French excavation reveals Neanderthal 'creative side'

Very brief article via The Independent, discussing new work undertaken at the Grotte aux Fees, and discussed by Professor Joao Zilhao, who contends that 'sophisticated artefacts' found there, and originally attributed to modern humans, were in fact made by Neanderthals, 44,000 years ago, some four millennia before the estimated arrival of moderns, who are generally credited with being the first and only humans to design and manufacture jewellery.

This revelation could seriously undermine the work of people like Steven Mithen, who has written at great length telling us that Neanderthals had no spoken language, because if they had, we would supposedly see more innovative behaviour from them. Expect plenty of backlash from the Neanderthal nay-sayers, who will continue to claim that only we moderns have ever been capable of symbolic thoughts and gestures.

Hopefully more to follow once I've tracked down some more detail, as this could be one of the great anthropological break-throughs of our time.

Will the hobbit argument ever be resolved

No, would seem to be the short answer, and later on I'll be updating this post to explain why - but in the meantime it's enough to know that this controversy will continue long into the night, largely because one group of academics appear to have made their minds up, or had their minds made up for them, that there is no room in the annals of prehistory to accommodate another unknown species - I believe this is because the implications go against many conclusions that have been drawn about what it takes to be a fully functioning modern human, and academia is going to have a very hard time explaining how such enigmatic creatures could possibly have come into existence. More, as ever, to follow...

Astronomers Discover Rapidly Forming, Large Proto-disc Galaxies 3 Billion Years After Big Bang

It's back in time to Universe - the Early Years, and this article announces the discovery of large disc galaxies that formed a great deal more rapidly, and a lot sooner after the Universe's hot, explosive phase, suggested here as being a mere 3 billion years after the event.

However, with the recent news that the Universe itself may be 15% older than previous estimates, perhaps it's more accurate to assume that instead of 3 billion years after the putative Big Bang, the actual figure of these formations should be closer to 5 billion years, which wouldn't make these disc galaxies quite so precocious.

Whatever the true figure, the it would appear that galaxies similar to our Milky Way have been around for at least 11 billion years - which might indicate the existence of early solar systems and planets capable of sustaining that mysterious phenomenon we know as life, though where that orginated and why, still remains to be resolved.

Why Scientists Shouldn't Be Surprised by the Popularity of Intelligent Design

In the event of mankind realising that Intelligent Design was responsible for the existence of ourselves and everything around us, no-one really knows, or has suggested, what we should do with such information - should we attempt contact with the Designer, construct a new reality for ourselves which would run according to our perceived needs and wants - or would there be a general resignation, whereby the futility of our existence would cause us to just give up in the quest to determine the facts of our origins and fate.

Objections from evolutionists tend to concentrate on the animal kingdom, citing numerous examples of one species that has at some time changed to become a new one. It's just a shame for them that we are living through a great die-off, and for the time being it's highly unlikely we'll be seeing any new suites of creatures appear - everything faunal we discover has already been around for ages, and there are no clues or guarantees as to what 'evolution' might produce in the future.

Moreover, if we expand our view out from Earth, we also see signs that not even solar systems or indeed the Universe can be seen as the natural products of organic evolution - rather we see a patchwork of anomalies stretching for billions of warped light years in every direction, starting with our nearest cosmic neighbour, Moon, which by rights should not exist in its current configuration.

This article deals with generally held public conceptions of what is considered 'common sense', a facet of the mind that seems to be inherently fallible, as detailed therein. It goes on to make rather dubious claims, such as alternative medicine being ineffective, and that the American public takes a broader view which encompasses theories not considered viable by science, implying an inherent belief system that negates rational thought, is to blame.

However, a great deal of scientific enquiry requires as much need for a core set of beliefs and values as do religions and other cults - maybe it's the perception that science can neither answer some of our most basic questions, such as how life began, or indeed many of the more complicated concepts, like how life will end, and what happens after that.. All around us there are anomalies and exceptions that science is unable to explain, but rather than admit defeat, its proponents often adopt a patronising stance, dismissing as pseudoscience that which cannot be physically demonstrated or duplicated.

