Latest news with #IceAge
Scoop
15 hours ago
- Science
- Scoop
How Much Of The Past Should We Bring Back To Life?
There is an incredible amount of scientific effort put toward understanding the past and bringing some of it back to life. Everyone agrees it's nice to have some old structures around—like the pyramids at Giza and the Great Wall of China—but what about the living creatures we once lived alongside? With recent advances in genetic technology, de-extinction may be a possibility—but should we be doing it? Several scientific disciplines are currently geared specifically to provide us with realistic insights into what life would have been like in the past. Archaeology in particular has rank after rank of specialists tuned toward reconstructing the built environment—monuments, houses, caves, and even whole towns—and the ways people would have lived in those environments. We conduct these experiments to understand the choices our species has made as we evolved into the cultures and societies that exist today, and we conserve the walls and temples of our pasts because they mean something to the people who visit them. We have highly trained conservators who carefully rebuild, brick by brick, the great Mesopotamian temples of 5,500 years ago (alongside conservators who are not as well-trained but whose good intentions outstrip their abilities, as seen with the case of the Ecce Homo reconstruction in Borja, Spain). There are also an extraordinary number of experimental archaeology projects aimed at unraveling even the most intangible mysteries of the past—helping us see that the beautiful Paleolithic art in caves like Lascaux may have been an early form of animation when seen under a torch, or that making some stone tools requires special cognitive abilities. Advances in technology make the reconstruction of the past increasingly realistic. But what if we could recreate the living environment of our evolutionary past? What if we could bring back species that haven't been seen since the last Ice Age? This is exactly the question that a major new research effort is asking. The Colossal project is a private enterprise that wants to use advances in genetics to attempt the 'de-extinction' or 'resurrection' of an iconic Ice Age animal: the woolly mammoth. De-extinction has certainly grabbed imaginations (not to mention headlines), but as research funding is squeezed by economic conditions around the globe, scientists must ask themselves: what will this achieve? For Colossal, there are clear benefits. There is the wow factor of creating a cold-adapted elephant that has not existed for thousands of years, and of course, there is the potential of developing new and, possibly, incredibly lucrative bioscience tech based on modifying genetics. Perhaps these technologies could save animals from extinction and bring back the past, even if many scientists are concerned about the prospect due to ethical and technical reasons. However, as archaeology has learned, bringing back the past is never as straightforward as it seems. Something as obvious as preserving 1,000-year-old ruins for future generations to marvel at becomes less clear-cut when future generations might need to build their own monuments and walls (or even just roads). How much of the past should we bring back? The debate over how much of the Stonehenge prehistoric landscape should be sacrificed to build a tunnel for one of the most congested roads in England has shown that even trained professionals can't agree on what is 'enough' of the past to save. This makes for some tricky questions for those who want to rebuild and recreate the past. What will happen if we really do succeed in the 'de-extinction' of a woolly mammoth—an animal that will be born alone into a world that it is not adapted to? Will it help us save the elephants that are under threat today? Colossal is putting a lot of effort into elephant conservation, but how will creating a genetically cold-adapted elephant address the habitat loss that has led our big-bodied species to face extinction? Would we be better off spending our research efforts on recreating the environments of the past, or the charismatic animals who once roamed them? What parts of the past to preserve—and which to leave behind—remains a complicated tangle of ethical, practical, and even philosophical quandaries. The toppling of a historic statue of a slave trader into Bristol harbor in 2021 by outraged citizens is a clear example of how governments, citizens, and professionals are still grappling with how we bring the past into the present. As technology advances, we will be confronted with even thornier issues—like the ethics of bringing animals or even people back to life. If we cannot agree on the morality of preserving the past as a cold metal statue, how will we resolve the question surrounding the consequences of bringing something that lives and breathes back into the world? Author Bio: Brenna R. Hassett, PhD, is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire and a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum, London. In addition to researching the effects of changing human lifestyles on the human skeleton and teeth in the past, she writes for a more general audience about evolution and archaeology, including the Times (UK) top 10 science book of 2016 Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, and her most recent book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood. She is also a co-founder of TrowelBlazers, an activist archive celebrating the achievements of women in the 'digging' sciences.
