Much Ado Over New ESA Mars Face Images

More coverage of the recent image release by the European Space Agency, who, like NASA, would apparently seek to mislead the public by releasing digitally altered images from space and passing them off as real, presumably hoping to quell the curiosity of anyone who questions the official version of events and features on Mars, or indeed anywhere else in the Universe.

In this instance, attention is drawn to the curious 'horned' feature that has mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Illustrating his point with a host of previously released pictures of the Face that have appeared over the last 30 years, with particular emphasis on those published within the last decade.

From the set of pictures on show, the glaring inconsistencies between the various pictures over the years plainly reveal that what we are being shown is not the same as what's actually there - unless of course the Face is so geologically active that it drastically alters its appearance on an almost annual basis, a property alone that should have triggered all manner of investigations.

There is also no mention from ESA how strange it is that such a prominent feature had never been noticed before, by anyone, along with their preposterous suggestion that another nearby formation resembles a skull, another part of the landscape that has thus far apparently managed to avoid detection by veritable batteries of cameras, until the present day.

If any other faces are discovered, it's a fair bet we won't get to see them, at least not in their true configuration - the first Viking image from 1976 is in many ways still the best, and likely most accurate depiction we have, released as it was before anyone had a chance to mess it up a little.

image by Viking, 1976

Scientists Discover 'Shadow Person'

Good, if somewhat brief article describing how a group of psychiatrists, attempting to explain particular paranormal phenomena, have picked up on some unusual reactions from a 22 year-old woman undergoing assessment for epilepsy. This involved the left temporoparietal junction of her brain being subjected to electric stimulation, with the rather surprising result that she began to discern the presence of an unidentified shadow person copying her movements.

However, this entity was not content with mere mimickry, as she went on to relate that first she felt she was being embraced by the shadow person, and later reported that when holding a card in her right hand, the shadow person sitting next to her tried to grab the card and stop her reading what was on it.

To the observers, who did not sense this being in any way, the woman was 'experiencing a perception of her own body', concluding that because they saw nothing, the entire event was a figment of the patient's imagination. It seesm they did not consider the possibility that the woman really was in the presence of another being, one that she was able to perceive precisely because her brain had been sufficiently manipulated in a way that actually enabled her to sense what may have been some kind of trans-dimensional being.

Back in the mid-'90s, a book entitled 'UFOs: The Electromagnetic Indictment - The Psychic Nature of Close Encounters' by Albert Budden was published, in which he proposed that many people who related phenomenal experiences, such as seeing ghosts, aliens and UFOs, were really reacting to unknown electrical impulses affecting their brain waves in ways that are yet to be fully understood.

image 'shadows'

9,500-year-old Decorated Skulls Found in Syria

News from Tell Aswad, a prehistoric village in Syria, situated in the Damascus Basin, which seems to have been in existence since around the time of the dating for the skulls, and continued to be occupied for several thousand years, so this new find marks an event that must have occurred very close to the founding of what was then a lake-side village of round-houses, on the shores of modern-day Lake Ateibe, nine and half millennia ago.

The 'Tell' part of the name refers to the discovery of a huge mound, or midden, a low rise hill that comprised the daily refuse and other waste that over the millennia had slowly accumulated - these ancient rubbish tips often contain important remains that can give very clear insights into the everyday lives of populations that have long since crumbled to dust and scattered to the winds.

Although Tell Aswad is described here as Neolithic, it was actually in existence during what has been called the PPNA - Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, described by Bar-Yosef and Gopher in 1997, and a site which had previously been notable for the plant remains found there, in this instance described by Zeist and Bakker-Heeres in 1985. The significance of the plant remains, which included domestic wheat, peas and lentils, dating back to between 11,000 and 10,500 years, and thought to represent some of the very first domesticated strains of these plants.

However, it's the painted skulls, found in a nearby cemetery, only recently discovered, that has caught the attention of the media, signifying as they do some sort of ritual or abstract behaviour, the details of which we shall probably never know, although as we shall see later, this type of cultural activity was not unique to this location. This from Stone Pages...

Archaeologists said they had uncovered decorated human skulls dating back as long as 9,500 years ago from a burial site near the Syrian capital Damascus. "The human skulls date back between 9,500 and 9,000 years ago, (on which) lifelike faces were modelled with clay earth ... then coloured to accentuate the features," said Danielle Stordeur, head of the joint French-Syrian archaeological mission behind the discovery.

Located at a burial site near a prehistoric village, the five skulls were found earlier this month in a pit resting against one another, underneath the remains of an infant, said Stordeur. The French archaeologist described as 'extraordinary' the find at the Neolithic site of Tell Aswad, at Jaidet Al Khass village, 35 kilometres (22 miles) from Damascus.

"The realism of two of these skulls is striking," stressed Stordeur, in charge of the excavation along with Bassam Jamous, the chief of antiquities of Syria’s National Museum. "They surprise by the regularity and the smoothness of their features," Stordeur said of the skulls. "The eyes are shown as closed, underlined by black bitumen. The nose is straight and fine, with a pinched base to portray the nostrils. The mouth is reduced to a slit," added Stordeur.

The decorated skulls were devoted “only to important individuals, chosen according to social or religious criteria,” she said.

