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If it wasn't for vast and titanic explosions in space, our Space headlines would be much thinner on the ground; luckily, for those of us living on the shores of Lake Blogosphere, such events frequently ripple through to us, from supernovae in distant star systems, gamma ray bursters sparking up without warning, to entire galaxies crashing into each other at reckless speeds which can reach up to 4 million mph.
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence for an "awesome upheaval" in a massive cluster of galaxies. A bright arc of ferociously hot gas extending more than two million light years requires one of the most energetic events ever detected.
"The huge feature we detected in the cluster combined with its high temperature (170 million oC) points to an exceptionally dramatic event in the nearby Universe," says Ralph Kraft of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of a team of astronomers involved in this research. "While we're not sure what caused it, we have narrowed it down to a couple of exciting possibilities."
However, it is thought that the giant emission depicted here might instead be the result of a supermassive black hole spewing forth undigested matter - in what is described as our 'local Universe'.
Here's another look at those mysterious caves on Mars, located on the lava flow of Arsia Mons, and in particular this image published earlier in the month on the MRO HiRISE site.
And while ESA might be considering sending a mission to Mars with a view to returning rock samples to Earth, it would be far more interesting, and possibly much more important to send something along that would be capable of going down into those caverns, there to begin capturing images and data from within their depths. Obviously it would be better if we actually sent a live human along to look on our behalf - an astronaut being winched down on live NASA TV would make for some fairly compelling viewing. Here's some comment from the Planetary Society...
The hope for the HiRISE images was that we could see some details from inside the hole. But as you can see by the highly stretched version at right, there is absolutely nothing visible inside that hole. It's black black black black black. HiRISE is a very sensitive instrument, and Mars' dusty atmosphere scatters quite a bit of light around, so there is certainly light entering that cave hole and bouncing around the interior. But it seems that the cave is so big and so deep that almost none of the light that enters the cave comes out.
It's deep, and it's big; the hole that we see really is just a skylight on a big subterranean room. How big? We'll never know for sure without visiting it, but I expect that Cushing and his coauthors and the HiRISE team will be crunching the numbers on the illumination conditions and the sensitivity of the camera to put a lower limit on how deep that cave must be for HiRISE to be able to see nothing at all inside it.
It's just possible that these caves might be the one of the most important, and unexpectedly beneficial, features of the Red Planet we have so far come across - as I've mentioned before, not only could past or extant life be found down there - it is thought that any living organisms might have a better chance of survival in such an environment, protected from harmful solar radiation etc., and further that mankind might well end up living in caves on Mars as its first home - assuming of course there's not already something large and fierce living down there already.
But archaic humans had such problems when they first began to inhabit caves, fairly late on in the Palaeoloithic - cave bears, inhospitable carnivores and rock-falls were just some of the hazards that had to be encountered and conquered upon entry into the subterranean world.
But one of the enigmatic aspects of these Martian caves is how they came to be there i the first place, especially on fields of ancient lava flow. For example, they don't appear to be the result of asteroid or cometary strikes, as there is no ejecta material on the adjacent planet surface, as seen on other impact craters. They have not been caused by erosional forces from above - there is, or has been no rain that we know of, acid or otherwise on Mars that could have caused these holes to open up - and neither do these appear to be caused by cracks in the surface resulting in pressures from deep below the surface, such as volcanic eruption.
Mars is one strange place - from the formations in Cydononia, which might well be natural, but look tantalisingly artificial set against an otherwise ordinary topographic landscape, to one or two other locations that resemble archaeological ruins on Earth, these caves might considered by some to be either artificial themselves, or something natural that have since been modified by sentient hands - possibly for the same purposes that we might one day sue them for - habitation, or preservation of unknmown artifacts or other remains.
There is also plenty happening on the surface of Mars to suggest that living organisms may be present there right now - observed seasonal changes would seem to clearly indicate the dynamic presence of surface features which appear to wax and wane, in a similar way to which we observe seasonal transitions on Earth.
MRO HiRISE
Mars Reconaissance Orbiter
image of Chasma Boreale from: Mars As Art
There comes a time when some technology comes into direct conflict with the humans who created it - i.e. when that technology so threatens or antagonises those in its thrall, that there is a concerted effort to rise up against it; nothing new in that idea, as that was one of the premises of the old 'Terminator' films.
An invention known as the Microdrone may soon taking to our skies, deployed as a remotely controlled helicopter - as yet armed only with cameras, though there's presumably a good prospect that guns and other armaments may yet be added.
But in the meantime, this device, measuring 2ft from blade-tip to tip, is described thus...
With four stubby arms carrying the rotors, a miniature camera and a pair of landing skids, the near-silent drone is designed to hover above crime scenes and send footage to officers on the ground.
It can take off and fly in all weathers and has a maximum speed of 15mph.
