Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico "much, much older than thought"

Something very strange is afoot, or at least may have been, some 1.3 million years ago. There are now doubts being cast as to whether the 'footprints' are real, although there has been no suggestion of what they otherwise might be...

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.

These scientists, led by geologist Silvia Gonzalez of Liverpool's John Moores University, dated the volcanic rock at 40,000 years old. They hypothesized that early hunters walked across ash freshly deposited near a lake by volcanoes that are still active in the area around Puebla, Mexico. The so-called footprints, subsequently covered by more ash and inundated by lake waters, eventually turned to rock.

But Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and an adjunct professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, and his colleagues in Mexico and at Texas A&M University report in the Dec. 1 issue of Nature a new age for the rock: about 1.3 million years.

"You're really only left with two possibilities," Renne said. "One is that they are really old hominids - shockingly old - or they're not footprints."

The implications of these latest findings could forever change our perception of palaeoanthropology, indicating that mankind has been present in the Americas far earlier than has hitherto been thought possible. At around 1.3 million years, Homo erectus was around, over a million years before our modern selves, and prior even to Neanderthals and other archaic forms, and at a time when such long distance travel from Africa to Asia by them would be considered extremely unlikely.

Curiously enough, the remains of what look to resemble the brow ridge of an archaic human, were found at Lake Chapala, elsewhere in Mexico, and although there has been neither confirmation that the fossil is hominid, nor of its age, the very faint possibility that very early humans somehow got themselves to the American continent, cannot be completely discounted.

But until further analysis and research can be carried out, we will just have to sit patiently with what could be one of the biggest conundrums in human prehistory, which if proved valid would completely revolutionise how we perceive both ourselves and our ancestors.

Either way, we can expect to see a great deal of discussion about this unique find, and it may be quite some time before the mystery is solved.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

The linked article was written in 1978 by Philip K. Dick, and is as incisive and relevant today as it was back then. In this essay, as is the case with most of his published work, he discusses the nature of what we perceive to be real and/or fake, or whether the world is made up from myriads of differing realities.

He goes on to discuss the similarities between stories he had written, with some of those appearing in the Bible, which he appears to have subconsciously re-written - and by his own admission he had no real idea of how this synchronicity occurred.

MaltaToday - Burying Pinto’s wall

Cautionary tale from Malta describing how modern building projects have wrecked and ruined various historic sites on the island - thankfully there is no mention of danger to the prehistoric sites elsewhere on the island. But that seems to have been of little comfort to the author of the attached article, who seems to be having a thoroughly miserable experience of life there, deriving some small solace from looking at old photos of the place.

image www.t-schoen-maltafan.de

The Surface of the Sun

Excellent resource for those interested in the composition of our parent star. I was previously unaware that 4800 km below the outer photosphere, the Sun has a transitional iron layer that covers another deeper rocky surface - I'd always assumed our star was just a mass of incandescent plasma and gas, never even considering the possibility that iron or rock could survive intact at such intense temperatures.

Just Keeps Going and Going

Spirit Rover has now spent an entire Martian year, equivalent to two of ours, marauding across the landscape in search of clues to water having been present in the past. Not only has this evidence been found, but the Rover is being lined up for even more missions, way beyond its initially projected lifespan of 90 days. This has been possible because the solar panels on which it depends for power, have been repeatedly cleaned by the mini-whirlwinds that occur between 11am and 3pm local time. Curiously, there is no mention of Opportunity Rover, which as far as we know has been just as diligent in its exploratory activities.

Probe 'gathers asteroid material'

Success at last for the Hayabusa mission, although JAXA's analogy of comparing their task with landing a jumbo jet in the Grand Canyon is completely misleading. The next task is to return the samples of Itokawa back to Earth, with the craft expected to touch down in the Australian outback some time in June 2007, so until then it's unlikely we'll hear much more.

SETI@home killed off

The woes and wherefores of fast fourier transformation as used by Seti@home will cease to exist on December 15th, when the experiment will be frozen. This was always a project that seemed likely to fail, depending as it did on alien races beaming radio waves in our direction as a means of communication - the fact that we used radio waves for only about 100 years would make it likely that we could only communicate with aliens who also used radio technology, which has not happened in this instance.