Similar finds have been described from the sites of Jericho and Nahal Hemar, dating to around 9,500 bp and 8,300 years bp respectively.

image from Ain Ghazal, c.9,100 years bp

50 Years of Spin - Shrinking the Hard Disk

Here's something that's worth a brief ponder, and as it's a verbatim account of what appeared in the print edition - I wondered at the wisdom of buying a newspaper that publishes all its stories online, obviating the need for a visit to the newsagent. But whatever the convenience to be gained from reading news on the Internet, there's still a great deal to be said for sitting round the house while wading through endless pages of the weekend newspapers - it's somehow much more relaxing, and it will be interesting to see over the coming years whether such media will continue to exist, let alone thrive. The problem with printed daily newspapers is that because they appear a day later than the events described in their reports, everything in it is essentially out of date, old news.

Then there's the endless proliferation of discarded newspapers that can soon become menacing towers of clutter, crazily looming this way and that as you attempt to negotiate safe passage through what was once clear empty space, i.e. the corridor that connected the front door with access to the rest of the house.

So, unless frequent trips to the relevant recycling-bin up the road are made, it becomes necessary to abandon your abode in favour of print-free accommodation elsewhere. Which, theoretically is where computers come in; destined as they once were to rid us forever of the printed page - the paperless office was the promise, a vast increase in the amount of printed paper in offices across the known world, is what we got.

However, as the linked article points out, we are now reaching a stage where the cost of digital storage space has been reduced to virtually zero, and as has been reported elsewhere, there is the strong possibility that we will see the commercial emergence of digital paper within the next few years,which alone will revolutionise the way we access news and a host of other written material, all available online.

Books and newspapers of the future will thus be able to update themselves whenever necessary - you read today's news, then roll up the digital paper, which although in standby mode, will continuously monitor online for updates and breaking news, as well as giving you access to vast archives of past news. After buying a book template, any text by any author could be downloaded into the book, to be erased and replaced with the content of whatever one felt inclined to read next.

These vast archives, as well as everything else online, are all possible because of the invention of the hard disk drive some 50 years ago - which although back then was what we would regard as primitive, was an essential step on the epic journey that was 'Man vs. Data - The Road to Victory', which has culminated with us in the present day having access to a bewildering array of information and applications, the vast majority of which were undreamt of back in 1956.

The article explains that the IBM 305 Ramac computer housed the original hard disk, the IBM 350 Disk File unit, described below as:

"...a rack of 50 24-inch, magnetically coated platters mounted on a single vertical spindle and rotating at high speed. In between the platters, and looking rather like a giant animated hair-comb, was an assembly of read-write heads that clacked in and out, reading or writing data from and to the disks and passing the information to and from the machine's processor."

Weighing in at 1 ton, and equivalent in size to two refrigerators, it had a storage capacity of just 4.4 megabytes, or the equivalent of three floppy disks, an industry standard of yesteryear, themselves now obsolete because of their limited capacity in the environment of today's bigger and faster machines. Comparison is made with a 60 gb iPod, which can hold 14,000 times the data of the 350 Disk File, with further comment that it is because of this huge increase in size, detailed phone and email information on entire nations' citizenships can be stored and made accessible or invisible on a permanent basis.

Selam, the three-year-old from 3.3m years ago

Although there has already been extensive coverage of this story, there seems little reason not to post yet more on the same subject, and as the Guardian has a good version, it would be churlish not to mention it here, what with ancient and cheerful face beaming the delayed radiance of fossil sunlight to us, live and direct from the distant Pliocene location of Dikika.

Agreement has been reached on naming the fossil australopithecine 'Selam', a word commonly used in Ethiopian languages to mean 'peace', and is somewhat more dignified than the' Lucy's Baby' tag, ascribed as the story first broke. For this one, they've quoted Chris Stringer, having lured him and his time machine back from their sojourn in the Upper Palaeolithic, evicting perplexed Neanderthals from their country estates, before handing them over to Security for processing into gloomy obscurity,

In Stringer's opinion this 1999 discovery is a momentous find, in a much better state of preservation than could normally be hoped for - it's not until the intentional burials of the Neanderthals, around 3 million years later, that we find such complete sets of remains, particularly when considering the fact that the delicate and fragile bones of an infant are even more likely to be scattered and broken. It is surmised the body was rapidly buried by a sudden flood shortly after death, thus preventing it from being chewed up by predators such as hyena, crocodiles, or a host of other tooth-and-claw wild-life, keen to track down anything resembling a free lunch.

There is however, much work yet to be done, primarily in removing the sandstone rock in which parts of the skeleton are still entombed - it is hoped this will resolve the question of whether Selam's species was fully bipedal, or spent much of their time swinging smartly through the trees - the view held by many is that this species represents a 'mosaic of evolution', one which exhibits a patchwork of new and archaic traits that recorded the process by which ancient proto-hominids gradually abandoned their arboreal existence, in exchange for becoming fully bipedal creatures on the ground.

As we now know, this was a step downwards that would eventually lead its descendants to take to the air, make the giant leap into the cosmos, before teleporting themselves through space and time, while generally trashing their ailing home planet like there was no tomorrow.

see also: Zeresenay Alemseged: Finding the origins of humanity (video)

more here

Not a Lasting Last For The Neanderthals

Following the recent revelation, largely hyped up at this blog, over what may have been Neanderthal artifacts dating to as recently as 23,360 years bp, here's an article that puts matters in a different perspective, leading to the conclusion that Gorhams Cave might not have been the Alamo of the Neanderthals after all, and my initial enthusiastic reaction had no real basis in fact. This from John Hawks' Weblog...

