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Clive Gamble

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The Evolutionary Uses of Imagination

I have just published a post on fifteeneightyfour, the blog of Cambridge University Press. Here is a taster. You can read the remainder via the link at the bottom. Why are we so imaginative? What possible use is there in passing through the looking-glass with Alice or supposing that the moon is inhabited by creatures with aerials growing out of their heads? These are some of the wilder flights of our imagination and not shared by everyone. Continue reading →

Charting celebrity

I have been discovering how Google NGRAM can answer all sorts of niggling questions about fame, celebrity and novelty http://books.google.com/ngrams . What it does is search the 5 million books that have been digitised between 1500 and 2000. This adds up to about 4 per cent of all the books published and a staggering 500 billion words. By any standards this is a big sample. Continue reading →

The death of prehistory

I know this will upset many archaeologists but let’s admit it, prehistory is dead. Adding a pre- to history no longer makes any sense. Pre-history rightly belongs to the Jurassic’s dinosaurs and the wriggling worms of the Cambrian explosion; those shaley superstars Opabinia and Wiwaxia that Stephen Jay Gould trumpeted so loudly in Wonderful Life. Human prehistory deserves better than being lumped with big lizards and creatures with less neurons than an Arctic midge. Continue reading →

Ice Age Art and the question of sex

There are many old friends in the British Museum’s must-see Ice Age Art exhibition. As a research student in the early 1970s I worked for several months in the Ulmer Museum in southern Germany. Every day on my way into the storerooms to measure more Palaeolithic reindeer teeth I passed the ivory statuette of the Löwenmensch, the Lion-headed-man. There was less of him in those days. His muzzle had not yet been handed in and big chunks of his back were missing. Continue reading →