243.9 - And Another Thing: Possible Viking site found in Newfoundland

And Another Thing: Possible Viking site found in Newfoundland

Last for this week, let's end on something lighter, with an episode of our occasional feature called And Another Thing, where we turn away from political things to talk about some cool science stuff. This time, it's some cool archaeology stuff.

The Norse sagas and Viking legends are often ripping good yarns of exploration and discovery with a good number of epic battles thrown in - kind of like Peter Jackson for history geeks.

But they have also provided historical material, including enabling the discovery in 1960 of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland. It was the only known Viking site in North America.

Until, quite possibly, now.

Archaeologists using satellite images have discovered what they believe to be a Viking site at Point Rosse at the southeast tip of Newfoundland, some 600km - about 370 miles - south of L'Anse aux Meadows.

Excavations at the site have uncovered evidence of a Norse-like hearth and eight kilograms of early bog iron. The Norse were the only ones extracting iron from bogs 1,000 years ago.

They haven't found a lot of artifacts, which actually strengthens the idea that Vikings were present at the area at some point, because they tended to have fleeting settlements, so there would not have been a lot of time for things to be discarded or broken and so be left at the site for later discovery. That is, the lack of artifacts doesn't prove the idea that the site was a Viking settlement as opposed to some other sort, but it does even less to contradict it.

It needs to be emphasized that this is a possible Viking site; much more study needs to be done if that is to be confirmed. It took several years to get widespread agreement that L'Anse aux Meadows was a Norse site.

But lead researcher Sarah Parcak says that her team has not found any contradictory evidence, suggesting, she said, that means that either this is a Norse site - or a new culture that presents as Norse.

If it is confirmed, it would widen our understanding and knowledge of the Viking experience in North America. Which personally I find rather exciting - because, after all, Vikings! Looting and pillaging their way across hundreds of years of European history: That's my heritage!

Sources cited in links:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/discovery-vikings-newfoundland-canada-history-norse-point-rosee-l-anse-aux-meadows-a6965126.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/vikings-newfoundland-1.3515747
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/146754/20160403/newly-discovered-viking-site-in-canada-may-rewrite-history.htm

Left Side of the Aisle #243

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of April 7-13, 2016

This week:

Good News: Supreme Court upholds class action suit claims
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/04/04/us-supreme-court-declines-to-take-up-wal-mart-class-action-appea/21337884/

Good News: Supreme Court rejects attack on agency fees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-deadlocks-over-public-employee-union-case-calif-teachers-must-pay-dues/2016/03/29/b99faa30-f5b7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/3/29/1507564/-A-Scalia-less-deadlocked-Supreme-Court-spares-unions-For-now

Good News: Supreme Court unanimously smacks down attempt to redefine "one-person-one-vote"
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/supreme-court-evenwel/476769/
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/04/04/update-2-u-s-top-court-rejects-conservative-challenge-in-one-p/21337940/

RIP: Patty Duke
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/patty-duke-dead-69/story?id=38004939
http://www.khq.com/story/31651923/patty-dukes-husband-calls-sepsis-a-silent-killer
https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/news/sean-astin-mom-patty-dukes-210040048.html?ref=gs
http://www.cdapress.com/news/local_news/article_6fed8c92-fa1f-11e5-b579-8bf1ced9a8d3.html

Update: "Equitable sharing" back in force
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/01/1901-good-news-mostly-feds-largely-end.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/03/30/justice-department-reinstates-federal-program-that-helps-state-cops-act-like-robbers/
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35429-doj-resurrects-policing-for-profit-program
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/

Clown Award: Idaho Gov. Butch Otter
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/19/1413473/--Patriot-guarding-Muslim-free-gun-store-accidentally-shoots-himself
http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/news/checotah-man-accidentally-shoots-self-while-guarding-store/article_bdef6cb6-45f8-11e5-8676-d37a877e4cba.html
http://www.care2.com/causes/gop-bans-guns-at-republican-national-convention.html
http://wonkette.com/600291/maine-gov-paul-lepage-will-teach-democrats-lesson-by-refusing-to-swear-any-of-them-in
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/01/lepage-refuses-to-swear-in-senator-elect-over-spat-with-democrats/
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/3/29/1507746/-Idaho-governor-on-not-expanding-Medicaid-People-with-insurance-still-die

Outrage of the Week Number 1: 1 million losing Food Stamps
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/04/04/food-a04.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able-bodied_Adults_Without_Dependents
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-food-stamps-work-mandate-20160402-story.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0402/As-US-economy-rebounds-1-million-people-could-lose-food-stamps-benefit

Outrage of the Week Number 2: Nearly 2/3 of Americans approve of torture
Sources cited in links:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-torture-exclusive-idUSKCN0WW0Y3
http://theweek.com/articles/441396/why-torture-doesnt-work-definitive-guide
https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/nov/04/2
https://www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/sbos/costanzo_effects_of_interrogation.pdf
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/senate-report-finds-cia-interrogation-tactics-were-ineffective-n264621
http://www.care2.com/causes/torture-doesnt-work-but-most-americans-support-it.html
http://www.care2.com/causes/torture-by-navy-seals-covered-up-in-afghanistan.html

And Another Thing: Possible Viking site found in Newfoundland
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/discovery-vikings-newfoundland-canada-history-norse-point-rosee-l-anse-aux-meadows-a6965126.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/vikings-newfoundland-1.3515747
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/146754/20160403/newly-discovered-viking-site-in-canada-may-rewrite-history.htm

195.1 - Good News: national museum in Baghdad reopens

Good News: national museum in Baghdad reopens

Just one little bit of Good News to get things started.

The national museum in Baghdad, Iraq, has reopened.

