2009 in Archaeology - Publications

Publications

• January: A publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds no evidence of a single event causing many simultaneous fires throughout North America nearly 13,000 years ago, contradicting the theory that a comet explosion may have caused the Quaternary extinction event.
• February: The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany publishes the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, covering 63% of the 3.2 billion base pairs.
• February: A publication in Science discusses the results from a study into over a dozen early hominid footprints, discovered over the last couple of years in Kenya. The prints date back 1.5 million years and were most likely produced by several individuals of the species Homo erectus. The results confirm that hominids evolved a modern walking gait even before Homo sapiens existed.
• March: British archaeologists publishing in Science lay out new evidence confirming that the Botai culture in prehistoric Kazakhstan may have been the first to domesticate horses, during the 4th millennium BC.
• March: At a conference in Rome, scientists report that a new analysis of frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi reveals that they were covered in cow's milk. The milk was used as a binder for the paint. The fragments were analyzed as part of a restoration project, after a 1997 earthquake caused part of the vault to collapse.
• Mark S. Anderson - Marothodi: the historical archaeology of an African capital (Atikkam).
• Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith - Europe’s Lost World: the Rediscovery of Doggerland (Council for British Archaeology).