Planned targets will be everything from youths riding motorbikes in a park to clashes between rival football fans and armed sieges where it might be unsafe for officers to come too close.
Merseyside Police hope it will fulfil many of the roles of their existing manned helicopter at much lower cost while supporting their mobile CCTV vans on routine patrols.
We further learn that there is no conflict of interest with the Civil Aviation Authority, partly because they only weigh 7kg, and are apparently classified as a toy.
However, I'm not sure if some of those being targetted by something trying to capture them on mobile CCTV will be able to resist the temptation to try and bring them down - although guns are officially banned in this country, it would appear that a significant portion of the criminal fraternity is armed by default, and an aerial target flying at 15 mph might find itself the recipient of an unexpectedly heated response from the ground.
Although initial trials will take place in Liverpool, there will doubtless be other cities watching the progress of the experiment, with the likelihood of further deployments elsewhere in the UK.
And they probably won't be confined to urban arena - the smaller towns and even villages of Surveillance Britain have been lured by the apparent attraction of watching everyone all the time.
According to this report by the BBC, there are around 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain - about 1 for every 14 people.
"People clamour for the feeling of safety which cameras give," said Assistant Chief Constable Simon Byrne.
That's odd, because the 'clamouring' seems very quiet from here - probably drowned out by all those helicopter camera-ships hovering overhead.
The Museum of London has a small exhibition featuring the headless skeleton of a late Roman unearthed at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, along with a few other bits and pieces that have prompted archaeologists to surmise that Saxon Lundenvic was in existence from ca. 500 AD, a century earlier than previous estimates.
The man in the grave is estimated to have died some 90 years prior to this date, apparently co-inciding with the time the Romans finally left Britain as the Empire was beginning to disintegrate. Here's a look at what might have been the life and times of the man in the tomb...
Francis Grew, senior curator at the museum, said the man would have been wealthy and well-respected and may even have been a "commuter" into the Roman city of Londinium.
"The man in the coffin may well have been living in a substantial Roman villa estate somewhere around Trafalgar Square - a big country house maybe with a little village, even, associated with it," he said.
The sarcophagus, along with a Roman tile kiln, Saxon grave goods and pottery unearthed at the site, sheds light on a "hidden" two hundred year period in the history of the capital, the museum said.
A clay pot dating from about AD500 suggests that the Saxon settlement of Lundenvic, built on the site of what is now Covent Garden, was established at least 100 years earlier than previously believed.
Here's a brief description of London around the time of the Roman/Saxon transition, by Peter Ackroyd, in his book 'London - The Biography'.
'By the middle of the 6th Century, the city can be assumed to have accepted Saxon rule. Large parts of the walled area were employed as pasture, and the great (Roman) public buildings were no doubt used as marketplaces, or stockades for cattle, or as open spaces for the wooden houses and shops of a population living among the monumental ruins of what was already a distant age.
There is a wonderful Saxon poem on the material remnants of just such a British city; they are "enta geweorc", the "works of giants", the shattered memorials to a great race which passed away "hund cnect" - a hundred generations ago.
In the description of broken towers and empty halls, of fallen roofs and deserted bath-houses, there is a combination of sorrow and wonder. There are intimations here, also, of another truth.
The stone fabric of this ancient city has been dissolved by "wyrde" or "destiny" and age; it has not been violently attacked or pillaged by marauders. The Saxons were not necessarily destroyers therefore, and this poem displays a genuine reverence for antiquity and for a "beohrtan burg", "bright city", where heroes once dwelled.
The idea of London being inhabited by citizens living among relics of bygone eras is as familiar now as it seems to have been back then - it is thought that even when the Romans first began construction work, they were doing so on lands that may have been Iron Age settlements, and there are signs that the general area of modern London has been occasionally visted by humans at least to the Upper Palaeolithic.
But the image of Saxons living amongst Roman ruins is an evocative one, and it's just a shame there are no pictorial records dating form tha time to give us a an accurate portrayal of what must have seemed in some ways a fairly surreal backdrop to the everyday lives of Saxon farmers, traders and residents - for such images, to come to life, requires the use of our own imagination - maybe an institution such as the Museum of London will one day have sufficient archaeological data of the transitional period to give us a better idea of what our urban ancestors would have seen in their daily travails.
Museum of London
Although the subject of this find in Taiyuan, in Central China, is referred to as 'ancient', by 1,400 years ago Europeans had been present at least as far east as Urumchi, to the north-west, since about 4,000 years bp, so it's not as if this was an unprecedented visit to China from western Eurasian settlers - but this is still a notable find because of the information that archaeologists have managed to glean from the tomb of Yu Hong, who died in 592 A.D.
The tomb, in Taiyuan in central China, marks the easternmost spot where the ancient European lineage has been found - [map].
"The [genetic group] to which Yu Hong belongs is the first west Eurasian special lineage that has been found in the central part of ancient China," said Zhou Hui, head of the DNA laboratory of the College of Life Science at Jilin University in Changchun, China.
