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Whilst I'm still up in Space, it would seem only sensible and indeed polite, to mention that Jupiter too is the camera-sights of an unmanned mission, this time those aboard New Horizons, en route to Pluto...
The flyby was intended to test the probe's instruments before it is hurled away by Jupiter's gravity toward the distant target of Pluto and its moons.
The plutonium-powered spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter at 0543 GMT (0043 EST) on Wednesday.
This gravity "kick" accelerated the probe by 14,000km/h (9,000mph).
This should send it hurtling towards Pluto at 84,000km/h (52,000mph).
With closest approach coming 13 months after launch, New Horizons has completed the fastest ever crossing by a spacecraft travelling from Earth to Jupiter.
So, like Mars, Jupiter has also become another 'way-point', a passing distraction for other missions of accelerated ambitions, whereas only 30 years ago, the fact that we had even managed to successfully send the Viking mission to Mars was hailed at the time as a major breakthrough for our nascent space technology.
More Martian news, which I don't have time to write up fully just now, but worth a look nonetheless...
NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.
The instrument, called Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector, has already shown its capabilities in one of the most barren climes on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile. The European Space Agency has chosen this tool from the United States as part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013. Last month, NASA selected Urey for an instrument-development investment of $750,000.
The European Space Agency plans for the ExoMars rover to grind samples of Martian soil to fine powder and deliver them to a suite of analytical instruments, including Urey, that will search for signs of life. Each sample will be a spoonful of material dug from underground by a robotic drill.
This appears to involve NASA researchers contributing to an ESA mission, which makes me wonder why this has taken so long to devise, given the steady stream of NASA missions already sent to Mars, but good to see that inter-agency co-operation has remedied this curious omission.
Hope to post more on this later...
New Instrument Designed To Sift For Life On Mars - with video
Fossil Hunting On Mars
Good to see the Red Planet looking so hale and hearty, even at a distance of 1,000 km, and it's strange to think that rather than being a destination, Mars is just a passing vision to the Rosetta craft as it hurtles through the solar system to another target, comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, onto which it will deploy its Philae lander.
In this instance, the lander was allowed to run entirely under its own steam for the first time during the voyage, something which will be required of it when it undertakes its science mission in 2014.
A sequence of observations from today's Mars close approach were run successfully, providing an important test for the science observations of the comet nucleus to come. In addition to CIVA, the ROMAP instrument was also switched on, collecting data about the magnetic environment of Mars. The data sets acquired by both instruments are unique, as the presented image summarises for CIVA.
The Philae lander still has still a long route ahead to ensure success for its highly challenging venture, which requires a safe landing on an unknown icy body, and performing a very complex programmed sequence of operations in a highly constrained environment.
And before the above image was snapped, some more stunning images were also obtained,
Rosetta Delivers Phobos Transit Animation And 'Sees' Mars In Stereo
During Rosetta's recent Mars swingby, the OSIRIS cameras captured a series of images of Mars and of Phobos transiting Mars' disk. The OSIRIS team have produced a cool animated sequence and a 3D view of the Red Planet.
The animated sequences (one faster, one slower) show the shadow of Phobos transiting Mars' disk on 24 February; the images were captured around 22:08 CET, a few hours prior to Rosetta's successful Mars swingby on 25 February.
All seems to be going swimmingly for the moment, and although we are by familiar to these long-haul, unmanned treks embarked upon by our science missions, it's still difficult to appreciate the vast amount of calculation and planning to the nth degree, that allows for two tiny objects, so many million miles apart, and travelling at serious speed, to rendez-vous at the correct time and place, so far into the future.
As for the object of the mission's aim, the comet is described thus...
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a large dirty snowball that orbits the Sun once every 6.6 years.
During this time, it commutes between the orbits of Jupiter and the Earth. However, little is known about it, despite its regular visits to the inner Solar System.
Rosetta's task is to rendezvous with the comet while it still lingers in the cold regions of the Solar System and shows no surface activity.
After releasing a lander onto the dormant nucleus, the orbiter will chase Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it charges headlong towards the inner Solar System at speeds of over to 100,000 kilometres per hour.
Bearing in mind that Rosetta is currently at Mars, it would seem logical to expect it to keep heading further away out into space, but due to the complexities of ensuring the craft gets to where it's going, we see...
A number of updates and validation of some systems and instruments are still required, which should be implemented during the upcoming cruise phase and the Earth swingby in November 2007.
Don't forget to wave as she hoves into view next time round - I think if I were an astronaut aboard this mission, I'd be quite downhearted at having spent so many months in space, only to find myself back to my original point of departure - fortunately, robotic missions have no such qualms.
The Planetary Society - Rosetta Was Here
Successful Rosetta Swing-By Next Stop Earth!
Following on from a couple of news stories that recently discussed the burgeoning problem of space junk littering our skies, comes this latest news from Russia...
The explosion of a Russian rocket stage in space may have created as many as 1,111 pieces of orbiting debris which could threaten other spacecraft.
The rocket section exploded on 19 February, generating as much debris - if not more -as the destruction of a satellite by China last month
The oddest aspect so far is how anyone knows there are 1,111 pieces of debris from this exploded rocket stage - has someone been staring up at the sky through a telescope and painstakingly counting them out over the past few days?
1111 is one of those digit sets, like 23, that over the years, increasing numbers of people have claimed to have seen or noticed with marked frequency. Although I don't really have time to go scooting round the Net, I'm sure there will be any number of people who will be writing this up and attaching arcane connections regarding the putative symbolism of this story.
I remember in the late 1980s sitting in a vast office, and how most mornings, whatever I was doing or wherever I was in the building, I'd often look up at the ceiling-mounted digital clocks, at 11.11 am - and at the other end of the day, I'd frequently arrive home, or check the clock last thing at night to see 1.11.