One of the tragedies that occurred in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the looting of the national museum. Museum officials said that almost 15,000 pieces were stolen, most of them probably to be sold on the black market in antiquities. It was a crashing blow to Iraq's physical cultural heritage, one we could, to get sense of it, compare to the looting of the Smithsonian Institution or the National Archives - or both.

Now, 12 years after it was ransacked, with 4,300 of the most important works recovered, the museum has reopened while the search for the remaining antiquities goes on.

The dark side of this is that the re-opening was moved up in response to new destruction of antiquities in Mosul by Daesh - that is, ISIS - which destruction seems to me, frankly, to be a case of bilious spite, of "we'll do as much damage as we can before we get kicked out of the city."

But just for the moment, let's focus on the culture, the history, that has been saved. The re-opening of the national museum in Baghdad is Good News.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/iraq-museum#.tqzODdY4O

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 6

And Another Thing 4: 5500 year old tomb found in Sweden

Archaeologists have found a 5,500-year-old tomb possibly belonging to a Stone Age chieftain. They found it at a megalithic monument known as Ales Stenar, or Ale's Stones. It has 59 massive boulders which are arranged in the shape of a 220-foot-long ship. The site has sometimes been called the Swedish Stonehenge.

The thing is, the Ale's Stones site is only about  1400 years old and so likely dates from the end of Sweden's Iron Age. But cut marks on the stones are strikingly similar to ones found in Stone Age technology. So researchers thought for a long time that these stones were actually taken from some other monument.

Now they believe they have found it - a little over 40 yards away. Imprints of large boulders that apparently had been removed marked the site of what appears to have been a neolithic burial chamber called a dolmen, which consists of several upright stones with a horizontal boulder on top in which a body would be placed.

Based on the layout, the dolmen may be up to 5,500 years old - which, if it's confirmed, could make the source of the Swedish Stonehenge older than the actual Stonehenge.


Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/swedish-stonehenge-tomb-ales-stenar-chieftan_n_2000936.html

Left Side of the Aisle #80

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of October 25-31, 2012

Classism
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video#47percent
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/18/pf/taxes/romney-income-taxes-millionaires/index.html http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/12/some-stuff-i-didnt-have-time-for-2.html
http://prospect.org/article/gingrichs-profound-insight-poverty
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/108817/anatomy-the-47-percent#

Outrage of the Week and Clown Award (combined): Italian court sentences scientists to prison for failing to predict an earthquake
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gsa6N0iwCl1gOiqwsm_2zo87D-9Q?docId=ec399c68073f4f428aaad7a53e2b80ac
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/world/europe/italy-convicts-7-for-failure-to-warn-of-quake.html?_r=0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/italian-scientists-found-guilty-of-manslaughter-for-failure-to-perform-magic/2012/10/22/8f52e872-1c6d-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_blog.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/least_scientific_members_of_the_house_science_committee/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/09/441515/inhofe-god-says-global-warming-is-a-hoax/

And Another Thing 1: "Shiny" things found on Mars
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/mars-shiny-particles-curiosity_n_1981298.html

And Another Thing 2: Earth's magnetic field changing
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/03/us-science-earth-magneticfield-idUSBRE8920X620121003?feedName=OutloudFeed&feedType=RSS

And Another Thing 3: Picture of galaxies colliding
http://io9.com/5953573/a-pair-of-milky-ways-smash-into-each-other-300-million-light+years-away

And Another Thing 4: 5500 year old tomb found in Sweden
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/swedish-stonehenge-tomb-ales-stenar-chieftan_n_2000936.html

And Another Thing 5: Possible organic material in dinosaur fossils
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/dinosaur-cells-discovery-t-rex-fossil_n_1988988.html

Left Side of the Aisle #75 - Part 7

And Another Thing: Some cool archaeology bits

Finally for this week, a few rather cool archaeological bits.

For almost three decades, Colin Steer, of Plymouth, Devonshire, UK, wondered what caused the living room floor beneath his sofa to dip. After he retired, he decided to find out. So he started digging - and discovered that the indentation in the floor was covering a well. A well 30 inches wide and 33 feet deep that dates back to the 16th century.

The well may be connected to something called Drake’s leat, a watercourse built in the 16th century by Sir Francis Drake to carry water from Dartmoor to Plymouth. Steer is trying to find someone to date the well more exactly. In the meantime, he's got a cool feature for his house.

Speaking of old English stuff, one of the enduring mysteries of British history has been the burial place of King Richard III. It's known he was killed during the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, the last major battle of the War of the Roses. After the battle, Richard's body was stripped naked and paraded through the streets of Leicester to prove he was dead.

Researchers believe Richard was then buried in a nearby Franciscan friary. But that friary was demolished during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, leaving the exact location of the friary unknown.

Now, researchers have found the friary under a city parking lot in Leicester. They have found medieval window tracery, glazed floor tile fragments, part of what may be the cloisters, and a section of wall.

And just over a week ago they announced they have found human remains, with "strong circumstantial evidence" suggesting it's the body of Richard III. If it turns out to be so, another history mystery has been solved.

Finally, researchers have used new techniques to examine 4,000 year old obsidian tools found in Syria near its borders with Turkey and Iraq to reveal trade and trade routes of four millennia ago.

Obsidian is naturally occurring volcanic glass. It's smooth, hard, and far sharper than a surgical scalpel when fractured. It was highly desired as a material for making stone tools. In fact, obsidian blades are still used today in some specialized medical procedures.

Using the most recent techniques that use the fact that each volcanic source has a distinctive chemical signature, the researchers determined that most of the obsidian at the site and other nearby ones came from volcanoes some 200 kilometers (125 miles) away in what is now eastern Turkey. That wasn't a surprise, as models of ancient trade routes predicted as much. However, the team also discovered a set of obsidian artefacts originating from a volcano in what is now central Turkey, three times further away, indicating trade in obsidian was - and thus the associated trade routes were - more widespread than previously thought.

