Anthropology.

Archaeologists study a colossal Olmec stone head in La Venta, Mexico, 1947.

The 9,000-year-old skeleton that Native Americans call The Ancient One and scientists named Kennewick Man may be headed home.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed Friday morning that representatives from the Corps and the Washington Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation are conducting an inventory of the bones at the University of Washington museum where the remains have long been stored.

The inventory will take about three to four hours, and after it’s complete the bones will be handed over to the state, said Amy Gaskill of the Army Corps.

An international team of scientists has discovered a new species of human relative, Homo naledi, which appears to demonstrate that modern humans are not unique in practicing ritualized treatment of the dead. 

“Homo naledi is an extraordinary new discovery, both in terms of the unique combination of features found in its skeleton and its inferred behavior,” said William Harcourt-Smith, a co-author on the paper who is a resident research associate in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology and an assistant professor at CUNY’s Lehman College.

The initial discovery was made in 2013 in a cave known as Rising Star in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, by University of the Witwatersrand scientists and six cavers who are being called “underground astronauts.”

H. naledi was named after the location: “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language. The finds were announced earlier today by the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society, and the South African National Research Foundation and described in two papers published in the journal eLife.

Perhaps most remarkably, the location and nature of the discovery has led the researchers to conclude that this hominin deliberately disposed of bodies—a form of ritualized behavior previously thought to be unique to modern humans.

The fossils—which include remains of infants, children, adults, and elderly individuals—were found in a room deep underground that the team named the Dinaledi Chamber, or “Chamber of Stars” in Sesotho. That room has “always been isolated from other chambers and never been open directly to the surface,” said Paul Dirks of James Cook University in Australia, lead author of the accompanying eLife paper on the context of the find. “What’s important for people to understand is that the remains were found practically alone in this remote chamber in the absence of any other major fossil animals.”

The team notes that the bones bear no marks of scavengers or carnivores or any other signs that non-hominin agents or even natural processes, such as moving water, carried these individuals into the chamber.

“We explored every alternative scenario, including mass death, an unknown carnivore, water transport from another location, or accidental death in a death trap, among others,” said team leader Lee Berger, research professor in the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, who led the two expeditions that discovered and recovered the fossils. “In examining every other option, we were left with intentional body disposal by Homo naledi as the most plausible scenario.”

So far the team has recovered more than 1,500 fossil elements belonging to at least 15 individuals, a wealth of fossil material that is expected to shed new light on the origins and diversity of our genus. A small fraction of the fossils are believed to remain in the chamber.

“With almost every bone in the body represented multiple times, Homo naledi is already practically the best-known fossil member of our lineage,” Berger said.

The new research shows that an average H. naledi stood about 5 feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. With a tiny brain—about the size of an orange—a slender body, ape-like shoulders, and curved fingers that demonstrate climbing capabilities, H. naledi looks like one of the most primitive members of our genus. But it also had some surprisingly human-like features.

Its feet, for instance, are “virtually indistinguishable from those of modern humans,” said Harcourt-Smith. This, combined with its long legs, suggests that the species was well suited to long-distance walking.

The discovery is featured as the cover story of National Geographic magazine’s October 2015 issue, available online now.

The Maya archaeological site of Muyil, located in the modern State of Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is thought to date from approximately the Middle Formative period (before 400 BC), and was continuously occupied up to the arrival of the Spanish. From this point it was abandoned, with no evidence of Maya or European occupation until the 1800s.

The relatives of a much-debated 8,500-year-old skeleton found in Kennewick, Washington, have been pinned down: The middle-age man was most closely related to modern-day Native Americans, DNA from his hand reveals.

The new analysis lays to rest wilder theories about the ancestry of the ancient American, dubbed Kennewick Man, said study co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.

A new relative joins “Lucy” on the human family tree. An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, has discovered a 3.3 to 3.5 million-year-old new human ancestor species. Upper and lower jaw fossils recovered from the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region of Ethiopia have been assigned to the new species Australopithecus deyiremeda. 

This hominin lived alongside the famous “Lucy’s” species, Australopithecus afarensis. The species will be described in the May 28, 2015 issue of the international scientific journal Nature. 

Today, Jay Inslee signed into a law a bill that will require “Washington’s tribal history, culture, and government to be taught in the common schools.”

Part of the passage of the bill, reports the Herald, is to raise awareness about free and inexpensive resources and training available to teachers on the subject, including the curriculum created by OSPI, which is even in line with Common Core. 

The curriculum has been in development for years, and is designed to be easily incorporated into existing curricula. 

“Washington’s high school graduation requirements include a minimum of one-half credit of Course work in Washington State history and government,” according to the language of the bill. “Courses designed to meet this requirement are encouraged to include information on the culture, history, and government of Washington Indian tribes.”

The bill was designed with both non-Native and Native kids in mind, and should be much more accurate than the shitty Native history you got in school.

“We endorse this bill because most Native American children attend public schools and unfortunately tribal cultures and histories that are taught in the public schools are not accurate and provide misinformation to all students not just tribal students,“ according to a summary of the public testimony in favor of the bill. 

Xalapa Museum, Veracruz, La Venta, Olmec. Photo taken by Octavio Medellin in 1959.

