A team of Russian archaeologists has found a site in far northern Siberia that?s all kinds of interesting.

For starters, there?s the age. Radiocarbon dating puts the age at about 30,000 years old. That?s Pleistocene, ice age times. That?s the oldest human occupations north of the Arctic Circle yet found. This is key, because for the first Americans to get here, they had to go up and across the Bering Strait, which is up hard against the Arctic Circle. Before this, the first solid evidence of folks making up there was half that age.

But since this is a story about how folks first got from Asia to the Americas, the second bit is even more interesting. The archaeologists found a worked horn of a wooly rhinoceros that they say ?bears a striking resemblance to Clovis foreshafts from North America?. Clovis culture is one of the first in North America, soon after the ice age slipped off. There?s a lot of arm-waving in archaeology, but this is arm-waving of a pretty interesting variety. This is an inference that those poor frozen sods in northern Siberia can be linked to Clovis culture.

New Scientist has a story, and the original paper is in Science (subscription required I think).

The Goddard Institute for Space Study has its December 2003 global climate data posted, and it shows 2003 as the third warmest in the century-plus of data they’ve got:

That’s a 10-year rolling average to smooth out the noise in the data. You can see what Karoly et. al. suggest is a natural warming trend for the first half of the 20th century, and our greenhouse handiwork for the more recent half century.

The full GISS data set is here if you want to pull it down and play with it yourself.

The Missouri legislature will consider a bill this session requiring “equal treatment of science instruction regarding evolution and intelligent design”.

Talk about muddy thinking. Try this “Hypothesis”, a scientific theory reflecting a minority of scientific opinion which may lack acceptance because it is a new idea, contains faulty logic, lacks supporting data, has significant amounts of conflicting data, or is philosophically unpopular.

The bill’s list of definitions for some reason singles out “Extrapolated radiometric data” for special treatment, suggesting a young-Earth creationist hand on or near the tiller, which is almost surely the kiss of death for these guys.

I’ve been reading a lot of climate science lately, partly for the newspaper (see especially this piece on the warm 2003, which I’ve mentioned before) and partly for the book.

But even though I delved into the controversies a bit in my ABQJournal piece, I’ve largely stayed away from the hurly burly of the debate between climate scientists and the skeptics on the question of human-induced global climate change. The whole argument seems so talk radio that I just don’t have much stomach for it.

But I poked my story at David Appell, and he blogged it. And the talk radio stuff began. It’s been kinda fun, actually, mixing it up. I hope I haven’t soiled myself too much in the process. After all, one owns ones posts.