What's amazing here is that the ability to read that volcanic signature is so exact that not only did the team identify the particular volcano where the obsidian in the artefacts originated, they were able to pinpoint the exact flank of the particular volcano where it was collected and to determine that it was gathered from two different spots on its slope. That is just incredible.

Sources:
http://www.care2.com/causes/5-reasons-archaeology.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9506985/Well-well-well-couple-find-medieval-shaft-beneath-sofa.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2196353/Archaeologists-digging-council-car-park-Leicester-confirm-friary-King-Richard-III-believed-buried-in.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904135334.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bosworth_Field
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-19561018

Left Side of the Aisle #75

Left Side of the Aisle for the week of September 27 - October 6, 2012

This week: Outrage of the Week: Bank-hired goons break into occupied houses - even ones without a mortgage
http://wonkette.com/483595/wells-fargo-accidentally-forecloses-on-wrong-house-throws-away-couples-precious-memories
http://wonkette.com/483773/wells-fargo-even-sorrier-after-second-time-it-foreclosed-on-wrong-house#more-483773
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/09/05/owners-lose-possessions-after-home-near-twentynine-palms-is-mistakenly-foreclosed/
http://news.yahoo.com/wells-fargo-mistakenly-cleans-retired-couples-home-twice-192508841--abc-news-topstories.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/18/bank-contractors-break-ins_n_1682672.html

Clarabell Award: Wells Fargo has canned apologies for breaking into the wrong house
http://wonkette.com/483773/wells-fargo-even-sorrier-after-second-time-it-foreclosed-on-wrong-house#more-483773
http://wonkette.com/483595/wells-fargo-accidentally-forecloses-on-wrong-house-throws-away-couples-precious-memories

Occupy: Media assist in making it invisible
http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local/occupy-protesters-vow-retake-justin-herman-plaza/nSDXT/ 
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Occupy-protesters-snarl-traffic-streetcars-3872516.php 
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-occupy-anniversary-20120917,0,6713498.story
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/protests-near-stock-exchange-on-occupy-wall-st-anniversary/
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2012/09/silent-march-celebrates-occupy-wall-streets-one-year-anniversary/
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/09/16/one-year-later-occupiers-have-thinned-but-remain-committed/dHI7BiRFlOTYtEeIXGjSLP/story.html
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-17/occupy-wall-street-celebrates-first-year-with-carnival
http://www.freep.com/article/20120917/BUSINESS07/120917015/Occupy-Wall-Street-first-year?odyssey=nav|head

Trans-Pacific Partnership: NAFTA on steroids
http://www.thenation.com/article/168627/nafta-steroids#
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1439/content_item/freetpp

And Another Thing: Voyager 1 and 2 nearing true interstellar space
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/04/165269/voyager-1-set-to-burst-solar-system.html 
http://www.universetoday.com/44572/neptunes-distance-from-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

And Another Thing: Good news on solar and wind energy
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/09/11/media-missing-the-big-picture-on-solar/189835

And Another Thing: Some cool archaeology bits
http://www.care2.com/causes/5-reasons-archaeology.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9506985/Well-well-well-couple-find-medieval-shaft-beneath-sofa.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2196353/Archaeologists-digging-council-car-park-Leicester-confirm-friary-King-Richard-III-believed-buried-in.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904135334.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bosworth_Field
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-19561018

Left Side of the Aisle #61 - Part 5

And Another Thing: Remains found of theater where Shakespeare's company performed; incredible precision of Large Hadron Collider experiments

And Another Thing is our occasional foray into things not really political, just interesting. This week, we have a two-fer: something old and something new.

First, the old. In the prologue to William Shakespeare's play Henry V, the chorus asks

can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?

"This cockpit" and "this wooden O" refer to the theater in which the play was to be performed - a theater, that is, where some of Shakespeare's plays were first performed.

A theater whose remains archaeologists have now been discovered behind a pub in London on a site marked for redevelopment.

The theater was called The Curtain. It opened in 1577 and was used until about 1620. It was home to Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, from 1597 until 1599, when they moved to the Globe.

Experts from the Museum of London have uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old theater in an area called Shoreditch, just east of London's modern business district and about two miles north of where the old city walls would have stood in 1599. The site will be further excavated and the developer says he intends to preserve the site, which is good news.

Now, the new. The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a underground ring some 17 miles in circumference near Geneva, Switzerland. It has been nicknamed the “Big Bang machine,” because it is designed to simulate the conditions existing at the very beginning of our universe.

Recently, one of the scientists working there, Dr. Pauline Gagnon of the University of Indiana Bloomington, posted a blog entry describing a surprise she encountered during her work there. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until the end of her shift, when another scientist called in to report unexpected fluctuations, dips, in the data coming in.

She called the control room and was casually by the operator “That’s because the moon is nearly full and I periodically have to adjust the proton beam orbits.” In fact, they routinely had to be adjusted every couple of hours.

Here’s what was going on: One side of the accelerator was a little closer to the Moon - and so the Moon’s gravity was pulling more strongly on that side of the accelerator, every-so slightly deforming the tunnel through which the particle beams pass. And that shift would be enough to affect the results of experiments if it wasn't adjusted for.

This caused a fair bit of comment, some snarky, some amused, about how his powerful instrument was "no match for the Moon."

But this is what I wanted to point out: The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is a something under 239,000 miles, or about 385,000 kilometers. Even at that distance, the difference in gravitational force between two points no more than roughly 5.5 miles apart (opposite points on a circle about 17 miles around) - that's a bit over 2/1000th of one percent of the distance - that even at that distance, the difference in force over just 5.5 miles is enough to screw up the results of experiments.

