The Fabulous Forager

Several months ago, the celebrity gossip blogosphere lit up over a mysterious new tattoo that Brad Pitt began sporting on his forearm. Originally, it was thought to be an outline of Lara Croft–Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider character–but a commenter at one blog noticed that it was actually an outline of Ötzi the iceman, Europe’s oldest natural mummy. Quite frankly, I don’t totally see the resemblance (apparently, the outstretched arm was mistaken for Croft’s braid), and to get a tattoo of a mummy because it reminds you of your girlfriend is… uh… kinda creepy. Not that that’s necessarily why he got the tattoo; no one really knows. Even his publicist admits she has “no idea.” Archaeology Magazine has already taken the liberty of coining the uni-name “Brötzi.”

The new issue of Archaeology Magazine has listed what its editors believe to be the Top 10 Discoveries of 2007. One story didn’t make the list but is a must-see: a Neolithic mural unearthed in Syria that could easily pass for modernist art.

Made up of red, black, and white geometric shapes painted 11,000 years ago, the small panel bore an uncanny resemblance to the early work of modernist masters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

…

This year Coqueugniot’s team not only gave us a more vivid glimpse into the ritual life of Djade al Mugahara, but a sense of just how close Neolithic aesthetic sensibilities were to those of early European modernists…

As you may have heard, the Oxford Dictionary’s official word of 2007 is locavore. In their words,

The past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

I just finished reading an excellent article by Urban Scout that discusses the prominent strain of assholery (it’s a word!) in the anarchist subculture. While many anarchists argue on a logical level for cooperation, many scarcely know how to cooperate with each other, and often create hierarchical relationships in the name of equality. Now, I admit that I’ve got a lot of social problems, even more than the average person raised in civilization. My intense social anxiety and awkwardness, combined with the paranoia I picked up in sixth grade when the other girls in my classes trained me to assume that niceness was just a sarcastic method of teasing, is my biggest roadblock to rewilding. Well, that and my fear of insects. And arachnids. And snakes. And greasy skin. Okay, fine, maybe I have a lot of roadblocks to rewilding. But hey, I know that’s a problem and I’m working on it. Because here’s the dirty little secret that chills my antisocial heart to the pulmonary artery: rewilding is all about friendship.

I am pissed off at Adbusters right now. For a long, long time, I anticipated the glorious day when I’d get my brand-new, guilt-free pair of Blackspot sneakers in the mail. Every time I stepped in a puddle and felt the water seep through the many, many holes in my old sneakers, several of which were located directly below the balls of my feet, I would think fondly of the Blackspot sneakers that were coming in the mail.  Yes, they were $90, but they were vegetarian and made of organic material by fairly paid union workers! I hoped with all my heart that they would hold up better than my Converse All-Stars, which fall apart faster than that “leave Britney alone” kid. (Sorry, did that already jump the shark? Are we back onto cats that play musical instruments? I have trouble keeping track…)

This is neat: remember when you were a kid and you’d chew mint Lifesavers in the dark to watch them make sparks? Well, you can do the same trick by rubbing two quartz crystals together. It’s called triboluminescence and while it won’t exactly light up a room (that’s what fire is for), it’s still a fun trick.

Ah, the hairy caveman: primitive man in his natural form, unkempt, long-haired, long-bearded, and with unibrows galore. I think the idea is that early man (and, by extension, man without civilization, as modern primitive peoples live very much the way our Paleolithic ancestors did) was too stupid to properly groom himself, resulting in hair like an early 90’s grunge rocker and beards like ZZ Top. The only problem with this ubiquitous stereotype, aside from the question of how we ever managed to hunt anything with hair falling into our eyes all the time, is its complete lack of evidence.

Two awesome articles, care of Primitive Ways: How to Paint a Mammoth and Black Dye.

Remember all the way back to three days ago when I posted a news article about recent archaeological discoveries showing that humans have been eating seafood and putting on makeup for thousands of years longer than previously thought? Well, ditto chocolate.

Residents of Central America were enjoying chocolate drinks more than 3,000 years ago, a half millennium earlier than previously thought.

Not that this is particularly surprising. It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to nibble a little on the plants in an ecosystem once you’ve moved into it. If good food is there, living creatures will find it. I don’t understand why we’d assume you’d need a particular level of intelligence–or complexity of culture–to figure out that, hey, chocolate is delicious.

This story is about a month old, so you may already have heard of it, but recent archaeological discoveries in South Africa show that humans were harvesting seafood and using makeup far earlier than previously thought. (Read the story here.) Specifically, 40,000 years earlier. Turns out that steady rise to Western perfection wasn’t quite so accurate. Who’da thunkit?

Marean also found 57 pieces of ground-up rock that would have been reddish- or pinkish-brown. That would be used for self-decoration and sending social signals to other people, much the way makeup is used now, he said.