Daily Maverick
a day ago
- Science
- Daily Maverick
New research strengthens case for age of ancient New Mexico footprints
Researchers used a technique called radiocarbon dating to determine that organic matter in the remains of wetland muds and shallow lake sediments near the fossilized foot impressions is between 20,700 and 22,400 years old. That closely correlates to previous findings, based on the age of pollen and seeds at the site, that the tracks are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. The footprints, whose discovery was announced in 2021, indicate that humans trod the landscape of North America thousands of years earlier than previously thought, during the most inhospitable conditions of the last Ice Age, a time called the last glacial maximum. The age of the footprints has been a contentious issue. Asked how the new findings align with the previous ones, University of Arizona archaeologist and geologist Vance Holliday, the study leader, replied: 'Spectacularly well.' Homo sapiens arose in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago and later spread worldwide. Scientists believe our species entered North America from Asia by trekking across a land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska. Previous archaeological evidence had suggested that human occupation of North America started roughly 16,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherers who left the tracks were traversing the floodplain of a river that flowed into an ancient body of water called Lake Otero. The mud through which they walked included bits of semi-aquatic plants that had grown in these wetlands. Radiocarbon dating is used to determine the age of organic material based on the decay of an isotope called carbon-14, a variant of the element carbon. Living organisms absorb carbon-14 into their tissue. After an organism dies, this isotope changes into other atoms over time, providing a metric for determining age. 'Three separate carbon sources – pollen, seeds and organic muds and sediments – have now been dated by different radiocarbon labs over the course of the trackway research, and they all indicate a last glacial maximum age for the footprints,' said Jason Windingstad, a University of Arizona doctoral candidate in environmental science and co-author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances. The original 2021 study dated the footprints using radiocarbon dating on seeds of an aquatic plant called spiral ditchgrass found alongside the tracks. A study published in 2023 used radiocarbon dating on conifer pollen grains from the same sediment layers as the ditchgrass seeds. But some scientists had viewed the seeds and pollen as unreliable markers for dating the tracks. The new study provides further corroboration of the dating while also giving a better understanding of the local landscape at the time. 'When the original paper appeared, at the time we didn't know enough about the ancient landscape because it was either buried under the White Sands dune field or was destroyed when ancient Lake Otero, which had a lot of gypsum, dried out after the last Ice Age and was eroded by the wind to create the dunes,' Holliday said. Today, the landscape situated just west of the city of Alamogordo consists of rolling beige-colored dunes of the mineral gypsum. 'The area of and around the tracks included water that came off the mountains to the east, the edge of the old lake and wetlands along the margins of the lake. Our dating shows that this environment persisted before, during and after the time that people left their tracks,' Holliday said. The area could have provided important resources for hunter-gatherers. 'We know from the abundant tracks in the area that at least mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels and dire wolves were around, and likely other large animals. Given the setting, there must have been a large variety of other animals and also plants,' Holliday added. The climate was markedly different than today, with cooler summers and the area receiving significantly more precipitation. 'It is important to note that this is a trackway site, not a habitation site,' Windingstad said. 'It provides us a narrow view of people traveling across the landscape. Where they were going and where they came from is obviously an open question and one that requires the discovery and excavation of sites that are of similar age in the region. So far, these have not been found.'
India Today
a day ago
- Science
- India Today
Humans adapted to diverse habitats before trekking out of Africa
Small bands of Homo sapiens made a few failed forays leaving our home continent before the species finally managed to launch a major dispersal out of Africa roughly 50,000 years ago, going first into Europe and Asia and eventually the rest of the why was this migration successful after the prior ones were not? New research is offering insight. It documents how human hunter-gatherers in Africa began about 70,000 years ago to embrace a greater diversity of habitats such as thick forests and arid deserts, acquiring an adaptability useful for tackling the wide range of conditions awaiting beyond the the dispersal 50,000 years ago was successful is a big question in human origins research. Our results suggest that one part of the reason is that humans had developed the ecological flexibility to survive in challenging habitats," said Loyola University Chicago archeologist Emily Hallett, co-leader of the study published in the journal Nature. Looking at an array of archeological sites in Africa, the study detailed how human populations expanded their range into the forests of Central and West Africa and the deserts of North Africa in the roughly 20,000 years preceding this examples of archeological sites dating to this time that illustrate the expansion of human niches to harsh deserts include locales in Libya and Namibia, and examples of expansion to forested habitats include locales in Malawi and South sapiens arose roughly 300,000 years ago, inhabiting grasslands, savannahs and various other African ecosystems."Starting from about 70,000 years ago, we see that they suddenly start to intensify this exploitation of diverse habitats and also expand into new types of habitat in a way we don't see before. They exploit more types of woodland, more types of closed canopy forests, more types of deserts, highlands and grasslands," said archeologist and study co-leader Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany."An Ice Age was coming, which means