I just want you to contemplate for a moment what that tells you about just how delicate, just how mind-bendingly precise, are the sorts of experiments being done by physicists today.

Sources:
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/full.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/curtain-theatre-shakespeare_n_1573445.html
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/big-bang-machine-suffers-interference-from-moon-gravity.php?ref=fpblg
http://www.universetoday.com/19426/distance-to-the-moon/

Left Side of the Aisle #61

Left Side of the Aisle for June 14 - 20, 2012

This week:

Good news on same-sex marriage: Another court finds DOMA unconstitutional
http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2012/02/domas-federal-definition-of-ma.html
http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2012/05/on-thursday-evening-a-federal.html
http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2012/06/another-federal-judge-finds-doma-marriage-definiti.html
http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2012/06/07/doma-takes-another-hit-in-court-fed-definition-of-marriage-deemed-unconstitutional/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scottie-thomaston/9th-circuit-prop-8_b_1571220.html

Attacks on the Commons: Government is not your enemy; the 1% is
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77209_Page3.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/us/politics/e-mails-reveal-extent-of-obamas-deal-with-industry-on-health-care.html
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/47-of-congress-members-millionaires-a-status-shared-by-only-1-of-americans/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/americans-suffered-record_n_1587387.html

Clarabell Award: School punishes student for actions of others
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/anthony-cornist-popular-h_n_1573901.html
http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/local_news/mt-healthy-schools-students-family-should-do-the-right-thing
http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/local_news/withholding-students-diploma-illegal

Outrage of the Week: US commits acts of war against Iran; media shrugs
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html
http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/06/01/cyberwar-is-war-white-house-said-but-nyt-didnt-notice/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/computer_malware/stuxnet/index.html

And Another Thing: Remains found of theater where Shakespeare's company performed; incredible precision of Large Hadron Collider experiments
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/full.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/curtain-theatre-shakespeare_n_1573445.html
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/big-bang-machine-suffers-interference-from-moon-gravity.php?ref=fpblg
http://www.universetoday.com/19426/distance-to-the-moon/

Attack of the 50-foot geek

Salud! Skoal! Here's to ya!

The earliest known winery has been uncovered in a cave in the mountains of Armenia.

A vat to press the grapes, fermentation jars and even a cup and drinking bowl dating to about 6,000 years ago were discovered in the cave complex by an international team of researchers.

While older evidence of wine drinking has been found, this is the earliest example of complete wine production, according to Gregory Areshian of the University of California, Los Angeles, co-director of the excavation. ...

According to the archeologists, inside the cave was a shallow basin about 3-feet across that was positioned to drain into a deep vat. ...

They also found grape seeds, remains of pressed grapes and dozens of dried vines. The seeds were from the same type of grapes — Vitis vinifera vinifera — still used to make wine.

This site is in the same area where the oldest known leather shoe, dated to some 5,500 years ago, was found. Maybe now we know why whoever lost the shoe did. (Yes, I know, not really. Geez.)

The Geektor's Daughter

Now don't anybody try to tell me that this is not major cool:

A previously unknown kind of human—the Denisovans—likely roamed Asia for thousands of years, probably interbreeding occasionally with humans like you and me, according to a new genetic study. ...

This "new twist" in human evolution adds substantial new evidence that different types of humans—so-called modern humans and Neanderthals, modern humans and Denisovans, and perhaps even Denisovans and Neanderthals—mated and bore offspring, experts say. ...

Taken together with a May DNA study that found Neanderthals also interbred with modern human ancestors, the Denisovan finding suggests there was much more interbreeding among different human types than previously thought, Stanford University geneticist Brenna Henn said.

That is not a position that has had a lot of support lately, although it has continuously percolated through discussions of human evolution. What makes this new DNA study, using material taken from a fossil bone of the finger of a young girl who died about 40,000 years ago, extra intriguing is that

living Pacific islanders in Papua New Guinea may be distant descendants of these prehistoric pairings.

Which, if true, would mean that prehistoric interbreeding not only occurred, it was common enough to leave present-day traces.

And Jean Auel smiles.

The Geek From The Black Lagoon

Easing back into the saddle while still trying to extend my politics-free vacation a bit longer, here are some science-related bits that caught my eye over the past couple of weeks.

1.- In 2008, some language researchers were documenting some unwritten languages spoken in the northeast corner of India, near the borders of China, Tibet, and Burma. At the time, there were 6909 documented languages. When they were done, there were 6910.

In doing their research, they discovered that a language known to its speakers as Koro, which was thought to be a dialect of a language called Aka, is actually an independent "hidden" language - one never before recognized.

"Koro is quite distinct from the Aka language," said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. "When we went there we were told it was a dialect of Aka, but it is a distant sister language."

Koro is an endangered language, spoken by only about 1000 people. Anderson said if they had made the trip 10 years later, they might have discovered only a handful of speakers. Linguists estimate that a language disappears about every two weeks as the last of its speakers die.

National Geographic, which supported the research as part of its Enduring Voices program, has a video about the discovery here.

2.- Around 5500 years ago, a Scandinavian Stone Age settlement, likely of the neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture, was hit with a disaster, possibly a fierce sandstorm or maybe a sudden flood that drew sand from the river. However it happened, the town was inundated and encased in a thick layer of sand.

And so it remained, undisturbed. Until now.

Archaeologists working in southern Norway dug through two meters of soil and sand, expecting to find an "ordinary" Stone Age site, one small and badly preserved. Instead, they uncovered what Håkon Glørstad, a spokesman for the dig, called "an archaeological sensation," an unspoiled dwelling site with stone structures and the most well-preserved Stone Age pottery ever found in Norway, including at least one entirely intact clay vessel.