And although I thought no more about it than mere coinicidence, I was surprised to note that through the 1990s and to the present day, '1111' has caught on, and is now a phenomenon of unknown dimensions that has intrigued many, resulting in all manner of exotic explanations of why this might be, or what it might mean. Plenty of websites have pinned this to their mastheads, but no clear explanations have yet been forthcoming. I think it's just a visual artifact, which once noticed by the eye, triggers a subconcious response in individuals who can then attribute meaning where none may actually exist.
Obviously, this is only a phenomenon of the past 20 or 30 years, during which time digital clocks have become commonplace - I have no idea if before our digital era, people were coincidentally looking at analogue clock faces at 11.11 am or pm, but even if they had, it's unlikely they would have been as visually impressed by the position of the clock hands as by the digital read-out of four ones standing neatly in a row.
In any event, as we read further through the story, we learn that only pieces of the rocket 10cm or larger can be spotted and counted by radar, with millions of extra bits and pieces generated by the explosion uncounted and unaccounted for - which still leaves the question as to why the 1,111 figure wasn't rounded up or down to something a little more general.
After the destruction of the Feng Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite in January, the risk of a mission critical collision with the space station was raised by 60%, according to European Space Agency (Esa) estimates.
But this figure is likely to fall over the coming months as some fragments burn up in the atmosphere.
So the chances of future space missions, manned or uncrewed, departing from terrestrial launch-pads and being damaged or destroyed by such mishaps, has increased dramatically in the past month, and I for one wouldn't feel overly optimistic were I resident on the ISS, or sitting aboard the Shuttle which is due to depart in March.
The ironic aspect is left right to the very end of the article...
No one is sure what caused the 19 February 2007 explosion of the Breeze-M stage. It could have been due to the corrosive hypergolic fuel it carried. Alternatively, it could have been caused by the impact of another piece of space debris, or a micrometeor
The fact that there was so much junk floating about in the first place and may itself have caused this proliferation of debris, will not be lost on mission planners, as they wonder at the possibility of creating some sort of vacuum device with which they could try and absorb some of these problematic pieces before it's too late.
On an unrelated topic, blogging at Remote Central may become a little sporadic, not because I'm giving up, or otherwise deserting my posts, but because I have been asked to submit anthropological posts to Anthropology.net.
As this will inevitably take up some or much of my time, I might not have so much opportunity to post here, but it is my firm intention to keep remotecentral going, and it may transpire that I'll cover more space and astronomy, such as upcoming Mars missions and the like, plus a few other bits, on this blog, with palaeoanthro and related topics mostly appearing at Anthropology.net.
On that note, I'd first like to give sincere thanks to Kambiz Kamrani for getting in touch and cordially inviting me over to his site, as well as to gratefully thank everyone who has visited, read and commented on these pages during the past couple of years - and I hope I can continue to report on matters of interest to the reader, both here and elsewhere.
Orbiting Space Junk, Once A Nuisance, Is Now A Threat
image courtesy of NASA
As well as conducting a host of new interviews for his second Audio Season, Tim Binnall is this week himself interviewed on this Swedish site, and it's good to hear him have the chance to tell us more about himself, how he got interested in esoteric topics in the first place, plus a load of other interesting points... the first hour is free, but I'm afraid a subscription is required for the whole show.
Meanwhile, back on his own show, Tim has been interviewing his own guests - last week, it was Jerry E Smith talking about HAARP...here's a brief description...
Weather modification, ranging from the Rainmakers of the 1890's, the UN's legislation on environmental modification and what's wrong with it, the military's studies of how to use the weather as a weapon, and some in-depth discussion on HAARP and what it might be used for, as well as, the contrail v. chemtrail controversy and how it all might be related to controlling the weather.
I had a quick listen, and there's some intriguing topics and chat - the show lasts 1 hour, 20 mins, and is freely available for download.
Moving forward to this weekend, and it's the turn of Farah Yurdozu, described as Turkey's only female ufologist, and again here's a brief description of the show, last 1 hour, 17 minutes...
Turkish history and how it may relate to matters of the esoteric, the amazing story of ancient underground cities in Turkey, Turkish Ufology, what esoteric area of research hasn't made it to Turkey yet, UFO sightings and landings, abductions and the strange traditions of abductions, Turkish Men in Black, rumours of Noah's Ark being in Turkey and tons more.
If these topics are of interest to you, be sure to have a listen, as the guests always have plenty to say, and Tim Binnall is a very talented interviewer, a fact reflected in the calibre of guests he attracts to his show. And unlike other shows of a similar nature, all the interviews from both Season 1 and 2 are freely available to listen in to or download any time - having said that, I'm sure they'd probably also greatly appreciate the occasional donation to the cause, as these things, like everything else, cost money to put together. In addition, there is plenty of good written material to check out from other contributors, so for now, happy listening, and apologies to Tim Binnall for having taken so long to post these past couple of shows.
Farah Yurdozu
Jerry E. Smith
HAARP
HAARP - Wikipedia
Following the recent excitement generated by the news from Walker Hill, Minnesota, regarding the discovery of what may be 15,000 year-old stone tools, an assessment by State Archaeologist Scott Anfinson suggests that not only are the purported artifacts a product of glacial and meltwater activity, but that the site itself, far from being an 'oasis' as referred to previously, including here, was an inhospitable environment, and one that would have been of little value or interest to any humans that may have been around at the time.
According to the paper, the area in which the site is currently located, would at 15,000 bp have been open forest, not much in the way of mega-faunal food resources, and was generally difficult to access - and would therefore not have attracted humans. Whilst to us it may have seemed an unattractive and hostile environment, people back then probably spent a great deal of their lives in situations we would not consider as comfortable - as we see from Palaeolithic Eurasia, where many humans chose to stay, even as the temperatures plunged and the survival stakes rose during the last Ice Age. After all, they could in theory have headed back south in search of warmer climes, but apparently preferred to sit out the freezing conditions over periods of thousands of years.
And although the current view from Anflinson is not what I'd ideally have hoped for, as I for one am constantly banging on about pre-Clovis, he raises many good points and observations, all of which have to be taken into consideration when speculating on the potential of this, and other sites, especially when the very prehistory of the New World is currently open to so many questions.