The tomb itself was first excavated in 1999, containing Yu Hong and a female who may well have been his wife - but incomplete crania prevented conclusive clues as to their geographical origins - although reliefs depicting people who were clearly European were found in situ - it wasn't unitl recent mtDNA analysis confirmed the remains' differing origins.
The research shows that Yu Hong arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1,400 years ago and most probably married a local woman.
Carvings found in the tomb depict scenes from his life, showing him to have been a chieftain of the Central Asian people who had settled in China during the Sui dynasty (A.D. 580 to 618).
The carvings suggest that his grandfather and father lived in northwest China's Xinjiang region and were nobles of the Yu country for which he is named.
Xinjiang is precisely the location of the European mummies found at Urumchi and the Tarim Basin, dating in some cases to over 4,000 years bp. An unusual finding of textiles there led author Elizabeth Wayland Barber, writing in 'The Mummies of Urumchi' to surmise that this was a twill, that could be traced back to Salzburg in Austria.
In a recent post, I mentioned how Oetzi, the body in the ice on the border between Austria and Italy, recovered in 1991, showed signs of tattoos which have been interpreted as a possible indication that these were acupuncture markings, acting as a kind of doctor's note, enabling the patient to be 'read' and treated accordingly by adept practitioners he encountered on his wanderings through the southern Alps, more than 5,000 years ago.
This came as a great surprise, as it had been assumed that acupuncture was confined to the Far East, i.e China, and the discovery of its possible existence in Europe at such an early date indicated either a separate invention in Europe, or maybe a connection between the two lands which are separated by thousands of miles - which back then, in the days before mechanised or even horse-powered travel, was a mighty long stroll. However, as the two locations are situated on the same land-mass, with no sea-crossings involved, a line of communication might well have existed back into the Palaeolithic.
Bak in the day, Salzburg itself was an extremely important location, as suggested by the 'Salz' component of its name, which refers to the salt-mines, that would have drawn many people from all dierctions over some distance to avail themselves of its preservative powers of food etc.
Following recent discoveries in southern China that indicate a Mousterian presence there at around 40,000 bp, and a Neanderthal presence at Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan, and it becomes apparent there has been either a steady flow of people from western Eurasia, or a flow of technology and culture that may have been transmitted along a chain of humans - this is the idea of goods travelling further than people.
Discoveries of late Neanderthal sites on the fringes of the Iberian peninsular, at Laghar Velho and down in Gibraltar have been interpreted by some as suggesting that these Upper Palaeolithic Neanderthals had been marginalised, and were by then clinging on to the last outposts of their existence.
It is quite possible therefore that if some Neanderthal populations were living apart form the early moderns, they could equally have headed East, or in the event that they were living there already, managed to stay alive longer than their western counterparts, simply by virtue of the fact that China was probably quite sparsely populated until relatively recently, thus reducing pressures on supposedly hard-pressed Neanderthals.
On that basis, it wouldn't greatly surprise me to find Neanderthal remains that might date to as late as say, 20,000 bp - just a figure off the top of my head, given here as a speculative indication rather than a statement of fact. China is a huge place, with its centre not easily penetrated by incoming humans - so maybe it's possible that archaic humans could have survived in pockets for longer than their occidental counterparts, living thousands of miles from the nearest moderns in places like Central Asia. So I'm not saying that Neanderthals definitely survived in south-east Asia past the 24,500 bp mark, rather that if Neanderthals became extinct due to the presence of Cro-Magnon people, and if Neanderthals really did hang on longer at the margins of the then known world, a vast expanse of inaccessible land like China, might be a place to start looking for traces.
I'm not sure if the Taiyuan mentioned here is the same region that was in the news recently concerning the 36,000 bp - 44,000 bp site at Dahe that was discovered, which would be a remarkable coincidence indeed.
I recently read somewhere about how in the days before Russia was locked down, people from China would walk clear across Asia and into Europe, in search of work and domiciles.
see also: Chinese Pictorial Space at the Cultural Crossroads
and: On the Presence of Non-Chinese at Anyang
This from the SciAm Observations blog, which looks at the rather odd decision by 'Time' magazine to choose creationist Michael Behe to write something biographically constructive about Richard Dawkins, scourge of said creationists everywhere.
This was part of 'The TIME 100 - The People Who Shape Our World' - our list of the 100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world.
The various sections of the great and the good include artists and entertainers, leaders and revolutionaries, heroes and pioneers, scientitsts and thinkers, with builders and titans bringing up the rear.
There seems to be some disquiet that a character such as Behe, whose main claim to fame is someone who has done more than most to sell the idea, which is widely criticised within the scientific community of 'irreducible complexity' should be asked to comment on someone whose scientific credentials are perceived to dwarf those of Behe, or any other creationist.
