Paleontology

With DNA from a museum specimen, scientists reconstruct the genome of a bird extinct for 700 years

The little bush moa, a flightless bird that went extinct soon after Polynesians settled New Zealand in the late 13th century.

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nearly complete extinct genomes have now been reconstructed for human species of Neanderthals and Denisovans, the woolly mammoth, and the passenger pigeon.
 
Saudi Arabian fossil find puts finger on the story of human dispersal
The finger bone is the oldest directly dated human fossil outside Africa and the Levant.
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Paleontologist Iyad Zalmout of the Saudi Geological Survey was walking through the Al-Wusta dig site in 2016 when he spotted a tiny bone eroding out of a layer of sediment. The 87,000-year-old fossil turned out to be a human intermediate phalanx—the middle section of your finger—from what was probably a middle finger. It's the earliest directly dated human fossil that has been found so far outside Africa or the Levant, and archaeologists say it's evidence that once humans ventured beyond Africa, they spread farther and faster than previously thought.
 
Robert said:
Saudi Arabian fossil find puts finger on the story of human dispersal
The finger bone is the oldest directly dated human fossil outside Africa and the Levant.
credit-Ian-Cartwright-800x644.jpg


Paleontologist Iyad Zalmout of the Saudi Geological Survey was walking through the Al-Wusta dig site in 2016 when he spotted a tiny bone eroding out of a layer of sediment. The 87,000-year-old fossil turned out to be a human intermediate phalanx—the middle section of your finger—from what was probably a middle finger. It's the earliest directly dated human fossil that has been found so far outside Africa or the Levant, and archaeologists say it's evidence that once humans ventured beyond Africa, they spread farther and faster than previously thought.
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I just thought i would quote your post so you would receive a nooootification ;)
 
30,000-year-old jawbone records tough diet in Pleistocene Southeast Asia
Raw meat and palm hearts helped early humans survive life in the rain forest.
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Two human mandibles from Niah Caves in Borneo; the top jaw is 30,000 years old, and the bottom jaw 11,000 years old.

Life wasn't easy for the first humans to settle in the islands of Southeast Asia. The rain forest was a completely new environment for people in the Late Pleistocene, so the learning curve was probably steep. A 28,000-year-old jawbone from Niah Cave in northeast Borneo reveals that Pleistocene people who first arrived there ate a tough diet.

The mandible belonged to a person who lived and died in Borneo nearly 10,000 years before the end of the last Ice Age, about 28,000-to-30,000 years ago, according to uranium-series dating (there wasn't enough collagen left in the bone for radiocarbon dating). It's small, but it's also unusually thick. Even without any other bones, the jaw tells us two important things about the Southeast Asians of the Pleistocene.

First, they were small. The jawbone is part of an adult mandible, but its height points to a person of short stature and small body size. That's something the ancient Niah Cave person has in common with modern indigenous people of the highlands of Borneo and the Philippines. It's also a very practical adaptation to life in the rain forest, according to University of New South Wales archaeologist Darren Curnoe—another way human diversity has been shaped by our long relationship with our environments.
 
Extinct gibbon in ancient Chinese tomb hints at other lost primate species
Excavations in an ancient Chinese tomb discovered an unknown species of gibbon.
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Primates, especially gibbons and other apes, are rare finds in the Asian fossil record. Fossils from the Pleistocene and Holocene are most often preserved in caves, where live gibbons almost never spend time. But humans preserved the remains of at least one gibbon for posterity by burying it in the tomb of a Chinese noblewoman 2,300 years ago during China’s Warring States Period.
 
Hominins lived in China 2.1 million years ago
A new stone tool find pushes back the date for hominin dispersal beyond Africa.
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Early hominins lived here, near Shangchen in China's southern Loess Plateau, 2.1 million years ago.

Early hominins ventured out into the world beyond Africa even earlier than we've given them credit for, according to a new stone-tool find on the southern edge of China's Loess Plateau.

Hominins—the lineage of apes that eventually came to include humans—began making recognizable stone tools about 3 million years ago. Before that date, we know that our early relatives inhabited a place only if we find their bones or, in rarer cases, their footprints. But stone tools offer a more durable, more abundant calling card. Pick up a stone flake or scraper—or a core of flint or chert with obvious scars from flintknapping—and you know that someone made this object. Someone was here.

And that's exactly what archaeologists led by Zhaoyu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found in a 2.1 million-year-old layer of ancient wind-blown sediment in China's southern Loess Plateau: a collection of stone cores, flakes, scrapers, borers, and points, as well as a couple of damaged hammerstones. The tools' style strongly resembles stone tools found at sites of about the same age in Africa, made by early human relatives like Homo erectus.

The find pushes back the earliest evidence for hominins outside Africa, which had been a 1.85 to 1.77 million-year-old group of Homo erectus bones and stone tools at a site in Dmanisi, Georgia, not far from the Armenian border. The location in China means that hominins may have ventured beyond the warm tropics of Africa into the less-certain environments of Eurasia a few hundred thousand years earlier than archaeologists previously thought.
 