If we have a posthuman future, will it mean we are taking over the reins of our alleged designer, making him or her obsolete - by assuming control over our destiny as we create consciousness and sentience enabled universes of our own. And some time later even deeper into the future, the (eternal) cycle could continue, as our conscious creations discern their own artificial origins, and go about creating yet another universe populated by their idea of designed beings suitable for the job.

The Hobbit Wars Heat Up

Excellent article from Time Magazine, which includes responses from the discoverers of the Flores remains, who vehemently maintain they have brought to light a previously unknown type of human, of miniature stature, but equipped with puzzlingly advanced technological prowess, as evidenced by stone tools found in their immediate vicinity.

The view of this dispute from the outside world is described here as being more in keeping with feuding students, rather than the reasoned and rational debate we would apparently expect from such high-powered intellects.

But anthropology, like its cousin archaeology, has from its inception been beset by warring academics, whose disagreements have often led to complete breakdowns in communication, with opposing camps refusing even to speak to one another.

Looking back over the history of this story from the time it broke last year, makes for depressing reading - what should have been heralded as one of the greatest finds in the field for maybe a century, battle lines were immediately drawn up, seemingly between traditionalists who regard the story of human evolution as seen by them as being effectively set in stone, and their opponents who claimed a new species for all mankind.

The official acceptance of a new human species would confer on its discoverers lasting fame, not only in anthropology, but across the wider world stage as well. Such situations can invoke personal envy and professional jealousy amongst other academics who have made no such discoveries of their own, and in my opinion this is likely to be what has happened in the Homo floresiensis debate.

For further refutation of the diseased humans hypothesis, keep an eye out for a paper due to be published by Colin Groves in the 'Journal of Human Evolution', in which he dismisses the PNAS team as having 'subtly shaped the evidence to fit their conclusion....' while Henry Gee at Nature accuses the PNAS authors of 'cherry-picking'their evidence.

On a more local note, it is reported that the past islanders on Flores related stories of people referred to as the ebu gogo, who were 3 feet in height, covered with hair and dwelt in limestone caves, apparently disappearing around the 16th century. Although the hobbits are thought to have become extinct some 12,000 years ago as the result of a volcanic eruption, the enigmatic ebu gogo may well have traced their roots back to that time.

Team finds 'proof' of dark matter

If we really are living in an artificial Universe, the manufacturers have included some fairly impressive extras in the box, not least the extension that allows clusters of galaxies to collide, creating enough destructive energy to 'completely evaporate and pulverise planet Earth ten trilion trillion times over', according to Maxim Markevitch, a prominent astrophycisist.

It is from collisions such as these that they were able to discern the gravitational signature of dark matter, said to make up the majority of matter in the Universe. Galactic clusters appear to have much greater gravity than can be explained by the amount of visible matter they contain - as an alternative to dark matter existing, it has also been suggested that gravity might work in an entirely different way on a scale of light years, to the more local effects familiar to us here on Earth.

However, none of this tells us any more about the nature and origins of either dark matter or dark energy, and it will probably be some considerable time yet before we know more.

Chandra link

Questions that call for a genius

There must be any number of subjects that need clarification, but in this article there are only 4 questions under consideration, and whether or not they need a genius to solve them, there's no reason why the rest of us can't have a go at answering them.

First up is the Higgs boson particle, a theoretical particle that 'latches on to other particles and gives them mass'. Moreover, it has been proposed that if this particle did not exist, presumably nothing in the Universe would have any mass, which in turn suggests that there could be no physical matter of any description. Although never seen before, the people at CERN plan to detect one, or maybe more, by deploying a 17-mile super-collider.

I'm not sure that a genius is required to observe and analyse the results of beams of charged particles smashing into each other at frighteningly high velocities - someone with extremely sharp eyesight, and able to view events at say 100,000 frames per second would presumably be a desirable staff asset in this instance. The genius applied to this project came with the guy who dreamt up the idea of the ghostly particle in the first place, rather than those scientists currently attempting to prove him right or wrong.

