Enigmatic object baffles supernova team

In this household at least, a hearty cheer rents the night air every time news of scientists being 'baffled' hits the stands. According to the news media, only scientists and experts are ever baffled, leaving the rest of us to wonder exactly how our states of befuddlement never justify us being told that we the public are qualified enough to warrant being baffled - presumably we have to have a good degree and a career if we are ever to be elevated to the hallowed realms of baffledom.

In this instance, a supernova explosion, spotted by our own superstar, the Hubble Telescope, grew bigger and brighter for a hundred days, instead of the usual twenty, sparking a furore in astronomical circles, as there appeared to be no galactic context in which the event had occured. Our current Universe coalesced from its hot, fluid state 13.5 billion years ago, and this recently observed explosion is estimated to have occurred a mere 1.5 billion years later, when the Universe was in its relative infancy.

Current opinion suggests that as there were no heavy elements contained within stars at the time, this type of explosion would have been more likely to occur - however, to date, this is the only comparable event of its kind, and the evidence for lone stars self-detonating seems sketchy. We might find in the future that we witnessed another failed Big Bang, as another Universe attempted to boot itself up within our own, like a small bubble forming inside a larger one - we can only hope that there are no repeats of this stellar catastrophism in our own neck of the woods.

The Boötes constellation in which the supernova appeared, has long been known, and considered by the Greeks and Romans to represent an ox-driver or herder, and to some depicted Demeter imparting the gift of agriculture to mankind, and to still others, a herder or chaser of bears, namely Ursae major and minor.

image Boötes the Herdsman

Computers 'set to read our minds'

Along with other humans, pets, and maybe the occasional alien, computers will be the next strand of intelligent life trying to judge the mental state of an individual by reading their facial expressions, presumably so that the silicon chip can better aid and assist the human with which it is engaged.

At first glance, it may appear that 'domesticating' computers in this way is a radical departure from anything humans have attempted before, especially when we compare this with the way in which the familiar and friendly dog first came to be domesticated, but the process by which dogs manifested themselves is markedly more mysterious than its modern day digital counterpart.

It is currently held that dogs first came to be used by humans around 15,000 years ago, and that all dogs today are descended from the grey wolf. Some of the earliest evidence for this comes from the Natufian village site of Ain Mallaha around 14,500 years b.p., where the bones of a puppy had been buried, as well as the burial at Hayonim, where three humans and two dogs were discovered.

It has been suggested that the original wolves to be domesticated were attracted to these early villages, as there were scraps of food and vermin readily available to them. From these, wolves that barked a lot when strangers approached might have been selected and bred for future use. Then, over a very short space of time, these wolves somehow became much smaller, a trait that is apparently to be found in all domesticated species - and as more time went by, somehow their genes were modified, leaving us with the bewildering array of 350 canine varieties currently on display, most of which look nothing like a grey wolf.

However, it's difficult to understand the means by which breeding wolves, no matter how selectively, creates another species - if you breed wolves with wolves, all you're going to get is more wolves. Genetic mutation is a favourite amongst evolutionists, and while on the surface it seems a neat solution, the means and causes of these mutations are completely unknown. When genes mutate, they generally tend to do so in a way that is detrimental to the host, and there is little or no evidence for genetic mutation being an evolutionary driver, or at any rate, one that creates brand new species.

At some point, 15,000 years ago, a 'magical ingredient' must have been inserted into the wolves' genome, one that allowed them to make the leap from wild marauders to house-trained minders - but we don't know the nature of that ingredient, let alone the donor or person that undertook this task. But whatever it was must have had a powerful and immediate effect, as the domesticating transition occurred in the 'evolutionary' blink of an eye - leaving the impression that someone or something had decreed that henceforth man and dog would be inseparable companions in the thousands of years that would follow.