The latest in a long line of "last known Neandertal" sites is now Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar. Of course, if this were actually a continuing string of "latest" sites, you would expect we would eventually either reach the present day, or some mathematical limit. There seems to be little danger of that happening for a while, though, since the previous "last known Neandertal" sites keep turning out to be older than their "first known" radiocarbon dates!

An analysis of the attached diagram does indeed show a very anomalous grouping of artifacts and their putative ages, with supposedly younger objects lying directly below others that are dated at several thousand years older, i.e. nearer the more accepted dates of 28,000 to 30,000 years. However, the hybrid fossil from Lapedo in Portugal is securely dated at 24,500 years, and I'm still confident that remains or artifacts corresponding to this date and possibly later, are still out there, quietly awaiting their resurrection and another day in the sun. Here's what I assume to be the equivalent of an abstract of the letter published in Nature, by Finlayson et al...

The late survival of archaic hominin populations and their long contemporaneity with modern humans is now clear for southeast Asia¹. In Europe the extinction of the Neanderthals, firmly associated with Mousterian technology, has received much attention, and evidence of their survival after 35 kyr bp has recently been put in doubt². Here we present data, based on a high-resolution record of human occupation from Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, that establish the survival of a population of Neanderthals to 28 kyr bp. These Neanderthals survived in the southernmost point of Europe, within a particular physiographic context, and are the last currently recorded anywhere. Our results show that the Neanderthals survived in isolated refuges well after the arrival of modern humans in Europe.

For a clearer look at some complex stratigraphy, check the rest of John Hawks' post.

Late survival of Neanderthals at the southernmost extreme of Europe

Clive Finlayson^1,2, Francisco Giles Pacheco³, Joaquín Rodríguez-Vidal⁴, Darren A. Fa¹, José María Gutierrez López⁵, Antonio Santiago Pérez³, Geraldine Finlayson¹, Ethel Allue⁶, Javier Baena Preysler⁷, Isabel Cáceres⁶, José S. Carrión⁸, Yolanda Fernández Jalvo⁹, Christopher P. Gleed-Owen¹⁰, Francisco J. Jimenez Espejo¹¹, Pilar López¹², José Antonio López Sáez¹³, José Antonio Riquelme Cantal¹⁴, Antonio Sánchez Marco⁹, Francisco Giles Guzman¹⁵, Kimberly Brown¹⁶, Noemí Fuentes⁸, Claire A. Valarino¹, Antonio Villalpando¹⁵, Christopher B. Stringer¹⁷, Francisca Martinez Ruiz¹¹ & Tatsuhiko Sakamoto¹⁸

New Visage for Red Planet "Face"

It's been a while since we've much in the way of news from Cydonia, the enigmatic zone on Mars that resembles a long lost city-scape, eking out the aeons in ruinous desolation, that has intrigued, mystified and in some cases, frightened the living daylights out of those who would have us believe there is nothing 'out there' that is not entirely natural. Although these new images are magnificent to behold, the accompanying media comment has been less than inspiring, let alone accurate.

Mac Tonnies has discussed this at some length on his blog, so have a look there for a fuller assessment of this release and its broader implications, the essence of which is that whether or not Cydonia turns out to be artificial, the general coverage and explanations given by the various space agencies and associated media outlets, fall far short of what we might consider objective appraisal.

It would have been good to have a one-on-one comparison with the original Viking pictures, but as usual we have been presented with an image that is at first glance difficult to reconcile with the original, and is in fact the latest in a long line of misleading interpretations, some of which have been digitally altered almost beyond recognition, as evidenced by the infamous 'cat-box' image a few years back.

In this age of digital jiggery-pokery, it might not always be possible for the layman to distinguish a real or altered image from Mars, or indeed anywhere else, and to that extent we are at the mercy of whoever publishes these pictures and what they chose to include or exclude. However, despite all this skulduggery, the underlying message is that there is definitely something up there that is more than mere erosional detail of freak geological activities - otherwise why would they go to all this trouble to confuse, obfuscate and deny?

Surprisingly, we haven't yet heard from Richard Hoagland, either at his site or on Coast to Coast, but it's a fair guess that he'll also have plenty to say - his keyboard is probably going into accelerated melt-down as we speak. He tends to take the view that the entire space program is a dummy, a mere shadow of the supposed black projects that have been running for decades, depriving the rest of us the true story of our solar system, and our place within it.

Pale Blue Orb

On a clear day, they say you can see planet Earth, even if it is only a tiny blue dot floating in the distance. Also on view is another water world, Enceladus, moon of Saturn and possible site of as yet unknown biological life-forms. But first up, it's over to NASA...

Not since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft saw our home as a pale blue dot from beyond the orbit of Neptune has Earth been imaged in color from the outer solar system. Now, Cassini casts powerful eyes on our home planet, and captures Earth, a pale blue orb -- and a faint suggestion of our moon -- among the glories of the Saturn system.

Earth is captured here in a natural color portrait made possible by the passing of Saturn directly in front of the sun from Cassini’s point of view. At the distance of Saturn’s orbit, Earth is too narrowly separated from the sun for the spacecraft to safely point its cameras and other instruments toward its birthplace without protection from the sun’s glare.

The Earth-and-moon system is visible as a bright blue point on the right side of the image above center. Here, Cassini is looking down on the Atlantic Ocean and the western coast of north Africa. The phase angle of Earth, seen from Cassini is about 30 degrees.

A magnified view of the image taken through the clear filter (monochrome) shows the moon as a dim protrusion to the upper left of Earth. Seen from the outer solar system through Cassini’s cameras, the entire expanse of direct human experience, so far, is nothing more than a few pixels across.