Nor will it take a genius to decide if there is life on another planet - life will either be observed or it won't, regardless of whether the astronomers involved are at genius level or not. The genius required in this case will be interpreting what sort of life we have discovered, and then extrapolating that data to broaden the search to look for yet more.

Prime numbers have long been a favourite mystery of mathematicians everywhere, and designing an equation that would predict a pattern of their distribution has been the ultimate challenge in this field - I know nothing of maths, other than it seems needlessly difficult to comprehend, and as such I'm quite prepared to concede that at least one genius, and maybe many more, is required to solve this particular problem.

The final subject on this list concerns the fate of our Universe - will it continue to expand forever, or will it reach a certain size, whereupon it starts contracting back in on itself, until all matter in the Universe is concentrated into one single, tiny point, that itself will doubtlessly explode to create another new Universe to replace this old one.

But at the point when the Universe stops expanding, and is about to go into shrink mode, there should be a brief period when the Universe achieves a kind of stasis, or perfect balance - neither growing nor collapsing, but freezing into a motionless sea of stars.

Whether or not this stasis could somehow be maintained, or even whether such a move would be beneficial in any way, I have no idea, and I'm not sure if even a genius would know the answer to that one - but in the event it just stops dead its tracks one day, I quite like the idea of visitors from another Universe arriving in ours to find it perfectly preserved for eternity as if set in some sort of cosmic amber, frozen and lifeless, with maybe an alien genius able and willing to re-boot us all back into life.

Why doesn't America believe in evolution?

One the main problems confronting the evolutionists and their arch enemies, the creationists, is that both sides are quite wrong, and it is this fact alone that ensures this pointless debate will rage on unabated for many years to come, with no hope of a satisfactory conclusion ever being reached.

So does it really matter if we were created from clay by an overseeing deity, or indeed if we evolved from microbes living in a pool of hot mud, back in the good old days of proto-prehistory? It's likely that this is a false dichotomy, especially if it turns out we are an artifice, the product of a strange mind with slightly shaky hands.

If we had a definitive answer tomorrow, would Earth's history veer madly off-course - maybe that would depend on whether God got the nod, or instead was definitively proved not to exist.

But as mankind looks set to progress and develop into something new, and probably a great deal more powerful, it might be argued that both God and evolution, as concepts, would cease to matter. Humans would theoretically be able to duplicate their creators' supposed roles, by sparking up life and effectively cheating death, at both micro and macro levels.

So it just remains to be seen for how much longer we will be shackled with belief systems that seem to have irretrievably broken apart, though it may be yet possible that we end up believing in nothing, conceding defeat to a mute force that cannot be contacted or traced in any way.

Top 10: Weirdest Cosmology Theories

Should you find yourself pondering the nature of the Universe that we inhabit, the linked article rattles off a few of the possibilities that are currently doing the rounds - personally I prefer the last one on the list, in which mention is made of Professor Nick Bostrum.

It is his belief that our Universe is itself artificial, the construct of advanced beings who have aquired some pretty impressive skills along the way, including the simulation of consciousness, that aspect of ourselves which seems to separate us from the vast majority of life on this planet.

Given that there are so many inexplicable paradoxes, both down here on terra firma, as well as the weird anomalies in space, which seem to increase with every passing discovery, it is suggestive of a Universe imperfectly constructed, albeit breathtaking in its breadth and vision.

It might be worth considering that we can tell all this isn't real just by all the 'mistakes' we discover around us - but are these geniune errors, or are they part of a coded message for us to interpret - and what, if any, is the prize we humans can expect to win. My feeling is that there probably is no reward, as such, for working out that we are artificial - for all we know, our controllers may just decide to pull the plug the moment they realise they've been identified and recognised by us for who they really are.

No Hobbits In This Shire

The horror, the horror...yet more rubbish from those who should know better, in this tiresome dispute over whether the hobbits of Flores are a species in their own right. It's been a long while since we heard from Teuku Jakob, who apparently does not read the research of others, preferring instead to forward his own daft ideas to a world that shouldn't do him the favour of giving him a moment's credence.