Behe was a key figure in presenting the case for 'creation science' to be taught at a school in Dover, Pa., - and although the creationists lost the case hands-down, they still maintain a high profile, despite the seeming bleakness of their future.
It would have been interesting if Dawkins had been given the task of describing Behe - after all, it could be argued that Behe is himself a person with influence, or at least is representative of a cult whose presence has made itself widely known across North America these past few decades. Somehow I don't think Dawkins would have been quite as conciliatory as Behe wish to come across - in fact he comes across as being patronising, however misplaced that sentiment may be...
Dawkins, 66, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, tells a tale and the rigor he brings to his thinking that even those of us who profoundly disagree with what he has to say can tip our hats to the way he has invigorated the larger debate.
Behe is here attempting to portray creationism as a valid part of that debate - apparently oblivious to the fact that the debate, particularly in regard to the original musings of Darwin, has moved some considerable distance forward from what the creationists are vainly claiming to be the current scientific standpoint.
There is no news yet as to whether he, and others of the Discovery Institute, will be hot-footing it down to Petersburg, Kentucky to attend the opening of Ken Ham's Creation Museum on Monday - it might be a constructive move on their part, as the most appropriate place for their Intelligent Design ideas might very well be a museum built on the shaky foundations of confusion and delusion.
Elsewhere on the SciAm site is their new video page - not only can you watch several new clips each day, but readers are encouraged to submit their own content, with an assurance that sutable material will appear on the same page. Good to see that the lay-person can contribute their own material to such a high-profile site, and hopefully we'll see plenty of good clips appearing there in the future.
image: 'Łódź niezgody' by Jarosław Miklasiewicz
Many hanks to Greg Laden for hosting FSH this time round, and my eye was immediately taken with the feature at Science Notes on a stunning Mousterian hand-axe, specifically manufactured for a left-handed Neanderthal.
It dates to between 80,000 bp and 40,000 bp, and comes to us from Fontmaure in West Central France, though I'm not sure as yet whether it was found in the context of other artifacts. I had a quick look at the site where it's featured, and they seem to have a few other Mousterian bits and pieces for sale - and they're not cheap, but I guess people with money would snap up items like these as soon as they become available.
On a semi-related note, I was watching the Time Team Special 'Britain's Drowned World', which included a look at Doggerland - we saw a Neanderthal fossil bone owned by a Duch collector, who said it had been dredged from the bottom of the North Sea by a fishing boat - and intriguingly hinted there were some/many other similar fossils from similar locations, which were also in the hands of private collectors - and presumably unseen and undocumented by any official source. Although I can easily understand why interested people would buy these and hoard them away, the more sceptical side of me thinks that Neanderthal or otherwise, such fossils are to some people just tradeable goods like any other - I wonder what else we might be missing out on from the numerous private collections that must exist, especially in the richer nations of the West.
Anyway, I've read the rest of FSH, and a mighty collection of posts it is too, so be sure to read them all - for some reason, my submission from remotecentral didn't make it this time, so I'll try and write something better for the next edition.
Although the title may suggest that dinosaurs could swim, the accompanying image strongly hints that they could not - I'm fairly sure that real swimming means no cheating by using your feet in suitably shallow water, as a means by which to support and propel oneself.
The 15m (50ft) trackway that reveals one animal's underwater odyssey was discovered in the Cameros Basin in Spain, once a vast lake.
The S-shaped prints suggest the beast clawed at sediment on the lake floor as it swam in about 3m (10ft) of water.
The marks are about 125 million years old, dating to the Early Cretaceous, the team writes in the journal Geology.
However, it is interesting to see a bipedal dinosaur that was aquatic, in that it exploited food resources in the water whilst actually living on dry land - i.e. eating, sleeping and reproducing. As it is unlikely that a herbiverous dinosaur would seek food in the water - the researchers feel able to conclude that this one must have been carniverous, with a taste for freshwater fish.
Ripple marks around the track suggested the dinosaur was swimming against a current, attempting to keep a straight path, the team said.
Quite why it was putting so much effort into wading upstream isn't clear - for instance was it hoping to catch fish swimming towards it with the current - or would it have made more sense to play a waiting game, similar to that of a modern bear, by stationing itself at a suitable point in the river and grabbing whatever happened to swim past.
The research was carried out at a site called the La Virgen del Campo, in the Cameros Basin in Spain, by a team from Nantes University, which includes palaeontologist Dr. Loic Costeur.
"The footprints are really peculiar in their shape and morphology - they are not at all like walking footprints," Dr Costeur told the BBC News website.
"In walking footprints, you can recognise the shape of the foot; but here it is not at all the case: it is sets of grooves on the sediment surface.
However, because this is so far the only discovery of its kind, more examples will probably be needed before any definitive statements about swimming dinosaurs can be made.