Earth no longer holds the distinction of being our solar system’s only “water world,” as several other bodies suggest the possibility that they too harbor liquid water beneath their surfaces. The Saturnian moon, Enceladus, is among them, and is also captured on the left in this image (see inset), with its plume of water ice particles and swathed in the blue E ring which it creates. Delicate fingers of material extend from the active moon into the E ring. See PIA08321, for a more detailed view of these newly-revealed features.

Other news from planet Earth indicates that one of their space-ships, the Atlantis shuttle, made it safely back home, after initially being delayed after concerns it was being followed by a UFO, as we see from Space.com...

NASA shuttle managers are deciding whether simple camera views, a third heat shield survey or possibly even a spacewalk may be required to address a mystery object near the space shuttle Atlantis that has already delayed the spacecraft's planned Wednesday landing.

"We have ruled out nothing and we'll take the time that it needs to take," NASA's shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told reporters today. "We'll come back and maybe have a little better gelled plan later this afternoon."

The mystery object [image here], coupled with anticipated poor weather at the Shuttle Landing Facility here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center during Atlantis' initial 5:58 a.m. EDT (0958 GMT) arrival time tomorrow, prompted mission managers to forgo the attempt altogether to settle the issue, Hale said.

Landing is now set for Thursday at 6:21 a.m. EDT (1021 GMT), NASA said, adding that the orbiter has enough supplies to last through Saturday. A press briefing featuring the heads of Atlantis' STS-115 Mission Management Team is expected no earlier than 6:00 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) with additional details.

"The question is 'What is it?'" Hale said, adding that the object - which appeared small and dark against a blue Earth in video - could be something as simple as ice, ceramic cloth gap-filler, or a piece of harmless shim stock plastic known to be dangling from Atlantis' heat shield. "Is it something benign like that, which we have seen before, or is it something more critical that we should pay attention to?"

While the object's appearance during Atlantis' flight systems checkout - which astronauts have likened to "standing next to a howitzer" when the thrusters fire - and its relative motion near the shuttle suggest the two are the same, Hale cautioned that extreme reactions like a spacewalk or potential repair are at the far end of the list of possible responses.

Atlantis' STS-115 crew - commanded by veteran shuttle flyer Brent Jett - has already conducted two planned detailed inspections of their spacecraft's heat shield that cleared its vital tiles and carbon composite panels of any concerns, first after launch, and then after about nine days in orbit. The second scan was completed on Monday.

NASA's STS-115 mission is the agency's first to resume construction of the International Space Station (ISS) following two test flights to evaluate safety changes stemming from the 2003 Columbia accident. The shuttle delivered new solar arrays and massive trusses to the ISS early in its now 12-day spaceflight.

Mystery object seen by "serendipity"

Hale said that discovery of the mystery object - which cannot be identified in video because of poor resolution - came at an opportune moment when mission managers were ready to declare Atlantis fit for landing.

"Normally we would have considered ourselves cleared for reentry by the end of the late inspection," Hale said. "This is just something that by serendipity we found out that we think we ought to go take another look at."
Shuttle flight controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston spotted the object floating between Atlantis and the Earth early

Tuesday, just after the orbiter's six-astronaut crew put their vehicle through a standard pre-landing shakedown to test thrusters, hydraulics and a number of other systems.

"We shake the ship pretty good when we do this," Hale said of the flight systems check, adding that a flight controller spotted a small object in Atlantis' vicinity and backlit by the Earth about 15 minutes after the 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) check today.

"It could be a little something up close or a bigger something a little farther away, it's a bit of a mystery," Hale said of the object. "We're principally going about the task of making sure that the orbiter is safe for reentry and landing regardless of what that may have been."

Ensuring an orbiter's heat shield integrity has been vital since the loss of Columbia's seven-astronaut crew, since that orbiter's heat shield was breached during launch by a piece of debris.

As far as I know, the mystery object was never conclusively identified - its whereabouts at present are presumably also unknown.

'Lucy's baby' found in Ethiopia

We're off to Ethiopia, to take a look at some recent developments in the field of remote human prehistory, namely the unearthing of the most complete skeleton of A. afarensis, or indeed any other hominid from that time. Although touted as the 'daughter of Lucy', this 3 year-old person actually lived 150,000 years earlier, so let's hope this inaccurate soubriquet fails to catch on. Remarkable for the amount of material that has survived the buffeting of 3.3 million years weathering, this specimen has largely been locked in sandstone, which accounts for the relatively long period of time before all this was announced to the world's media. This from BBC News...

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region.

The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed "Lucy".

Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature.

They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor.

Juvenile Australopithecus afarensis remains are vanishingly rare.

The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones.

"The Dikika fossil is now revealing many secrets about Australopithecus afarensis and other early hominins, because the fossil evidence was not there," said dig leader Zeresenay Alemseged, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Note is made of the small brain size, although no mention is made here of the fact that the 'hobbits' discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores had a similar cranial capacity which nevertheless allowed them to manufacture and use fairly advanced stone technology, and moreover was sufficient for them to have survived to as recently as 12,000 years bp.

Mention is also made of the very rare discovery of a hyoid bone, the one in your tongue, which in this case bore a closer resemblance to an ape's, leading to the conclusion that this particular australopithecine didn't conduct conversations using spoken language as we would understand it.

see also : TED Talks : Zeresenay Alemseged Looks For Humanity's Roots

Neanderthals’ Last Stand Is Traced

More on the Mousterian site of Gorham's Cave on Gibraltar, this time from the New York Times - they require a registration before you can view their content, so if you can't be bothered with that, here's what they have to add to the mix.

