Salon.com > Kate Rix

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Wed, 16 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000

for the past week, the television-watching world has been treated to painfully detailed coverage of the Martian surface. Looking more like pictures of a rocky mesa in Arizona or New Mexico, digital images of the ancient flood plain called Ares Vallis have dominated the news, partly as a travelogue for those of us unlikely to ever vacation on the Red Planet. But the Pathfinder mission is also the climactic chapter in a astronomical saga.

Last July an announcement that a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica might contain fossilized signs of life reinvigorated one of the oldest questions of all: Are we alone in the universe? It also sent the science community into a kind of front-page pissing contest, squabbling over the evidence and its implications.

Astronomer Donald Goldsmith has chronicled the discovery of the meteorite and the ferocious debate that ensued in "The Hunt For Life On Mars" (Dutton). Goldsmith is also the author of more than a dozen books, including the companion volume to the PBS series "The Astronomers."

Salon spoke with Goldsmith at him home in Berkeley.

What's the most important thing that Pathfinder has shed light on so far?

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Wed, 14 May 1997 19:00:00 +0000

a subject that seems much better suited to the pages of the Weekly World News made the April/May cover of Lingua Franca, the high-toned magazine of academic life. To wit: Do people eat each other? Did they ever, for any reason other than to avoid starving to death?

Outside of documented cases like the Donner Party, reliable eyewitness accounts are hard to find. The journals of early explorers, with their baggage of colonial and racist assumptions, have to be taken with a great deal of salt.

Still, most anthropologists assumed some ritualistic cannibalism took place until the publication in 1979 of "The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy" by William Arens of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Arens challenged his colleagues to find real proof -- not just the jottings of 14th century explorers -- that such cannibalism ever occurred.

In 1992 UC-Berkeley archaeologist Tim White came up with what he and other scientists consider to be evidence of cannibalism in southwest Colorado 800 years ago. Aided by a new electron microscope, White analyzed bone fragments of an Anasazi site at Mancos and spotted what he says are cuts, marks and abrasions that could only come from the preparation of nearly 30 adults and children for consumption by other humans.

And now a word from Chicken Little …

Mon, 17 Feb 1997 20:00:00 +0000

the sky is falling! The sky is falling! Well, at least during the month of February -- television's sweeps month. The tube is suffering from major apocalyptic-impact overload these days, what with NBC's four-hour "Asteroid" concluding Monday night, a cheery Valentine's Day special titled "Doomsday, What Can We Do?" on Fox, an earlier Discovery Channel broadcast of a British documentary called "Three Minutes to Impact" and an upcoming National Geographic special on big-rocks-hit-Earth. There's even talk that Steven Spielberg is at work on a film called "Deep Impact," based on the Arthur C. Clarke novel "Hammer of God."

Network programmers and editors (The New Yorker ran a cover story by science writer Timothy Ferris on asteroids) have just discovered a subject that has fascinated astronomers even before they realized that it was a space rock crashing into Earth that killed off the dinosaurs millions of years ago. These days, astronomers call comets and asteroids -- the garbage left over from the big bang -- "Near Earth Objects." And since comet Shoemaker-Levy blasted the surface of Jupiter in a series of fireballs two years ago, their interest in these unwelcome chunks of astral matter has become a bit less theoretical.

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Mon, 03 Feb 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Of the grassy mists and terraced steppes of southern Russia they rode. Buff, one-breasted woman warriors riding high on muscled stallions and wielding heavy iron shields and swords.

Or at least something like that.

What Herodotus called "Amazons" and most modern historians have dismissed as myth came to life last week in the January-February issue of Archaeology magazine, which published the findings of a team of archaeologists led by Jeannine Davis-Kimball at the University of California, Berkeley. Burial mounds on the Russia-Kazakhstan border excavated by Davis-Kimball's team revealed the skeletal remains of women laid with legs in horseback-riding position and buried with daggers, swords and amulets of war. Nearby were the remains of men, buried with children at their side.

They may have been members of a nomadic group of tribes called Sarmatians who roamed the Russia-Kazakhstan region from the sixth to the second centuries B.C. While "Amazons" may be an exaggeration, Davis-Kimball says her findings suggest that female-dominant cultures were more widespread than previously thought.