First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
It has long been suspected that an additional organ transplant may not necessarily be the best treatment in the aftermath of an already critical operation. Pattakos et al. supply the proof for the short term and confirm that in the long term it makes no difference anyway. See also Anthes.
There is a tendency to use average values e.g. for estimating land use, work intensity, and carrying capacity in the Neolithic. I’ve always contended the real value to use is about 1.5 standard deviations below average. (One SD is exceeded frequently, about every sixth year, 2 SD is rare enough to be endured and recovered from.) Strong et al. explicitly show an example of the cycles early sedentary societies would have had to deal with. Here again average values don’t mean much.
Worldwide the social structure is breaking down completely and all the big cities tend towards what Harlem used to represent in the seventies. Rural areas hold out a bit longer, but not much. Added to this is the total social bifurcation described in Murray’s Coming apart (2012). So it is very interesting to read in Martinhow the new, emerging, stable upper class is reverting to the traditional social norms and values, that have proved successful over centuries and millenia until a small bunch of uneducated know-it-alls declared them superseded by “modern” values. “Modernity”, “progress”, and “die neue Zeit” were the big buzzwords of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao and I have always seen them as short-lived fads that are not going to last.
Garner offers no new insight into the question of early tin and nothing new about central Asian mines. The question how tin and tin-bronzes were discovered at the beginning of the third millennium and where the first tin came from is still completely open. Even the earliest hypotheses about Bohemian alluvial tin are still open and far from disproved, but Mushiston continues to be one of the better bets. You tend to find the oldest use only in the rare case of short-lived mines that were soon exhausted, so perhaps we’ll never get proof.