Yesterday Sara and I sang in a fundraising concert for our local choir, Voces Novae at the Stone Age Institute. What a cool place! It's a beautiful building--most of the stone, we were told, is about 330 million years old (though there was a piece of flint over every doorway that was a paltry 80 million years old), and some of the stones had fossils in them.

The directors (seen in this video about the Institute) talked about two kinds of "experimental archaeology" that they have been doing lately. One is teaching a group of bonobos (in Des Moines!) to make and use stone tools--apparently, they have also taught the bonobos to play instruments, and Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel jammed with them for a few hours. The other experiments they've been doing were butchering elephants and wildebeest with stone hand axes. We got to see one of the directors make just such a hand axe: he's really good.

In addition, the directors have a rock band that records (apparently at the rate of about one song a year) educational rock songs, one of which we performed in arrangement. They said that soon they will upload these songs to their website (fromthebigbang.org), so I urge you to check that site in about a week or so and listen to "From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web," which gives you the highlights of known history, and their other song, which apparently goes through human origins (imagine singing "Australopithecus" in a laid-back reggae-flavored sort of way).