Although there is no official site report yet available, a recent Council for Minnesota Archaeology (CMA), which I reported on at the time, Community Learns More About Walker... presented some of the findings of the archaeologists, amongst whom were Matt Mattson and Colleen Wells, who had excavated the site - the former of whom mentioned that about 70 or 80 lithic objects which appeared to him to be artifactual/artificial?. Although I'm unsure of the entire number of rocks, pebbles and stones that were examined and compared, 70 or 80 certainly seems like a sizeable collection, assuming of course that the total sample wasn't in the tens of thousands.
As I mentioned in that post, there was a potential problem in that the area itself is described as a 'high energy site', which briefly means that the rocks and stones had been prone to the actions of the local glaciers, causing turbulence to the ground and sub-strata levels, as well as the actions of meltwater flooding - in such circumstances, rocks and stones can become fractured and damaged, sometimes in ways which leave them resembling human artifacts.
There have been other sites in the past, particularly at Calico, where Louis Leakey took a lot of flak for suggesting stones that what have since been described as 'geofacts', were in fact stone tools dating to over 200,000 bp - I think it was the dating alone that got him into trouble, but that's for another time.
Here's what Brian Hoffman has to say...
There are no formal tools in the assemblage, no bifaces (although at least a few items have bifacial modification on an edge), and overall very little diversity. I looked at a number of their recovered flakes, including several jasper taconite flakes found in close proximity to each other, but saw none that appear to be from bifacial tool production or retouch - with one exception. The exception is a small flake of Hudson Bay Lowland chert that had multiple dorsal flakes scars and a distinct striking platform. I would not hesitate to identify this flake as cultural if I had found it while surveying for sites.
That last comment is interesting, because it appears to validate at least one of the putative artifacts, and leaves open the possibility that other less equivocal finds might yet be recovered...he further adds...
This small flake highlights the most obvious issue with the Walker Hill site - the essential absence of any indisputable artifacts. The question raised in the discussion following their presentation was why did the site’s occupants not manufacture any formal stone tools? Humans all over the world at this time were making exquisite bifacial and blade tools. Clovis, Dyuktai, Solutrean, even Chesrow complexes all include many items of indisputable human origin. The researchers’ reply that the Walker Hill occupants may have relied on bone and wood projectile technology because of the poor quality of northern Minnesota lithic materials is unconvincing given that later occupants of the region manage to chipped some decent tools from these same crappy rocks.
However, although it is undoubtedly true that stone tools over hundreds of thousands of years ae regularly depicted and exhibited, I have sometimes wondered why we see so few badly made stone tools, or assemblages thereof. Of course there are examples where knapping has had to be abandoned due to structural flaws in the core, for example, and these are found after having been discarded.
But does this imply that all prehistoric people were adept at making stone tools. Just as today, we have pianists, sports stars and Internet gurus, and can rightly cite these as human abilities, only a very small percentage of humans excel, with many completely unable to engage in these activities to any good effect.
So, were the elegant stone tools we so often admire today the product of all members of various societies, with eveyone being able to knap and chip to a high standard, or was much or most of the tool-making carried out by individuals recognised and selected for their learned or innate abilities.
A notable point raised regarding the exhibits was that they didn't appear to be very sharp - stone tools can remain in pristine condition for tens of thousands of years, and are not known to become blunt when in say, a stratified setting.
Whichever the case, I think it highly likely that there were plenty of people around back then who weren't able to produce high quality tools, and weren't always in the company of others with expertise. In this scenario, it's qite likely there were plenty of groups of humans who were unable to master the finer techniques of others, and often as not, created tools that did a basic job without looking stylish or sophisticated in any way.
My point being that the tools we see here may mostly have been made by inexperienced tool-makers, who for whatever reason, found themselves, possibly isolated in this locale, and just made tools as best they could, though I'm not sure how one would go about proving that.
Either way, I'm not abandoning all hope that this may yet turn out to be a pre-Clovis site, but there will undoubtedly be a demand for more and better proof, probably in the shape of better crafted and securely dated tools or other items. Until that time, it would appear that the debate is very much still alive, and from what I've read, both sides of the debate seem to respect and be prepared to listen to one another, without resorting to the type of feud that can occasionally arise when those with differing views simply dismiss each others' claims as a matter of course.
There should be plenty more research and coverage from Leech Lake in the future, and whether it turns out to be pre-Clovis or not, the whole episode is one of great interest, as it shows us how careful we must be before leaping to conclusions. But the degree of openness is one of the best features of this story, with no-one running off with the evidence or refusing to engage in a dialogue, and it is this type of transparent debate that should appeal to those who feel that disciplines like archaeology and anthroplogy should where practicable, be inclusive as opposed to exclusive.
The link to Scott Anfinson's pdf appears in line 2 of the linked story, and is well worth a read.
Update:: Nov. 11, 2007 :: Walker, Minn. Archaeological Dig Unearths More Finds
Talking Shop - Regional Analysis, Mapping Sites, and the Walker Hill Site
via Afarensis - Minnesota Pre-Clovis
Council For Minnesota Archaeology
The Early Minnesotans - Part I
Community Learns More About Walker Archaeological Finds
image from here
I'm actually meant to be writing something else at the minute, but in the meantime I thought I'd better post this, as it seems such an extraordinary finding, and one that I'm sure will be hotly contested by a majority of those who have concluded we split with the chimps between 5 and 7 million bp. As we see...
The researchers compared the DNA of chimpanzees, humans and our next-closest ancestor, the gorilla, as well as orangutans.
They used a well-known type of calculation that had not been previously applied to genetics to come up with their own "molecular clock" estimate of when humans became uniquely human.
"Assuming orangutan divergence 18 million years ago, speciation time of human and chimpanzee is consistently around 4 million years ago," they wrote in their study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Genetics.
This I think is based on the idea of a putative molecular clock, ticking away in the background of life, presumably at a regular rate, which to me sounds an awful lot like predeterminism - ie just because some or other species has been around long enough, it will eventually mutate into something else - obviously the theory probably involves a lot more than that, but it's nevertheless not a theory I find myself drawn towards.
