🔥Andrew Sorensen🔥

**SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION ALERT** My @UniversiteitNL talk about #Neanderthal #fire-making is now online for your viewing enjoyment! Check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=O61Yc7… #ShamelessSelfpromoMonday #archaeology #evolution @LeidenArchaeo @UniLeiden @pyroarchaeology

Oldest evidence of fire-lighting comes from early humans in Britain youtu.be/BUokWM_nceo?si…

The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered - BBC News share.google/fVvQ5RF5Kctb8T…

This could be the oldest evidence of fire-making | National Geographic share.google/REz05TZFYcA55I…

Neandertals mastered fire-making tools 400,000 years ago sciencenews.org/article/neande…

🚨New paper alert!🚨 Earliest known instance of pyrite ca. 400 kya at Barnham (UK), in layers with strong evidence of fire use, in an area with no naturally occurring pyrite nodules, together strongly suggest these pre-Neandertal peoples were making fire! nature.com/articles/s4158…

@RalphHassall @Graham__Hancock The most telling signs would be: 1. Geopolymer binder (amorphous/isotropic) looks different from natural calcite cement. 2. Lack of interlocking grain contacts; natural diagenetic features, stratification, and fossil orientation. 3. Unnatural distribution/size of voids.

Marcell Fóti, author of The Natron Theory, is featured on my website this month. Marcell's book examines the perplexing mystery of megalithic construction and describes experiments that bring to light an ancient recipe for casting stone. grahamhancock.com/fotim1/

@RalphHassall @Graham__Hancock Could ancient Egyptians do this? Sure, they were smart. Did they? Maybe to a limited degree, I don't really know. For ALL the blocks? I'm skeptical but happy to be proven wrong. Could geologists (now and in the future) tell the difference? I'm thin section, almost certainly!

@RalphHassall @Graham__Hancock Probably easier, cheaper, and safer (easy to break) to send samples to a petrographic thin section preparation service (Google it), rather than buy a couple of rock saws, epoxy, glass slides, polishing equipment, etc. You'll also need a petrographic 🔬 to look at them properly.

@YumiBod @Graham__Hancock U-Pb dating of inclusions, electron spin resonance (ESR), optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). Assuming quartz crystals would actually form under these conditions (unlikely), any these dating methods should be able to distinguish between modern and ancient quartz.

@Pyropithecus @Graham__Hancock He's not making amorphous glass. He's growing quartz crystals around feldspar crystals that were never destroyed. Good luck putting an age on them.

@Graham__Hancock Any geologist worth their salt (teehee, natron...salt...get it? 🤭) could tell the difference between real stone and artificial stone 💁

@Graham__Hancock Easy to prove: Make a thin section of a piece a stone you think is artificial and stick it under a petrographic microscope using cross polarized light. Turning the stage, quartz alternates black/gray/white (anisotropic), while amorphous glass will always appear black (isotropic).

@flyfin588445 @Graham__Hancock Weak stress birefringence in (hardened) glass can appear as a patchy pattern of bright or colored areas, often concentrated near edges, but since it's amorphous (i.e., no crystals), it will not exhibit the clean, systematic extinction typical of anisotropic minerals like quartz.

@Pyropithecus @Graham__Hancock yea nah

@FlintDibble @kurtmetzger @joerogan Yours is a strange existence, Flint 😵‍💫 Probably not what you signed up for 😅

A friend just told me there is a “Flint Dibble” meme coin $Dibble @KurtMetzger said yesterday on @joerogan that it will “go to the moon” I don’t know much about crypto other than it is stupid and bad for the environment. A few thoughts: 1/4 JRE clip: youtube.com/watch?v=CSPkPO…

Please sign the #petition against giant budget cuts to #HigherEducation in The #Netherlands! #academia #research campagnes.degoedezaak.org/campaigns/stop…

@MW_hominin's winning smile is featuring very prominently between talks at #ESHE2024 😁😁😁

@PCI_Archaeology Wasn't expecting it to end up in publishing limbo, but lesson learned 😅

@Pyropithecus Congrats! Could have been a preprint for this year, already readable by everyone, and peer-reviewed transparently in the meantime by our community! 😜

🔥🚨#NewPaperAlert!🚨🔥 After being buried on the editor's desk for over a year, my manuscript on experimentally testing the utility of manganese dioxide powder as a #fire-starting aid has seen the light of day! 😅 #Neanderthals #archeology link.springer.com/article/10.100…

D'oh!😖 *hold the line 😒

This is a fun read 😁 Way to not only only the line, but gain back some ground for #archaeology, @FlintDibble! 💪