Although quoting from the same source, namely Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum, NYT are saying that indicating that the date of the site, or rather the specks of charcoal in the Neanderthal occupation levels, is around 28,000 years bp, which they claim is 2,000 years younger than the next best documented fossils.

They go on to suggest that modern humans only arrived from Africa at 35,000 years bp, against a more generally accepted figure of 40,000 years - which according to their figures would mean that Neanderthals and moderns shared Europe for a mere 5,000 to 7,000 years, whereas the true figure is probably nearer 15,000 years. Although they mention a proposed date of 24,000 years, the indications are that it will be some time before the books are re-written - an interesting comment from two researchers is the observation that although the stone tools found are Mousterian, it might transpire that they were actually made and used by modern humans. However, this scenario seems unlikely in the extreme.

As mentioned elsewhere, recent discoveries in northern Spain and south-west France, show that a more modern tool-kit was already in use by 44,000 years bp, so it's something of a mystery that the relatively unsophisticated Mousterian tools were still in use 20,000 years later, at the southern end of the Iberian peninsular. This particular site has been excavated since 1999, during which time only 60 square feet of the cave has been penetrated, and doubtless there is still much work to be done there - let's hope it's not another 7 years before we have new developments to consider.

In keeping with other articles, they appear to have ignored the irony that humans so well adapted for coping with freezing conditions, may have eked out the last millennia of their time on Earth by decamping to the southern and western parts that constitute some of the warmest regions of Europe. Furthermore, locations such as Gibraltar, although removed from the central mainland, might well have been on a migratory route used by moderns, heading up into Spain from destinations in northern Africa, meaning that far from being distant and remote from the rest of the European population, they would have had a veritable stream of pioneering travellers moving through the neighbourhood, on an annoyingly regular basis.

The Gibraltar Museum link

Puffy Planet Poses Pretty Puzzle

Another day, another mystery winging in from the cosmos, namely HAT-P-1, a type of planet that has only once been previously encountered by humans staying up late and staring into space the whole night through. Although significantly larger than our own Jupiter, this extra-solar object only has half its mass, and moreover has only a quarter of the density of water, which might have something to do with its ability to orbit its parent star every 4.5 days - in fact the star itself is part of a double system, a phenomenon which always adds a modicum of glamour to the cosmic neighbourhood. BBC News reports the following...

"This planet is about one-quarter the density of water," said Gaspar Bakos, a Hubble fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

"In other words, it's lighter than a giant ball of cork! Just like Saturn, it would float in a bathtub if you could find a tub big enough to hold it, but it would float almost three times higher."

HAT-P-1b is one of the 200 or so planets that have been detected outside our Solar System. It has the largest radius yet measured.

Like many of these extrasolar bodies, it orbits close to its parent star, revolving around it in just once every 4.5 Earth days.

As we see, it shares a property with Saturn, in that it would float in a tub of water, were a sufficiently large container to hand, as well as being similar to another extra-solar planet HD 209458b - they are 24% and 20% respectively bigger than current calculations on planet size would account for. All in all, these ghostly planets seem to represent a supernatural component in the Universe, as locations for what were once normal planets that had vast quantities of themselves stripped away by their parallel equivalents in one or other quantum dimensions that abound nearby.

Other than that, the only other comment I have is that the alliterative headline posing as the hotlink, doesn't really work, and fails to reflect the true paradox of this inter-stellar sensation.

Astronauts Perform Last Spacewalk

Although by now we should be strolling across Mars, mining the Moon and generally leaving cumbersome footprints on any number of other extraterrestrial locales, the sad truth of the matter is that we're still aimlessly pottering around, fixing the International Space Station, barely a couple of hundred miles out into space.

With news that Russia and China are considering teaming up for a trip to the Moon, as well as various private enterprise ventures, it looks as though we'll soon have whole crowds of inquisitive humans floating through space and drifting in time with each other, which probably means that soon thereafter the first Space War in the modern era will silently erupt, as groups of competing egos attempt to carve up the Electric Universe into planet-sized chunks of pure profit.

All of which leaves us, as ever, constantly moaning while coming to terms with the unpredictability of the present, hoping that the current Atlantis shuttle mission continues to run smoothly, with the astronauts involved making it safely back to Earth - as one by one, these entirely unnecessary Shuttle missions tick down until the remainder of the fleet is finally retired from service, as it should have been, at least 20 years ago.

image from microgravity.co.uk

Neanderthals and humans lived side by side

The paradox of the Lapedo child, a modern/Neanderthal hybrid, has been one that has vexed at least several minds, for just over a decade. Because the find from Portugal has been dated at circa.24,500, and therefore 3,500 years after Neanderthals were meant to have vanished, various figures in the anthropology establishment have poured scorn on the very idea that humans and Neanderthals ever got it together.

They claim that no evidence for such a union, fruitful or otherwise, can be found in our mitochondrial DNA, but given the long expanse of time that has since elapsed, others claim it is no surprise that the evidence has disappeared along the way. They claim the hybrid is just some 'chunky kid', whereas evidence such as the proportions of the limb bones, as well as in the overall shape and size, indicates that this 4-year old child really was the result of mixed genetic reproduction. From New Scientist comes the following...

Lagar Velho's juvenile nature has made it difficult to determine if it is indeed a hybrid, and one of the other objections has been the fact that it lived thousands of years after the Neanderthals were thought to have died out. “Clearly, our results show Neanderthals may have been around at the time,” says Finlayson.

