Quotes

Around 50,000 years ago, there is widespread evidence of producing bone and antler tools, heat-treated and flaked flint, projectile weapons, grindstones, fishing and birding equipment and a command of fire.

“Was this driven by a brain mutation, cooked foods, the advent of language or just population density?”

Dr Hare and his colleagues argue that human society advanced when people started being nicer to each other, which entails having a little less testosterone in action.

“If prehistoric people began living closer together and passing down new technologies, they’d have to be tolerant of each other. The key to our success is the ability to cooperate and get along and learn from one another,” said Robert Cieri, a student at the University of Utah and the first author on the study published in the journal Current Anthropology.

In their study, the scientists compared the brow ridge, facial shape and interior volume of 13 modern human skulls older than 80,000 years, 41 skulls from 10,000 to 38,000 years ago, and a global sample of 1,367 20th century skulls from 30 different ethnic populations.

The trend that emerged was toward a reduction in the brow ridge and a shortening of the upper face, traits which generally reflect a reduction in the action of testosterone.

“Heavy brows were out, rounder heads were in, and those changes can be traced directly to testosterone levels acting on the skeleton,” said Prof Steven Churchill of Duke University, a co-author on the study.

http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/science-low-testosterone-technology-boom-50000-years-ago-02087.html
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Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are.

Marcel Duchamp (via fables-of-the-reconstruction)
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All organizing is science fiction. What does a world without poverty look like? What does a world without prisons look like? What does a world with everyone having enough food and clothing look like? We don’t know. It’s science fiction, and it is as foreign to us as the Klingon homeworld (which is called Q’onos in case you were wondering). But being able to envision it and imagine it means we can begin seeing the steps it would take to move us there.

Walidah Imarisha, Growing Octavia’s Brood: The Science Fiction Social Justice Created (via nomadmanifesto)
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Since 1996, scientists have debated about whether the Martian meteorite ALH84001 contains evidence that life once existed on Mars. The rock holds some microscopic wormy-looking structures that some scientists have suggested could be fossilized remains of life on Mars, whereas others say the weird shapes derive from normal geochemical processes.

In a new study, physicists at University of Kent tested the hypothesis with a big gun. More specifically, they took powdered diatoms (a type of microscopic algae with a hard silica shell), packed them inside a nylon bullet, added water, and froze the sample. Then, they loaded the bullets inside a light gas gun and fired them at a sack of water at speeds ranging between 0.25 and 3.1 miles per second.

When they looked in the water afterwards, the researchers analyzed the whole and partial remains of the little diatom fossils. They concluded that small fossils could survive a meteorite impact, and that if they exist, then it’s possible to find them inside meteorites.

But there are a few important caveats.  At impact speeds above 0.62 miles per second, none of the diatom fossils survived in one piece—they broke into tiny shards. And the faster they crashed into the water, the tinier the diatom bits became.  That’s a problem for any potential fossils that would fall to Earth from other planets, because meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds between 6.8 and 44.7 miles per second before they hit Earth, according to the American Meteor Society.

The other important limitation is that the diatoms were shot frozen in ice, meaning they potentially behave differently during impact than they would if they were encapsulated in rock.

So the jury is definitely still out on ALH84001, and it probably will be for many years. Even if tests provide stronger evidence that fossils can travel between planetary bodies, it doesn’t necessarily mean they did.

What is pretty neat is that, because meteorite impacts tend to be slower on the Moon, it looks like fossils that have been smashed off from Earth could survive a collision with our natural satellite.  The authors conclude that the lunar surface could be a good place to scout for fossils, and those terrestrial transplants may be better preserved on the Moon than if they had remained on Earth.

http://www.popsci.com.au/space/the-moon-could-be-littered-with-fossils-from-earth,390418
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In the past, some researchers have tried to explain the demise of the Neanderthals by suggesting that the newcomers were superior to Neanderthals in key ways, including their ability to hunt, communicate, innovate and adapt to different environments.

But in an extensive review of recent Neanderthal research, CU-Boulder researcher Paola Villa and co-author Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, make the case that the available evidence does not support the opinion that Neanderthals were less advanced than anatomically modern humans. Their paper was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

“The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there,” said Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. “What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true.”
Villa and Roebroeks scrutinized nearly a dozen common explanations for Neanderthal extinction that rely largely on the notion that the Neanderthals were inferior to anatomically modern humans. These include the hypotheses that Neanderthals did not use complex, symbolic communication; that they were less efficient hunters who had inferior weapons; and that they had a narrow diet that put them at a competitive disadvantage to anatomically modern humans, who ate a broad range of things.

