Overruling the protests of environmentalists and historians, the government on Wednesday approved construction of a highway that will pass near the Hill of Tara, an ancient site where St. Patrick reportedly confronted and converted pagans.
Opponents had demanded a different route farther from the hill, which was a popular meeting point for Irish kings and chieftains from pre-Christian times until the 11th century.
Recalling Ancient America's Forgotten History
For anyone who has studied the story of America, the books often emphasize how young this country is, especially compared to those countries in Europe or Asia.
But this country has an ancient history, too. And a rare exhibit at the St. Louis Museum of Art until May 30 is teaching Americans about that past.
"I had no idea that, Native American culture went back so far," said Louisa Brouwer, a high school student who saw the exhibit on a previous stop at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This is a great idea. Most people probably know more about the ancient history of Egypt than about North America.
Ancient Musical Instruments Found
Chinese archaeologists have discovered an unprecedented collection of approximately 500 clay musical instruments that date to around 496 B.C., according to news reports from China.
The collection, found in a three-chambered tomb in East China's Jiangsu Province, includes many percussion and bell-like instruments, such as a three-foot-long fou, a dingning, a niuduo, a yongzhong and a quing.
Many of these instruments are so rare that little is known about them, aside from a handful of descriptions in old texts. The fou and duo, for example, are firsts for China.
How Culture Pushed Us to the Top of the Food Chain
Specialties in the social sciences are proliferating at a record pace, and the job title of Dr. Robert Boyd illustrates that point perfectly.
Dr. Boyd is a theoretical biological anthropologist: he uses mathematics and deduction to develop ideas about how Homo sapiens became earth's dominant species.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Over a 30-year career, Dr. Boyd, 57, of the University of California, Los Angeles, has made it his task to show how contemporary human behavior is rooted in the cultures that humans developed as they lived the evolutionary process.
Good, long interview with Boyd. He and Richerson seem to be among those who think that regular evolutionary theory (Darwinism) can be usefully applied to culture. That is, culture is a means of transmitting phenotypic traits both within and between generations. Read the whole thing.
Search for roots of modern images
Where do the images that surround us come from?
This was the seemingly innocuous question we asked ourselves when we began work on How Art Made The World, a major new BBC Television series.
Little did we know our search for the answer would take us on a journey across five continents, through a hundred thousand years of human evolution and involve some of the most stunning works of art ever created.
This is kind of an introduction/trailer to a television program tracing the history of artistic images. There's not a whole lot there, just some suggestions about what will be covered.