Until about 8500 years ago, Europe was populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers who hunted, fished, and ate wild plants. Then, the farming way of life swept into the continent from its origins in the Near East, including modern-day Turkey. Within 3000 years most of the hunter-gatherers had disappeared. Little is known about these early Europeans. But…
Tiny molecules called microRNAs are tearing apart traditional ideas about the animal family tree.
Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 10^26. That’s what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider…
University of Alberta researchers have uncovered physical proof that animals existed 585 million years ago, 30 million years earlier than all previous established records show. The researchers found fossilized tracks of a centimeter-long, slug-like animal left behind 585 million years ago in a silty sediment. The research team determined that the tracks were made by…
Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery, archaeologists say. The findings add to recent efforts that have dated pottery piles in East Asia to more than 15,000 years ago, rebutting conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the…
Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn’s moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or…
Eighth-century jump in carbon-14 levels in trees could be explained by “red crucifix” supernova.
A rare and highly reactive iron mineral called green rust appears to have played an important role in ancient oceans, suggest new findings, which may have implications for the formation of Earth’s early atmosphere. The research team identified green rust in an Indonesian lake where conditions mimic those of the ancient oceans, and found the…
The long-standing belief that dinosaurs were cold-blooded may have been premature, if new research into herbivorous mammals is anything to go by, potentially overturning dino theory. Dinosaurs had long been assumed cold-blooded because bone microstructures identified in fossilized remains showed portions of slowed development also seen in lizards and crocodiles today. However, a new study…
Bits of food stuck between the teeth of a two-million-year-old South African hominid show that, unlike almost all other known human ancestors, it ate tree bark and other hard foods. Australopithecus sediba’s diet was dramatically different to that of its African cousins, which tended to eat grasses and sedges. “It is an important finding, because…