Alun Salt has begun producing his own podacast at Clioaudio - there are 4 editions to date, all of which will be of interest to anyone familiar with such topics as how the bones of the excavated dead should be treated - for example, handed over to pagans who believe they should have a say in finding them new homes for eternity.
There are still a couple I have yet to listen to, but if you want to listen, you can subscribe either via iTunes, or directly from his site - from what I've so far heard, they're definitely worth a listen - enough thought-provoking detail whilst still remaining accessible - which goes to prove the old saying 'Never can ye too many good Archaeo-podcasts have.'
Clioaudio - the Podcast
image Lindow Man from here
Whilst I'm still not entirely sure that this is a bona fide museum in its own right, as I'd assumed that such buildings needed to display artifacts within some sort of scientifically accepted paradigm, none of that has stopped Ken Ham and his fellow creationists from opening the $27 million construction of their dreams for a nightmare run which looks set to continue for too long.
This permanent exhibition exhorts it visitors to believe that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, and as I've mentioned before, portrays humans as having at one time lived alongside dinosaurs, all of whom were supposedly herbivorous and no threat to mankind - there is even a claim that dinosaurs were present on Noah's Ark. Here's a little extra detail from the New York Times...
There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.
Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.
If you want something like this to look good, it's important to get the right people on board, and in Patrick Marsh, it looks like they've got their man to wow the crowds - they're expecting 250,000 visitors in the first year alone - I wonder how much the admission charges will be, or whether it will be possible to buy miracles in the gift shop.
We are told that central to the museum is the theme of catastrophism...
The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.
The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.
I suspect that one of the ulterior motives of this museum is to act as a sort of attractor - they're hoping for Jesus to one day return and save us all (again), and maybe they're hoping that JC will choose their museum as an appropriate venue to make his re-appearance, assuring us that Ken and his friends were right all along, or that the pterosaurs were just angels in disguise.
[via Anthro-L]
Video from Seed Magazine showing how computer sims can depict complexity in a way that no human would reasonably have time to portray working in analogue mode alone.
Despite the fact that one of its 6 wheels no longer rotates, Spirit Rover, on duty at Gusev Crater, has nevertheless made a potentially important discovery - precisely becuse one of its wheels is malfunctioning.
Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, completed their original three-month prime missions in April 2004. Both are still operating, though showing signs of age. One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. That churning has exposed several patches of bright soil, leading to some of Spirit's biggest discoveries at Gusev, including this recent discovery.
And whilst no-one is still quite sure how the Rovers have managed to stay operational for so long - one theory holds that their solar panels have been kept free of Martian dust by the mini-whirlwinds, or 'dust-devils' must have serendipitously blown away the dust which would otherwise have caused the solar panels to become covered and thus unable to download energy from the Sun - the fact remains that their operational lives have been extended from 3 months to 3 years.
In any event, this latest discovery of a patch of soil that is 90% pure silica, has NASA talking excitedly about the possibility that this could be an indication for Gusev Crater having once been inundated with water.
"This is some of the best evidence Spirit has found for water at Gusev," said Albert Yen, a geochemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. One possible origin for the silica could have been interaction of soil with acid vapors produced by volcanic activity in the presence of water. Another could have been from water in a hot spring environment. The latest discovery adds compelling new evidence for ancient conditions that might have been favorable for life, according to members of the rover science team.
The idea of a hot water spring on Mars lends an exotic element to the possiblility of past life having existed on the Red Planet, though in this instance, that type of life is more likely to have been extremophile or microbial in nature, rather than a complex organism - although even that possibility remains a tantalising prospect for future explorations.
image from here
Very brief description of what archaeologists in Maine are describing as the discovery of a fire-pit, dating to between 11,000 bp and 9,000 bp - as well as the find of two parts of a stone tool, thought to have been used for cleaning animal hides.
Bob Bartone, assistant director of the University of Maine at Farmington's Archaeological Research Center, figures the site dates to the time following the most recent ice age, between 9,000 B.C. and 7,000 B.C. When the glaciers retreated, they would have left behind a wide-open tundra populated by animals and people hunting them. The excavation, Bartone said, gives more understanding to the those first Mainers.
"The artifacts and their context, their relation to each other across the site and down through the ground is really what helps us piece things together," he said. "You can show me some stone tools and chips at the lab, and it's very interesting. But if I know those things were found in some relationship to each other, it tells me a lot more."
Following the recent proposal which suggests North America was hit by a comet that set ost of it alight at 13,000 bp, it will be interesting to see if the archaeologists dig below the fire-pit and discover more signs of a burnt layer or even more of the microscopic diamonds, thought to be the residue of the exploded comet, or maybe further detection of unusually high levels of irridium.
Maine is a particularly interesting area, as it was there, and up along the coast into Canada that the later Martime Archaic Indians took up residence, a sophisticated hunting and gathering culture which existed between about 7,500 bp and 3,300 bp; part of the enduring legacy was the frequently found red ochre burials, as well as some very technically accomplished tools and other artifacts.