Homo erectus ate crunchy food

The dining habits and cuisine of a bygone people, in this brief piece that shows once again what revolutionary beings the erectus people were, living over 2 million years ago. It appears that they might have been the first omnivores, adding tough tubers and meat to what had previously been a vegetarian diet.

image www.nhm.ac.uk

Ancient tools at High Desert site go back 135,000 years

It's not often that we hear from the Calico Digs site, but it might be the case that we'll be hearing more if these latest tool datings are confirmed. Louis Leakey and others have been roundly criticised for their beliefs that America could have been populated so much further back in time, but then again it would appear that ancient humans were a lot more adventurous and courageous in their travels than we care to give them credit for.

Asteroid probe 'did touch down'

Continuing the mysterious adventures of one probe's attempts to land on an uncooperative asteroid. It now appears that Hayabusa spent some 39 minutes on Itokawa, but it is still not known whether any of the asteroid's material was collected for later analysis. Another landing is slated for this Saturday.

Flints give Cyprus oldest seafaring link in Med

Misleading article that gives the false impression that the earliest mariners only go back 12,000 years. But as we all know, Solutrean people at 20,000 years bp made it across the iced-up Atlantic to North America, Australia was reached by sea at least 40,000 years ago, with Homo erectus sea-farers reaching the island of Flores at a whopping 900,000 years ago.

image cyprus in the sea

Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon

Brief piece from the BBC, discussing the US space program, and the Nazis who were shipped in at the end of WWII to help them achieve their aims. The most well known of these people was Werner von Braun, the man seen as the brains behind the Apollo moon missions, and who harboured unrealised dreams of sending men to Mars.

NASA - Mesmerized by Moondust

News from the Dusty Plasma Lab, wherein individual particles of moon dust are studied - ultra violet light from the Sun causes the dust to become positively charged, but to a much higher degree than previously thought, and the bigger the dust grain, the higher the charge.

Is the Sun Heating Up?

Article from Earthfiles discussing the idea that global warming is also taking place on Mars and Pluto, and might be the result of the Sun itself heating up.

image dan bush via spaceweather.com

Binge-drinking an age-old problem

Later this week the licensing laws change, allowing pubs and bars to stay open later, returning to us once again the option of heavy drinking around the clock. The excuse back in the 12th century was that drinking water was often fatally contaminated, and the boiling process when brewing beer killed off the lethal microbes. Today there is abundant drinking water for all, but this doesn't seem to blunt the alcho-thirst of London's drinking enthusiasts.

Japan's asteroid touchdown fails

The Itokawa asteroid seems determined to keep its secrets, as the Hayabusa 'Falcon' mission hits another glitch.

image hayabusa shadow

Baby robot lost in space

But all is not yet lost, as there are other components to the mission, with Hayabusa detailed to land on the asteroid, from where it will gather data for transfer back to Earth.

image minerva robot

Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head

Someone has discovered the secrets of hydrinos.

Early Humans Settled India Before Europe, Study Suggests

Short story explaining how our esteemed and ancient forebears might have travelled to the Indian sub-continent, blown away the local heidelbergensis people, before turning their eyes to Europe, there to do away with the indigenous Neanderthal population.

However the European model is deeply flawed, as there is no direct proof that Neanderthals were killed off by moderns, but there is direct evidence that the populations shared and exchanged their genes regularly over thousands of years, the Lapedo hybrid discovery in Portugal being the most recent example of this.

This article makes no mention of the eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia at 71,000 years ago, an event that blew 800 cubic kilometres of material into the atmosphere, and that is thought to have almost wiped out humanity around the world. Following that eruption there was a period of intense cold lasting a thousand years, during which temperatures plunged even lower than the glacial maximum that hit Europe about 20,000 years ago. Neither does it make any mention of the earliest evidence of humans in South America, also dating to around 70,000 years, and who are thought to have originated in Australia, having travelled down from Africa.

Various hominids have been wending their way around the world for at least 2 million years, not in clean pulses of occupation, but crossing this way and that, producing encounters by all sorts of disparate groups and tribes. At times there have been anything upwards of 5 different species living together, including erectus, floresiensis, heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and moderns. We moderns are the only hominid species to live in isolation from all other species, while it is unknown if there will be any further organic species of mankind that appear in the future.

Institute of Space and Astronautical Science JAXA

Hayabusa's home-page or thereabouts, complete with clear and sharp images of the target asteroid, which in places is unusually smooth, as if ice or water had once been present, acting as an erosional agent.

