Images courtesy of University of Tuebingen

That people wore clothes back in the Stone Age will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who grew up watching The Flintstones. That show, never wholly reliant on established archaeological fact, didn’t get too specific about its time period. But it turns out, based on recently published discoveries by a team of researchers from the University of Tübingen, the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, and Leiden University, that Stone Agers were dressing themselves as early as 300,000 years ago — over one hundred millennia earlier than previously thought.

“This is suggested by cut marks on the metatarsal and phalanx of a cave bear discovered at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany,” says the University of Tübingen’s site. The location of such marks indicate that the bear was not simply butchered but carefully skinned.

A cave bear’s winter coat “consists of both long outer hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that provide particularly good insulation” — making […]

Robert van Embricqs, a designer based in Amsterdam, has created The Flow Wall Desk–a wooden decoration that “transforms from a piece of art on the wall into a functional desk by showing off its unique aesthetic.” On his site, he writes:

The Flow Wall Desk acknowledges the potential how to combine functionality with art. This results in creating a desk inside one’s indoor environment. And only with one twist, it becomes a true joy to have a separate working area when needed. It can be subscribed as a piece of functional art that builds on the design track record of transformations in space. However, this one offers a part of the interior that shifts with time: a cozy workspace during the day becomes a compact wall hanging after being used.

Inspired by recent global events and the longer-term trends that precede them, to devise a statement piece that lends dignity to the digital workspace through craft, warm textures, and durably engineered fastenings. The Flow Wall Desk is adaptable and with the contemporary design elements, it can be used throughout homes, […]

Image by Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority

I don’t recall any of my elementary-school classmates looking forward to head-lice inspection day. But had archaeological progress been a few decades more advanced at the time, the teachers might have turned it into a major history lesson. For it was on a comb, designed to remove head lice, that researchers in southern Israel recently found the oldest known sentence written in an alphabet. Invented around 1800 BC, that Canaanite alphabet “was standardized by the Phoenicians in ancient Lebanon,” writes the Guardian‘s Ian Sample, later becoming “the foundation for ancient Greek, Latin and most modern languages in Europe today.”

The comb itself, dated to around 1700 BC, bears a simple Canaanite message: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” As Sample notes, “ancient combs were made from wood, bone and ivory, but the latter would have been expensive, imported luxuries. There were no elephants in Canaan at the time.”

Despite its small size, then, this comb must have been […]

You need not be a student of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints to recognize artist Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave Off Kanagawa – or the Great Wave, as it has come to be known.

Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, it’s been reproduced on all manner of improbable items and subjected to liberal reimagining – something Sarah Urist Green, describes in the above episode of her series The Art Assignment as “numerous crimes against this image perpetrated across the internet.”

Such repurposing is the ultimate compliment.

The Great Wave is so graphically indelible, anyone who co-opts it can expect it to do a lot of heavy lifting.

For those who bother looking closely enough to take in the three boatloads of fishermen struggling to escape with their lives, it’s also narratively gripping, a terrifying woodblock still from an easily imagined disaster film.

It’s also an homage to Mount Fuji, one of a series of 36.

Thousands of prints were produced in the early 1830s for the domestic tourist trade. Visitors to Mount Fuji snapped these souvenirs up […]

Cher, the mononymous Goddess of Pop, gifted the small screens of the 70s with a lot of over-the-top glamour.

Her work ethic, comedic flair and unapologetic embrace of camp helped her stand out from the crowd, conferring the fame she had longed for since childhood, when she commandeered her 5th grade classmates for an unofficial, and, from the sounds of it, all-female production of Oklahoma, covering the male roles herself when the boys declined to participate.

Some twenty years later, she was a household name – one that was no longer appended to that of ex-husband Sonny Bono, co-host of the popular eponymous variety hour in which they sang, hammed their way through goofy skits, and busted each other’s chops to the delight of the live studio audience.

The 1978 television event Cher…special found her bringing many of those same talents to bear, along with country star Dolly Parton, rocker Rod Stewart, outré glam band, The Tubes, and the crowd-pleasing array of spangled, skin-baring Bob Mackie designs that defined her look.

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