I need to read up a lot more on this and related subjects, but I've been more impressed by the 'punctuated equilbrium' ideas of Gould and Eldredge, espoused back in the late 70s, and recently revived under a different name, which eludes me for now.
They used a statistical technique called the hidden Markov model, developed in the 1960s and originally applied to speech recognition.
What they found directly contradicts some other recent research. They found evidence that it took only 400,000 years for humans to become a separate species from the common chimp-human ancestor.
Just last May, David Reich of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School's Department of Genetics found evidence that the split probably took 4 million years to occur, although his team put the final divergence at just 5.4 million years ago.
Still, the 'Hidden Markov Model' as a name has plenty going for it, and it certainly seems thus far to have been pretty well concealed since the 1960s, but maybe it's due for another day in the sun. However the upshot of this is that it tells me how little I understand about what causes speciation, for one species to split into two, or even why - for example I've mentioned in the past that I don't understand how the domesticated dog came about, around 15,000 bp, as a result of breeding wolves with wolves - or why the chimp, as far as I'm aware, (although there is little in the way of fossil evidence), has essentially remained a chimp for the last 4, 5 or 7 million years, depending on your take, whilst we are definitely not who we once, or severally, were, at numerous points throughout deep and more recent prehistory.
I was surprised to learn the orang utan is estimated as having diverged an astonishing 18 million years ago, similar to the time when the gorilla went the same way, and I'm wondering if they have evolved much, or even at all during that time - maybe they have very stable characteristics that are lacking in humans and chimps - the latter are described here in a reference to a study last year, that posits chimps are closer to humans that the orangs and gorillas, which would seem to be borne out by the divergence events set so far apart in time.
There was a related story out last year regarding the sexual proclivities of human and chimp ancestors, and I've wondered since about how many odd offspring have been sprung in the course of our (shared) evolution, of which we have no record or trace in the fossil record.
NB: I can't get the link to the PLoS paper by Dr. Asger Hobolth and colleagues from Britain and Denmark, to work just yet, so hopefully this will be fixed later.
This follows on from the post two below this one, and looks at how in the future humans might have to travel across space, were it to transpire that we are unable to create missions capable of travelling at lightspeed, or don't work out to exploit, or even create or detect wormholes, and come nowhere near gaining the ability to teleport ourselves from A to B.
The essay under scrutiny is 'Interstellar Ark', culled from the Strange Paths website, and part of it is concerned with a discussion over what type of propulsion system might one day become available to future 'arkonauts'. One choice might be relativistic rocket, apparently powered by antimatter that would travel so close to the speed of light that time would appear to slow down for those on board - the figures quoted suggest that a crew could cross the entire galaxy in what would appear to them to be 12 years - but would in fact be closer 113,000 years. A second idea involves the following...
But what energizes the essay is the long-haul ark, a vessel driven by a what the author calls thermonucleoelectric propulsion, channelling fusion plasma through a magnetic conduit for thrust. The beauty of the ark is that it is a self-contained world, housing its own society and capable of maintaining itself in stellar systems unlike our own.
Needless to say, a craft capable of ferrying entire communities across deep space would be necessarily large in order to accomodate so many souls, and here we see how such a craft might be constructed, as described at 'Strange Paths'...
The dry mass of the Ark as discussed here represents some 25 Gt (gigatons) or 2.5E13 kg. It would be necessary, of course, to discuss the basis of this estimation and the parameters which can intervene to reconsider it. But in any case, one has a presentiment that for a kilometric structure under tension it must be question of “gigatonnic” mass. A take-off of such structure from the Earth would be whimsical. The gravitational well is too deep and the body should be unreasonably reinforced to resist to the departure thrust. Construction will have thus to be done entirely in space. But even then, the contribution of materials neessary for its construction could not realistically come from Earth, because of energy requirements. The extraction would be done preferentially from small bodies of the solar system (asteroids and comets), whose gravity well is tiny, then conveyed in terrestrial orbit. The structure of the Ark is much larger and massive than any human artifact ever considered, and it is also that which should remain intact over the longest duration, with absolute requirements of resistance and sealing.
All of which at first reading vaguely brings to mind Darth Vader and his minions building a Death Star, although of course an Ark such as this constructed by humans would have no such dastardly aims in mind - though the question of whether such a craft should be armed isn't mentioned here, many would contend that some heavy weaponry could certainly come in handy, if only to blast away at incoming asteroids or other hazards which could damage or destroy the Ark. Having said that, when travelling at such high velocities, a collision with even something as small as a speck of paint could have potentially disastrous effects on the integrity of the ship's hull, and outer space is the last place you want to be dealing with large and unexpected holes in your spaceship.
Moving on from such morbid thoughts, it's back to 'Strange Paths', consideration is given to how humans might regard long-term missions of this nature...
Can one seriously consider a normal life, accomplished on all the plans, within an artificial structure far away from the Earth? Could we do it by ourselves and could we imagine without quivering a line of generations living there, which we would be the ancestor? This prospect undoubtedly constitutes the most immediate psychological brake, but not inevitably the deepest, that every normally made human being will oppose first of all to the idea of a life in the Ark.
Although the long-term aim of such missions is likely to be the seeking out and acquisition of new worlds on which humans may dwell, there is the very real possibility that future generations of these so-called 'arkonauts' might very well decide that they're happy and comfortable enough living in their ark, to bother heading down to the surface of a planet or moon, there to begin life anew, and one which in the first stages would be unlikely to be able to offer the same creature comforts as enjoyed on the mother-ship.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether humanity should embark on these long-term missions, which could easily span multiple centuries, or even millennia - or instead, hold back, in the hope that Physics and other applied sciences can come up with technology that enables what's described as 'instantaneous' travel, whereby any point in space can be reached instantly - or as suggested elsewhere in the article, within time-frames shorter than one year.
There is no certainty that we can ever crack light-speed, email ourselves to Mars, or even detect suitable worlds in whose direction we should propel ourselves, and of course the funding and maintenance of such missions in the long-term are always fraught with danger, with political and other administrations which hold sway over such projects themselves being subject to human instablities.
