The significance of the fossil hominid skull from Petralona,Greece

Evidence is accumulating that the hominid cranium found in the Petralona cave in 1960 is associated with cave deposits of middle Pleistocene age. If this is so, the fossil is the most complete middle Pleistocene cranium yet discovered and provides important morphological, metrical and radiographic information on the possible evolutionary transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. The classification of the specimen is discussed and it is suggested that a grade system within Homo spaiens should be erected. The Petralona fossil would be allocated to Homo sapiens grade 1 rather than to Homo erectus or to a subspecies of Homo sapiens.     

Exploring the Relations Between Riverbank Erosion and Geomorphological Controls Using Geographically Weighted Logistic Regression

The relations between riverbank erosion and geomorphological variables that are thought to control or influence erosion are commonly modelled using regression. For a given river, a single regression model might befitted to data on erosion and its geomorphological controls obtained along the river's length. However, it is likely that the influence of some variables may vary with geographical location (i.e., distance upstream). For this reason, the spatially stationary regression model should be replaced with a non‐stationary equivalent. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a suitable choice. In this paper, GWR is extended to predict the binary presence or absence of erosion via the logistic model. This extended model was applied to data obtained from historical archives and a spatially intensive field survey of a length of 42 km of the Afon Dyfi in West Wales. The model parameters and the residual deviance of the model varied greatly with distance upstream. The practical implication of the result is that different management practices should be implemented at different locations along the river. Thus, the approach presented allowed inference of spatially varying management practice as a consequence of spatially varying geomorphological process.     

The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement — essentially visual in character — about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement — this visual identification — became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world.     

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.