As before, his team have concentrated their feeble and mis-directed efforts on erroneously analysing a single skull, without taking into consideration any of the other post-cranial material, such as the exceptionally long arms that would have reached the creatures' knees, as well as the fact there are at least nine other individuals so far recovered in the cave, displaying similar features.

The oddest aspect of the behaviour of Jakob and others, apart fom the appalling damage they did to the skull whilst in their 'care', is their absolute determination from the beginning of this saga to deny any possibility that a new, and very enigmatic being, could have seemingly emerged from the ether. The impression given is that if Jacob had found these remains, it's extremely unlikely they would have seen the light of day.

This probably has as much to do with the fact that these fossils have been found on a fairly remote island, and these people cannot imagine a means by which the hobbits could have got there. But as they know, Homo erectus artifacts dating to at least 840,000 years ago have been found on the same island, so we know that somehow this location could be reached, even if that did mean navigating across the open ocean, or travelling by some other means not yet discovered.

But what Teuku Jakob and his acolytes have decided is that because they don't understand the circumstances in which these people came into being, the idea of an unknown species cannot be true. And to shore up their position, they have banned any further excavations taking place in the cave, for at least this year, presumably just in case any more impossible people should pop out of the ground. This is both a dereliction of duty and an exercise in intellectual cowardice far beyond the scope of normal anthropology, and it is only to be regretted that academic depravity on this scale should ever be granted the seal of official approval.

About the only good news in the offing is that Professor Mike Morwood, the man who actually made the initial discovery, is due to publish a book some time around the end of this year, so let's hope he's tapping away like fury on his keyboard, in order that he can put a few people right on a great many issues.

SMART-1 towards final impact

With all the recent fuss over whether or not Pluto qualifies as a planet, it was mentioned in passing that our Moon is actually bigger than its distant cousin - in which case, the Moon itself could be considered a planet in its own right. Of course, its unlikely ever to be granted this upgrade whilst it remains in orbit around us, but the facts indicate the relative futility of deciding what is or isn't a planet - but it keeps various people occupied and funded, so who are we to gripe.

Back in September 2003, SMART-1 was launched, reaching the Moon in November 2004 after a leisurely trip, during which an ion engine was tried out for the first time in space, along with a host of other experiments designed with the future in mind. Originally destined to spend 6 months orbiting the planet moon of Selene, the mission was extended for a further year - but this time there will be no addition to its duties, as SMART-1 is due to smash into the Moon on September 3.

However, this impending lunar collision should not be regarded as an assault on the Moon just to see how big a bang might be produced - evidently, this part of the mission is to determine 'physical and mineralogical data', but it's my guess this is merely a repeat of earlier, similar impacts, which by all accounts seemed to indicate our trusty Moon may in fact be hollow.

Another puzzling aspect of this mission is that I had been under the impression that one of the main objectives was to photograph the Moon in unprecedented detail, giving us a supposedly complete and accurate idea of the topography and surface structure of our nearest cosmic neighbour, and I think there was some mention of spotting the old Apollo landing sites, but no news of that detail as yet. However, the dearth of new images would suggest that this part of the plan either didn't happen, or is still in the process of being analysed and completed.

Newly Discovered Gene May Hold Clues To Evolution Of Human Brain Capacity

More news on the unique developmental abilities of early humans and their unfeasibly large brains, which emphasises more than ever the extremely odd way in which humans have undergone spectacular and unexplained advances in mental capacity for reasons that no-one can quite determine.

It's a little known fact that humans brains, have on the whole, been getting smaller for the past 15,000 years, but way back in the good old days of when everything was free and you could go pretty much any place you wanted, human brains repeatedly expanded in size and function in a way that has probably never been matched in all the history of life on this planet.

There was news the other day suggesting that in the next decade or so, we will have the ability to visually and aurally record our entire lives, thus giving us the ability to relive all those favourite moments that have hitherto remained where they belong, i.e. the past.

By breeding back, a process by which aspects of our genome would gradually be deleted until we arrived at previous species of ourselves, it may be one day possible to track back to the memories of our ancestors and download their lives into accessible media for us to experience.