Maybe live, hairy dogs will have had their day, shortly after a holographic cyber-dog will be able to switched on and off again at will - there you are, out walking the dog when an important call comes through - there's no time to return home and dump the pooch, so you merely switch it to standby, allowing you to save that particular walk, or, upon your return home, have Fidodechahedron re-appear at the front door, calculating your mood as you approach, and modifying its welcome to your predicted mood-set.

image Hayonim Cave

Early signs of elephant butchers

Britain today is an overcrowded set of islands, wherein some 60 million of us jostle for space, and up until a few years ago, was thought to have been largely free of people up until the Neolithic. But an increasing number of important finds has recently revealed that people have been carving a niche for themselves for hundreds of thousands of years.

This latest find is of the bones from an extinct type of elephant, twice the size of those roaming around at present, and dates back 400,000 years. We are lucky to find such treasures, and it's only because someone had the bright idea of digging up half the Kent countryside in pursuit of a dream involving high speed train travel to and from Euroland, that this opportunity has arisen.

The Britain of 400,000 years ago was a peninsular on the north-western tip of Europe, which at the time enjoyed a warmer climate and a spectacular array of exotic animals patrolling the landscape. The people believed to be responsible for the stone tools found more or less undisturbed at the butchery site are thought to have been the redoubtable Homo heidelbergensis, thought by some to have been the ancestors of the Neanderthal people who would appear some 100,000 years later.

This find, along with other recent discoveries detailed elsewhere on this blog, has led some to believe that there were greater numbers of people living here over longer periods of time, which in turn might indicate more sophisticated cultural activity, including the use of spoken language. As ever, we await with keen interest for even more finds that can provide further insights into Palaeolithic Britain and its environs.

image palaeoloxodon antiquus

Revolutionary research dispels the agricultural revolution

The agricultural revolution is the term used to describe the process by which humans went from living the hunter-gatherer, mobile life, to a sedentary existence that depended on the life cycles of plants to feed the population.

It is claimed that this turn towards farming was ultimately responsible for the foundation of civilisation, right through to the world as we know it today - so it's worth considering whether any sort of civilisation could have taken root without without the introduction of farming, as well as looking at the broader question of whether this would hold true for alien civilisations, should they exist.

What this article makes clear is that along with the mythical human revolution of 40,000 years ago, both these changes in human culture took place intermittently over many thousands of years, at many locations distant from one another. In the case of the first farmers, there were many experimental forays into the fields, which had their origins as wild gardens, climate change often brought to an end all such activity, sometimes for hundreds of years, at other times permananently.

As for today, it should be abundantly clear that no civilisation can last indefinitely by relying on farming to feed itself - sooner or later, the system will crash catastrophically, causing the starvation of all or many. The solution to this would presumably entail having a population that does not need to be fed, or watered - indicating that the future of humans will be guided by the electronic arms of our non- consuming cyber-selves. But even that epoch of humanity, which could well last for millennia, will probably also eventually crash, unless a limitless and free energy source can be acquired in the interim.

Ancient beads imply culture older than we thought

As a Finnish film director once said, 'people talk too much', in response to a question asking why so many of his characters tended towards the taciturn. In a way, he's quite right, as today we find it almost impossible to do or consider anything without talking to someone about it, resulting in endless chit chat about not very much.

Although the use of language can be linked to the manufacture of symbolic items, even more telling is the fact that the snail shells originated between 20 and 190 km from where they were found, indicating that some level of trade must have been involved, which of necessity, required verbal communication between buyer and seller. However the evidence isn't definite - it is suggested that no-one would have walked so far to obtain the raw materials, but maybe that's imposing 21st century reasoning on people who lived in a radically different world to ours, with the occasional trek across the landscape being undertaken by energetic people who had plenty of time and space on their hands.

The cave at Skhul is notable in that although modern humans are believed to have been there at 100,000 years bp, there were earlier and later occupations of the same site by Neanderthals. This is thought to indicate that there was a brief florescence of more modern culture at that date, which did not survive, but later re-appearing in Europe at around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. However, now that we know the Neanderthals were capable of creating stone tools much more complex and at a much earlier date of 250,000 years ago, it might be possible that the shell bead makers at Skhul were themselves Neanderthal, and no modern humans actually dwelt there.