Search for Life in the Universe

Staying with this ephemerally minimalist style of blogging, here's another story, this time discussing the alien life-forms we're creating here on Earth.

image Apollo 11 Command Module, via Smithsonian

Unbowed by Robot Loss, Japan's Asteroid Probe Readies For Touchdown

Most of the story is contained within the headline, but still worth reading nevertheless.

image temple of minerva

Ancient Americans

Following on from the post below.

image by tradtionalkayaks.com

Southern archaeologists revise history

More discussion on the first peoples to settle the Americas, with Clovis-First theory looking more fragile with each passing day.

DNA shows first Europeans were hunters not farmers

Ongoing studies indicate the that the first farmers in Europe left almost no genetic imprint on us, and that we are more likely descendants of hunter gatherer stock.

It was expected that we would have farmer DNA, but instead the inheritance they left was the idea of agriculture, an activity that was eventually taken up by the hunter gatherers. It seems that the incoming farmers were a small group of people who settled in Europe from the East around 7,000 years ago, who would have found themselves in the company of hunter gatherers who arrrived in Europe some time around 40,000 years ago.

image emmer wheat

Nuraghi of Sardinia

Good page with lots of pictures portraying ancient stone structures, known as 'nuraghi' on the island of Sardinia. To this day it remains unknown why they were built or what purpose they served, although current thinking posits that nuraghi may have formed some sort of territorial defence arrangement.

image Su Nuraxi - Barumini

The Chemistry of Great Coffee

If coffee consumption is a mainstay of your life, it's possible you'll want to read up on part of the process of its preparation - so widespread is coffee drinking in the UK that it is now more commonly drunk in public than tea.

image britishcouncil.org

Volcanoes ruled out for Martian methane

Despite an ongoing search for the source of methane on Mars, scientists are not much nearer to finding it than when it was discovered two years ago. One potential cause could have been volcanic eruptions, but thus far none have been detected, leaving Vladimir Krasnopolsky to conclude that the methane gas could be biological in origin rather than geological.

image hecates tholus volcano, mars

Security Guard Fired for Seeing Ghosts

A good example of why it's not always a good idea to tell someone you've just seen a ghost. However from time to time we see cctv footage of transparent people flitting across the field of view, but we never hear of the cameras being replaced as a result.

The security guard concerned became disturbed when he perceived he was being haunted by a small crowd of ghosts while on duty in a neighbourhood - he contacted his boss who then went with him to the scene, but after being unable to see any ghosts himself, the unimpressed boss sacked the guard shortly thereafter.

The actual point of the story was that the sacked man won a tribunal decision that he would be entitled to unemployment welfare, on the grounds that he had not perpetrated the sort of misconduct that would otherwise have disqualified him.

image from horseshoe canyon, utah

Bolivians Honour Skull-Toting Tradition

There is an old Andean belief that humans have seven souls, one of which stays with the skull after death, and this soul is thought to be able to lend assisstance to mortals with difficulties in their daily lives.

And so it was that on Tuesday November 8th that families in La Paz dusted off their skulls or 'natitas' to be placed on the altar in the chapel of the main cemetery, there to garland the skulls with flowers, and placing lighted cigarettes into the empty mouths.

This is said to reflect the return of pre-Columbian beliefs, one of which is that the living and dead remain connected with each other, and surprisingly this has even been recognised by the Catholic Church.

Sony's EULA is worse than their rootkit

If you're thinking of buying music from Sony to store on your computer, you may want to think again after reading this informative piece from Boing Boing. This is a supplementary post to the one about 8 posts down from here, but the extra detail provided here is worth reading.

image guitar and music paper juan gris 1926-27

Light could trigger super-fast synthetic muscles

There was a recent report that stated human athletes would probably not break many more track records, as the limits of human performance have just about been reached - women will at some stage be able to run as fast as men, but we're never going to see an 8-second 100 metres, or other similar feats of muscle and endurance.

On the other hand, the droids and cyborgs of tomorrow will be so much faster than us, that we'll probably hardly be able to see more of them than a vague blur as they hurry about on whatever mission they're tasked with.

'Gravity tractor' to deflect Earth-bound asteroids

Although this is probably a more sensible solution than blasting incoming asteroids with nukes, I think we'd all like to see the latter tactic deployed, if only for the great excitement, tension and images that would be involved - and I think any self-respecting asteroid would feel the same way, preferring to take its chances against anything explosive we have to throw at it, rather than being meekly shepherded out of harm's way by a humble spacecraft.