Anyway, both articles are best read in their entirety, and there are quite a few comments worth checking out as well, and so without further ado...
Although I first read the story on Nature's news section of their website, I'll just leave a link at the bottom, because as mentioned before, they tend to pull stories and then charge for future access a few weeks later - if something is first issued as a free news story, it would seem more practical to leave it up, but doubtless they have their own reasons. Anyway, here's a quick quote from them...
A new study counters this notion by showing that the Clovis culture is nearly 500 years younger than previously thought, and may have lasted for as little as 200 years. There is evidence of other cultures in the Americas well before this new date.
This presentation of evidence as new, in the sense that it's a first indication of a pre-Clovis population living in the Americas, is slightly misleading, as there has been plenty written in the past few years indicating that Clovis was by no means the first culture of the New World. However, papers such as these go a long way to making such ideas officially accepted, particularly as there has traditionally been a great reluctance in mainstream studies to accept the idea that anyone would be even capable of arriving in America before the accepted Clovis dates.
For example, the new permanent exhibition at The Field Museum in Chicago, dedicated to portraying the history of settlement in the Americas, starts at 13,000 bp, altohugh as I mentioned in my earlier post, it's quite possible that this exhibition might well have to be extended backward in time as more evidence comes to light, in the guise of artifacts, and if we're fortunate, some ancient human remains as well.
Although artifacts are themselves very valuable in what they tell us about the activities of their past users, it is only by extracting nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from such remains that we will get a clearer picture of the origins of very early settlers.
Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station and geochemist Thomas Stafford Jr of Stafford Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, have now re-evaluated the age of Clovis artefacts, many of which were dated in the 1960s and 70s using carbon-dating techniques that are now obsolete.
The duo re-dated the artefacts using a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry. Like standard radiocarbon dating, this method measures the ratio of different forms of carbon in a sample. But it requires much less material and delivers more precise results.
Clovis technology turns out to be younger than previously thought — 13,100 years old, rather than 13,600 — and to have lasted only 200 to 350 years.
However there have been critics of this study, saying that evidence is needed from more than the 11 sites researched for this paper, and according to Vance Haynes, who opines...
"...people, driven by curiosity and an abundance of game, would have taken much less than 600 years to infiltrate the Americas.
"This is exploration of a new world by a fairly sophisticated group," says Haynes. "I don't believe other people who say it takes hundred of years for this culture to spread."
But as recent studies by Michael Collins and others have indicated, the Clovis people may have been much more sedentary than was formerly believed, and according to Michael Waters...
Waters says those dates show that Clovis was no more than 200 to 400 calendar years long, making it almost impossible for the Clovis people to spread as far as previously thought in such a short time span. They would, at most, have had to be prehistoric jet-setters to cover the ground in this amount of time.
“Once you realize that the Clovis Complex dates much younger than previously thought and that Clovis has a much shorter duration than we thought, you have to ask how could people, in such a short period of time, reach the tip of South America.” Waters says. “It doesn’t make any kind of anthropological sense that these people could have been moving that fast, nor would they have wanted to move that fast. And it seems highly unlikely, given 20 generations, they could have made it that far that quickly.”
And as he says, as more evidence for earlier dates becomes accepted, others will be encouraged to look elsewhere and preumably deeper down in their search for yet more artifacts and signs of human occupation, dating back tens of thousands of years. Up until recently, most archaeological digs in this area of research never dug below the Clovis levels, such was the belief in its primacy.
One of the more potentially contentious issues surrounding early dates going back as far as 50,000 bp, is that it leaves the door open to hitherto unexected possibilities - is the fact that at that time there were three and possibly four types of human on the planet - ourselves, or rather our Cro-Magnon ancestors, Neanderthals, Homo erectus,and if proven to be a species in its own right, Homo floresiensis.
We know Australia may have first been visited by humans as long ago as 60,000 bp, though more conservative estimates put this date nearer 40,000 bp. With the date given thus far for a Homo sapiens dispersal out of Africa at around the same time, it seems those humans must have fairly raced around the globe to hit all those destinations so early on. This might mean a much earlier, and so far undetected African exodus, or that some type of multi-regionalist evolution event, as suggested by Milford Wolpoff was in progress, or that archaic humans reached either or both Australia and America before moderns had even set foot in Eurasia. Who knows...
And while it would appear obvious to most that the earliest arrivals in the New World were modern humans, it's not completely impossible that Neanderthals or even Homo erectus could have wended their ways in that direction - after all, they wouldn't necessarily have been aware that they were broaching an entirely new continent, merely just extending their perambulations over yet one more set of horizons.
Of course, any discoveries hinting of archaic humans in the New World would at first be met with intense resistance, and possibly outright ridicule - but then, up until a few years ago, so was the idea of pre-Clovis Americans.
On a final note we from Michael Waters via Scientific American...
"This revives the old concept of a technology spreading across a population base," he continues. New evidence seems to point to humans populating the Americas as long as 25,000 years ago and it may be that the Clovis points were simply a superior weapon that spread rapidly from people to people. But scientists need to come up with a new explanation for the original American settlers that incorporates this new archaeological data as well as genetic and geological evidence. "I think we need to stop thinking about the peopling of the Americas as a singular event and start thinking about it as a process," Waters says. "I think there's enough evidence now to say that there were pre-Clovis people in the Americas."
Good to see him making the point that human migration into the Americas was more a process than a single event, and which until the latter arrivals, probably wasn't even viewed as a purposeful settlement of anywhere - to those making the first forays across a landscape that was at first devoid of humans, these new lands, seemingly fully laden with an unparalleled abundance of flora and fauna, probably resembled something akin to an Earthly paradise.
Ancient Stone Weapons Not Ancient Enough to Be Used by First Americans
Centre For The Study Of The First Americans
Who Were The First Americans?