This last suggestion would indicate that ideas and new ways of doing things did not originate from a single source, but were the result of some sort of spontaneously generated meme that struck at random times over hundreds of thousands of years, at various discrete locations across the ancient world, before gaining a ubiquitous and permanent foothold around 50,000 years ago.

Front garden yields ancient tools

A mysterious article that aptly demonstrates why field archaeology can sometimes tell us more from the discovery of artifacts, than entire books theorising on the cognitive abilities of our distant ancestors.

I'm currently reading Steven Mithen's 'Singing Neanderthals' book, and it is his contention that Neanderthals not only lacked language, but did not have the wherewithal to invent any. Mithen proposes that Neanderthals' stone tool-kits did not change or diversify from a fairly basic suite in all the 2-300,000 years of their existence. He maintains that if language had been in use, tools would have changed, presumably as the users discussed new and better methods of improving the technology. And because of what he sees as being very low numbers of population, he contends that there was no demographic process capable of transmitting language and ideas across the world and down through the generations, with little or no knowledge being universally acquired.

However, appraisal of the two tools found at Cuxton in Kent, suggests that the level of skill required to produce such implements, as well as the fact that they were found together, indicates a more complex set of behaviours than would be expected at that time. Indeed, if these tools are Neanderthal, they date from about the time that they began to occupy Europe, meaning that they were much smarter from the beginning of their existence - had these tools been found 50 or a hundred years ago, our entire perception of Neanderthals might have been elevated - but the die has been cast, and Neanderthals will doubtless continue to be considered shambling brutes with an attitude problem, long into the future.

But the points Mithen raised still raise valid questions - if there really were so few about, how was language transmitted btween distant groups of people who would seldom have encountered one another. Neanderthal stone technology did remain roughly the same for the duration of their sojourn on Earth, right up until the Chatelperronian, when there was an abrupt change that immediately preceeded the moderns' arrival in Europe - but the fact that it didn't develop, now seems to be unrelated to their supposedly limited intellectual capacity.

In an indirectly related piece of research, Paul Mellars believes he has come up with evidence that modern human behaviours began in fits and starts in a type of mosaic pattern, rather than the accepted view that modern behaviour began at a specific date in the last 100,00 years, and continued on an upward curve to the present day. He bases his ideas on his studies from two sites in the Middle East, where two periods of Neanderthal occupation were divided by a modern presence, which according to Mellars, failed to establish itself securely enough to avoid being supplanted by Neanderthal survivors in the region.

Backs to the Future

Although we tend to think of the future as something that lies ahead of us, with the past tucked away to the rear, the Aymara people of the Andes view the world in the opposite way. To them, the past represents the known, something that they have seen with their eyes, and consequently see the past as lying before them. As for the future, it is considered to be something completely unknown and as yet unseen - and as such, not only to they not discuss it, but they also consider it to be pointless to even think about a future that cannot be known. In conversation they point forward when discussing past events, while gesturing backwards over their shoulders when considering the future.

They also employ a tertiary logic system, one that gives a third option to the usual binary considerations of yes/no or true/false, which may in the future be used to give computers a third logical option of choice, however abstract that may be.

However, this unique concept of past and future might only last as long as the Aymara language, currently spoken by only a couple of million people - younger Aymara who speak fluent Spanish, gesture forward to the future and back to the past, as we do, which must make for some confusing conversations between young and old.

schmoo on the run: super horror at the supermarket

The weekend is upon us, which for many means a trip to the supermarket to stock up on all those essentials, which are often on offer at reduced prices. However, after reading the attached book review, we begin to see the true cost of having endless supplies of cheap food, from the environmental consequences, to the huge cost to health services tasked with rectifying wrecked human beings who have all but succumbed to the twin evils of sugar and salt.

'Fang' dentures link to skeleton

Jim Chatters, the man most responsible for bringing 9,300 year-old Kennewick Man to the attention of an anthropologically divided world, is back in the news again, this time with a great discovery from the one-time paradise that we now know as the land of Mexico.