Mammoths may roam again after 27,000 years

Having discovered that sperm from mice that had been frozen for 15 years was still able to fertilise eggs, the world of faunal revivalism is now predicting that it may soon be possible to resurrect the mighty woolly mammoth, along with a host of other extinct creatures. Whilst we appear to be overseeing the sixth great extinction, it seems ironic that we aren't devoting all our resources to saving what we are about to lose - gorillas, orang-utans plus thousands of others, all clinging on for dear life as their habitats and numbers are relentlessly reduced by armed and otherwise dangerous humans.

SETI and the Aliens Conundrum - Part I

Despite the recent claims by Steven Greer that SETI has not only made contact with ET, but they have been positively inundated with traffic from a particular region of Space, it's probably safe to assume we won't be exchanging caps and flags with aliens, intelligent or otherwise, at any time in the near future.

For their part SETI, i.e. Seth Shostak and Jill Tartar, who must surely be the 'highly placed sources' rumoured by Greer to have been keeping this information from us, have unsurprisingly denied all - even if they had been chatting with something or someone far away, it's highly unlikey they'd let someone like Dr. Greer upstage them - Shostak seems, as far as the news-media are concerned, to be the favoured human deemed 'expert' enough to be able to make the right introductory noises to the aliens as they disembark from their silver ships on the White House lawn. However, it's fair to assume that there exists somewhere a carefully prepared speech, and one that has been influenced by the Brookings Report, that decades ago, warned against the possible disintegration of morale and breakdown of law, order and society in general, if such news was not broken in the correct manner.

The linked essay, penned by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D, is a good appraisal of the current situation - that being, after 45 years of uninterrupted SETI funding, not one single genuine contact, (apart from the possible 'Wow' signal), has yet been detected, or at least officially reported through their good offices.

That we have so far failed to communicate with life on the inner or outer fringes of our sector of Space, can be ascribed to many factors, six of which are discussed here, and as they make for compelling reading, here they are.

First up, there is the possibility that no aliens exist, meaning we are the only conscious or intelligent life-form in the entire Universe. Current thinking counters this, especially when the age and size of our own galaxy are taken into consideration. In the 10 billion years since formation, there could have been ample time and opportunity for any number of intelligent civilisations to have flowered and died away billions of years before our own solar system came into being at 5.5 billion years ago.

As this link illustrates, organic molecular compounds have been detected in cold and dead regions of space, where it was thought that no such structures could exist, at least according to the theory that suggests all such compounds must have been forged at very high temperatures. Although not proof of anything in this context, the indications are that life, and by association, sentient life, across inter-galactic space really could be ubiquitous, compared here to being as commonplace as the generative action of stellar formation.

The second suggestion as to why we have failed to make contact is that alien technology could be too advanced for us ever to detect, and this links with another point, in that instead of exploring space by the nuts-and-bolts method of physical beings travelling in material space-craft, aliens may conduct their explorations by employing techniques akin to remote viewing, which of course would leave little if any trace of evidence for us to find. It therefore follows, that despite having the capability and technology available to them, advanced aliens would have no need or desire to establish contact with us - although this raises the question of whether and how or why, different groups of aliens may choose to communicate with one another.

Next up is the possibility that we're simply looking for clues in the wrong spectra, and it has been mentioned many times in the past that slow, crackly radio signals are probably not the best way to go when attempting to communicate over the vast distances between hyper-distant locations. Given the almost infinite possibilities of technologies unimagined by us, other media should be researched and implemented, but as pointed out, budgetary constraints, as well as the squandering of hundreds of millions of dollars on the ruinously out-dated Shuttle fleet, mean that there is precious little money available to initiate such efforts.

Fourth on the list is the idea that alien life may be so alien that we would fail to recognise it at all, although there are good reasons to believe they could share some of our basic characteristics, such as walking upright, attaining (bin-)ocular vision, and the possibility that they could have hands with opposable thumbs, assets thought to be essential for inventing and handling technologies. The inference here is that intelligence would also feature as part of the bio-package

However, there is also a great deal of debate that imagines beings who, unlike us, are not organic, or carbon-based, with the suggestion that:

".... the universe may be populated with silicon, or nitrogen-phosphorus based races or with information-waves or contain numerous, non-interacting "shadow biospheres".