More than 300 square meters have been excavated so far. It appears the complete settlement is much larger.

3.- The common belief among scientists is that life on Earth began forming in a “primordial soup” in the oceans. However, it develops that there is another possibility.

A study simulating chemical processes in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, discovered that molecules known as nucleotide bases and amino acids could have formed there. They are components, respectively, of DNA and proteins: the basic building blocks of life.

Intense radiation hits the top of Titan’s thick atmosphere and can break apart normally stable molecules, members of the research group explained. They studied what happens after these molecules fall apart. The researchers beamed radiation into a chamber containing chemicals believed to replicate those in Titan’s atmosphere, nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide. Formation of the life-building molecules, called complex organic compounds, followed.

In fact, the simulations generated all five of the nucleotide bases used by life on Earth, plus the two smallest amino acids. Team member Sarah Horst noted this means that to start building organic molecules, "We don’t need liquid water, we don’t need a surface."

Which means in turn that instead of starting in that "primordial soup," the building blocks of life on Earth might have arisen in a "primordial haze" high in the atmosphere. Life again proves to be more creative and more robust than we imagine.

4.- Finally, and speaking of evolution, while it wasn't their goal, a team of scientists at the University of Bristol in the UK has given what amounts to a big "Buzz off" to creationists and their "intelligent design" fellow travelers. After studying the impact of various fossil discoveries, they have concluded that despite various claims by various palaeontologists about "rewriting evolutionary history,"

most fossil discoveries don’t make a huge difference: they confirm, rather than contradict our understanding of evolutionary history.

That is especially true in the case of human evolution, where most discoveries of new fossil species simply fill in previously-known gaps in the fossil record.

Put another way, the more we learn about human evolution, the more we discover that while they may have had some of the exact details wrong, those dang evolutionists had the right idea all along.

Footnote: There are, of course, the Ig Nobels, awarded this year on September 30.

The Crawling Geek

Adding a bit to the overall mystery of Stonehenge comes the fact that in ancient times it may have been a tourist destination - at least it was a place people from quite some distance came to see.

Studies of the skeleton of an adolescent boy from some 3,500 years ago found near the site suggest that he traveled all the way from the Mediterranean - potentially Italy, Spain or southern France - to the southwest of England. ...

Another body found near the famous stone complex has been identified as coming from the German Alpine foothills some 800 years earlier.

So over 4,000 years ago, not only was Stonehenge being put to some actual use but knowedge of it was spread wide enough that people traveled halfway across Europe to be there.

Knowledge of the skeletons themselves was not new - the boy was found five years ago and the German before that - but determining where they came from, is.

Tooth enamel forms in a child's first few years, so it stores a chemical record of the environment in which the individual grew up. ...

Most oxygen in teeth and bone comes from drinking water - which is itself derived from rain or snow.

In warm climates, drinking water contains a higher ratio of heavy oxygen (O-18) to light oxygen (O-16) than in cold climates. So comparing the oxygen isotope ratio in teeth with that of drinking water from different regions can provide information about the climate in which a person was raised.

Most rocks carry a small amount of the element strontium (Sr), and the ratio of strontium 87 and strontium 86 isotopes varies according to local geology.

The isotope ratio of strontium in a person's teeth can provide information on the geological setting where that individual lived in childhood.

By combining the techniques, archaeologists can gather data pointing to regions where a person may have been raised.

One interesting thing is that both skeletons seem to indicate the presence of some sort of illness or injury. The boy died at 14 or 15 and since the article makes no mention of the skeleton bearing marks of violence, he apparently died young of some sickness.

The German seems to have suffered from a painful leg condition.

It may be that Stonehenge was a center of healing, drawing people from across Europe in search of cures....

Nobody is quite sure what the site was used for. It could have been a religious site built by sun worshipers, since the axis that runs through the center of the stone circle aligns with the midsummer sunrise.

Actually, it doesn't anymore due to Earth's precession of the equinoxes, but it did a few thousand years ago. Personally and in what is hardly an unshared opinion, I think part of the problem of "what was Stonehenge used for" is that is was used for different things by different people over the 1500 or so years in which the site was in use.

Whatever drew these ancient travelers to the location, they certainly weren't budget travelers. The boy was found with a 90-piece amber necklace, while the German had copper daggers and gold hair clasps.

"People who can get these rare and exotic materials are people of some importance," Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archeology told BBC News.

So were they seeking some sort of medical miracle? Was this a Bronze Age Lourdes? Or were they each on some (very) early version of The Grand Tour who just happened to die while they were there?

Questions are cool.

Footnote: Major props to the first one who can identify the source, the theme if you will, that provides the titles of a number of the science posts, marked by use of the word "geek" somewhere in the title.

Tales from the Geek

Time for a sanity break with a couple of recent science stories that interested me.

- Last week, paleontologists reported that

they've discovered fossils in the southern Utah desert of two new dinosaur species closely related to the Triceratops, including one with 15 horns on its large head.

The discovery of the new plant-eating species - including Kosmoceratops richardsoni, considered the most ornate-headed dinosaur known to man - was reported [last] Wednesday in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE, produced by the Public Library of Science.

The other dinosaur, which has five horns and is the larger of the two, was dubbed Utahceratops gettyi. ...

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has been a hotbed for dinosaur species discoveries in the past decade, with more than a dozen new species discovered. ...

Paleontologists say the discovery shows that horned dinosaurs living on the same continent 76 million years ago evolved differently.

- Also from last week comes the cool news that

[t]he $10 billion Big Bang machine under the Swiss-French border may be on the verge of its first scientific breakthroughs after appearing to produce a small amount of the matter that existed in the first moments of the universe....