The remains of a man whose upper and front teeth had been removed, causing abcesses that had been present at the time of his death, have been found below a painted cliff in a secluded mountain area in western Mexico, and the word round the camp-fire has it that 4,500 years ago he may have worn a denture constructed from jaguar or wolf teeth. His own teeth were cut right down to the pulp to make room for such a decoration, which may have had associations with the underworld, and it may be that his own journey there was hastened as a result of his fellows' enthusiasm for cutting-edge dentistry.

The good news for him, scarce though it may have been, was that his life appears to have been largely free of ardour brought about by hard work, and we can only hope his enforced cosmetics were not passed on to his next of kin or other beneficary of his will, especially as biting food would no longer have been possible - though at least there was no need to have his food pre-chewed by toothsome others.

According to National Geographic, his teeth were filed down over a lengthy period of time, rather than being extracted in one fell swoop, with an entire palate of teeth being inserted later, almost certainly for ceremonial reasons, though whether this individual was shamanic, we don't yet know. Further details of the cliff paintings also describe dancing and hunting human figures, ascribing a culture known as the mesoamerican Archaic, which endured from 11,500 years bp to 4,500 years b.p., making this burial contemporary with the transition to the later cultures that spawned the Aztec and Maya.

More here

Basques were fishermen more than 8,000 years ago

It seems hard to believe that 8,300 years ago, there was such a shortage of food in Europe that these early Basques depended on deep sea fishing for as much as 50% of their diet - which sounds quite surprising, especially as we tend to think of Europe at the time as being a well-stocked larder, with plenty of food available to a fairly sparse population.

But rising temperatures and sea levels meant less land, which in turn meant fewer resources for a population that was starting to boom right across Europe - and it was roughly around this period when we start to see organised violence on a communal scale, with the first farmers being forced to protect their territories and resources against marauding bands of hungry foragers. It has been shown that in some cases, a village or farmstead would be attacked at harvest time, after all the hard work had been done - the stores would be plundered, and in some cases the entire population of the village was massacred, with the invaders simply moving in, and taking over. In these circumstances, spending a lot of time out at sea seems something of a sensible option.

Astronomers link human evolution, cosmic radiation

With The Professionals' lyric 'just another dream, just like any other dream...' echoing to fade in the background, remotecentral suddenly awoke, and groggily realised that almost an entire week had elapsed since conscious memory could recall anything resembling meaningful life. So with a sigh and a yawn, a flick o' the cat and a click on the mouse, we lurch unsteadily once more towards the general direction of cyber-space.

Remarkably little seems to be going on in the outside world, save for inside various football stadia located around a hazy Germany, the blanket coverage of which managed to nearly obscure Nick Cook's new-ish documentary, 'UFOs: The Secret Evidence', shown in the UK on Channel 4.

Best known for his excellent book 'The Hunt For Zero Point', Cook continues some of the lines of inquiry arising from this work, and although there is little in the way of startling new revelations, he does manage to cover quite a bit of ground investigating our mysterious skies and some of the enigmas that emanate from them. Treading the well-worn path from the Foo Fighters, Roswell, Project Blue Book, via various AFBs and witnesses of varying reliability, we arrive at the same conclusion that there's definitely something going on, but no-one seems to have a clear idea of exactly what this may be.

The linked article is barely worth reading, except to marvel at the innacuracy of the link to cosmic radiation, claimed to be responsible for the emergence of modern humans 40,000 years ago. Modern humans are known to have originated nearer 200,000 years ago, but it wasn't until around 50,000 years ago, that moderns gained a strong enough demographic foothold to facilitate and sustain the rapid spread of novelty and spoken language.

This mistake is compounded later in the article, with the revelation that a nebula began emitting radiation around 200,000 years ago, a date they ascribe to the incept date of the Neanderthals (they had already been around for more than 50,000 years at this time) - whereas in fact this date corresponds far more closely with the birth of moderns, so in a muddled way they might have made a case for timing radiation events with what they claim to be mutating human genes.

