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On a rugged island just offshore from Ventura County, archaeologists have turned up evidence of some of the oldest human activity in coastal Southern California. On Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, researchers have found three sites scattered with ancient tool-making debris and the shells of harvested shellfish. The youngest of the three sites has been dated to 6,600 BCE, but based on the types of tools found at the other two, archaeologists say they may be as much as 11,000 to 12,000 years old. The artifacts are traces of what's known as the Island Paleocoastal culture,...

Take a look at this abstract from the journal Progress in Human Geography: ………………………………………………………………………Glaciers, Gender, and Science:A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY: framework for global environmental change research Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, Jaclyn Rushing ABSTRACT Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging...

A fossilized skull and teeth from a newly described species of beaver that lived 28 million years ago have been unearthed in eastern Oregon. The fossils worked their way out of the soil within a mile of the visitor center at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, said the monument's paleontologist, Joshua Samuels. The find is significant, he said, because unlike the other species of ancient beavers found at the monument, this one appears related to the modern beaver, a symbol of Oregon found on the state flag. The others all went extinct. The species is named Microtheriomys brevirhinus....