When Native actors working on an Adam Sandler western objected to the film’s racially-offensive humor, they were told they could leave. So they did.

Approximately a dozen Native actors and actresses, as well as the Native cultural advisor, left the set of Adam Sandler’s newest film production,The Ridiculous Six, on Wednesday. The actors, who were primarily from the Navajo nation, left the set after the satirical western’s script repeatedly insulted native women and elders and grossly misrepresented Apache culture.

The examples of disrespect included Native women’s names such as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra, an actress portraying an Apache woman squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe, and feathers inappropriately positioned on a teepee.

The film, which is said to be a spoof of The Magnificent Sevenand was written by Adam Sandler and his frequent collaborator Tim Herlihy, is currently under production by Happy Madison Productions for a Netflix-only release.  The movie will star Adam Sandler, Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Dan Aykroyd, Jon Lovitz and Vanilla Ice.

Among the actors who walked off the set were Navajo Nation tribal members Loren Anthony, who is also the lead singer of the metal band Bloodline, and film student Allison Young. Anthony says that though he understands the movie is a comedy, the portrayal of the Apache was severely negligent and the insults to women were more than enough reason to walk off the set.

“There were about a dozen of us who walked off the set,” said Anthony, who told ICTMN he had initially refused to do the movie. He then agreed to take the job when producers informed him they had hired a cultural consultant and efforts would be made for tasteful representation of Natives.

“I was asked a long time ago to do some work on this and I wasn’t down for it. Then they told me it was going to be a comedy, but it would not be racist. So I agreed to it but on Monday things started getting weird on the set,” he said.

Anthony says he was first insulted that the movie costumes that were supposed to portray Apache were significantly incorrect and that the jokes seemed to get progressively worse.

“We were supposed to be Apache, but it was really stereotypical and we did not look Apache at all. We looked more like Comanche,” he said. “One thing that really offended a lot of people was that there was a female character called Beaver’s breath. One character says ‘Hey, Beaver’s Breath.’ And the Native woman says, ‘How did you know my name?’”

“They just treated us as if we should just be on the side. When we did speak with the main director, he was trying to say the disrespect was not intentional and this was a comedy.”

“The producers just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’” —Alison Young

Allison Young, Navajo, a former film student from Dartmouth, was also offended by the stereotypes portrayed and the outright disrespect paid to her and others by the director and producers.

“When I began doing this film, I had an uneasy feeling inside of me and I felt so conflicted,” she said. “I talked to a former instructor at Dartmouth and he told me to take this as finally experiencing stereotyping first hand. We talked to the producers about our concerns. They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’ I was just standing there and got emotional and teary-eyed. I didn’t want to cry but the feeling just came over me. This is supposed to be a comedy that makes you laugh. A film like this should not make someone feel this way.”

“Nothing has changed,” said Young. “We are still just Hollywood Indians.”

Goldie Tom also shared her frustrations with ICTMN. “I felt this was all really disrespectful,” she said. “Our costumes did not portray Apache people. The consultant, Bruce spoke to the crew and told them we should not have braids and chokers and he was very disappointed. He asked to speak with Adam Sandler. We talked to the producers about other things in the script and they said ‘It’s in the script and we are not going to change it.’ Overall, we were just treated disrespectfully, the spoke down to us and treated everyone with strong tones.”

74-year old David Hill, Choctaw, a member of the American Indian Movement, also left the set. “They were being disrespectful,” he said. “They were bringing up those same old arguments that Dan Snyder uses in defending the Redskins. But let me tell you, our dignity is not for sale. It is a real shame because a lot of people probably stay because they need a job.”

Hill also mentioned that the producers called back the consultant as well as other native actors to their departure from the set on Wednesday.

“I hope they will listen to us,” Hill said. “We understand this is a comedy, we understand this is humor, but we won’t tolerate disrespect. I told the director if he had talked to a native woman the way they were talked to in this movie—I said I would knock his ass out.”

“This isn’t my first rodeo, if someone doesn’t speak up, no one will.”

Temple of the Kukulcan, Chichen Itza, 1959.

Comparison of Various South Asian Scripts (Devanagari, Thai, Burmese, Khün, Lanna, and Khmer)

A quick look at: Chac, the Maya rain deity. 

Chac, being the rain god, was closely associated with life and creation. As one might expect, Chac was the all-important deity for the ordinary Maya farmers in particular, whose primary concern was the well-bring of their maize fields.

Chac is presented in the codices with a reptilian face, 2 downwards-facing fangs coming out of his mouth, and a long (usually down-curling) snout. Throughout the Maya area today, the mask panels with this signature long, curled nose, probably represent the head of Chac. Often the nose will be broken off, but the example shown above from Chichen Itza is one typical, and well-preserved example.

Chac had 4 principal aspects. Each of these were associated with a colour and linked to a particular cardinal direction. The great festival named ocna (“enter the house”) was held yearly in the mouth of Yax or Chen, in honour of the Chacs. In order to determine an auspicious day to hold the ceremony, the Bacabs were consulted: who were 4 gods held in close association with the Chacs. Incense burners and idols were renewed during this ceremony.