Michael Waters' Clovis People Study Is Cover Story For Science
First American Settlers Not Who We Thought
image from Nature
Here's a look at some of the problems that will probably be faced by astronauts in the future, en route for example to Mars, assuming of course that we are still able to launch rockets through the ever-growing amount of space junk orbiting around our own planet - the ultimate irony of humans trying to escape a polluted planet, stymied by yet more pollution in the skies forming an inpenetrable barrier to the stars.
The linked article makes the assumption that humans will eventually begin making long-distance trips across space, beginning in our own back-yard, the Solar System, with manned missions to Mars probably being among the first expeditions to be made.
With current technology, or extrapolations thereof, the quickest journey a manned mission the Red Planet would entail 6 months of travel just to get there, a year or so there, followed by another lengthy trip back to Earth.
All of which has prompted Benny Elmann-Larsen, coordinator of physiology in human space flight at the European Space Agency, to warn that one of the biggest hurdles for the astronauts could be from the psychological stress that could manifest itself as the result of humans living for extended durations with only each other for company, sharing what could be some fairly cramped conditions.
Anxiety, loneliness and tensions with crew mates, a daily battle to maintain fitness and avoid accidents, DNA-shredding radiation from solar flares or cosmic rays - all these make mental and physical health the key to whether a long-term mission will succeed or fail catastrophically.
Fortunately, a wealth of research conducted aboard nuclear submarines, in outposts in Antarctica and on long-duration missions on the Soviet space station Mir and the International Space Station (ISS) has thrown up a number of of solutions, says Elmann-Larsen.
This seems to centre around hiring psychologists at Mission Control, whose jobs would include the maintenance of high morale, and presumably trying to head off potential conflicts before they happen, although this could be somewhat difficult when bearing in mind the huge delay in relaying messages to and from Earth - the example given is that it could take an hour and a half to end and receive help or advice from Earth, by which time any psychological aid could well have been rendered redundant.
An example of how cameraderie can quickly degenerate into chaos was demonstrated in 1999 is reported here...
A 110-day experiment in isolation that was carried out in a mock space station in Moscow in 1999 showed how things can badly go wrong. One module housed four Russian men; the other, three international test subjects, from Austria, Canada and Japan.
Reports within the space community say that during a New Year's celebration two of the Russian men engaged in a 10-minute fist-fight that left blood on the walls before they were restrained by the other men.
So how do you select the most suitable type of personality for these voyages - on the one hand you need to have technically accomplished and motivated crew members, who by their very nature will have a competitive streak, an essential attributed needed to succeed in such careers, as well as the missions themselves.
People thus gifted and selected will need to keep their minds and bodies occupied for much of the time, and even then boredom is bound to set in, and with it discontent - unless sufficient distractions are found to avoid these occupational hazards, arguments and disputes are bound to surface sooner or later.
Of course when we are all familiar with the idea of astronauts on long trips hibernating for the majority of the time, being awoken shortly before a destination is reached, and it's likely that a great deal of research has been undertaken to test for viability of such schemes.
From a psychological viewpoint of some of the astronauts, this may seem an attractive proposition, because their conscious experience of the longest journey they would have mebarked upon, could effectively be shrunk to a few days -and assuming they weren't prone to long-running nightmares and other bad dreams, they would presumably be mentally fresh and motivated, ready and keen to carry out their mission objectives on Mars and Europa and eventually out into the Milky Way itself.
However, once ensconced in their new quarters on distant planets, the astronauts would likely still prefer to have their own privacy wherever possible - I recall watching some footage of one of the Shuttle missions, (I think) in which it was shown that the opportunity to have some personal space of one's own was of paramount importance to the crew.
With personal space and carrying capacity being strictly limited on long-distance space travel, it's estimated that a typical crew would comprise between 4 and 7 members, which on the one hand would be good, as fewer people aboard should be reflected in a lower incidence of inter-personal disputes, while at the same time people could quite quickly tire of the same old company after the first 5 million miles or so.
Elswhere on another site, the redoubtable Centauri Dreams, there was a discussion involving really long journeys lasting hundreds or thousands of years, but rather than sending limited missions involving a few people sitting in a souped-up tin can, the idea would be to build something far larger, i.e. so-called 'worldships' wherein entire communities would exist across multiple generations...a later post should cover this, but in the meantime you can see it here...
Envisioning the Interstellar Ark
image - Moby - from 'We Are All Made Of Stars'
Here's a story I saw posted at Anthro-L just now, and a very curious one at that. We have seen in the past on one or other documentaries how gangs of chimps organise themselves into hunting groups that chase and capture prey leaping through the trees, but this is the first time I've come across this behaviour...
Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.
Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks
Researchers Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani claim to have observed no less than thirteen incidences of this astonishing behaviour, but what seems more surprising to me is that they haven't as yet captured any of this on film or photograph.
The use of sticks by chimps digging for termites and, I think other insects, hidden within places like tree trunks has been observed and documented in the past, but these new observations cast a new light on what we thought we knew about chimps, and possibly our own evolutionary past.
Although it used to be commonly believed that chimps and humans shared over 99% of DNA, this figure has recently been reduced downward to around 96%, so to see this and other behaviours - e.g. the purported use of hammer stones by chimps to crack nuts - that were previously held to be human, is all the more surprising.
Chimpanzees were observed jabbing the spears into hollow trunks or branches, over and over again. After the chimp removed the tool, it would frequently smell or lick it.
In the vast majority of cases, the chimps used the tools in the manner of a spear, not as probes. The researchers say they were using enough force to injure an animal that may have been hiding inside. h
Describing a four-step manufacturing process which involves the stripping of living branches, and which sometimes includes chimps sharpening the ends with their teeth,
reveals another surprising aspect of the observations is that rather than dominant adult males participating in this behaviour and passing it along, it appears that adolescent chimps learning from their mothers are the first to engage in such activities.
In other regions, chimps have been known to hunt the red colobus monkey, but in their absence in this part of Senegal, it appears the poor bush-baby has made it to the top of the menu, though whether these too are eaten, I'm uncertain.
