Reptiles in ancient Egypt
“Did prehistoric people consider themselves as equals or unequals?” asks from 2020. The question is broader than it may appear. An earlier study by the same scientist suggests that some of those people weren’t people. It suggests they were reptiles.
Archaeologist Emmanuelle Honoré at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium studied ancient drawings and paintings found on rocks in south-west Egypt. About 900 of those look like stencilled outlines of hands, but in a report from 2016, Honoré and her colleagues noted that 13 of the hands are “quite tiny”. The report, , was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. It says: “Tiny hands have previously been considered to belong to human babies. We challenge this identification… Evidence suggest [sic] that the hand stencils belong to an animal, most probably a reptile.”
Advertisement
The researchers reached their conclusion by measuring the tiny-hand drawings and comparing them with the measurements of hands of “living pre-term babies”. The tiny “hands”, they decided, are probably made by tracing the feet of young lizards or crocodiles.
Honoré’s later study sidesteps the earlier reptiles-or-humans question. Its arguments take an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach to the equals-or-unequals issue, and make use only of the larger – evidently human – stencil-drawn hands, not the tiny, maybe-reptile extremities (or paws, or whatever). The study’s final sentence urges further research, “bearing in mind that different kinds of archaeological evidence can also be in contradiction”.
The joys of accounting
Almost by tradition, people assume that accounting is boring. And that accountants are, too.
Those assumptions may be very wrong. Consider the essay titled , which Geoffrey Whittington at the University of Cambridge presented as a lecture in 1995. So intense was the provocation that the paper has since been cited in more than 20 publications – an average of around one citation per year.
Others in the profession argue that accounting and accountants aren’t boring enough. And that there is too much floccinaucinihilipilification.
What is this? The answer is plain to anyone who reads the study by Raymond Chambers at the University of Sydney, published in the Australian Accounting Review in 1996 on the heels of Whittington’s thunderation.
Chambers explained: “Floccinaucinihilipilification is the habit of treating things as trivial, as of no account… Treating significant differences between things as of no account is the source of much that is confusing, vacuous and fruitless in accounting debate.”
Chambers identified three great solecisms that had crept into the professional ways of too many accountants. He thundered: “The third solecism proceeds from the blunders of the first two. It is the fallacy of what Whitehead has called misplaced concreteness.” Chambers doesn’t identify who Whitehead is or was.
But too much thunder can scare off the young ‘uns. Ingrid Jeacle at the University of Edinburgh in the UK analysed the ways big accountancy firms try to attract new hires. They use recruiting tricks designed to “camouflage the spectre of the stereotype”. For details, see her study .
On boredom
Just from their titles, decide whether you want to read these two studies published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology: and : The mere anticipation of boredom exacerbates its occurrence in lectures”.
After you calm down, decide whether to read this third paper, from the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association: “Only boring students get bored? A new perspective on academic boredom”.
If you knee-jerkily decided no to that one, maybe this will change your mind: here is the final sentence of that paper’s abstract. “Overall, recent findings on academic boredom suggest that it is a considerably more complex emotional experience than stereotypically perceived in terms of it being not only highly variable, domain-specific, and situationally dependent, but also consisting of multiple ‘boredoms’ that vary in both valence and arousal.”
The last word on this is a study called , by researchers at the University of Alberta and the University of Manitoba in Canada. It is short: one page. The researchers give a clear description of what they did: “we tested changes in students’ knowledge about boredom pre-and-post video”. Then comes a clear description of what they found: “Our results showed students indicated more knowledge about boredom post-session.” That sentence can be read in two ways.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.