The site of the discovery in Gibraltar is Gorham’s Cave, where Neanderthal artefacts were first discovered more than 50 years ago. Animal bones found with the tools indicate that the occupants butchered their hunted prey in the cave. The environment is rich and diverse, which perhaps enabled the last of the Neanderthal stragglers to survive a little longer than most. Finlayson estimates that only a small group lived in the cave itself.

Although modern humans were breeding all around them, we are not thought to have actively exterminated the Neanderthals.

“Fragmented populations survived in southern localities and their final extinction may have been due to their small numbers,” says Finlayson. “Modern humans played a minor or no role in this.”

In recent Neanderthal news and other articles, Lapedo has scarcely, if ever been mentioned, such was the over-riding dogma that Neanderthals couldn't possibly have survived until such a comparatively recent date. Obviously we cannot predict what will be found in the future, but these two finds might well represent the very last Neanderthals alive in anywhere in Eurasia, although I wouldn't be surprised it yet younger Neanderthals dating to around 20,000 years bp, turn up to confound and delight us yet again.

Although no new skeletal material has been recovered, mass spectrometer dating of relevant sediments containing artifacts and Mousterian stone tools indicates a period of occupation some time between 28,000 and 24,000 years. In some ways it is surprising that no modern tools were found, as there have been recent findings dating from 44,000 years bp, that Neanderthals, e.g. at Grotte aux Fees, were beginning to use a more modern tool industry, even before the arrival of the moderns. From this we can surmise that while some Neanderthals progressed technologically and integrated socially, there were others that kept to themselves, retaining the old and traditional ways that had served them so well for 230,000 years - and it is the remains of these last survivors that we are dealing with here.

New findings down in Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, have thrown up startling new evidence that the Neanderthals did indeed survive until around 24,500, more or less the same time of the Lapedo, or Lagar Velho burial. As we know, both these locations are coastal, and this is taken to indicate that where Neanderthals did survive, it was on the outer fringes of mainland Europe. This is taken to mean that by this time the Neanderthals had retreated away from the centre, unable to cope with the incoming moderns, and once they had their backs to the sea, there was nowhere else for them to go. This, according to Zilhao, would have left them with two choices - one to fight the invading moderns, the other to mate with them, and by so doing, preserve their genes in our species. Who knows, there may have been an effort by the moderns to try and keep the Neanderthal genes alive by deliberately breeding with them in some sort of Genetic Ark project

There are other alternatives, and although there is currently no evidence, I think it quite possible that some of them may have fled deliberately, or accidentally, across the ice floes of the Atlantic, and on up into North America. If they did make it across the ocean, there are as yet no official finds to offer material proof, and I am not aware of any genetic evidence present in Native American tribes - although the chances are that by now those traces may long since have vanished, even if someone were to go looking for them.

There have been recent findings there that push back the time of the first humans there from around 13,000 years to at least 40,000 years, and it's possible that there may have been even earlier incursions into the New World. As there seems to be good evidence for ocean-going humans going back to 800,000 years, as well as the recent discoveries that humans may have been using pigment to decorate themselves for 300,000 years, it would appear that people around before the moderns possessed the intellectual wherewithal to devise and undertake long and perilous journeys around the world.

There is even evidence that people living as long ago as the Neanderthals knew the proportions and distances of this planet, as all our modern ways of measuring distance appear to date from well before the emergence of what we term civilisation, as does the apparent knowledge of astronomy - for example the Pleiades constellation is known by different peoples separated by vast tracts of land and time, as the Seven Sisters, and the myth of how they came to be is repeated from North America to Australia.

The latter continent was populated by at least 60,000 years ago, and maybe even as far back as 176,000 years bp, by the ancestors of today's aborigine population, and the theory goes that if they had been isolated from the rest of the world for all that time, it would be very unlikely they would come up with the same Pleiades myth told elsewhere around the world.

This is taken to mean that their ancestors must have known of this myth before they settled Australia at 60,000 years, meaning they must have known of this myth before that time. There are many other little mysteries that need not concern us here for the moment, but suffice it to say, our ancestral forebears were just as smart and capable as we moderns, and we differ from them in the way we have used our brains to construct the technological societies we have today, quite probably at the expense of some truly amazing mental powers that appear to have been present deep into our collective past.

A great deal has recently been said and written suggesting how different from us the Neanderthals were, as if they were some exotic species that flitted briefly in and out of existence. However, as has recently been shown (remote central passim), Neanderthals were actually more genetically similar to previous Homo species than ourselves, and it now looks as if we moderns were the odd-men-out in this Upper Palaeolithic drama.

However, we do know that in Europe at least, Neanderthals and moderns shared the landscape, and maybe much more, for a good 15,000 years, and since their untimely passing, we moderns have been about the only species of Homo to live on Earth in the absence of any other Homo species.

more here

Bronze Age Pyramid Found In Ukraine

After the disappointments of the so-called Bosnian pyramids, we can at least take some small comfort in the news that just such a structure has been found in the city of Lugansk, situated in the eastern Ukraine, and this time the evidence looks pretty unequivocal. Although it said to more closely resemble a step pyramid of the Aztecs or Maya, it may pre-date, as it does of those in Egypt, (by 300 years) most of the pyramids there. The only relatively nearby location of pyramids in western Europe is on Tenerife, where other step pyramids of an unknown age have previously been found.