drier conditions in parts of Africa. It seems possible that humans responded to this squeeze by learning how to adapt to new niches," Scerri increased ecological flexibility of the species appears to have reflected cultural and social advances such as passing knowledge from one generation to the next and engaging in cooperative behavior, the researchers said."This must have entailed profound changes in their interaction with the natural environment, as it allowed them to occupy not only new environments in Africa, but entirely new conditions in Eurasia as well," said evolutionary biologist and study co-leader Michela Leonardi of the Natural History Museum in London."Another way to phrase this is that the ability to live in a variety of environments in Africa is not directly the adaptation that allowed a successful out of Africa, but rather a sign that humans by that point were the ultimate generalist, able to tackle environments that went from deep forest to dry deserts," said University of Cambridge evolutionary ecologist and study co-leader Andrea flexibility is the key trait that allowed them, later on, to conquer novel challenges, all the way to the coldest tundras in Siberia."Trekking out of Africa, Homo sapiens encountered not only new environments and unfamiliar animals and plants, but also other human species, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans. The ecological flexibility learned in Africa may have provided an edge when Homo sapiens encountered these other humans, both of whom disappeared relatively soon thereafter, the researchers evidence indicates that today's people outside of Africa can trace their ancestry to the population of humans, numbering perhaps only in the thousands, who engaged in that pioneering migration out of Africa approximately 50,000 years ago."I think that adaptability and innovation are hallmarks of our species, and that they allowed us to succeed in every environment we encountered," Hallett said. "At the same time, we are almost too good at adapting to different places, to the detriment of most other species on Earth."Trending Reel
Time of India
a day ago
- Science
- Time of India
Who really were the first Americans? New study debunks earlier theory
A new study has reignited debate over the age of human footprints discovered at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. These ancient tracks, first revealed in 2021, were initially dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago — suggesting humans lived in North America during the peak of the last Ice Age, far earlier than previously thought. To verify these findings, researchers led by Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona conducted fresh radiocarbon dating on organic sediments from core samples at the site. Their results aligned with the earlier estimates, placing the footprints firmly within the Last Glacial Maximum. The analysis, conducted in independent labs, adds weight to the theory that humans occupied the region around 23,000 years ago. "Our data supports the original data" that dated the site to 23,000 years ago, study first author Vance Holliday, a professor emeritus of anthropology and geosciences at the University of Arizona, told Live Science. "Plus, we now have an idea of what the landscape was like when people were out there." by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Access all TV channels anywhere, anytime Techno Mag Learn More Undo The footprints, likely left by Ice Age hunter-gatherers, suggest early migration via the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to North America. If confirmed, this would challenge the long-held belief that the Clovis people — who arrived around 13,000 years ago — were the first inhabitants of the Americas. Dating the tracks has proven controversial. In 2022, skeptics argued that radiocarbon dating of ditch grass (a water plant) may have yielded misleadingly old results due to underwater carbon contamination. To address this, researchers later used optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and pollen-based radiocarbon methods, which again confirmed the original timeline. Live Events The latest study brings the total number of radiocarbon-dated samples from the footprint layer to 55, including mud, seeds, and pollen. 'It would be extreme serendipity for all these independent dates to be wrong,' Holliday said. Still, some experts remain cautious. Michael Waters of Texas A&M told Live Science that the source of the organic carbon is unclear and could still be affected by old water-derived carbon. He also pointed out the absence of associated artifacts or tools, though Holliday argues this is consistent with mobile hunter-gatherer behavior. Despite lingering doubts, the growing body of evidence points to a much earlier human presence in North America than previously accepted — a discovery that may reshape our understanding of the continent's earliest settlers.
BBC News
2 days ago
- Science
- BBC News
Artefacts suggest Australia's first people lived in mountains
A team of archaeologists have made a discovery in Australia that suggest that the continent's first people may have lived in high up in mountain found rare artefacts that dated back to the last Ice Age at a cave in Australia's Blue Mountains - which is west of have found that site known as the Dargan Shelter was lived in by early humans around 20,000 years Amy Mosig Way, who lead the study said: "Until now, we thought the Australian high country was too difficult to occupy during the last Ice Age." The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour and makes the case that humans once lived above 700m in Australia - with this particular cave being 1073m above sea say the area would be been much cooler during the last Ice Age and there wouldn't have been as much vegetation as also say there wouldn't have been much firewood available at that time and sources of water would likely have been frozen during the study has raised questions about how some of the continents first people managed to adapt to the difficult conditions. Archaeologists from the Australian Museum, the University of Sydney and the Australian National University worked together with First Nations community members to unearth the artefacts during a digs at the site - they found almost of these items were prehistoric tools which researchers believe people used for cutting or is thought that most of those tools were made locally to the cave site, but not say that some seem to have come from an area around 31 miles away.
