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Darwin’s fingerprints can be found all over the human genome. A detailed look at human DNA has shown that a significant percentage of our genes have been shaped by natural selection in the past 50,000 years, probably in response to aspects of modern human culture such as the emergence of agriculture and the shift towards living in densely populated settlements ... New Scientist Breaking News
Australian scientists have proved what is common knowledge to most people – that teaspoons appear to have minds of their own.
In a study at their own facility, a group of scientists from the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health in Melbourne secretly numbered 70 teaspoons and tracked their movements over five months.
Supporting their expectations, 80 percent of the spoons vanished during the period – although those in private areas of the institute lasted nearly twice as long as those in communal sections ... Reuters
Hundreds of human footprints dating back 20,000 years to the Ice Age have been discovered in a dry lake bed in Australia, scientists said on Thursday.
University of Melbourne archaeologist Matthew Cupper told Australian radio they were the earliest footprint fossils found in the country ... Reuters
The top 11 feet of soil in the Arctic continues to thaw. Sinkholes are opening, highways buckling, houses and forests tilting, all of which is wreaking havoc on landscapes, wildlife and cities from Murmansk to Juneau. This permafrost layer – defined as soil that remains icy cold for more than two years – covers nearly a quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere. But that total is shrinking and new models show that it may nearly disappear by the end of this century ... Scientific American
The remains of a 28,000-year-old woolly mammoth fueled debate over the 21st-century science of genomics on Monday, as two teams offered evidence about the big mammal's genetic makeup.
Competing papers in the journals Science and Nature both focused on what is left of a woolly mammoth found in Siberia ... Reuters
Since time immemorial the North Sea has gradually eroded the cliffs of eastern England, including those near the village of Pakefield in Suffolk. But 700,000 years ago, the bottoms of those cliffs were riverbeds draining an England that was merely a peninsula of a much warmer Europe populated by elephants, bison and even hippopotamuses. Now archaeologists have discovered proof that ancient humans lived there too – some 200,000 years earlier than they were believed to have penetrated northern Europe.
Fossil hunters continually scour northern Europe for convincing proof of early human habitation. Until recently, evidence from Germany and the U.K. only proved that humans inhabited the area for the past 500,000 years or so. But 32 flint tools discovered in a cliff side during low tide near Pakefield point to humans living in the vicinity of its tidal flats and rivers around 700,000 years ago. Simon Parfitt of University College London and his colleagues found the flints and ascertained their antiquity by, among other things, dating the rock layer in which they were found as well as animal bones from that same stratum ... Scientific American
Scientists cast doubt on Wednesday on the age of footprints discovered in Mexico which suggested humans had arrived in the Americas 30,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The fossilised footprints discovered two years ago in volcanic ash near Puebla, Mexico were thought to be 40,000 years old, but researchers in the United States and Mexico who visited the site and collected samples came to a different conclusion.
"You're really only left with two possibilities," said Paul Renne of the University of California, Berkeley.
"One is that they are really old hominids – shockingly old – or they're not footprints," he added in a statement ... Reuters
New research shows early humans were living in Britain around 700,000 years ago, substantially earlier than had previously been thought.
Using new dating techniques, scientists found that flint tools unearthed in Pakefield, Suffolk, were 200,000 years older than the previous oldest finds.
Humans were known to have lived in southern Europe 780,000 years ago but it was unclear when they moved north.
The findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature.
A team of researchers from the UK, Italy and Canada found a total of 32 flint tools in a fossil-rich seam at Pakefield. They say it represents the earliest unequivocal evidence of human activity in northern Europe ... BBC News
Image: Flint tool found at the Pakefield site (Harry Taylor/NHM).
Researchers are confident the tools are 700,000 years old.
According to an article published in Nature on December 15, 2005, an international team led by Simon Parfitt of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project has discovered 32 pieces of black flint debitage, including a core and retouched flake, in alluvial sediments dated to about 700,000 years ago.
These artifacts represent the debris created by flintknapping, the manufacture of a stone tool, possibly for butchering purposes. The flint chips were recovered from four separate places within the channel fill deposits of a stream bed which in-filled during the inter-glacial period of the Early Pleistocene ... About Archaeology
Image © Nature 2005
Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature.
The study was conducted by geologists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the United States and Mexico.
Earlier this year, researchers in England touted these "footprints" as definitive proof that humans were in the Americas much earlier than 11,000 years ago, which is the accepted date for the arrival of humans across a northern land-bridge from Asia ... EurekAlert!
