It’s by no means the most interesting article in the world, but the discovery of this thing seems to provide “new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they’re changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors through the millennia.”

The point is basically that you can extrapolate larger, archaeologically invisible social formations from the style of cuts found on the animal bones…

I should explain my exclamation: I spent some time a while back on a forum on which the readers collected a whole bunch of “diagrams of meat”, along with various images which used the conventions of the butcher’s meat diagram in their conception. I had forgotten all about this – admittedly rather strange – collection, until I encountered the author’s work on Bldgblog and above. It was sadly lost with the passing of the forum, but I suspect a grand collection of meat diagrams is simply waiting to be collated.