Although unfamiliar with a 'non-interacting 'shadow biosphere' , such a phenomenon must presumably be similar to one of those mini-universes so hallowed by Japanese research scientists, (see post below). This is followed by the theory that even if we were unable to recognise extra-galactic beings as actually being what we would consider to be living beings, we should be in no doubt that we would detect their sentience and/or intelligence, as both we and they are apparently mutually capable of such cognition.

Point 5 discusses the notion that although we as humans are mightily keen on communicating not only with one another, but anything that moves, makes a noise or otherwise attracts our attention, other alien races may have no wish to communicate with outside worlds at all. This presents us with the possibility that we may have been detected already, but there is no intention on their part to reply or in any way reciprocate. Then there is the question of what constitutes spoken, written or other types of language, which even on our small dark planet, serves to divide entire nations and cultures from one another, as well as wreak havoc on a much more local scale.

The final reason given is that any aliens out there are deliberately ignoring us, maybe perceiving mankind to be bellicose in the extreme, bearing in mind that last century alone, something like 200 million people died as the result of warfare and related conflicts. Another suggestion is that they wouldn't care for the way we've apparently trashed the planet in the space of a few short centuries or millennia, with yet other ideas that we are a type of galactic zoo, nature reserve, or even laboratory, with ourselves and surrounding flora and fauna being subjected to unwitting analyses and experiments.

Additionally, in the event of there being more than one, and quite possibly many
instances of ET intelligence, there is no reason to suppose that they would be united in response and subsequent contact with us - each race would likely have its own agenda, with the further possibility that conflicts could arise from such differences or alliances.

But while we scour the heavens with various telescopes and other cosmological instruments, it is very unlikely that we have been detected by anyone out there. The only signals that would betray our presence here would derive from radio and TV broadcasts, which are beamed daily and 'omni-directionally'. However, radio beams have only been transmitted for the last 130 years, and TV only came into being during the 1930s, which in the general context of space time is so microscopically small and insignificant, that it's unlikely anyone out there will have the slightest clue of our existence over here.

This first part of an essay in progress leaves us with the comment that remaining incognito from the rest of the Universe might not be a bad thing, as there is no guarantee once perceived, we wouldn't find ourselves at a distinct disadvantage to our new arrivals from the stars. From our own history on Earth, we have seen time and again the effects of one advanced civilisation discovering other more 'primitive' peoples - war, disease, death and destruction almost inevitably follow in the blood-soaked footsteps, of the invading power, and therein is plenty of evidence to imply that humans might in this case turn out to be the down-trodden victims of someone else's project.

image moholy nagy c. 1920

Phycicists Plan to Create New Universe in Lab

This is related vaguely, to the article referring to the claims that our Universe may be 2 billion years older than thought - I know this is meant to be big news, but we are forever making adjustments of a billion years here or there regarding the age of our Universe, and doubtless there will be further, differing, or even dithering, conclusions drawn in the future.

But of more interest to me is the notion of mankind creating our own Universes, or even a mini-Multiverse, and how we might be able to manipulate them to our own ends - all the while bearing in mind that our own worlds may have come into being as the results of similar experiments undertaken by unknown others who for unknown reasons may have deliberately, or accidentally, created our conscious life, solar systems and galaxies, plus a load of other stuff we're only just beginning to discover.

As we know, one day all this will come to an end - in a few billion years, our Sun will explode, the Earth will fry, and one by one, the stars will burn themselves out, until there is no longer enough energy to create new ones. So at some point, and in very unlikely event that we or our civilisations endure that far into the future, we might have to consider the prospect of de-camping to another, younger Universe, there to continue whatever it is we're meant to be doing in this one.