What they seem to have failed to address is whether or not these cosmic rays caused genetic change in other species of either fauna or flora, as it would be rather odd if mankind were the only creature to have been affected in this way.

Scientists build a world of 'software beings'

There is a growing belief in some quarters that we are merely a software programme running inside an artificial and holographic environment created by unknown programmers, who presumably derive some sort of sadistic fulfillment by sitting back, and watching us as we go around screwing things up in ever more inventive and disastrous ways.

With the invention of computers we have both enslaved and freed ourselves at the same time - enslaved because we now live in a world that would more or less collapse without them, but freed in the sense that we can begin to create artificial life in virtual worlds, that over time, will become completely accessible to us, allowing us to effectively leave this part of the space/time set-up, to live potentially everlasting lives anew in places we can as yet scarcely imagine.

As for the two thousand cyber-beings created in the New Ties project, it is reported that they are the first to be created with the specific purpose of seeing how they interract with one another, in what are fairly limited circumstances.

For example, they have characteristics such as gender, mortality and metabolic rates, with physical attributes such as size also tacked on. Additionally, they will have language, coupled with the ability to learn, as well as pass on traits and attributes through reproduction. They presumably won't be affected by climate, illness, poverty or boredom - such are the advantages of living in a two-dimensional universe.

Although we are now beginning to see that our own 3-D, plus Time, universe may in fact comprise many more hidden dimensions, there is every possibility that we will never be able to access these, so tightly bound are we by the physical constraints imposed upon us by this version of reality.

There is every reason to believe that we as humans may one day cease to populate this 3-D world, choosing instead to load our consciousness into a 1 or 2 dimensional place, moving left and right, and up and down across a liquid crystal sea, watched over by no-one at all, except perhaps by our controlling programmers, trying to work out how to extract us from a system that we have somehow managed to make inaccessible to them. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if the subjects of New Ties will themselves get to the point where they invent an artificial reality of their own, into which they will seek to escape from us.

"Hobbit" Island Tools Predate Modern Humans, Study Says

Following their recent article that sought to dismiss the findings on Flores as diseased modern humans, National Geographic have in part redeemed themselves with the publication of this most recent article. Although it completely refutes their previous story, no mention is made of it here, marking a lack of logical continuity in the debate.

This latest twist concerns the comparison and analysis of two sets of stone tools found on Flores - those found in association with the hobbit fossils, at Liang Bua cave, and others from the Mata Menge site, dating back 800,000 years, and previously thought to have been made by Homo erectus.

It is becoming clear that the hobbits were probably not
descended from Homo erectus, as their morphology differs too greatly - for example, the hobbits are thought ot have arms long enough to have reached their knees, causing some to propose that they might represent an unknown species of australopithecus. The great mystery here is how they managed to reach Flores, and from where they originated. Mike Morwood, one of the orginal discoverers of the hobbits, has opined that they might have originated in Australia, though as yet, there is no evidence to support this.

Although it's possible to imagine Homo erectus building ocean-goinng craft capable of reaching Flores nearly a million years ago, that capability would surely have been beyond australopithecines - nevertheless, the fact remains that somehow, these 1m tall creatures, with brains the size of a grapefruit, definitely made a sea-crossing from the mainland, some time within the last million years, and once there, either copied tools from an earlier occupant of Flores, or came up with their own, either there or from wherever they had set out from.

There's an outside possibility that Homo erectus were still the original occupants of Flores, building boats that carried them across the Wallace Line - but instead of travelling there alone, they may have taken the hobbits with them - and although we can only guess at their motives for doing so, the possibility is an intriguing one.

The publication at the end of this year of the first book on these discoveries will be eagerly awaited by all, but as the cave at Liang Bua continues to remain scandalously closed for further excavation, the book itself might not contain as much new and relevant data as could be hoped for.

100,000 year-old DNA sequence allows new look at Neandertal's genetic diversity

As we know, a newsday without Neanderthals is a day without news, so this article about the first true Europeans is a promising way to start the week. Although no new Neanderthals have been discovered, new DNA analysis of a 100,000 year-old tooth, from the Meuse Valley in Belgium, indicates they were more dynamic than previously thought.

