These are probably the world’s largest petroglyphs. They’re ancient rock carvings that we can see from space.

You can’t make out the funky checkerboards, or the hummingbirds or monkeys… but you can see that there’s something there.

Welcome to Nazca, ancient gods. Approach on runway number three.

[via NPR]

SONG: “Mesopotamia” (penitential cover) (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: This is a cover (a late one) making up for a late song in November. There’s no original research here, and some pretty sketchy anthropology. But still. It’s the B52s. It’s hard for me to say which version is really the original – there’s [...]

Click to embiggen

This is what America meant for Claude Auge, who edited Le Larousse pour tous nouveau dictionnaire encyclopedique in 1909.

Eskimos and tapirs.

You can browse through your Larousse at the Open Library.

This engraving shows a bunch of humans spearing a sea turtle. But wait! A manatee looks on in terror, clutching her child! And thinks back to all the different kinds of harpoons she has seen… and thus far avoided.

Or something like that.

It comes from Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin’s rollicking History of Filibustering Adventurers*, published in 1744, although I found [...]

This is a Julbock – a “Yule goat” – from a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.

I never realized there was doubt about the tales of vicious headhunting tribes in South America until I read this Discovery News item. Apparently, they’ve just gotten around to DNA-testing a well-preserved shrunken head to verify that yep, it’s real:

“The shrunken heads were made from enemies’ heads cut on the battlefield,” co-author Gila Kahila Bar-Gal told Discovery News. [...]

The Ayapaneco language is about to die out, the Guardian reports, in part because the last two speakers aren’t talking to each other:

Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco[, Mexico]. It is not clear whether there is a [...]

Discovery takes a peek inside a famous statue’s hand to find Michelangelo’s lost weapon of war:

“Bulging with veins, the right hand is holding what remains of a terrible weapon used in antiquity until the 17th century,” art historians Sergio Risaliti and Francesco Vossilla wrote in the book L’Altro David (“The Other David”).

Called a fustibal, or staff-sling,the weapon was [...]

“Trophic level” is a measure of how far up the food chain an animal is. It’s generally used in ecological studies to show how much impact a predator has on its habitat – sharks have high trophic levels, because they eat lots of smaller fish. New Scientist is using trophic levels in a different way – to get ecological [...]