It is likely they were the direct descendants of those people who made the fire-pit and stone tools mentioned at the top of this post.
see also: Modern Site, Ancient Past (with pictures, from where the image at top originated)
Port Au Choix National Historic Site Of Canada
If you're considering leaving home on a part-time basis, there's a place in Tokyo that might help you to realise that dream - the Bagus Gran Cyber Cafés, which opened for business back in 1999, are doing a roaring trade amongst a section of urban Japanese, who just want some quality time and space to themselves.
In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a break by checking themselves into media immersion pods: warrens cluttered with computers, TV's, video games and every other entertainment of the electronic age.
Today there are 10 (Gran Cyber Cafes), serving some 5,000 people a day. Each has a slightly different orientation — some are geared to teenagers, some to salarymen — but the atmosphere is the same throughout the franchise: equal parts lending library, news-stand, arcade, Kinko's and youth hostel. An inspired extension of the basic Internet cafe, the Gran Cyber Cafés shift their meaning the more you study them, as if by a trick of their trademark low light.
The author of the article went in for an intitial look round, though as we learn later, it wasn't until 8 hours later that he emerged - here's a clue as to why...
I loved 16-A the instant I saw it. I closed the door, slipped into a low-slung leatherette seat and surveyed the all-you-can-eat tech feast, which includes VHS and DVD players, satellite and regular television on a Toshiba set, PlayStation 2, Lineage II and a Compaq computer loaded with software, all the relevant downloads and hyperspeedy Internet. In the nearby library were thousands of comic books, magazines and novels. On the desk was a menu of oddball snacks, like boiled egg curry and hot sandwich tuna.
The atmosphere is airless and hot, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke. Over all the effect is of a low-wattage, low-oxygen casino.
One of the key attractions to Japanese people is that it gives them the opportunity to temporarily lose their identity, in a society which apparently obsesses about social status - and which moreover, is one of the most materially competitive in the world. However, it's not all good news, as we see here...
Nevertheless there's something a little shameful about spending a solo hour, or two, or seven, on a wanton media bender. It was in Japan that I first heard the word "infomania," a 2005 coinage by Hewlett-Packard, whose study last May showed that compulsive e-mailing and text-messaging do more damage to the I.Q. than regular marijuana use. But, as I read about the study in my pod, I came to doubt that such warnings would ever make people temper their infomaniac ways; maybe these are the I.Q.'s we're stuck with now.
I'm not sure how long the novelty of such an experience would last, but in a city where domestic living space is so scarce that privacy at home is almost unheard of for a majority of citizens, the chance to escape to somewhere that isn't work, or home, or even a venue where other human beings have to be engaged directly, the appeal of these venues looks likely to endure for some time to come.
[via New York Times - free reg. required]
see also: Immersed In Japan's Media Pods
There's a new article in Nature, going by the name of 'Blast In The Past?' by Rex Dalton, in which he suggests that 25 sites across America, 9 of which are Clovis, exhibit signs of an event which generated intense heat and burning across a wide area of North America. And although Clovis is described as America's first people, current research would seem to indicate a human presence in the Americas going back at least 50,000 years, i.e. nearly 40,000 years of pre-Clovis occupation.
As the Nature article is accessible by payment only, and they have chosen not to put this in their News section, it's over to Mongabay.com, as this is the only place, other than Anthro-L which has so far covered the story - in the meantime here's a quote from the author, Rex Dalton, in Nature...
"A change in ocean circulation is generally thought to have brought about the onset of the millennium-long cooling, which is known as the Younger Dryas. This cooling might, in turn, have caused the Clovis hunters to disappear. And, if they had not previously been killed by disease or hunted to extinction, the big prehistoric beasts may also have been doomed by this change in climate," writes Rex Dalton, author of the Nature article.
The new evidence for the cosmic turn of events "comes in the form of geochemical analysis of sedimentary layers at 25 archaeological sites across North America - 9 of them Clovis," Dalton continues. "Certain features of the layers, say the team, suggest that they contain debris formed by an extraterrestrial impact.
These include spherules of glass and carbon, and amounts of the element iridium said to be too high to have originated on Earth. In addition, the rocks contain black layers of carbonized material, which the team says are the remains of wildfires that swept across the continent after the impact."
It's not immediately clear if the mega-faunal extinction is being portrayed as the initial event in a sequence that eventually claimed the lives of those living life the Clovis way, or whether they died in their own later extinction event which seemed not to have much effect on the other extant fauna of the time.
It's also worth bering in mind that there was an earlier extinction event in Australia at 40,000 bp, a faunal extinction event in Europe, which not only killed much of the mega-fauna, but may have included the demise of the Neanderthals as a standalone species, and later the Cro-Magnons, our immediate evolutionary forebears, who similarly just seem to 'disappear'.