The researchers found that none of the hypotheses were supported by the available research. For example, evidence from multiple archaeological sites in Europe suggests that Neanderthals hunted as a group, using the landscape to aid them.

Researchers have shown that Neanderthals likely herded hundreds of bison to their death by steering them into a sinkhole in southwestern France. At another site used by Neanderthals, this one in the Channel Islands, fossilized remains of 18 mammoths and five woolly rhinoceroses were discovered at the base of a deep ravine. These findings imply that Neanderthals could plan ahead, communicate as a group and make efficient use of their surroundings, the authors said.
Other archaeological evidence unearthed at Neanderthal sites provides reason to believe that Neanderthals did in fact have a diverse diet. Microfossils found in Neanderthal teeth and food remains left behind at cooking sites indicate that they may have eaten wild peas, acorns, pistachios, grass seeds, wild olives, pine nuts and date palms depending on what was locally available.

Additionally, researchers have found ochre, a kind of earth pigment, at sites inhabited by Neanderthals, which may have been used for body painting. Ornaments have also been collected at Neanderthal sites. Taken together, these findings suggest that Neanderthals had cultural rituals and symbolic communication.

Villa and Roebroeks say that the past misrepresentation of Neanderthals’ cognitive ability may be linked to the tendency of researchers to compare Neanderthals, who lived in the Middle Paleolithic, to modern humans living during the more recent Upper Paleolithic period, when leaps in technology were being made.
“Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors,” Villa said. “It would be like comparing the performance of Model T Fords, widely used in America and Europe in the early part of the last century, to the performance of a modern-day Ferrari and conclude that Henry Ford was cognitively inferior to Enzo Ferrari.”

Although many still search for a simple explanation and like to attribute the Neanderthal demise to a single factor, such as cognitive or technological inferiority, archaeology shows that there is no support for such interpretations, the authors said.

But if Neanderthals were not technologically and cognitively disadvantaged, why didn’t they survive?

The researchers argue that the real reason for Neanderthal extinction is likely complex, but they say some clues may be found in recent analyses of the Neanderthal genome over the last several years. These genomic studies suggest that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals likely interbred and that the resulting male children may have had reduced fertility. Recent genomic studies also suggest that Neanderthals lived in small groups. All of these factors could have contributed to the decline of the Neanderthals, who were eventually swamped and assimilated by the increasing numbers of modern immigrants.

Neanderthals were not inferior to modern humans, study finds – ScienceDaily
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About a year ago, the retailer quietly began staffing up Lowe’s Innovation Labs, a group meant to lead innovation by testing and creating technologies, as well as partnering with startups. Kyle Nel, executive director, leads the labs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as another under construction in Boulder, Colo. The labs focus on “uncommon partnerships” with Singularity University and SciFutures, for example.

“A lot of companies have outside spaces, but we approach it in a different way, through science-fiction prototyping,” said Mr. Nel, who reports to Lowe’s Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay. “You take all of your market research, all of your trend data and hire professional science-fiction writers. And they write real stories with conflict and resolution and characters. We turned it into a comic book and created possible stories or visions of the future.”

One of those visions involved giving homeowners the ability to envision remodeling projects with augmented reality. “Because it was a sci-fi story, it really opened up people’s imaginations to understand what was possible,” Mr. Nel said. “Now that we’ve gone through it, it seems weird we wouldn’t work in this way.”

“We look at emerging tech, consumer insights, unmet needs and pain points, give them to sci-fi writers and create preferred futures,” said Ari Popper, founder and co-CEO of SciFutures, a self-described “technology, research and foresight agency” that counts Hershey, Del Monte and PepsiCo among its clients. “Technology removes a lot of the barriers and unmet needs and pain points associated with the visualization of home improvement.”

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Tibetans live in a region that averages more than 4,000 meters above sea level. (Not for nothing is it called the roof of the world.) How did they come to be able to cope with their extreme environs? Some researchers in China and the United States think they might know, and their findings were published Wednesday in Nature. By sequencing DNA from a group of Tibetans and comparing the code to other gene databases, the researchers have discovered that Tibetans are inheritors of an ancient trait that helps regulate the oxygenation in their blood. But surprisingly, this trait did not arise in Homo sapiens. Rather, it came from another group of humans, the Denisovans—mysterious, little-known hominid cousins that died out some 40,000 years ago.