It was Michio Kaku who opined that in order to survive the fate of our own dying Universe, we may well end up sending our DNA, rather than our physical selves, down a potential worm-hole to another Universe near this one. However, this latest enterprise might suggest to some that if we could create our own Universes, we might just be able to load the dice in our genetic favour, in the hope that an environment capable of producing something conducive to our continued, extopian existence, can be pulled from the quantum hat. Of course, were any version of humanity to survive such a trans-dimensional transplant, it's unlikely they would have any clear idea of their own origins - unless we could somehow encode a message into their genomes that might suggest a clue - it has even been suggested that our own so-called junk DNA might contain just such a message from our putative creators.

In the meantime we should beware of assurances that playing with the Creator's dice can lead us to no harm, and that we are all perfectly safe from some or other imminent disaster on the scale that could see our planet shrunk to the size of a pea in two tenths of a nano-second, or otherwise engulfed in some weird set of dimensions that would distort us out of existence, fully, forcibly and forever.

Strange 'twin' new worlds found

One of the reasons we like Big Space so much is that it's always got something lurking in its depths to surprise and amaze us, and this week, 'planemos' have hit the headlines - they are neither stars nor planets, hence this rather curious nomenclature.

At about 1 million years old, they are nothing short of brand new, far younger than anything of a comparable size that we, or at least I, have ever heard of. Although having only about 1% the mass of our Sun, they are respectively 14 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter, while orbiting each other at a distance roughly 6 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto, another object that has recently been at the centre of an ongoing identity crisis.

And of course, not only does no-one have the faintest idea of their origins, but there is no certain way of predicting what will become of them later in life (1 million is such an impressionable age) so let's hope some kind of form and function for them can be found and applied, before they start tearing up the neighbourhood. There are among a few dozen such objects that have thus far been discovered, so at this rate, the Universe is probably teeming with them, thus upsetting yet another cosy, and now fallible theory of planets forming from solar discs - and if this latest pair really are so young, at a mere 1 million years, there is a chance that we may catch more in the very act of their creation.

More here

Deep DNA memory theories: Can we remember our ancestors’ lives?

There have been recent reports that recipients of body parts, that formerly belonged to other individuals, sometimes find themselves taking on various aspects of the former owner - new found artistic and musical abilities are but two of many examples.

From this, we might deduce that living cells do to some extent, take on board information relating to the life and preferences of a given person, and become so deeply embedded in the living tissue that they can survive transplant to another host. However, it has not been shown that the recipients experience memories of the donor playing an instrument or creating a work of art, although it is unlikely that any research has yet been conducted in this area.

In the film 'Quatermass and the Pit', humans are portrayed as having memories that extend back 5 million years to a time when they were creatures on Mars, acting en masse out of hive mentality - something which they passed on to a modified human host, thus invading Earth by proxy, with the inference that mankind's war-like ways could be directly attributed to its unearthly origins.

But even if we could travel back 5 million years in time to the mind of a human ancestor, would we have any way of understanding the thought processes of that early creature, if indeed there were any real human ancestors on this planet.

Say for example, we decided to travel back to more recent ancestors, whose memories were of past wars and conflicts - there are plenty of these dotted throughout the brief period that has witnessed human civilisation, in many ways helping to define humnaity itself - indeed, it was suggested by Sigmund Freud to Albert Einstein in 1931 that war was just 'another of life's odious importunities, for it seems a natural enough thing, biologically sound and practically unavoidable'.

At first, the memories would be familiar to us - say for instance, we travelled back to the memories of someone living through the Second World War. Their reality would be perceptibly different from our own, but we would have a general understanding of who and what they were fighting for, whichever side they happened to be on.

Back to the Great War of 1914-18, and the industrialised slaughter that marked a quantum shift of the scale of destruction that armies were able to mete out to each other. As with WWll, campaigns had begun with populations riding a wave of nationalistic enthusiasm in golden days of marching troops through streets lined with waving, cheering crowds, that soon turned to the black nights of despair and defeatism, as grim reality took hold.

From there we could revisit the Napoleonic Wars, and for a real change of scene, we could revive Roman memories, and before them, Greeks and Egyptians. At this point the world was different in that it was pre-Christian, and many gods and godesses were still extant, enjoying huge levels of popularity.