The gist of this report is that Neanderthals were far more genetically diverse than hitherto supposed - which implies that that they probably travelled, explored and interbred with each other over comparatively large geographical distances, over long periods of time. Neanderthals are often portrayed as solitary and culturally sedentary, sticking pretty much close to home, and certainly not up for much in the globetrotting stakes.

Neanderthals, over the course of 300,000 years, populated a vast swathe of land, stretching from the northern reaches of Europe, including Britain, right across to Middle Eastern locations in Iraq and Israel, indicating that they were just as capable as the later, modern humans, at colonising and exploiting a range of habitats in a variety of environments.

Ancient cave in western France contains rare finds

Update on the discovery last year at the cave in Vilhonneur, in which a human burial dating back 27,000 years has been found - with the added bonus of a minimalist depiction of a human face painted onto the wall, as described here:

"...two pieces of calcite that split were used to form the hair with two black horizontal strokes depicting the eyes. A vertical stroke formed the nose and another horizontal stroke the mouth."

With the exception of the Wounded Man of Lascaux, and the possible faces drawn onto the floor of the same site, the vast majority of Palaeolthic cave art features contemporary animals, both real and imagined, so the discovery of a human face depicted on a wall is very unusual, and unique in the context of a cave burial. It may turn out to be the earliest known face in Europe, if not the world, though the method of execution, i.e. using the natural contours of the rock face to deliniate the subject, is everywhere to be found in Palaeolithic art.

We are told that the site is now in the hands of the French Ministry of Culture, from whom more detail, and hopefully some more images, will shortly be forthcoming. Let's just hope they make a better job of it than their recent efforts at Lascaux, as reported recently on this blog.

More here

link to Cussac cave, similar site, 22,000 years b.p.

Electric Fish on Verge of Evolutionary Split

A common complaint amongst Creationists and ID proponents is that if evolution were real, we'd constantly, or at least occasionally, be seeing the birth of new species - instead, the only new species around are those created by mankind dabbling with the genes of domesticated animals, leading most notably, to all manner of cats and dogs littering the landscape. As I understand it, a new species is created when the DNA of a species is altered to the extent that the new and old models can no longer breed and produce offspring - or, if any births do occur, the result will be an infertile crossbreed, such as the mighty mule.

In this article from Live Science, a species of tabloid news dispenser, it is claimed that electric fish, sharing the same DNA, but emitting different signals, are on the verge of speciation - i.e. splitting into two new species. However, if the two differing fish have the same DNA, they will still be able to produce offspring, meaning they are still the same species and no physical evolution has taken place at all.

What we are seeing, in the use of two different electric signals amongst the same fish population, is evolution of a cultural nature, where different behaviour patterns emerge - but how this in itself would cause the genes in one or the other of the fish to diverge in the future, to the extent that no further procreation is possible, is not explained here. There might well be two distinct populations, but if their DNA matches, they will still be genetically capable of reproduction.

Of more interest is discovering what has caused some fish to start behaving differently from one another in the first place, and how they were physically able to modify their electrical discharges - was it learned behaviour from one orginal fish, or did the change take place simultaneously across large numbers of fish?

Evolutionists are having a hard enough time as it is, and with poorly reasoned articles like this, their efforts to convince the world of their validity, will only get harder as time goes by.

Archaic contribution to modern human populations

Although nobody is quite sure where exactly modern humans came from, a new study of ancient African populations proposes that the newly emerged Homo sapiens, from about 200,000 years bp onward, may well have interbred with the pre-existing archaic peoples, creating an admixture of species, whose genetic fingerprints can still be detected today.

This would imply a model that does away with the need for a replacement of old populations by newer humans, intent on wiping out the competition, whereas in this proposal, the ancient genetic pool would have been slowly absorbed by the moderns.