The structure in question was built about 5,000 years ago, and is thought to have been use for 2,000 years, possibly being used for sacrificial burning by the local farming community. Said to be a collection of buildings including temples and sacrificial articles, the entire complex sits upon a sculpted hillside, this must have been a truly impressive sight, completely different from anything else in the Eurasian Bronze Age. About the only other sophisticated temple complex at that time was built on Malta, for example at Hal Tarxien, though whether there was any connection between the two locations is as yet unknown.

As well as the bodies of sacrificial victims, ashes and ceramics have also been recovered, and it is further stated that no treasure, presumably meaning gold trinkets and the like, has been found, although many would contend that the entire site is a treasure in itself. There is no mention here of how long it will take to excavate the entire site, or whether it will be accessible to the public, but hopefully there will be an equivalent amount of media coverage to that deployed down in Bosnia earlier this year.

Here is the BBC version

Body art made its mark 300,000 years ago, scientists claim

The prehistory of the symbolic world as depicted by humans, just took a giant leap backward in time, by a massive 200,000 years, to an era long before the first modern humans were to emerge. This finding, which demonstrates that people were grinding pigments with stone tools 300,000 years bp at Twin Rivers in Zambia, indicates that those who prepared these pigments were doing so on a regular and widespread basis, suggesting that some sort of spoken language was in use at a time supposed by orthodoxy that was far too remote for such advanced behaviour. Here's the entire piece from The Independent...

The use of coloured pigments in early forms of body art may have begun many tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to a study of artefacts found at an ancient archaeological site in Africa.

Scientists working at the Twin Rivers hilltop cave near Lusaka in Zambia have found evidence for the use of colours - possibly for body painting - as early as 300,000 years ago.

This would predate the known use of coloured pigments in cave art by more than 200,000 years and, if confirmed, mark the point when humans began to experiment with paint.

Lawrence Barham, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, said an analysis of coloured stains on rock tools found at the site indicated that early humans were grinding ochre pigments long before they were known to be used for cave paintings.

"My work in Zambia is beginning to show that, at least in this one small part of central Africa, the use of mineral pigments or ochres as colours goes back at least 300,000 years," Dr Lawrence said yesterday.

"There is a long period between the appearance of rock art about 32,000 years ago - which is strong evidence of colour symbolism - and this more indirect, ambiguous evidence in the archaeological record of Africa," Dr Barham told the British Association's annual meeting at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Archaeologists digging at the Twin Rivers site found ochre pigments of various colours, including red, yellow, brown, black and "sparkling purple", at levels in the ground that correspond to 300,000 years ago - long before the rise of modern man, Homo sapiens.

Dr Barham said the evidence pointed to the use of coloured pigments as part of symbolic rituals by the primitive Stone Age people who lived there. They possibly belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a species with a relatively large brain.

"If you were to argue that these iron oxides are purely functional, and are of no historic value, how do you explain away the range of colours that are being selected from different places in the landscape?" Dr Barham said.

"If it was just the iron element, any of them would do, whether it was the red or the yellow. Some colours are closer to the site than others so people are deliberately selecting the pigments for the colours, that's how I interpret this," he told the meeting.

Until now, the only unambiguous use of colour in symbolic art is found in our own species in the form of rock art, beads and pigments - such as the famous cave paintings of Lascaux in France.

In Europe the earliest cave art appears no earlier than 40,000 years ago, long after Homo sapiens originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago, Dr Lawrence said.

"In South Africa, at Blombos Cave, shell beads - some ochre-stained - have been found with engraved blocks of red ochre that suggest colour symbolism existed 75,000 years ago. But that is still less than half the age of Homo sapiens," he said.

It is possible that an interest in the use of coloured pigments for symbolic purposes developed at the same time that early humans made the radical shift from hand-held stone axes to finer stone tools tied to wooden or bone handles. "It may seem a simple development but it is the foundation for all the technologies we use today. It's called composite technologies," Dr Lawrence said.

"I think by that time we have not just language, but the development of quite a complex language, which allows the planning that you see in the artefacts but also the planning to take something out of the environment and to change its meaning by putting it on your body."

It may, however, be difficult to prove unless the art itself was preserved. "We'd love to find a bog body of that age which is covered in tattoos, but that is not going to happen," Dr Lawrence said.

What marks this out as especially significant is the sheer range of colours that were put to use - normally, red ochre is the only colour found in ritual activities, dating from about 100,000 years bp, to the present. The bones of the dead were often stained with red ochre, thought by some to symbolise blood and believed by others to signify a belief in an abstract realm where the spirits of the dead were thought to dwell.

However, in the Twin Rivers site, workers have "found ochre pigments of various colours, including red, yellow, brown, black and "sparkling purple", at levels in the ground that correspond to 300,000 years ago - long before the rise of modern man, Homo sapiens". This startling detail conjures up images of people, living and dying hundreds of thousands of years ago, decorated in a veritable swatch-card of colours, an idea that seems so fantastical as to almost defy belief.

A curious aspect of this is the extremely long gaps in time that appear to have existed from this indirect evidence at 300,000 years, to 100,000 years at Quafzeh, to 75,000 years when modern humans, who by then had existed for nearly 130,000 years, at the Blombos Cave in South Africa are known to have made beads from sea-shells, and coloured them with red ochre. There then follows a gap of another 30,000 years before we see the Ice Age rock art of Eurasia beginning to emerge - raising the question of whether such practices were only taken up intermittently, and independently of each other, without skills being passed down through subsequent generations.