Scientists say they are thrilled about a series of recent experiments with simple protons at the Large Hadron Collider, and that a wealth of new physics knowledge could be unearthed soon when the machine begins to smash more complicated nuclei into each other at nearly the speed of light.

Already, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, and outside experts are hailing the new data. They say colliding particles seem to be creating "hot dense matter" that would have existed microseconds after the Big Bang and might hold the key for understanding how the liquids, gases and solids of our universe were created. ...

Scientists say the effects they are observing are "obscure." But they are possibly a key piece in CERN's ultimate quest of answering the great questions of particle physics, such as the presumed existence of antimatter and the Higgs boson - sometimes referred to as the "God particle" because scientists theorize that it gives mass to other particles and thus to all objects and creatures in the universe. ...

The machine in the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva is already operating at 7 trillion electron volts, an energy level three times greater than any previous physics accelerator. The energy won't be doubled to 14 TeV until 2013, but CERN already plans to replace the simple protons with heavier lead nuclei for collisions in October.

As a sidebar to that, the LHC had a lot of technical glitches and one major melt-down at its start-up. So much so that two physicists suggested - no one seems quite sure how seriously - that the Higgs boson was actually causing "ripples in time" from some point in the future and thereby sabotaging its own discovery.

And in April, CNET reported, a "strangely-dressed young man" wearing "a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age" was found at the collider site, rooting around in trash bins. Upon being arrestred, he said he was looking for fuel for his time machine's power unit. He had come from the future, you see, a future when the discovery of the Higgs had lead to a "communist chocolate hellhole" of limitless power, no poverty, and "Kit-Kats for everyone" - and he was determined to prevent that by cutting off supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He was taken to a secure mental facility but later disappeared from his cell.

In considering this, the facts that CNET published it on April 1, that the "fuel for the time machine" sounds suspiciously like the device itself would be built on a DeLorean, and that the description of the "young man" sounds rather much like Matt Smith's Doctor Who should be ignored as thoroughly irrelevant.

- Yesterday, Greek archaeologists announced finding an ancient skeleton covered with gold foil in a grave on the island of Crete.

Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna. ...

The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimeters (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had been sewn onto a lavish robe or shroud that initially wrapped the body of a woman and has almost completely rotted away but for a few off-white threads.

"The whole length of the (grave) was covered with small pieces of gold foil - square, circular and lozenge-shaped," Stampolidis told The Associated Press. "We were literally digging up gold interspersed with earth, not earth with some gold in it." ...

The ruins of Eleutherna stand on the northern foothills of Mount Ida - the mythical birthplace of Zeus, chief of the ancient Greek gods. Past excavations have discovered a citadel, homes and an important cemetery with lavish female burials.

The town flourished from the 9th century B.C. - the dark ages of Greek archaeology that followed the fall of Crete's great Minoan palatial culture - and endured until the Middle Ages.

- And just today, Time magazine reported on new research that shows just how "social" there is in our being "social creatures." It notes that "we've known for some time" that "social denial lights up our central nervous systems," so much so that even if we know the rejection is coming from a computer, the experience sparks the release of a stress hormone called cortisol.

This week a new study shows that these physical effects go further: rejection actually stops your heart. ... The authors of the study - a three-member group led by a University of Amsterdam psychologist named Bregtje Gunther Moor - measured beat-by-beat heart rate changes in 22 students as they received either rejection or acceptance of portrait photos they had submitted. When hooked up to electrocardiogram monitors, the students reliably showed a skip in their hearts when they thought they had been rejected by someone shown their photos. ...

[T]he findings help explain how evolution programs human sociability.

In essence, it reinforces social tendencies by making it unpleasant to be rejected - which in turn pushes us toward seeking acceptance.

The geek's alive! Alive!

Two recent geeky things I came across:

1. NASA's Kepler mission uses a space-based telescope to search for exoplanets (ones outside our Solar System) by detecting the changes in the light reaching Earth from a star when an orbiting planet passes in front of that star, that is, between us and it. What's special about Kepler is that it's designed to look for "Earth-sized" planets: ones with a radius of half to double that of the Earth. And guess what:

Scientists celebrated Sunday after finding more than 700 suspected new planets - including up to 140 similar in size to Earth - in just six weeks of using a powerful new space observatory. ...

Astronomers said the discovery meant the chances of eventually finding truly Earth-like planets capable of sustaining life rose sharply. ...

“The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way [which has more than 100 billion stars] will contain 100 million habitable planets, and soon we will be identifying the first of them,” said Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a scientist on the Kepler Mission.

NASA has formally announced only five of the discoveries because it wants to be certain they are planets before it does so. But the initial results are very exciting.


2. Even as Stonehenge is slowly revealing its long-held secrets, it turns out to have some new surprises.

Archaeologists have discovered a second henge at Stonehenge, described as the most exciting find there in 50 years.

The circular ditch surrounding a smaller circle of deep pits about a metre (3ft) wide has been unearthed at the world-famous site in Wiltshire.

Archaeologists conducting a multi-million pound study believe timber posts were in the pits.

Project leader Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University of Birmingham, said the discovery was "exceptional".

He said the team "would guess" the newly-discovered site, which lies about 900 meters (2950 feet) west-northwest from the famous stone circle, dates back to about the time when Stonehenge was emerging at its most complex, about 2500 BCE, or 4500 years ago.

Mike Pitts, the editor of British Archaeology magazine, says that it surely is an important discovery but is more cautious about the interpretation of the site as a henge. The pits "might just be very big pits: there is a henge in Dorchester, Dorset, known as Maumbury Rings, that fits that description," he said.

He also suggests it could be "something quite different," noting it was previously known as a plowed-out burial mound and that it might still be that, just with "an unusual ditch or pit arrangement" where the large pits were quarries for a center mound.

