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.”
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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.
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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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.
Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.
Neil deGrasse Tyson in response to “Aliens can’t exist because we haven’t found them yet” (via samuraifuckingfrog)
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Read moreTen years after the introduction of Google’s self-driving car, it still shows ads for businesses in other cities. Everyone complains, but we’d be terrified if the ads were too good. There’s a mutual interest to retard the platform. You want a dumb ad network so you can believe Google doesn’t know too much. Google wants it to seem dumb so they can keep some knowledge for themselves. After watching a 15-second YouTube ad for bail bonds, the car starts driving you to the Google grocery store without you telling it you needed milk. When you arrive, the car makes you sing the grocery store’s jingle to unlock the doors.
Read morePerhaps a safer way for seed to spread would be for whole rocks to travel other worlds. Previous research has showed that, theoretically, a massive meteorite impact could blast up and scatter tonnes of rock across the solar system.
In their recent paper, Hara and colleagues considered one of the biggest meteorite hits known in Earth’s history: the Chicxulub impact 65 million years ago, usually blamed for killing off the dinosaurs. The 10-kilometre-wide asteroid weighed well over a trillion tonnes, and could have excavated as much mass from the surface of the Earth.
The team calculated how much of that stuff could have ended up on the bodies in the solar system thought most likely to be hospitable to life: Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa, both of which are thought to have subsurface oceans of liquid water.
Under certain conditions, as many as 300 million individual rocks could have ended up on Europa, and 500 on Enceladus, they calculated. Even more could have ended up on the moon and Mars. The team write:
“Although it is uncertain how rocks enter the presumed sea under the surface, for example, of Enceladus and Europa, the probability may be high that microorganisms transferred from Earth would be adapted and grow there.”
A handful of rocks could even have made it to planets around other stars. Once such could be Gliese 581, a red dwarf 20 light years away with a super-Earth orbiting at the outer edge of its habitable zone, where water could be liquid. Hana and colleagues calculated that about 1000 rocks from the Chicxulub impact could have reached that far in about a million years, meaning any life that made it would have had 64 million years to develop – or die off.
Read moreBy reconstructing conditions in the disk of gas and dust in which the Solar System formed, scientists have concluded that the Earth and other planets must have inherited much of their water from the cloud of gas from which the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago, instead of forming later. The authors say that such interstellar water would also be included in the formation of most other stellar systems, and perhaps of other Earth-like planets. The dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust where stars form contain abundant water, in the form of ice. When a star first lights up, it heats up the cloud around it and floods it with radiation, vaporizing the ice and breaking up some of the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. Until now, researchers were unsure how much of the ‘old’ water would be spared in this process. If most of the original water molecules were broken up, water would have had to reform in the early Solar System. But the conditions that made this possible could be specific to the Solar System, in which case many stellar systems could be left dry, says Ilsedore Cleeves, an astrochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the new study. But if some of the water could survive the star-forming process, and if the Solar System’s case is typical, it means that water “is available as a universal ingredient during planet formation”, she says.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 