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prehistoric Sicilian dwarf elephants.
One theory about the origin of the Cyclops myth is that skulls of these were found in caves, and the proboscis cavity mistaken for that of an eye.
 
The oldest drawing in the world was done with an ocher crayon
73,000 years ago, someone drew a cross-hatch pattern in ocher on a stone flake.
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This small flake of silcrete bears the oldest drawing ever discovered.
The world’s oldest drawing might be easy for a casual observer to miss: a 38.6mm (1.52 inch) long flake of silcrete (a fine-grained cement of sand and gravel) with a few faint reddish lines drawn on one smooth, curved face using an iron-rich pigment called ocher. The lines would have been bolder and brighter when the drawing was new, according to University of Bergen archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues, but over time they’ve lost pigment to rinsing and wear, leaving them faint and patchy. But an archaeologist working at Blombos Cave, about 300km (186 miles) east of Cape Town, South Africa, noticed the markings while analyzing stone flakes and debris excavated from a 73,000-year-old layer of the site.

The design features six nearly parallel lines, with three curved lines cutting across them at an oblique angle, but it hints at a more complex piece of work. All the lines cut off abruptly at the edges of the flake, which suggests that the pattern archaeologists see today is just a fragment of something originally drawn on a larger surface and later broken.

“The pattern was probably more complex and structured in its entirety than in this truncated form,” wrote Henshilwood and his colleague. Modern viewers will likely never know what the rest of the drawing looked like—or what it meant to people 73,000 years ago.
 
New study argues against some of the oldest evidence for life
Are these 3.7 billion-year-old fossils or just messed-up bedrock?
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The triangular shapes had been described as possible relics of 3.7 billion-year-old microbial life. The rock has been flipped upside down since then, but the red arrow highlights that one of these triangles is not like the others.

Few things in science seem to be as controversial as claims to the oldest evidence of life on Earth. As researchers strive to push life's origins back further into the history of the early Earth, the evidence they have is never completely unambiguous. (If you were over three billion years old, you wouldn’t look so great, either.) Other scientists inevitably question any new evidence, and arguments ensue.
 
redrumloa said:
When Arabia was green

Oh noes! Climate change 300,000 years ago!! Someone tell ManBearPig!
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Yup. And now it's not. It's harsh and inhospitable - just like you wish everywhere else was, right? Because everything will be better when the desert is everywhere, right?

So, over the course of history the climate has fluctuated - and life has adapted - by which we mean, died, except for those few individuals that could handle the change. But climate has usually changed fairly slowly so there were usually enough survivors to start the next generation (even though many species have gone extinct over the ages as they could not adapt fast enough).

Today the rise in CO2 is at a rate we do not see in the historical record and the rate of temperature rise and ocean acidification is concerning. Ecosystems are dying.

Ultimately, maybe even in a couple of decades, humanity will be extinct and then the cockroaches and the bacteria and things that breed very rapidly will have a chance to take over, or maybe not. Pasteurisation works on the fact that it is possible to change temperature fast enough and extremely enough that life cannot adapt.

But even if we determine that the warming is largely natural, some of it at least isn't. Since the killing only happens at the hottest or draughtiest times and the difference between life and death can be quite thin, should we be trying to make it worse even a little? If the tide is coming in and the water is rising up to our nostrils, should we bend our knees? That remains the choice. Is it really so important to drive the biggest truck and live in the biggest house with the best air conditioning - or is it alright to just try to make the habitable parts of the planet last just a little bit longer. Ultimately it needn't even matter why the planet is sick if the question is, shall we make it worse?
 
Neanderthal teeth reveal lead exposure and difficult winters
Winters were hard on young Neanderthals, reports a new study.
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A new study of oxygen isotope ratios and heavy metals in the tooth enamel of Neanderthals who lived and died 250,000 years ago in southeast France suggests that they endured colder winters and more pronounced differences between seasons than the region’s modern residents. The two Neanderthals in the study also experienced lead exposure during their early years, making them the earliest known instances of this exposure.
 
redrumloa said:
When Arabia was green

Oh noes! Climate change 300,000 years ago!! Someone tell ManBearPig!
Click to expand...

the Sahara desert and the Arabian peninsula alternate between desert and grassland & Mangrove swamps in a 20k year cycle do to a wobble in the earths axis of rotation

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It is speculated that tribes forced off the Sahara grasslands 5 -6k years ago moved to the Nile valley and were the founders of the Egyptian civilization
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Yup. And now it's not. It's harsh and inhospitable - just like you wish everywhere else was, right? Because everything will be better when the desert is everywhere, right?
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Antarctica was once a vast forest, today there is not a single tree or shrub. Because everything would be better without warmth, right?
 
redrumloa said:
Antarctica was once a vast forest, today there is not a single tree or shrub. Because everything would be better without warmth, right?
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Antarctica can become ice free again and perhaps a forested but there can't be 7 billion people alive on a planet like that - the rest of the environment would be untenable. Further, it would take a few thousand years at least (probably tens or hundreds) for the plants and animals to adapt to the months of daylight and darkness that characterise the year at the poles. We are warming at a degree every few decades - far too fast for biological adaptation.
 
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