Surely Mr. Pitts knows a hell of a lot more about such things than I do or ever will, but it does seem odd to me that quarries for a central mound would be evenly spaced around it and each the same size. That suggests more purposeful behavior in the arrangement than just getting material for a barrow.

In any event,

Professor Gaffney said he was "certain" they would make further discoveries as 90% of the landscape around the giant stones was "terra incognita" - an unexplored region.

What's old is new - at least to us as we rediscover it.

Tales from the Geek, Part Two

Oetzi the iceman may have been frozen in time in more ways than one. NPR reported recently that

British and Italian scientists have painstakingly spelled out the entire genome of the mitochondria — the tiny powerhouses within each cell — taken from intestinal cells of the remarkably well-preserved iceman. ...

The new analysis, published in the Nov. 1 issue of Current Biology, shows that his mitochondrial genes don't match up with any retrieved so far from modern-day humans. That virtually rules out any descendants from Oetzi's maternal lineage....

Mitochondrial DNA is passed down only from mothers to their offspring. It's an important tool for constructing family trees and tracing the movement of people across time and space. Mitochondrial DNA has only about 16,500 genetic units, called base-pairs, instead of the 3 billion in the entire human genome. And the mitochondrial genome is peppered with lots of mutations, unique genetic tags that make it easier for scientists to track genetic lineages.

What this means is that there are, as far as in known, no living descendents from the maternal side of Oetzi's family, no one from any aunts or sisters. That doesn't, however, rule out the possibility of descendents: If he had sons, they would not have received his mitochondrial DNA - which is, again, passed down only through females - but they would have inherited his Y chromosome.

So while Martin Richards of the University of Leeds says that "the maternal lineage of the iceman has apparently gone extinct," he's thinking of sequencing Oetzi's Y chromosome - a far bigger undertaking because it has far more genetic elements than the mitochondria. But Oetzi just may still have some distant relatives around.

Understand that this is "not earth-shattering," in the words of molecular anthropologist Ann Stone of Arizona State University, because "a sample size of one is difficult to do much with." Still, it ultimately might provide some additional clues to life in the copper age.

And besides, as Stone says, it's "kind of cool."

Tales from the Geek, Part One

There have been some neato-keen geeky stories recently, so I'm going to plow through some of them. Savor these few moments; the bad news will return soon enough.

This time, it's news via the BBC that

[f]ive lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says. ...

Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago - about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The writing is in proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet, and only a few words - including judge, slave, and king - have been deciphered so far. Researchers say they believe it's Hebrew because of the presence of a word that is only used in that language, but others aren't so sure: Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel's

colleagues at Hebrew University said the Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, therefore making it difficult to prove it was Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time.

But not matter if it's Hebrew or not,

Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was "very important", as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found.

The idea of "lost languages," the fact that there are ancient languages which can't be translated because there aren't enough surviving texts long enough to do analysis, has long fascinated me. In fact, the very idea of language itself interests me. Noam Chomsky made his name by arguing that there is a basic, common, underlying syntax to all languages - which strongly suggests that not only the ability for, but the root structure of, language is hard-wired into the human brain. (His famous line "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was to illustrate the idea: Even though the statement is complete, internally-contradictory nonsense that is unlikely to ever have been spoken before he came up with it, we instantly recognize its syntactic correctness.)

Others - notably, Stephen Pinker - have challenged that idea, but even he admits that the ability to language is inherent in people.

Related to that is the recent finding that birds "learn to sing from a hymn sheet in their head," as the BBC put it a couple of days ago.

Swiss researchers have identified a region of the Zebra Finch brain which they believe has an internal recording of how the birds ought to be singing.

A separate region seems to enable the birds to identify mistakes in their songs, they wrote in Nature journal.

What happened was that a team from the University of Zurich monitored the brain activity of the birds as they sang and as they listened to a recording of other zebra finches singing. They found that while the birds were singing, parts of their brain associated with listening were always active and other neurons became active when the birds made a mistake. According to team leader Professor Richard Hahnloser,

"This is a proof of concept that birds do actually listen to their own songs, and they do seem to be comparing it to something that they expect, or would like to hear." ...

The authors believe their research could also shed light on how humans learn to speak.

It has long been assumed that, like songbirds, humans learn complex vocal patterns by first listening to their speech and then comparing it to patterns stored in the brain.

But very little is known about the neural mechanisms involved.

This could well add to that knowledge.

The Last Geekfighter

Continuing the stream of consciousness topic choices, some sciency stuff. This one about the on-again-off-again romance of early modern humans and Neanderthals, which, latest information says, never happened.

Did the first modern humans in Europe share a bed with nearby Neanderthals? Almost certainly not, according to a new analysis of 28,000 year old Cro-Magnon DNA.

The Cro-Magnons were the first modern Homo sapiens in Europe, living there between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago. Their DNA sequences match those of today's Europeans, says Guido Barbujani, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Ferrera, Italy, suggesting that "Neanderthal hybridisation" did not occur.

His team published similar findings in 2003, but that study left open the possibility that the Cro-Magnon DNA had been contaminated by the researchers' own genes.

Now, Barbujani's team has sequenced a section of DNA from everyone who handled the sample and found no trace of contamination. ...

Tom Gilbert, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says the new tests convinced him of the Cro-Magnon DNA authenticity. "I was one of the guys who criticised it heavily the first time," he says.

In addition to the the DNA evidence, there is the fact that no "hybrid" skeletons have been found in Europe where the two species coexisted: All are either Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal. Although it remains hypothetically possible, it is increasingly doubtful that early modern humans and Neanderthals interbred.

It's a geek, geek, geek, geek world

Four relatively recent notes from the science front.

- May 29: The International Herald Tribune reported on an study published in the scientific journal Nature indicating that futuristic images of brain-machine interfaces may be closer than we thought.