The bioweapon is in the post

After pretty much a dearth of news recently, New Scientist have posted a few stories, so here's the first of them - sadly there's an indestructible pop-up once again obscuring my view of the first part of this story, so I'll attempt to move swiftly on to the next.

Having now read it, the article turns out to be a cautionary tale of how terrorists might be able to order diseases like smallpox or ebola through the post. Mind you, given the vaguaries of the postal system, there's no guarantee they'd receive it on time, if ever at all.

image 'Plague in Rome' Jules-Elie Delaunay 1869

Venus Express en route to probe the planet's hidden mysteries

They finally got the old crate off the ground, albeit a week or two late, but at least the mission is now underway. Considering that 14 countries and 25 contractors were involved in the project, it's a testament to human co-operation and determination, even if there have been 20 previous missions in the same direction since 1962.

It won't arrive until next April, so until then we won't hear much apart from progress reports, or lack thereof, which means we can get on with watching endless re-runs of the launch.

When Dust Storms Engulf Mars

Thoughtful piece on the true nature of Martian dust storms - according to this theory, the atmosphere on Mars which is only 1% as dense as our own, should not be capable of starting or sustaining such events. Yet the dust storms on Mars are greater than anything we see here on Earth, sometimes lasting for months and covering the entire planet, leading the authors of the linked article to suggest that some form of electric charge is involved.

Blair defeated over terror laws

So after all the spin and Whip cracking, Tony Blair today suffered his first parliamentary defeat since coming to power in 1997. Despite a majority of over 60 in the House of Commons, he lost today's vote by a margin of 31, on whether to hold suspected terrorists for up to 90 days without charge.

This was in response to a request from the Police Federation, who argue that we are dealing with a unique threat to our national security, at the hands of would-be terrorists whose aim it is to kill as many civilians as possible by whatever means available to them.

In the end the vote was for 28 days detention, doubled from the initial 14 days which are permissible at present, but the damage to Blair's authority already has some calling for a vote of confidence in the House, while many of his own detractors within the Labour Party can hardly wait for the day of his departure from office.

Blair however will not go just yet, claiming that he was merely backing a request from the police, and that this was not a party political issue. As it is, we have effectively doubled the amount of time that someone can be held in custody without charge, but the real issue is how the law will be applied, and how terrorism itself is actually defined. In the US it has been mooted that any crime or felony could be construed as crime against the State, and can therefore be construed as terrorism, if only by proxy. Under such interpretation more or less anyone could be picked up and detained witohut charge, and what people need to remember is how they would feel were they to fall foul of such laws.

Even as this is being written, right on cue, news is coming in from Jordan, where three huge explosions have ripped apart luxury hotels in Amman, causing scores of deaths and injuries - it can only be a matter of time before such crimes are once again visited upon us here in the UK and elsewhere across the Western world, regardless of how long we can detain anyone for.

image end of the road Route 30 West

For Sale: Island with Mysterious Money Pit

Oak Island is up for sale - there's a legendary prophecy that states seven men will die before the treasure is found, and so far the body count is up to six, so I don't think I'll be submitting a bid just yet.

There is still no clear idea of what comprises the treasure, only that it has been extremely well hidden, and has exhausted men and their fortunes in vain efforts searching for it.

Sony aims at pirates - and hits users

I wrote earlier about the benefits of the Web, without mentioning file-sharing, a truly wordwide phenomenon that has taken many, including the music industry by surprise.

This links to an article describing Sony's actions to prevent pirate copies of its own products being made - and if attempts are made to delete such 'malware', the computer's CD drive may well become disabled.

Despite the antipathy of music makers to the idea of file-sharing, it's an activity that looks here to stay, albeit alongside i-Tunes and Napster.

Women get a bigger buzz from cartoons

Curious piece from New Scientist magazine about the differences between genders on how we perceive and react to cartoons. Apparently women have less expectations of a cartoon being funny, and when they subsequently find it amusing, their sense of reward is greater than in their male counterparts.

image Da Vinci cartoon 'The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Young St. John the Baptist' c. 1501

IBM chip slows down light

Very brief article discussing how IBM are playing with light-speed, slowing it down and then applying the results to chip technology.

Web’s never-to-be-repeated revolution

Brief article extolling the virtues of the web, and one that also makes the point that if the Web were invented t