What this might indicate for the earlier members of the human family is unclear - did the first hunters pursue only other primates, ones that were presumably smaller than themselves, develop a taste for meat which led them to scavenge other larger prey before reverting to hunting, but on a larger, on-primate basis?
Or alternatively is this a behaviour learnt only by chimps, who don't scavenge other meat, and are largely vegetarian - by sharpening their sticks and effectively making them into spears definitely indicates an intention to at least cause pain and harm to their potential victims, and although we might not like to think of it as such, would appear to be an advanced or complex pattern of behaviour.
I think it likely that before this becomes accepted as a definitive study, other researchers will at least want to see more evidence for this, either in the flesh, or at least in the form of some photographic material - but for the time being, suffice it to say that if true, this marks a crucial development in how we consider what it means to be a primate.
As a last thought, I suppose it's just about possible or feasible that chimps may have evolved this behaviour before early humans, who having witnessed the chimps' behaviour, took that knowledge and adapted it to their own ends - but how that could ever be proved or otherwise is hard to say. The question then would be why chimps didn't go on to develop even more complex behaviours, whereas our own ancestors clearly did just that.
Current Biology - Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools
Jane Goodall Institute - Chimpanzees Hunting
There have been a couple of new Museum exhibitions announced to the world recently, namely in New York and Nairobi, and not to be out-done, The Field Museum in Chicago is hosting its own, namely 'The Ancient Americas', the introduction for which reads as follows...
Step into the windswept world of Ice-Age mammoth hunters. Walk through a replica of an 800-year-old pueblo dwelling and imagine your entire family cooking, eating, and sleeping in one small room. Explore the Aztec empire and its island capital, Tenochtitlan, a city of more than 200,000 people and an extraordinary feat of engineering for any era. Discover what Field Museum scientists and others have learned about the Americans who lived here before us, and how it’s changing nearly everything we thought we knew!
And in case that didn't convince you, here's Kris Hirst's description...
The exhibit includes more than 2,200 artifacts representing more than twenty cultural groups such as the Hopewell and Mississippian of the American midwest, the Taino of the Caribbean, the Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec of Mesoamerica; the Moche, Wari, and Inca of South America, and others. Displays are to include recreations, interactive maps, dioramas and animated videos. Public programs are available, including lectures, family workshops, daily gallery programs, student classes, and teacher workshops.
A couple of weeks back, I encouraged everyone to visit the American Museum of Natural History's new offering, little realising that New York was at the time under about 8 feet of snow, but in this case the exhibition in Chicago isn't opening its doors until March 9th, by which time I imagine the worst of the winter freezes will be long gone.
Once again it's good to see such high quality permanent exhibitions being put together, and in this case, 13,000 years of American culture shows just how dynamic and innovative, as well have been the people that have settled there during that time - from Ice Age hunter-gatherers entering a more or less pristine environment, to the enigmatic, pyramid and temple building (and on occasion horrifically blood-thirsty) cultures of meso- and South America, to the industrial and technological power house that fast-forwarded the world's eyes and ears across vast expanses of Space, fingers on keyboards tapping into an online global community like none before it, as well as what we hope might yet just, turn out to be a glittering future. Of course, the rest of the world has chipped in with invaluable contributions along the way, but it still strikes me as odd that the world's newest society has been by far the most influential in the modern era.
How this influence will manifest itself in the future is increasingly unclear - a vast amount of the population is under the impression that this world and everything in it have only been here for the last few thousand years, and that brand of fundamentalism in concert with others around the world could well see to it that we're only going to survive into the future for an even more limited time-span - odd that a belief system going by the name of 'Creationism' could yet turn out to be one of the most destructive forces ever known to mankind.
In years to come, and if we haven't all gone to Hell in a handcart, it may be this exhibition is extended to cover what might be another 37,000 years of human occupation - but in any event, I imagine this will be very well worth a visit for anyone with an interest into an American past which seems to become richer and more complex with every passing announcement of new discoveries, as we have recently seen from Walker, Minnesota, Valsequillo in Mexico, and of course the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina.
The Field Museum - Chicago
There are a number of other good stories worth catching at About.archaeology this week, just hit the front page and scroll down.
At first glance, I assumed this was just another of those single killer theories that are often proffered by headline writers when considering how this or that species, genera, the dinosaurs etc., became extinct, often suddenly and with no apparent warning.
I noted that it bore a remarkable similarity to the third in a three-part series on BBC Radio 4, named 'Origins Reconsidered', in which Aubrey Manning heads off to Forbes Cave down on Gibraltar, in search of what were believed to have been the last surviving Neanderthals living on the periphery of a Europe over which they had held domain for around 250,000 years.
Paul Mellars notes Neanderthals used wooden spears, probably used for thrusting at large prey animals, hence the unusual amount of injuries that show up on their skeletons - but they knew their environment, and also beachcombed on Gibraltar, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean - at the time it was a savannah, lots of large animals, but they lived on 'pretty much anything' - in some levels of the cave, there were exclusively the remains of mussels and limpets
The exploitation of coastal resources formerly thought to be exclusive to Homo sapiens, but 120,000 yers ago, Neanderthals were eating seals, dolphins, fish and marine molluscs - I'm not sure how they went about catching dolphins, as it's unlikely they were deep-sea fishermen, so maybe it was unfortunate creatures that beached who ended up being scavenged by opportunistic humans.
Joao Zilhao talks of inland sites at around 45,000 bp, where Neanderthal remains have been found in context with such items as pierced fox teeth, prompting him to believe that Neanderthals too were capable of modern behaviour, although Paul Mellars believes it was too much of a coincidence that after 300,000 years of being decidedly Neanderthal, that they should independently adopt modern behaviours almost simulataneously with modern human arrivals.
There is a clash over dates, with Zilao claiming EMH didn't emerge in Europe until 40 - 42,000 bp, which Zilhao takes to mean that Neanderthals were exhibiting these modern behaviours 3,000 years before the arrival of the moderns.