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. ...

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach. ...

The new experiment goes a step further [than previous ones]. In it, the monkeys' brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

The monkeys even came to putting the robot fingers in their mouths to suck off the sticky residue from when they had picked up marshmallows.

There are still bugs before this could be a practical technology, not the least of which is that the implantable electrode grids used to control the arm tend to fail after just a few months and no one is sure why. Still, this is an impressive result. As University of Montreal neuroscientist Dr. John Kalaska said in an accompanying editorial in Nature, systems such as these, when perfected,

would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.

I admit I find the idea of a brain-machine interface the tiniest bit creepy - but not nearly creepy enough to refrain from celebrating the sort of potential Dr. Kalaska outlined.

- June 29: I can't understand why, but for 15 years no one blew through either of two skull-shaped clay whistles found in the hands of a skeleton buried in an Aztec temple.

When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.

If death had a sound, this was it.

Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods.

The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico's ruins.

For years, many archaeologists who uncovered ancient noisemakers dismissed them as toys. Museums relegated them to warehouses. But while most studies and exhibits of ancient cultures focus on how they looked, Velazquez said the noisemakers provide a rare glimpse into how they sounded. ...

Velazquez is part of a growing field of study that includes archaeologists, musicians and historians.

Velazquez says that for too long, archaeology treated ancient civilizations as if they were deaf and dumb.

That's changing, said Tomas Barrientos, director of the archaeology department at Del Valle University of Guatemala.

"Ten years ago, nothing was known about this," he said. "But with the opening up of museum collections and people's private collections, it's an area of research that is growing in importance."

Archaeologist Paul Healy notes that we may never know just how these ancient instruments were intended to sound because "we don't have sheet music" for them. Still, even just the types of different sounds can give a deeper understanding of cultures that for too long stood silent.

- July 4: The Beeb describes how a new study published in the journal Science offers confirmation of what astronomers have suspected for some time: Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, is shrinking.

Data from a flyby of Mercury in January 2008 show the planet has contracted by more than one mile (1.5km) in diameter over its history.

Scientists believe the shrinkage is due to the planet's core slowly cooling.

That same cooling, it's believed, powers Mercury's magnetic field.

The Messenger (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft passed within 200km (125 miles) of Mercury earlier this year.

It was the first time the planet had been viewed up close since Mariner 10's third and final fly-by in March 1975.

The flyby was one of three to be made by the craft as it prepares to enter into orbit around the Solar System's smallest planet in 2011.

During that earlier flyby

[c]ameras revealed a densely cratered world - with wrinkles. Planetary geologists call them "lobate scarps" and, like wrinkles on a raisin, they are thought to be a sign of shrinking.

A belief that appears to be confirmed.

- July 6: According to a release in ScienceDaily, findings by Great Ape Trust of Iowa scientist Dr. Serge Wich show that populations of the endangered wild orangutan are declining more sharply than previously thought.

Orangutans live in the wild only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo and estimates of their numbers have dropped so sharply over just the past four years - down 14% on Sumatra and 10% on Borneo - that if urgent action is not undertaken, they could in just a few more years become the first great ape species to go extinct.

Dr. Wich blamed the decline mostly on illegal logging and the expansion of palm oil plantations which have served to both reduce and splinter the orangutan's habitat.

The report, originally published in the conservation journal Oryx, also included a number of recommended actions to halt the decline, perhaps most important of which is creating the government will to enforce good land use policies.

Stargeek Atlantis, Episode Two

Here's a discovery that is quite literally full of shit. From the Washington Post for April 4:

Using radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis, an international team concluded that fossilized feces found five feet below the surface of an arid cave [in Oregon] are significantly older than any previous human remains unearthed in the Americas.

About 1,000 years older, in fact, placing people genetically similar to Native Americans in North America more than 14,000 years ago.

The discovery ... is a blow to the widely held theory that the Clovis culture - named after a site in New Mexico where its distinct artifacts and fluted spearheads were first identified in the 1930s - was the first human presence in North America. [Dennis] Jenkins [of the University of Oregon, who oversaw the dig.] said that while the human DNA found in Oregon could be from ancestors of the Clovis culture, none of the distinctive Clovis technology has been found in the region.

The "Clovis first" theory has been challenged by almost a decade of discoveries from Canada to the southern tip of South America that indicate that humans were present before the time of the Clovis civilization, generally dated at about 13,000 years ago. But yesterday's report is considered key because it is the first to involve datable human DNA.

Some criticize the finding, suggesting the human DNA may be the result of later contamination of earlier animal feces, but the team says there is too much human protein to be explained that way.

Besides the sheer coolness of the find, there is another interesting aspect.

If the discovery is ultimately confirmed and accepted by anthropologists, it will also challenge the prevailing theory about how humans spread across the Americas.

Most experts agree that the first American inhabitants came from Siberia, traveling over what was then a land and ice bridge across the Bering Strait to what is now Alaska, probably before 15,000 years ago. Much of Canada was then covered by an ice sheet that would have made it impossible to migrate southward.

Using geological and climate information, researchers have concluded that a corridor of ice-free land opened in inland Canada between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, and that the earliest inhabitants could have made their way to the high plains of the United States by that path. Humans are believed to have then spread quickly across North America and then South America - doing so in hundreds, rather than thousands, of years.

But if very early humans lived in Oregon, that suggests they either came directly from Asia by boat or traveled down the Pacific coastline after crossing the land bridge.

Of those two, I find the idea of skimming the coast in small craft a more likely scenario than a direct transit from Asia, but either way, it requires a re-think of how early people lived and traveled. Which is what is so cool about science, including the so-called "soft" sciences like archaeology and anthropology: There is always more to learn.