From this it appears that modern humans took a great deal of time to catch up with the symbolic use of colours, pioneered thousands of centuries earlier by species of humans that are largely considered culturally inferior to our own. Thus the implication is that those supposed artistic and spiritual aspects that seemed to define our species as distinct from all others that went before us, were in fact probably inherited from entirely different species of Homo than our own.

This is also something of a blow to those who suppose we modern humans were in some way genetically and benignly altered by some or other alien presence, giving us all the supposed human qualities that would set us apart from our ancestors, enabling us to build what we consider the advanced world in which we currently exist.

Elsewhere in the world at 300,000 years bp, Atapuerca in Spain witnessed the deposition of around 30 bodies of people into a deep pit, comprising the largest collection of fossil humans anywhere in the world. Found among them was a beautiful rose coloured hand-axe, and in the context of the Zambian finds, we can literally add a little colour to the way we view how they might have appeared to us. For the time being however, no-one has a clue as to how so many young adults at Atapuerca came to be buried together in such an unusual manner and location.

And for all we know, these finds might be preceded by yet older sites, populated by even more archaic humans, causing us to question how it was that what many consider to be little more than souped-up apes, suddenly acquired an aptitude and taste for complex spoken language and artifactual decoration. It's my guess we can definitely trace this back to Homo erectus, the longest living and most durable of all humans so far, and who apparently knew how to navigate the open seas at nearly 900,000 years ago - who's to say that these people weren't the first to use language and invent symbolisms of their own, as they set about exploring the world for the first time, travelling from Africa to remote spots like China to the east and Dmanisi, Georgia, to the north.

Expect plenty of raging arguments on this one, as there will doubtless be a bunch of reckless academics seeking to maintain the evolutionary status quo that has remained in place more or less over the last 150 years - the fabulously early dates will be queried, as well as the site itself. But there will also hopefully be further revelatory material published on the subject, which can only be augmented by further treasure troves of prehistoric artifacts at which to marvel.

image: Homo heidelbergensis

How Modern Were European Neanderthals?

This sort of discovery should be compulsory headline news around the world, for days on end, rather than buried away in online dark corners such as this site. There now seems to be concrete proof that Neanderthals upgraded their tech skills at 44,000 years bp. 4 millennia prior to the arrival of the first moderns in Europe from Africa - and crucially, there seems to be more than one site that contains artifacts of this age, both in France and Spain. This from Eurekalert...

Neandertals were much more like modern humans than had been previously thought, according to a re-examination of finds from one of the most famous palaeolithic sites in Europe by Bristol University archaeologist, Professor Joao Zilhao, and his French colleagues.

Professor Zilhao has been able to show that sophisticated artefacts such as decorated bone points and personal ornaments found in the Châtelperronian culture of France and Spain were genuinely associated with Neandertals around 44,000 years ago, rather than acquired from modern humans who might have been living nearby. His findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA.

The site from which this Neandertal culture derives its name is the Grotte de Fées at Châtelperron in Central France, first excavated in the 1840s. It has been one of the most important and controversial places to understand how modern humans that had previously moved out of Africa replaced the Neandertals, often portrayed as more 'primitive'. In the conventional interpretation of the rock strata of the site, the cave was thought to have evidence of both modern human and Neandertal occupation in interleaved layers. The fact that Neandertals came back to the site after modern humans had lived in it for quite some time would prove the long-term contemporaneity of the two groups, and validate the notion that the cultural novelties seen among the latest Neandertals represented immitation or borrowing, not innovation.

Now archaeologists can show that the Grotte des Fées stratigraphic pattern is illusory because the supposedly Neandertal levels overlying those belonging to the modern human Aurignacian culture are in fact backdirt from nineteenth-century fossil hunting. According to Professor Zilhao and his team, this adds to the evidence from other sites in the region that the Neandertals already had the capacity for symbolic thinking before the arrival of the modern humans into western Europe, which has been radiocarbon dated to around 40,000 years ago.

Professor Zilhao said: "This discovery, along with research on the rock strata at other cave sites, has huge implications for how we view the European Neandertals and, more widely, human evolution. The differences between Neandertals and modern humans may be much less than had been previously thought, suggesting that human cognition and symbolic thinking may date back to before the two sub-species split around 400,000 years ago."

Of course it's possible that some will argue that even these sites really belonged to moderns who arrived much earlier than the following hordes that spread so rapidly across north western Europe and much of Eurasia. Unfortunately there is little more in the way of detail, especially the names of the other sites where this parallel leap in technology and decoration had taken place, so until we hear more from Joao Zilhao, this will have to do.

However, as we see from the story above this one, although this is a momentous discovery, and hats off to all those that made it possible, another discovery down in Africa looks to rewrite yet another huge chunk of prehistory - step forward the mighty men we know today as Homo heidelbergensis, the probable ancestor of the redoubtable Neanderthal man.

But for the time being, it is as well to ponder just how innovative Homo sapiens really was, for it now appears he was only the third species of human, rather than the first, to come up with idea of body decoration, and with that, almost certainly a sophisticated spoken language. In the space of just a few days, we moderns have slipped from the pinnacle of civilising influences on this planet to an also-ran, trailing in the cultural wake of our esteemed ancestors.

Update 27/11/06

Subsequent articles have described what might be the latest Neanderthal site of all, on Gibraltar, and dated to c. 24,500 years b.p. - somewhat surprisingly it seems the tool technology used there was traditional Mousterian, some 20,000 years after their forebears had begun innovating their own stone tool-kits, as described above.