But their physical world was not so very different - commerce, work, poverty and entertainment, and of course the never-ending violence - would all be familiar to us today. For the beginning of organised human violence, we need to go back some 9,500 years to the European Mesolithic, and by now our induced memories would appear to us to be quite strange and unfamiliar. However, our daily concerns would have been very human - keeping ourselves watered and fed, as well as clothed and sheltered. We wouldn't know that many people in our lifetimes, probably a few hundred at most, and our memories would probably correlate quite closely with those around us.

Life would essentially have been an endless stream of days and nights, marked out here and there by solar, lunar and stellar alignments, but probably no concept of days of the week, let alone what year it was. Life itself was probably lived relatively fast by prehistoric standards, especially in places where agriculture and sedentary life had begun, as timetables and agendas would have to be adhered to in order to ensure the timely production of resources needed to support that mode of life. But for the vast majority of people, life continued along hunter-gatherer lines, with sets of days and temporary camp-sites corresponding to the timings of the seasons, and in the longer term, changing climatic conditions.

And so we go back to between 20,000 and 50,000 years, the Upper Palaeolithic, and mankind's first flurry of creativity on a macro scale, and with it the twin inventions of novelty and boredom. We also, for the first time, come into contact with other species of human, namely the Neanderthals.

We can keep going back further in time to millions of years ago as the first humans began to stir here and there, and of course, their memories would have been extraordinary, with the invention of tool making, the increase of social activity, both at group and individual levels, as well as innovative means of communication with each other.

But however far we go back, memories forwarded from Hell will continue to haunt us, as we witness humans gradually seizing control of the Earth, in a wild frenzy of killing, victimising a huge range of animals which fed, clothed and kept us warm, and it is through the seas of their blood that we arrived at this point in history, which sees us once again about to kill each other in vicious new wars destined, or at least designed, to wipe us all out for good.

Fairly soon, it would appear that humans will cease to have memories, as there will be no humans to do the remembering, at which point it will be as if humanity had never existed at all. It might then fall to some advanced alien visitors in the future to somehow access our memories through our remains, though what they make of us, only they will know.

image from here

'Bosnian Pyramid' Doubts

There hasn't been much news from the scene of the alleged pyramids in Bosnia, which in a way tells its own story - excavations have been underway for several months now, yet there have in that time been no startling, or even mundane, discoveries of genuine archaeological import. Rest assured that any real evidence of human construction would have been revealed by now, but it will be a good while yet before this case is declared officially closed.

So for the time being, it looks as if our own Silbury Hill will remain as Europe's only known true pyramid, even if it is conical in shape, and is rarely referred to in this context.

France's new Stonehenge: Secrets of a neolithic time machine

Having never lived in one, the humble bungalow has throughout my life remained something of an enigmatic marine presence, at once a comfortable retreat for those whose lives have long since ceased to have any real meaning, while at the same time acting as a front-line (albeit feeble) stalwart of defence in the everlasting battles against globally rising sea-levels.

So here's a story concerning six of the redoubtable domiciles in France, that were planned but never built, drawn up but never set down, thought about but never dreamed in. During the excavation work at the start of the build, the contractor unwittingly uncovered 'an enormous hunk of granite', which he immediately recognised as being a probable standing stone - and as they rarely if ever exist in isolation, he also realised that the entire site might be the remains of a much larger complex.

Understandably, and with remarkable alacrity, he ordered the guy in the digger to immediately re-cover the stone, in the hope that no-one would notice, and the building of the bungalows could proceed unhindered. Fortunately for the rest of us, a nosey passer-by spotted the protruding rock, and immediately grassed up the contractor to the Ministry of Culture, whereupon all construction work ceased forthwith.

Kerdruelland, near Belz, in Morbihan is to most of us an unknown location on a very vague and hazy mental map, but rest assured its name is soon to be writ large in the annals of Neolithic anthropology and archaeology. It's probably a tad early to be planning any megalithic picnic days in the region for a year or two yet, as the site is at least 30,000 square metres of exploration away from being recorded and analysed. Of particular importance is the fact that the original Neolithic mud and silt which has protected the 60 stones, is itself still intact, giving researchers an invaluable insight into life and climate at the time of their emplacement.