Four protrusions appear to be arranged in pairs, each consisting of two connected branches surrounding a central depression. We really don't understand what any of these features represent anatomically.
The first study analyzes canid remains from two sites: Pnarbas, on the Central Anatolian Plateau, and Gough's Cave, in Somerset, UK. The fragments from Pnarbas are extraordinarily small, but the team still managed to extract enough nuclear DNA to confirm that they were domestic dogs and not wolves.
Although there are many amber stones containing a single creature, there are fewer that include two or more, as is the case with a pair of mosquitoes trapped in amber 130 million years ago which tell us that, back then, males also sucked blood. Even more extraordinary is when several organisms can be seen interacting, either eating the other, acting as a parasite, or cooperating.
For example, reader David Erickson had this on his mind: If there were aliens 66 million light-years from Earth, how big a telescope would they need to see dinosaurs? Ha! I love this question. I've thought of it myself but never worked out the mathexcept to think, Probably pretty big, which turns out to dramatically underestimate the actual answer.
At first glance, it looked like Wooller and his colleagues might have found evidence that mammoths lived in central Alaska just 2,000 years ago. But ancient DNA revealed that two "mammoth" bones actually belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale-which raised a whole new set of questions. The team's hunt for Alaska's last mammoth had turned into an epic case of mistaken identity, starring two whale species and a mid-century fossil hunter.
His investigation began after identifying recurring giant T-shapes, three-level indents, and step pyramids carved into ancient stones worldwide. 'These specific symbols that are built in different size proportions, and the symbols are found in ancient stones around the world, are not supposed to exist; no cultures are supposed to have any cross-platform,' LaCroix explained. The symbols appear in locations ranging from Turkey's Van region to South America and Cambodia.
I'm always looking for books that challenge the status quo, and when I learned about Roland Ennos' new book The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization, I couldn't wait to get my eyes on it, and I'm thrilled I did. In this landmark book, Ennos offers "a compelling argument that flips the traditional view of humanity on its head."
New research published today in Nature dates the boneschipped out from a cave called Grotte a Hominides and nearby it over decadesto about 773,000 years ago, during the era of the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Denisovans (a group of humans that ranged across Asia and that does not have an agreed-upon species name). We can say that the shared ancestry between these three species is perhaps in Grotte a Hominides in Casablanca, says study co-author Abderrahim Mohib, a prehistorian at the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage Sciences in Rabat, Morocco.
We have little physical evidence of these interactions turning violent, however, because burials were rare and carnivores were more likely to finish off their prey. That's why the embellished burial site of a 15-year-old from 27,000 years ago is an important window into the past: the teenager's bones indicate he was mauled by a bear. The finding represents some of the first evidence of its kind.
Researchers have found traces of what appears to be plant-derived poison on tiny stone arrowheads from South Africa dated to 60,000 years ago. The finding pushes back the origin of this revolutionary hunting technology by tens of thousands of years. Scientists have long been fascinated by the development of poisoned hunting weapons. For one thing, they would have seriously leveled up our ancestors' foraging game.
The oldest known pieces of sewn clothing have been discovered in a cave in Oregon, potentially rewriting all of human history. Researchers from the US uncovered pieces of animal hide stitched together from the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. That would mean that humans in North America had advanced skills, specifically for working with plants, animals, and wood, thousands of years before the Great Pyramid of Egypt was constructed.
Dinosaur fever gripped the Western world during the early 1900s, fueled by the discovery of new, ever larger and more spectacular dinosaurs in Europe and especially in North America. Interest in these fossils was not merely driven by academic curiosity. Dinosaur skeletons and research had become a status symbol for museums and their financiers, whether government or private, and colonial powers turned to their areas of influence to find new remains.
Wooden objects carrying the marks of carving and use could be the oldest wooden tools ever found. Researchers dated the artefacts, found in what is now Greece, to 430,000 years ago - and suggest they might have been made by early Neanderthals or their ancestors, Homo heidelbergensis. A separate study describes 480,000-old flint-knapping tools made from antler and elephant bone, from what is now the United Kingdom.
Since the version of the article initially published, the copyright line has been amended to North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and James Napoli, under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
Sauropodshumongous reptiles with a long neck and tail and thick, elephantlike legsplayed a starring role in the dinosaur ecosystem, according to a new study. These massive dinosaurs are the largest creatures to ever walk on land. But they also played a crucial part in the food chain, the study authors write, acting as ecosystem engineers. The research was published on Friday in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin.
Specifically, I take people around downtown Seattle to explore the stone that makes up our buildings. On the corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street is an elegant six-story structure built with two-foot-tall blocks of rough-hewn sandstone, about 44 million years old, quarried in Tenino, Washington. The building rose soon after much of downtown Seattle burned to the ground in 1889, and the jagged stone gives it a feeling of rugged permanence, certainly what the city needed after the great fire.
Researchers have discovered the naturally mummified and skeletal remains of 61 cheetahs, which were hidden deep inside caves in northern Saudi Arabia for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years. The find indicates that these big cats roamed the Arabian Peninsula for millennia before they disappeared from the landscape between 49 and 188 years agoevidence that bolsters an effort to rewild the region with modern-day cheetahs, according to Ahmed Boug, general director of the National Center for Wildlife in Riyadh.
