attention.  The techniques are fairly straightforward.  Researcher...