The new study on Tibetans demonstrates for the first time an evolutionary advantage conferred directly by Denisovans, an adaptation that seems to be singular to the Tibetan people. For people whose ancestors lived in milder altitudes, experiencing a dearth of oxygen at great heights causes the level of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in blood, to increase in attempt to compensate. But this raises the likelihood of cardiac events in the short term, and it is unhelpful for reproduction, as it increases the risk of preeclampsia (hypertension during pregnancy). Tibetans don’t have the same reaction to elevation: They have greater fitness and higher fertility even when there is little to breathe. This, along with other respiratory adaptations, allows them to thrive where others cannot.

Denisovans and Neanderthals are called extinct human “species”—a term that used to demark a clear line between two organisms incapable of interbreeding to produce fertile offspring. But the definition is no longer so clear. We know that these hominin cousins did couple with our Homo sapien ancestors—and some of us have inherited from them valuable modern traits. How we define “humans” past and present is a subject to contemplate—as fitting for scientists as for pilgrims to think about on their journeys across Tibetan plains.

Tibetans inherited Denisovan genetic adaptation for elevation: DNA for living at high altitude.
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One of the latest ideas put forward is that perhaps the collision that likely formed Pluto and Charon heated the interior of Pluto enough to give it an internal liquid water ocean, which also gave the small world a short-lived plate tectonics system, like that of Earth.

“We predict that when New Horizons gets there it will see evidence of ancient tectonism,” said Brown University’s Amy Barr, coauthor of a new paper with Geoffrey Collins in the latest issue of the journal Icarus. By “ancient,” Barr means sometime way back during the first billion years of the solar system’s history.

Barr and Collins modeled the Pluto-Charon system based on the idea that the initial collision of the two bodies would have generated enough heat to melt the interior of Pluto creating ocean that would have survived for quite a while under an icy crust.

“Once you create an ocean on an icy body, it’s hard to get rid of it,” said Barr. That’s because as the ocean freezes, the remaining liquid portion gets enriched with salts and ammonia – which serve as antifreeze.

http://news.discovery.com/space/pluto-may-have-deep-seas-and-ancient-tectonic-faults-140412.htm
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Scientists are investigating what may be the oldest identified race war 13,000 years after it raged on the fringes of the Sahara.

French scientists working in collaboration with the British Museum have been examining dozens of skeletons, a majority of whom appear to have been killed by archers using flint-tipped arrows.
The bones – from Jebel Sahaba on the east bank of the Nile in northern Sudan – are from victims of the world’s oldest known relatively large-scale human armed conflict.
Over the past two years anthropologists from Bordeaux University have discovered literally dozens of previously undetected arrow impact marks and flint arrow head fragments on and around the bones of the victims.


The identity of their killers is however less easy to determine. But it is conceivable that they were people from a totally different racial and ethnic group – part of  a North African/ Levantine/European people  who lived around much of the Mediterranean Basin.

The two groups – although both part of our species, Homo sapiens – would have looked quite different from each other and  were also almost certainly  different culturally and linguistically. The sub-Saharan originating group had long limbs, relatively short torsos and projecting upper and lower jaws along with rounded foreheads and broad noses, while the North African/Levantine/European originating group had shorter limbs, longer torsos and flatter faces. Both groups were very muscular and strongly built.

Certainly the northern Sudan area was a major ethnic interface between these two different groups at around this period. Indeed the remains of the North African/Levantine/European originating population group has even been found 200 miles south of Jebel Sahaba, thus suggesting that the arrow victims were slaughtered in an area where both populations operated.

What’s more, the period in which they perished so violently was one of huge competition for resources – for they appear to have been killed during a severe climatic downturn in which many water sources dried up, especially in summer time.

The climatic downturn – known as the Younger Dryas period – had been preceded by much lusher, wetter and warmer conditions which had allowed populations to expand. But when climatic conditions temporarily worsened during the Younger Dryas, water holes dried up, vegetation wilted and animals died or moved to the only major year-round source of water still available – the Nile.
Humans of all ethnic groups in the area were forced to follow suit – and migrated to the banks (especially the eastern bank) of the great river. Competing for finite resources, human groups would have inevitably clashed – and the current investigation is demonstrating the apparent scale of this earliest known substantial human conflict.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/saharan-remains-may-be-evidence-of-first-race-war-13000-years-ago-9603632.html (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)

look we don’t know at all who the killers were, but it is *inconceivable* that early man could get his ass kicked by a bunch of Neanderthals ok. They certainly couldn’t have had technological superiority either, just because they might have recently come down from the harsh European tundra environment they’d pitted themselves against for thousands of years, developing a unique culture, as mountain passes thawed out, glaciers melted etc. No. Human pride yo.

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