Read moreScientists have unearthed rare, ancient human remains in silts close to the River Seine in France.
The left arm bones are dated to about 200,000 years ago, and look to be Neanderthal – although the researchers say that with no other fossils it is impossible to make a full description
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Not much can be said about the individual because it is represented solely by the three long bones of the arm – the humerus, ulna and radius.
Their robustness would support a Neanderthal interpretation, says the team, and they could have come from a juvenile or young adult.
One interesting observation is a raised crest, or ridge, on the upper-arm bone that may be the result of muscle damage at the shoulder.
The team speculates in its paper that the individual might have been hurt by repeatedly throwing something.
The scarring looks very similar to what has been documented in professional throwing athletes.
“We have a particular morphology on the humerus where we have this very important crest that is related probably to a specific movement – a specific movement that has been repeated by this individual,” Dr Maureille told the BBC.
“Right at that point, we have a kind of micro-trauma, which could be related to a movement that is more difficult, and it has created this strange relief.”
Quite what that repetitive movement might have been is open to debate.
“If the evidence for the strong development of the deltoid region on the humerus has been interpreted correctly, this could provide an important clue that thrown spears were already in use in Europe about 200,000 years ago, something which many experts have questioned,” commented Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London.
“There has been a widespread view that Neanderthals and earlier humans were reliant on thrusting spears, used for dangerous close-range confrontational hunting, and that only modern humans perfected launched projectiles – that view could now be questioned.”
Author: m1k3y
Read moreThe discovery on the island of Sulawesi vastly expands the geography of the first cave artists, who were long thought to have appeared in prehistoric Europe around that time. Reported in the journal Nature, the cave art includes stencils of hands and a painting of a babirusa, or “pig-deer,” which may be the world’s oldest figurative art.
“Overwhelmingly depicted in Europe and Sulawesi were large, and often dangerous, mammal species that possibly played major roles in the belief systems of these people,” says archaeologist and study leader Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
The finds from the Maros cave sites on Sulawesi raise the possibility that such art predates the exodus of modern humans from Africa 60,000 or more years ago.
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As site after site was found in Europe, the view emerged that modern people must have arrived there from Africa and undergone a cultural shift as they competed with Neanderthals for prey and for caves. (Related: “Newly Discovered Engraving May Revise Picture of Neanderthal Intelligence.”)
Instead, the newly discovered cave painting suggests that art may have been universal among early modern people, including those who left Africa and traveled across southern Arabia to Indonesia and Australia within the past 50,000 years. (Related: “Migration to Australia.”)
Cave art may have left Africa with early modern humans, the study authors suggest, or possibly it sprang up independently among different groups. The earliest examples of other kinds of art are even older, such as decorative perforated shell beads and pigments that date to more than 75,000 years ago.
Monsters: Dark Continent Official Trailer
sweet I had no idea they were making a sequel until just now…
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Read morePolynesians were able to sail downwind to Easter Island and New Zealand centuries ago, a new analysis of past climate has found. There were narrow windows of time between 1140 and 1260 AD where the winds allowed this, say researchers in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s really incredible to think that for a 120-year period the Polynesians took advantage of these windows of opportunities and they crossed almost a third of the surface of the Earth,” says co-author Associate Professor Ian Goodwin of Macquarie University. Archaeological evidence suggests that from around 1000 years AD, Polynesians travelled in their ocean-sailing canoes east from Samoa to what is known as Central East Polynesia (CEP) – which includes Society, Tuamotu, Marquesas, Gambier, Southern Cook and Austral Islands. In a short period between 1140 and 1260 AD they then migrated on to New Zealand and Easter Island. “It’s always been quite a mystery as to why there was a concentration of colonisation in a period of a couple of hundred years and why it ceased after that,” says Goodwin. Especially since, according to today’s prevailing winds, travelling to these later destinations would have been against the wind for most of the time, he adds. While some researchers have proposed Polynesians must have had much more complex canoes than have been found to date, Goodwin and colleagues suggest this was not necessary. They have found that during this short time there were actually a number of ‘climate windows’, lasting around 20 years each, where the winds were in favour of the long voyages to New Zealand and Easter Island.
Read moreAmerican geophysicists believe the moon’s Procellarum region, a dark patch more than half the size of Australia, resulted from a magma plume rather than a massive asteroid strike, as previously thought. The finding “deals a big blow to the asteroid theory”, said Brown University, which contributed to the study. Procellarum is the only lunar “sea” big enough to be called an ocean and is one of a number of dark spots on the moon’s surface that, when seen from Earth, resemble a face. Unlike other dark areas such as the Sea of Rains and Sea of Serenity, Procellarum is not surrounded by signs of impact, such as mountains and scars. Scientists have long debated whether Procellarum is so old that the impact signs have been eroded, or was formed by a different process. Now researchers say they have settled the argument, using data from twin NASA spacecraft that orbited the moon in 2012 and mapped its gravity. The team created a high-resolution map showing Procellarum’s border composed of sharp angles that could not have been created by an asteroid. The researchers believe the angular outline was produced by giant tension cracks in the crust as it cooled around magma from deep inside the moon. Maria Zuber, co-author of a paper in the journal Nature, said tthe cracks had formed a “plumbing system” which had allowed magma to meander to the surface and created the dark spots we see.
In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.
Robert Anton Wilson, Principia Discordia (via burningonyx)
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Archive recreation for The Great Martian War documentary by impossible factual for History Canada. Directed by Christian Johnson, (Plazma). and Steve Maher (impossible factual). Music: “88” by Working for a Nuclear Free City. http://ift.tt/LliWGt Great martian war PLAZMA
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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Read moreSo are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I’ve lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke’s Law (which originally said ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter. This vote has consequences. If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained. And as to why we haven’t found any alien artifacts in our solar system, well, maybe we don’t know what to look for. Wiley cites Freitas as having come up with this basic idea; I’m prepared to take it much further, however. Elsewhere I’ve talked about this particular long-term scenario for the future, an idea I call The Rewilding. Now normally one can’t look into the future; in the case of the long-term evolution of technological civilization, however, that is precisely what astronomy allows us to do. And here’s the thing: the Rewilding model predicts a universe that looks like ours–one that appears empty. The datum that we tend to refer to as ‘the Great Silence’ also provides the falsification of certain other models of technological development. For instance, products of traditionally ‘advanced’ technological civilizations, such as Dyson spheres, should be visible to us from Earth. No comprehensive search has been done, to my knowledge, but no candidate objects have been stumbled upon in the course of normal astronomy. The Matrioshka brains, the vast computronium complexes that harvest all the resources of a stellar system… we’re just not seeing them. The evidence for that model of the future is lacking. If we learn how life came to exist on Earth, and if it turns out to be a common or likely development, then the evidence for a future in which artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable is provided by the Great Silence itself.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 