did you see them? did you hell

[hawkwing_lb]

Today.

The library closes at 1600 on Saturdays. I spent the hours between 1300 and 1515 reading about late Mesolithic and early aceramic Neolithic Cyprus.

At a site called Akrotiri, the remains of at least 500 pygmy hippos (and three pygmy elephants!) have been discovered, in a context which implies they were hunted by humans. This is about 10,000 years ago. Interesting stuff, but I had thought ceramic specialists were the only people who went into lengthy, tiresome detail about typologies. Not so! The typologies of microliths are at least as tedious.

Then I went to the gym, and discovered that a week of being sick, and a week of recovering from being sick, really really affect my aerobic - and anaerobic: not fair - fitness. Ouch.

---

My laptop came home today. I am trying not to pet it and worry about it too much - all things appear to work, apart from when I loaded all my music into iTunes it came up with doubles of each track, and the case is only missing a single screw - but I don't know what to do with myself. Laptop! Yay!

Comments

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

fascinating! Did it go in species of the 'pygmy' hippo? And that's a lot of hippo-meat. How were the killed? Any clues (hippo killing modern Africa sans firearms is a fairly horrible process. The hippo-trail is studdet with a hippo 'arrestor-bed'of spikes, (because to tiy to kill a moving hippo is to die) an then they are hacked and speared to death.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Phanourios something. Over the space of possibly more than a hundred years (the radiocarbon range for the site indicates that several hundred years are possible, but pygmy hippos only predominant in the earliest phase, phase 4), 500+ hippos is not an excessively large number.

Alan H. Simmons is the guy with the Cypriot pygmy-hippo info: his book is on google books, Faunal extinction in an island society: pygmy hippopotamus hunters of Cyprus (http://books.google.ie/books?id=hCwYwyEBXEAC&pg=PA303&lpg=PA303&dq=pygmy+hippo+akrotiri&source=bl&ots=cZJy1gNFiM&sig=EZOqhThk_FERizAV0enPmcTGtes&hl=en&ei=3eTISvqONMO64QaK-KzHAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=pygmy%20hippo%20akrotiri&f=false). I haven't read it, but I'm going to look through it now. :)

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

I see. I thought it meant mass slaughter of 500. I still feel quite some respect for a mesolithic hunter/s taking on hippo of any size. Apparently they kill more people than crocs do, and I can believe it, having had a few brushes. I'm scared of them. Not irrationally terrified like I am of crocs. But respectfully, sensibly scared.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

You do not mess with the river horsie. No.

But apparently Phanourios was adapted to be primarily a land animal, with short legs and a structure adapted for the mountainous Cypriot terrain. So "hippos potamos" is a bit of a misnomer in his case. :)

(You have been up close and personal with hippos? I don't know whether to say, "Cool!" or "Yikes!")

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

I'm an Ichthyologist. I have worked in African rivers. Hippo are territorial and come and chase you (or at least check you out) if you are setting nets in their patch. My brother was in conservation in the greater St. Lucia wetland park... which is home to more hippos than most of the rest of SA. I spent a fair bit of his free time fishing there with him. I also managed a fish farm which drew its water from a river with a resident hippo population which I would see every day for a couple of years(and crocs too, which got in sometimes. I had to cope with my utter terror of them and catch them.) You know it all seemed very commonplace at the time. It was just part of the job. It's only talking to other people later that you suddenly realise that it was quite a bizarre life.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I suppose your life is totally normal. As weird lives go. :P

(If I were a slightly more hardcore archaeologist, I would have ambitions to work in Africa. As it is, not so much. Unless I can work underwater. :P )

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

LOL, yeah that's it. It FEELS normal from the inside while its happening anyway. I had no idea you were interested in early/non-european archeology. There is some very cool Tasmanian Aboriginal sites near where Barbs and I will be living - Flinders Island in the Bass strait, where it is a lot cooler than much of Africa, and yet a lttle warmer and drier than Ireland (temps min 2 degrees in winter, average about 16, 22 avrage in summer with 2.4 (or something silly) days above 30 a year. It also has the second best rock-climbing in Oz and fantastic diving (and many of the sites are on small islands - I suspect the underwater area is very relevant and untouched. The Bass strait was an ice-age land-bridge and is no deeper than 50 meters anywhere. Water temps are a bit on the cool side 14-20. So if you want a really remote research project...

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in everything. The problem is specialisation. And getting into the field in the first place - I would kill, I swear, to get a place on an underwater archaeology project. But because they - UW archaeology projects - tend to be expensive, they're rare. And getting into them is... problematic.

So I have an excuse to visit, do I? :)

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I have a feeling that Barbs and I are not going be seeing great rafts of intelligent sf/fantasy reading/writing visitors. (except maybe around worldcon next year)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Australia is on my list of places to visit in the next decade. Although it's a very long list. :)