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Scientists announced the discovery of stone tools dating to 2.1 million years ago in Shangchen, China, the oldest evidence of hominins outside Africa.
The finding doesn’t necessarily indicate that it was Homo erectus which made it to China faster than previously thought. It’s believed Homo erectus hadn’t even evolved by this point, so the artifacts could suggest that a whole other species of hominins expanded east to Asia.
“The implications of all this are large,” Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute not involved in the study, tells Zimmer. “We must re-evaluate our understanding of human prehistory in Eurasia.”
Zimmer reports that back in 1964, researchers found the skull of a Homo erectus in the Lantian area of the Shaanxi province, which at the time they placed at around 1.15 million years. When researchers revisited the Lantian site in the early 2000s, however, they determined that the layer the skull came from was older—about 1.63 million years old. They also noticed what appeared to be stone tools embedded 200 feet up in a cliff face.
That observation led to 13 years of painstaking excavations. During that time, the team found that various human ancestors occupied the site in Shangchen’s southern Chinese Loess Plateau between 1.26 and 2.12 million years ago. According to their study, published in the journal Nature, the researchers uncovered 80 stone artifacts found in 11 layers of soil deposited when the climate was warm and wet. They also uncovered 16 artifacts in six layers that date to a time when the climate conditions were colder and drier.
Most importantly, they were able to date the layers of soil using a technique called paleomagnetism by looking at certain minerals which align with the Earth’s magnetic field, which occasionally flip flops. The oldest artifacts were found in a layer sandwiched between rock formed 2.14 million years ago and 1.85 million years ago. Based on their position, the researchers estimate six of the tools are 2.12 million years old, making them the oldest stone tools found outside Africa.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oldest-stone-tools-outside-africa-unearthed-china-180969621/#YdML7tKpLhSzoUYR.99 |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| Stephen Hawking |
If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form. |
| Tito Jackson |
Oh, Michael Jackson is Michael Jackson. And no matter if he sold 40 million records off of one record and sold 15 off his last or whatever the counts may be, Michael Jackson will be Michael Jackson. |
| Michele Bachmann |
Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species. |
| Antonio Damasio |
When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer. |
| Georgia Jagger |
Fake tan is really difficult to get right. When I was younger, I'd always do it wrong. I'd leave it on and forget to wash it off. So I embrace being pale. I like getting a tan, but I also think that if you're going to do it, it has to be gradual. I just work the pale thing now. |
| James Balog |
We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone. |
| Tim Cahill |
Hot, dry katabatic winds, like the south foehn in Europe, the sharav in the Middle East, and the Santa Ana of Southern California, are all believed to have a decided effect on human behavior and are associated with such health problems as migraines, depression, lethargy, and moodiness. Some scientists say that this is a myth. |
| David Baker |
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses. |
| Paul Feig |
It's healthy to have older friends. You go, 'Look, I'm younger than them!' That's always the nice thing, if you can be the youngest one in the room at times. Like if you're always the oldest one in the room, you'll start to feel like the oldest person in the world. So get older friends, because they're cool. Get cool older friends. |
| Thomas Sowell |
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today. |
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When our ancestors first migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, they were not alone. At least two of our hominid cousins had made the same journey?Neanderthals and Denisovans. Neanderthals, the better known of the two species, left Africa about 300,000 years ago and settled in Europe and parts of western Asia. The Denisovans are a much more recent addition to the human family tree. In 2008, paleoanthropologists digging in a cave in southern Siberia unearthed a 40,000-year-old adult tooth and an exquisitely preserved fossilized pinkie bone that had belonged to a young girl who was between five and seven years old when she died.
Photo: Entrance to a cave in a cliff wall in SiberiaRecently, scientists successfully extracted nuclear DNA from the pinkie bone and conducted comparison ...
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Scientists Confirm There Was Life On Earth 3.5 Billion Years Ago (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/12/12/1718063115)
Paleobiologists have confirmed today that life forms existed some 3.5 billion years ago. The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses the latest techniques to date the most aged remains available. Quartz reports:
The research, led by paleobiologist William Schopf of the University of California-Los Angeles and geoscientist John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been in the works for what seems a long time to most, but which the academics know is merely a blink of the eye in terms of life on Earth. The sp...
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51st Known Mersenne Prime Number Found (mersenne.org)
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1, having 24,862,048 digits. A computer volunteered by Patrick Laroche from Ocala, Florida made the find on December 7, 2018.
GIMPS has been on amazing lucky streak, finding triple the expected number of new Mersenne primes -- a dozen in the last fifteen years.
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Homo hobos
This post is a comment.
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China Says it Cloned a Police Dog To Speed Up Training
A cloned dog, believed to be the first of the kind in China, has started training in Yunnan Province in a program to reduce the cost and time needed for training police dogs. From a report:
Kunxun, a female of the Kunming wolfdog breed, was born on Dec. 19 last year in Beijing and arrived on March 5 for training at the Kunming Police Dog Base of the Ministry of Public Security. She was cloned from a 7-year-old female dog, known as Huahuangma, that has been in service in the city of Pu'er, Yunnan, by Sinogene, a Beijing-based biotechnol...
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Study Finds Flaw In Emergent Gravity https://phys.org/news/2018-08-flaw-emergent-gravity.html
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org:
In recent years, some physicists have been investigating the possibility that gravity is not actually a fundamental force, but rather an emergent phenomenon that arises from the collective motion of small bits of information encoded on spacetime surfaces called holographic screens. The theory, called emergent gravity, hinges on the existence of a close connection between gravity and thermodynamics. Emergent gravity has received its share of criticism, however, and a new paper adds to this by showing that the holographic screen surfaces described b...
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China Says It Has Developed a Quantum Radar That Can See Stealth Aircraft
At a recent air show in the city of Zhuhai, state-owned Chinese defense giant China Electronics Technology Group Corporation displayed what it claims to be a quantum radar that's able to detect even the stealthiest of stealth aircraft. The company claims to have been working on the technology for years, and to have tested it for the first time in 2015. In principle, a quantum radar functions like a regular radar -- only that instead of sending out a single beam of electromagnetic energy, it uses two split streams of entangled photons. Only one of these beams is sent out, but due to a quirk of quantum physics both streams will display the same changes, despite being potentially miles apart. As a result, by looking a...
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"never thought id say this, used to be an atheist. actually i believed in unification. but now i found a way that made sense put some faith in it. wanna help others, helpin people is my favorite. remember how i thought, looked down on god. thought i had it right but realize now im wrong"
This post is a comment.
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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review:
Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roa...
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New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago
In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it. "The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones. It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered...
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