The startling conclusion, described in the Provisional Abstract, is that Neanderthals in Europe, and an unknown West African species of ancient human, contributed at least 5% to modern gene pools, flatly contradicting the estblished anthropological view that Neanderthals were so different from we moderns that any inter-breeding in Palaeolithic Europe would not have been possible.

No doubt someone from academia will attempt to debunk these findings, but the proposal that Neanderthals never went truly extinct, instead living on, through their genes, in ourselves, is one that certainly finds favour on this blog.

There is a curious parallel between conservative anthropology and New Age literature, both of which claim that we, modern Homo sapiens, are a species, not only vastly superior to, but completely distinct from, all those that went before us - a view mistakenly held by both parties.

Anthropology needs to accept that we are at least partially related to Neanderthals, moreover, we can probably trace our roots back as far as heidelbergensis and erectus, although by now those traces would be vanishingly faint.

For their part, some New Age writers, such as Laurence Gardner, Sitchin et al, tend to portray all humans before ourselves as mindless brutes, incapable even of speech, or accomplishing the controlled use of fire, locked in a bloody conflict of tooth and claw with Nature - until one fine day, from out of the blue, aliens of god-like stature appeared, who for a variety of reasons created modern humans - a perfect new master race, ostensibly unblemished by the murky presence of antiquity in the depths of the gene pool.

It may well be that beings from elsewhere did create modern humans, and if that's the case, it's just as reasonable to assume they created all our predecessors as well - we are led to believe that we are the apotheosis of intelligence related success, far smarter and more capable than anything that has ever lived on this planet. However, it's worth bearing in mind that all the other versions of early man were equally phenomenal in the way that they exploited their respective environments in completely new and dynamic ways, never before witnessed by flora and fauna alike.

In their time, each new species of human represented the cutting edge of humanity, newly upgraded hearts and minds eagerly licking their wounds and cursing their luck, before heading back out again to solve whatever problem that had most recently challenged them - and in doing so, surviving for millions of years, nearly all of which was probably done without the promptings of fond or fierce alien forefathers.

In conclusion, we could well be alien hybrids, and so might our ancestors - equally, we could be totally home-grown, evolving or morphing into existence by means unknown - but either way, we are inextricably linked to our ancestors, no matter how fervently some may wish that not to be true.

The Case Of The Neutron Star With A Wayward Wake

Ignoring news that the US regards George Bush as the worst president since 1945, and with indications that Blogger's servers are once again in the primary stages of meltdown, this post will either appear once, twice, or possibly not at all, judging by the results of the afternoon so far.

Undaunted, we plod along in the wake of a dizzy neutron star, J0617, whose current location is puzzling the astronomers at Chandra X-Ray Observatory - it's travelling at the correct speed, slightly faster than the speed of sound ( in Space, no-one can hear you boom), but travelling on a trajectory that is perpendicular to the norm, were it to have originated from its associated supernova.

Even more strange is the jet of cooler gas being emitted in its wake, as well as "a second point-like feature embedded in the X-ray nebula around the neutron star", but the good news is that observations will continue for the next 10 years, though hopefully it will be sooner than that before we learn more.

Bocksten Man shows his face after 700 years

Bocksten Man may indeed be revealing his face after seven centuries, but due to a curious oversight that seems to be afflicting more editors, everywhere, every day, once again there is no image. I can't help wondering which editor made the executive decision of reading this article, whose sole purpose is to give a visual description of a facial reconstruction, before giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up, deciding to go ahead and publish it image-free. Nice one.

Actually, there are one or two other details of this story worth a quick muse - the man, whose body was discovered in a Swedish bog, apparently died from three strikes to the skull - possibly murdered for recruiting soldiers, or even worse, because he was a tax collector - but nowhere is there a clue to indicate what might have led to these odd conclusions. But at least they go on to admit they have no idea why there was the branch of a straw roof protruding from his chest - I guess they just did things differently in ye oldene dayes.