All of which, when considered together, might imply that there has been, and continues to be a global extinction event which has been ongoing since at least 40,000 bp in Australia, and has since spread in pulses of activity around the world to the present day.
[via Anthro-L]
I recently carried a post discussing an essay at Centauri Dreams itself commenting on one called 'Interstellar Ark', written by an author named 'gilgamesh' which in the second half, discussed how future humans, in a hypothetical exodus from Earth, might be obliged to spend their days and years traversing deep space, and the type of craft on which they might be obliged to live.
It later occurred to me to consider what role, if any, our animal kingdom might play in the future of an extraterrestrial human race- thus far our very humanity has been defined in the context of millions of other animals flying, running, rustling and swimming around us, and the thought of us living alone without them on other worlds prompted me to consider how we might take them with us, as a matter of choice or necessity.
Before we even consider decamping to other worlds with any of our native fauna or flora, we might want to ponder the environmental impact of releasing terrestrial (wild-) life on what might otherwise be pristine planetary environments - with or without their own floral and faunal suites. What animals would we take and why - as a food and material resource, as pets, or because life on other worlds devoid of any animal life would be too strange for humans to bear - we have lived all our evolutionary existence surrounded by animals, without which we should certainly not have survived into the present day.
There might be parts of our faunal suite we might wish to leave behind - a life without mosquitoes, vermin, cockroaches or other insects deemed undesirable, might seem a good idea, but we could find we need an extensive a range of life as possible, in order to maintain the right mix or balance required for the longevity of complex bio-systems.
In the limited amount of space exploration undertaken by mankind, it was animals who proved to be the true pioneers - from fruit-flies in 1946, a few monkeys in the late 1940s, a mouse in 1950, (which actually survived the trip) followed by more monkeys, until 1957, when a dog named Laika became the first animal to orbit the Earth, aboard the Russian craft, Sputnik 3. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, and as time and technology have since progressed, space has effectively become an exclusively human domain.
Current technology prohibits the transport of 'live' humans and animals from travelling any meaningful distances across space; our respective life-expectancies would require a multi-generational strategy, where the original crew and menagerie to leave Earth would be but distant ancestors of those who arrived at one or more cosmic destinations. There would be the problem of how to care for and manage the resources of whatever animals were taken - humans who were farmers, vets and zoologists would be required to accompany the animals, as well as introduce them to new environments and surroundings upon arrival. However, it could be argued that to confine generations of animals to a life in space would be unwarranted cruelty, and that they should be left in peace.
It's possible that with future technologies, we might be able to take just the genomes of animals, and with the aid of some sort of Genesis device, we might then be able to 'print' copies of the desired animals at the other end. In which case, there would theoretically be no constraint on the numbers or types of species that were taken along - the genetic database might even include animals which are currently extinct. Maybe we could populate entire worlds with all our known animals, leaving in our wake a series of (probably terraformed) planets or moons on which all these animals could live, but without a human population that was intent on hunting, eating or otherwise exploiting them for resources.
We humans, as a lone species, might eventually die out, but some of those animals who had made possible our own existence on Earth, and their transport from it, could survive, completely unaware that their current habitats were now far from native.
For the time being, the only animals in space with which we are familiar, are those to whom we refer when looking at various constellations in the night sky, a practice that may have existed for tens of thousands of years here on Earth - but whether future generations of extraterrestrial humans would still describe newly encountered star systems as resembling the forms and shapes of terrestrial animal life, remains to be seen.
see also: Wikipedia - Animals In Space
Interstellar Ark
Although the idea of writing dating back 8,000 years is quite radical, according to an article at China.org, written in December 2005, the earliest carvings at the site are thought to date back 20,000 to 30,000 years, and although it might be considered that these dates are far too old to be intepreted as writing, Chen Zhaofu, an expert on parietal art with the Central University of Nationalaties believes they are nevertheless, 'communication efforts'.
But the carvings under discussion at the moment are thought to date from the Neolithic - here's a brief description...
The rock art site in Damaidi covers an area of 15 square kilometers and experts found in the 6-square-kilometre core area 1,089 cliff carvings, featuring over 4,210 individual figures.
Besides its large number, the rock art in Damaidi is also peculiar for its rich and varied subject matter, including mythological creatures, animals, symbolic designs, events and human figures, Zhou added.
Half of the cliff carvings were created during the Neolithic Age about 7,000 years ago, and the animal figures, such as sheep, horses, deer, dogs and tigers, were the dominant images in the petroglyphs of that time, according to Li Xiangshi, a researcher with the Cliff Carving Research Center of the No 2 Northwest College of Nationalities. The images of sheep, in particular, could be seen in many carvings - either sketched with simple lines or portrayed in an elaborate style. Experts believed that sheep had played a significant role in ancient nomadic people's life.
