The House Husband

This week is National Volunteers Week…apparently. To celebrate, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum (NHM) put on a bit of a do for us. I went tonight and had a great time.

The do was in the new Darwin Discovery Centre at the NHM which sort of resembles a big egg inside an airport terminal. Inside the big egg is a big laboratory for scientists who want to dissect and work out stuff. As they do. It’s all very snazzy.

The Darwin Discovery Centre at the Natural History Museum

I chatted with a fellow volunteer who is from Brisbane and knows Caboolchure. She had her first orientation day at the NHM today and was all excited about scanning and entering information about small bugs (like lice) onto the database.

We then had a fantastic talk by Chris Stringer who I saw at the archaeology conference I went to with Dawn earlier in the year. It was the same talk, about Neanderthals, but was updated with all the new information regarding the genome sequencing of Neanderthal DNA. It was excellent!

But the highlight, the truly marvellous bit, was when he took out of a tissue lined box, a real Neanderthal skull and put it on the table in order to demonstrate certain features. And then, afterwards, everyone crowded round to take photographs of it. And I reached out and touched the brow ridge! It felt like rock. Mainly because it is rock. Still.

We then all went back to the booze and food for a bit. I excused myself from Francis and Nick (my boss who had joined us) and left. I wanted to get the 9pm train so I wouldn’t be home too late. Well, that was really, really stupid.

All was fine until the train suddenly stopped outside Wimbledon. And then the power went off (there were emergency lights). And then, after about 20 minutes, we had an announcement. We were being held there because a train had struck a passenger in Wimbledon station on the adjacent track to ours and all the power had been turned off so the police could do their CSI thing.

It was very frustrating to watch all the other trains go belting by as we just sat there. I almost finished my book. Other people finished books and hunted around for discarded newspapers. We were there for an hour and a quarter.

I finally walked into the house at 11:45 instead of 10:30. BASTARDS!

A real Neanderthal skull!

I have just returned (well a few hours ago) from a weekend in the big city, attending an archaeological conference with Dawn and lots of people I don’t know. It was called Archaeology 2010 and was at the British Museum, downstairs in the lecture halls. Ignoring the less than diverting discussion on coin moulds, it was a great weekend. Most notable was the lack of muddy poodle paws. Though we did have plenty of rain.

My main reason for going to the conference (apart from a great love of archaeology) was to hear a few of the speakers. Most notably Mary Beard (Professor of Classics from Cambridge and one of the 100 most influential woman in Britain), Chris Stringer (the foremost expert in evolution in the world) and Brian Fagan (Professor of Anthropology, University of California and the author of a few ancient climate books, most notably The Little Ice Age, which I recommend). Each of them was brilliant. Prof Fagan was particularly entertaining. But there was so much more than these three.

In fact I think it will be a long time before I forget the sight of Prof Fagan listening to a long involved question from Dr Julian Richards and then striding over to him, explaining he was going deaf and bending down to him in the front row, asking him to repeat the question.

I’d never heard of Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard. They have just published (like, so new, it’s not actually for sale yet, except at the conference where the copy I bought still had wet ink) a book called AD410: The year that shook Rome. It’s about the sack of Rome. So far (I’ve read one page) it’s very good. They spoke on Saturday and were very engaging.

They were followed by ex-Monty Python star, Terry Jones with his (now old) presentation about Barbarians. It was also a BBC series. While very entertaining, it was irritatingly unscientific and, therefore, annoying. So what if the Romans called anyone who didn’t speak Latin a barbarian? The word originally meant foreigner! Anyway, the previous talk by Moorhead and Stuttard was streets ahead and far more interesting.

Along with Chris Stringer, another chap spoke on Sunday morning. His name is Clive Gamble and he is a professor at the Centre for Quaternary Research at Royal Holloway. His talk was also on Out of Africa but in greater detail. He had a wonderful anecdote about his visit to an Australian palaeolithic site two days north of Alice Springs. He told the story of his first trip there.

He was sitting in the Landrover, next to the dig director. They had already been driving for a day and a half, through the wonderful red centre, scrub and desert all around, and he was wondering where the dig actually was. He asked the director who said he was looking for something. When asked what this was, he replied, completely straight faced, “a filing cabinet.” Clive digested this without any sign of alarm.

Suddenly there it was! On the side of the road. A filing cabinet. The dig director quickly relaxed and said, “we take the next right“. They left one track for another and sped off into the bush once more. Half a day later, they arrived at the site. The audience thought this was hilarious. I just sat back and thought, ‘yeah, that’s Australia‘.

Frances McIntosh from the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) was another person I’d never heard of. She is writing her Phd on a particular type of Roman brooch. Her presentation sounds like it would be dire but, in fact, she made it very interesting. She was followed by a guy who’s been working on improving the online searchable database for the PAS. The new site looks fantastic and I am going to use it for my dissertation.

All round, a fantastic weekend. And Dawn agrees wholeheartedly.

Spending the night at the flat was interesting and not a little odd. But at least I didn’t have to get up too early on Sunday morning.

Below is a photo of lecture hall #2 just after Chris Stringer’s talk on the Out of Africa proposal. I should add that it was packed and this is between lectures!

Lecture theatre, British Museum