Memnison Journal

Longtime readers will recall that I’m a great fan of the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem Van Loon, a taste that I got from my mom and her brother, my uncle.   There’s an online exhibit at the Ohio State University site of Van Loon’s illustrations (crude, but charming) for his best-known work, The Story of Mankind.   I always recommend his stuff - dated in many ways, but very neat and clever in many more.

BBC article about a cave full of skeletons from the Bronze Age in Germany, and how they matched the DNA to a couple of locals…3000 years down the line.

This is the waaaay early part of my timeline; edits or comments welcome. It’s going from 35.7 mya to .5 mya, with special note to the major level 8 eruptions, big impacts, and a smattering of human development events thrown in.  There are different colors for events - orange for impacts, red for eruptions.

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak.

My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount of material that isn’t in book form, and I’m going through that all the time and hacking away at it to be able to organize and marshal the stuff. At present, the idea is to digitize everything, and use various management utilities to be able to find and figure out what’s what.

Here’s a *short* list of the topics I’m still digging for:

An article (circa 1995) written for the Findlay Times by my mother about Ohio’s Serpent Mound.

jarandolph_findlaytimes_serpent_mound. (PDF, 700k)

Article on how there very nearly wasn’t a human race after a drought 70,000 years ago.  Details after the cut:

Does anyone out there have any good leads on the theories on Kennebec Man and the concept of pre-1000 AD European(ish) people migrating to North America?  Yes, I’m fully aware that it’s a wide matter of controversy.  Mormon theories not included.
Similarly, is there anyone out there who can give me a lead on the stability of Karst formations in, say, the lower midwest US?  (We’ll say Illinois, Indiana or Ohio south of I-70 / US 40.)