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Lydia Pyne

Lydia Pyne

Lydia Pyne is a writer and historian in Austin, TX.  Her most recent book is Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Can Teach Us About Real Stuff (Bloomsbury 2019).

Paradisaea rubra

Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 150 Years Later

A new book on Darwin’s classic asks what he got right and wrong about “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist:” human evolution.
Take

Restoring the Prehistoric Horse

It’s the National Day of the Horse! Do You Know Where the Real Wild Horses Live?
Heads quarters

The Statistics of Coin Tosses for Theater Geeks

At the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a coin toss lands as heads 92 times in a row, the odds of which are a mere 1 in 5 octillion.
Black and white drawing of an ant

What We Saw Under the Microscope’s Lens

The lens, a tool technology that helps make the invisible world visible, brought a revolutionary perspective to our descriptions of nature.
Central medallion of a Qashqai rug, 19th century, with fragmented Herati pattern.

An Object History of the Persian Carpet

The famous Persian carpet, woven by female artisans in southwestern Iran, may be going extinct. Its story can be told in spindles and whorls.
adhesives

The Sticky History of Adhesives

Our Pleistocene ancestors in southern Africa made and used glue-like adhesives as early as the Middle Stone Age.
alchemist

Inside the Alchemist’s Workshop

What tools would an alchemist use in the quest to transmute other elements into gold?
Sherd of the Geometric period. Sifnos, 8th century BC. Archaeological Museum of Sifnos (in Kastro).

Complexity in Simplicity: The Three Technologies Behind Ceramics

More than two thousand years ago, the Mayans of eastern Guatemala used ceramic teapots to pour themselves hot ...
Neanderthals

We Didn’t Start the Fire (Neanderthals Did)

Fire was once thought to be a strictly human technology, but new discoveries show that Neanderthals could wield it.
Comparison of skull features of Homo naledi and other early human species.

Dear Paleoanthropology, Homo Naledi Just Shifted Your Paradigm

A new fossil human ancestor has made its way into the media spotlight, and it’s causing quite a ruckus.