miércoles, 12 de septiembre de 2012

Sands of time date layers of human life

Geochronologist Zenobia Jacobs explains how ancient grains of sand may unlock the secrets of where we came from and what makes us human.

As typecasting goes, Neanderthals have had it pretty bad, frequently portrayed as brutish, flat-headed, grunting beasts with less culture than a tub of yoghurt. Whenever archaeological evidence suggests otherwise, the credit usually goes to co-habitation with Homo sapiens.

But Dr Zenobia Jacobs thinks these ancient humans have been unfairly pigeonholed, and is building up her case for a more 'modern' Neanderthal using nothing more than a grain of sand.

Jacobs goes by the exotic-sounding title of 'geochronologist', which she says generally raises more questions than it answers.

"I don't think people really get what it means, so it's sometimes easier to start off explaining that I'm an archaeologist interested in old things and you need to determine the age of old things," she says, "and that's where the chronology comes into it."

Jacobs is pioneering a technique called 'optically stimulated luminescence dating' to determine the age of archaeological finds — more specifically, when the sediments in which those finds are buried were last exposed to sunlight [...]

abc.net.au

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