In the meantime, the search is on for a look at this guy's face, but if it's anything like the usual result they come up with in these reconstructions, he'll probably just end up looking like an unemployed axe-murderer, having a difficult day.

anatomy of a find here

Hominids' cave rave-ups may link music and speech

There's an unwritten law that states no piece of writing should ever begin with the words "It was a dark and stormy night...", and although in this instance the night referred to was a strictly Neanderthal affair, dating back some 50,000 years, it's probable they had a similar rule for the opening lines of stories related amongst themselves. Laughing in the face of literary tradition, this line illustrates an image of a noisy group of Neanderthals, standing and sitting around in a cave, whilst tapping and bashing out rhythm and melody on the rocks around them, in an apparent attempt to pass the time.

In this belated review of Steven Mithen's 'The Singing Neanderthals', we are given the basic premise of the book, which holds that Neanderthals did not have a word-based spoken language such as we use today, but instead employed a form of communication dubbed "HMMMMM" -- standing for "holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic." - which according to author Steven Mithen, means that Neanderthals used a mixture of musical phrases and body language to convey their messages back and forth to one another.

From these early roots, Mithen contends that our modern passion for music was implanted, to such an extent that we appear to be hard-wired for both listening to and composing music - indeed, it is almost unheard of for anyone to claim they don't like music in any of its forms.

Despite extensive research into a range of subjects, from the human brain, fossil remains and the musical and linguistic abilities of brain-damaged people, Mithen admits that his imagination also had a great part as he sought proof of his theories. In this respect, Mithen should be praised for his creative thnking and bringing it to bear on one of the least understood species of human, those famous Neanderthals, although in my opinion, the origins and use of music could easily reach back as far as Homo erectus, between 1 and 2 million years.

Mithen argues for music as having become embedded in our collective psyche, passed down though the ages, in the manner of a meme, but it may yet transpire that some aspect of our physical and mental configuration is pre-selected to code for musical stimuli, potentially meaning each one of us is wearing our own pair of quantum Red Shoes.

image 'The Neanderthal' Frank Frazetta

New twist in 'hobbit' human story

Although I would never like to think of myself as an advocate of news censorship, the linked article provides a good example of stories that should be published, at the expense of others, such as the ludicrous article doing the rounds a couple of weeks back, concerning the futile efforts of Martin and others to debunk what is plainly a new hominid species.

Far from being a 'new twist', another device beloved by headline writers, this story merely re-iterates the theory that stone tools, found in the vicinity of the Flores fossils, were almost certainly manufactured by those people.

The point of contention is the brain size of Homo floresiensis, roughly equivalent to a chimp, is thought by some to be far too small to allow the owners to develop culture, let alone a tool industry - not sure of the lower limit of brain capacity previously considered necessary for such activities, but probably in the region of 700cc plus. One of the main contentions of anthropology is that increased brain size directly relates to cognitive ability, and that the rise of humankind directly corresponds cranial capacity that appears to have expanded in fits and starts over the past 5 million years.

We know from previous studies that the island of Flores was inhabited at least 900,000 years ago, evidence of which is supported by stone tools found elsewhere on the island, and securely dated in stratified archaeology - and now a team headed by Adam Brumm, has compared these very ancient tools with those of the comparatively recent 'hobbits', believed to have died out as recently as 12,000 years.

As the tools from both periods bear strong resemblance to one another, it is being suggested that a single, and very long, lineage of humans were responsible. It was hitherto believed that the first settlers were Homo erectus, but the newer 'hobbits' bear very little similarity to known erectus specimens, and it is now being suggested that the 'hobbits' themselves were descendants of a mysterious, unknown species, that preceeded them, with suggestions that they have originated in Australia, although as yet there is no physical evidence to support this.

In the meantime, there is still no further news of whether Lian Bua cave will remain closed, preventing further research and study, crucial to collecting more essential detail needed to clarify the current enigma. Slightly better news indicates that the first book describing the situation so far is due out at the end of this year, but if future and updated books are to be published, the cave needs to be re-opened, bringing to an end a petty intellectual feud instigated by Indonesia's 'top' anthropologist, responsible for immersing material from the site in a liquid that rendered impossible any DNA analysis of that particular fossil.

More here and here