However, as now seems clear from Kostienki, early moderns had reached the Central Russian Plain by 45,000 bp, meaning that they could also have been in north western Europe at dates that might coincide with the seemingly precocious cultural artifacts at the centre of the debate.
The Neanderthals are described as having largely disappeared by 35,000 bp, although dating from Gibraltar indicates they may have held on there until 24,000 bp. As we see...
a climate downturn may have caused a drought, placing pressure on the last surviving Neanderthals by reducing their supplies of fresh water and killing off the animals they hunted.
Sediment cores drilled from the sea bed near the Balearic Islands show the average sea-surface temperature plunged to 8C (46F). Modern-day sea surface temperatures in the same region vary from 14C (57F) to 20C (68F).
In addition, increased amounts of sand were deposited in the sea and the amount of river water running into the sea also plummeted.
Whether or not these drought-threatened Neanderthals could have moved from that location to somewhere more salubrious isn't discussed, and normally, this is where the story would end.
However, tucked away towards the bottom of the linked article, comes this rather surprising announcement from a site elsewhere on mainland Spain...
In a study published in the journal Geobios, Jose Carrion, from the University of Murcia, Spain, and colleagues analysed pollen from soil layers at Carihuela cave to determine how vegetation had changed in the area during the past 15,000 years.
During the course of this work, they also obtained ages for sediment samples from the cave, using radiocarbon dating and uranium-thorium dating.
Sediment layers containing stone tools of a style known to have been made by Neanderthals were found to date from 45,000 years ago until 21,000 years ago.
As usual caution is advised, and as yet there are no firm dates to go by, but if true, this could be quietly sensational news indeed, as it would propel the Neanderthal species to dates, and maybe places, far beyond previous estimates, and far nearer to ourselves in time.
But it would seem that this particular question will remain unanswered for the time being, because in yet another dispute which stretches the limits of credulity, the cave containing the material is closed to excavation...
Neanderthal bones have also been excavated from these sediment units, including a male skull fragment which could potentially be very recent. But Professor Carrion is extremely reluctant to draw firm conclusions about the site based on the evidence so far.
Spanish archaeologists carried out a detailed excavation of Carihuela between 1979 and 1992. But the cave is currently closed due to a dispute between national and regional governments over rights to dig at the cave.
In such cases it is clear that the services of an independent arbiter should be employed forthwith, who if required could appoint an unaffiliated human with a trowel to get to work, whilst allowing the political antagonists to carry on arguing to their hearts' discontent, far off in the distance.
In conclusion, there is an outside possibility that Neanderthals clung on to a life dearly loved almost into the Solutrean period, and knowing how they like to live peripherally in their later years, maybe they headed further north and farther east than thought. Obviously I'm not proposing outright that some of the First Americans could also have been the Last Neanderthals, but people from right across the Palaeolithic have a habit of turning up in places and at times you least expect them to. But until someone digs up some unusually recent and robust bones somewhere south of Alaska, our Neanderthals will remain a strictly Palaeoeurasian people.
Origins Revisited - Aubrey Manning BBC Radio 4 - In 3 parts, spanning 6 million years of human development, culminating with the Neanderthals in the third edition.
Ice Age Ecology And Neanderthals vs. Moderns
Another science Blog Carnival event which was posted last week, and again one I haven't had the time to sit and read through as yet, and considering the vast number of contributions, might take me a while yet. Again, as I mentioned earlier, I've a bit of catching up to do regarding news from the past week, and so for the time being I'm just going to post the link rather than attempt to cover it in greater depth.
A great feature of these Blog Carnivals for me, and hopefully for others, is the amount of other sites and blogs out there, which individually and collectively comprise a ton of great writing, with all sorts of people coming up with original ideas, and often as not giving unique insights into subjects and topics of which I was previously unaware, or at best only vaguely familiar with.
This has an identical publishing schedule to that of Four Stone Hearth, running on an essentially mid-week, fortnightly basis, and as with FSH, Carnival of the Godless et al, always worth checking, plus they actively encourage contributions from far and wide - a quick scoot around will plainly describe which type of material is suitable for each particular Carival.
In the past when writing about Stonehenge, it has been noted that the monument itself should be seen in the context of being but a single component in a much larger collection of sites and routes spreading far across the landscape of Bronze Age Britain. This article makes it clear that some of the very stones that comprised Stonehenge have themselves been spread around that landscape, having been carted off at various times by people with constructions of their own in mind, taking advantage of a site offering free material in large quantity.
In this instance, Welsh archaeologist Dennis Price has been on the trail of a missing altar stone, which he believes to have tracked down to a nearby village, Berwick St James, where two stones lying either side of a local road, which if joined together, appear to match one described in 1620 by Inigo Jones.
However, this stone is believed to be Jurassic limestone, whose origins lay in Dorset and Somerset to the West, rather than the Preselli mountains, located at a more northerly location in Wales. And although Dennis Price concedes that someone in more recent centuries could have dragged the stone, either singly or in two pieces up from the West Country, he believes it more likely that someone availed themselves of the abundance of free stone at Stonehenge.
"On the balance of probabilities, there can be little doubt that Inigo Jones's fabled and once-lost altar stone from Stonehenge now stands in two pieces in a nearby village either side of a small lane, in plain view of anyone who wishes to inspect them. There can also be little if any doubt that our ancestors went to great pains to select this stone and to transport it from either Dorset or the Cotswolds to Stonehenge, where it formed an integral part of the ancient observances and ceremonies there over four thousand years ago."
And the stones, if put together, would look remarkably similar to one in a Victorian woodcut picture he has acquired. Price believes the stone was taken from the site in the Victorian era, when such raids were commonplace.
We tend to think of the Victorians as people living through a period of scientific enlightenment, and one which first began to realise the value of the past, both from a cultural and materialist point of view, and would imagine that they would have left sites such as Stonehenge well alone. But this story shows us that when it comes to relics from antiquity, the needs of contemporar 
Whilst I'm still up in Space, it would seem only sensible and indeed polite, to mention that Jupiter too is the camera-sights of an unmanned mission, this time those aboard New Horizons, en route to Pluto...