But what caught my eye in particular, was this description of a carving which will be familiar to palaeoanthropologists studying Eurasian portable art of the Upper Palaeolithic...
Of the many finds the most interesting and significant is a figure of a pregnant woman carved into a cliff, known as a prehistoric oriental "Venus," the Goddess of love.
The "Venus" has a plump figure, full breasts and a bulbous belly. The woman, standing straight with her legs together, has slender fingers but no facial features.
The image was a typical reproduction of figures of naked women carved on stone by ancients in the late Paleolithic period, said Zhou. This was the first time that a prehistoric figure of a woman carved on cliff has ever been found in China, and such cliff carvings are valuable for studying the development process of primitive society, plastic arts and ideology, added Zhou.
There is no date indicated for this particular 'Venus' carving, but it reminded me of an online debate I was reading recently concerning archaic humans in China, the Tocharians from around the Tarim Basin, and the idea that there may have been a steady, if not continuous flow of people and ideas travelling from at least Upper Palaeolithic times, or possibly even earlier, i.e. before 40,000 bp. (For an unknown reason I failed to bookmark the link, or even take a note of the site I was on, and I have since been unable to find any trace of it, frustrating to say the least).
Of further interest - to me - is the idea that the Man in the Ice, Otzi, found in 1991 between Italy and Austria, and dating to 5,200 years bp, displayed signs of what may have been acupuncture. I imagine it is widely assumed that there was little or no contact between western Europe and China at this time, but the fact a 'Venus' meme appears to have travelled East at an early date, combined with the possibility that acupuncture may have travelled West at a similarly(?) early date, might be an indication that there was a two-way communication between the regions separated by geographical space, but at the same time sharing a partially similar mind-set.
Although I tend to cover the prehistory of Eurasia and America quite a lot, this is generally because there is so much more access to information and ongoing research in those areas, but I think China, and probably India too, have much for us to learn that will just as radically alter some of our perceptions regarding out largely unknown past.
see also: Mystery of Ancient Carvings Lives On
One of the ongoing mysteries in palaeoanthropology concerns the small cranial capacity of Liang Bua 1, more commonly referred to as the 'hobbit' from the Indonesian island of Flores. Despite having a brain roughly the size of a chimpanzee's, it is contended by Professor Mike Morwood et al, that not only are we seeing a new hominid species, but one that despite its small brain, appears to have been capable of manufacturing sophisticated stone tools.
And while their continuing research may eventually call into question the very idea that a large brain is mandatory for any primate capable of sophisticated technological or cultural behaviour, a 29 million year-old fossil, Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, found near Cairo, indicates that our Old World ancestors developed large brains much later, or for different reasons, than previously thought. Here's the gist of it...
The new skull hints at several other features of Aegyptopithecus' lifestyle. The relatively small eyes suggest it was active during the daytime (diurnal), and the well developed visual region of its brain indicates it had acute vision.
The new skull, that of a female, is also smaller and has more delicate canine teeth than an earlier, male skull fragment from the same species - indicating that males were much larger and fiercer than females. Such size disparities only arise in primates that live in groups, where evolution favours larger males who can better compete for mates and defend the group against threats.
All three of these characteristics, however - diurnality, acute vision and group living - have often been advanced as reasons why primates evolved their large brains. However, Aegyptopithecus, which has all three while still having a tiny brain, argues against these theories, says Elwyn Simons, a physical anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US, who led the research team that found it near Cairo, Egypt.
All of which reminded me that 'Punctuated Equilibrium', excerpted from Stephen Jay Gould's work 'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory', has just been published in paperback, although Amazon UK appear to have a shortage of stock, as a quick check there revealed.
Punctuated equilibrium holds that instead of evolution proceeding along at a steady rate of slow incremental change, sudden bursts of evolutionary activity spark speciation events, and it may be the case that something along these lines was responsible for a dramatic increase in the cranial capacity of our distant primate ancestors.
Reverend Jerry Falwell has at the age of 73, slipped through the mortal portal, and is probably waking up to a slightly different after-life than he imagined - during his time here with us, he appears to have forgotten, or simply been ignorant of, such fundamental Christian tenets as tolerance and free-will - but then again, those two human attributes are notably absent from much of evangelical Christianity, as well as from various other maistream religions.
Part of his legacy was the University at Lynchburg, Virginia - there are an estimated 20,000 students in attendance there, who, true to form, are dismissive of phenomena such as global warming, believing that God has everything under control, so need to worry or try and do anythng about it - and that we should instead be contemplating the Rapture, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the prospect of Gordon Brown MP taking over the reins of power from Tony Blair, sometime in the next month or so.
Many will mourn Falwell's passing, millions more will not - so as my nod in the direction of posterity, the linked headline will take you to a small sample of his quips and quotes over the past few years. Normally, I'd say 'enjoy', but to do so here would be entirely missing the point.
image 'Dallas Rapture' from 'BoingBoing'
