Paleontology news

A new analysis of the remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) that roamed Earth 68 million years ago has confirmed traces of protein from blood and bone, tendons, or cartilage. The findings, scheduled for publication in the Sept. 4 issue of ACS' monthly Journal of Proteome Research, is the latest addition to an ongoing controversy over which biochemical remnants can be detected in the dino. In the study, Marshall Bern, Brett S. Phinney and David Goldberg point out that the first analysis in 2007 of a well-preserved, fossilized T. rex bone identified traces of seven distinct protein fragments, or peptides, from collagen. That material is one of the primary components of bone, tendons and other connective tissue. However, later studies disputed that finding, suggesting that it was a statistical fluke or the result of contamination from another laboratory sample.

The scientists describe reanalysis of the T. rex data and also report finding evidence of substances found in collagen. "In summary, we find nothing obviously wrong with the Tyrannosaurus rex [analysis from 2007]," the report states. "The identified peptides seem consistent with a sample containing old, quite possibly very ancient, bird-like bone, contaminated with only fairly explicable proteins. Hemoglobin and collagen are plausible proteins to find in fossil bone, because they are two of the most abundant proteins in bone and bone marrow."

credited to American Chemical Society

Known for their wide variety of vibrant plumage, birds have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colors over millions of years. A team of paleontologists and ornithologists led by Yale University has now discovered evidence of vivid iridescent colors in feather fossils more than 40 million years old. The finding, published online August 26 in Biology Letters, signifies the first evidence of a preserved color-producing nanostructure in a fossilized feather.

Iridescence is the quality of changing color depending on the angle of observation, such as the rainbow of colors seen in an oil slick. The simplest iridescent feather colors are produced by light scattering off the feather's surface and a smooth surface of melanin pigment granules within the feather protein. Examining feather fossils from the Messel Shale in Germany with an electron microscope, scientists have documented this smooth layer of melanin structures, called melanosomes.

"These feathers produced a black background with a metallic greenish, bluish or coppery color at certain angles—much like the colors we see in starlings and grackles today," said Richard Prum, chair of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale and one of the paper's authors.

For more than 25 years, paleontologists have found microscopic tubular structures on fossilized feathers and hair. These were long interpreted as bacteria that had digested the feathers at the time they were fossilized. The team had previously discovered that these structures were in fact not bacteria but melanosomes, which then allowed them to document the original color patterns. Following up on the new finding, they are racing to discover what additional coloration features may be found in fossil feathers.

"The discovery of ultra-structural detail in feather fossils opens up remarkable possibilities for the investigation of other features in soft-bodied fossils, like fur and even internal organs," said Derek Briggs, Yale's Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Geology and Geophysics, and an author of the study.

The discovery could pave the way for determining color features of other ancient birds and even dinosaurs, the team said.

"Of course, the 'Holy Grail' in this program is reconstructing the colors of the feathered dinosaurs," said Yale graduate student and lead author Jakob Vinther. "We are working hard to determine if this will be possible."

credited to esciencenews.com

The North Sea was once isolated from surrounding oceans and its change to a more fresh water state led to a significant reduction in the diversity of life, say a team of German and British scientists who have used fossilized shark teeth to reconstruct the climate of the North Sea during the Palaeogene period, between 40 and 60 million years ago.

The Palaeogene was a time when greenhouse conditions prevailed and mammals began to diversify in the wake of the mass extinction event that saw the demise of the dinosaurs, along with 65% of all species. It also featured a brief episode of global warming known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), a rapid climatic disturbance that saw temperatures rise by around six degrees in a 20,000 year period.

Whilst scientists already have a lot of information about the climate on land and in open water during the period, very little has previously been known about the climate of marginal seas like the North Sea. The researchers used oxygen isotope data obtained from shark teeth recovered from the London and Hampshire basins, as well as sites in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. They cover a 33 million year period during the Palaeocene-Eocene epochs, representing both shallow and deeper water depths.

Shark teeth are continually shed throughout their lives, so they are relatively abundant in the fossil record. Often they are the only part of a shark to be fossilised, with specimens from as far back as 450 million years ago having been discovered.

When the teeth grow, their oxygen isotope ratio mirrors that of the sea water they are in, so fossilised teeth can be used as a record of palaeo-temperatures. Warmer seas contain more of the heavier isotope, 18O, as it is easier for the lighter 16O to be vaporised. They are also used to indicate the salinity of water, as the water becomes more salty with increased water evaporation.

The results indicate that the North Sea was once far less salty than it is today. For a period of between 2 and 4 million years, the ratio of 18O to 16O was a substantially lower than the average for sea waters of that period, with the value lower even than some contemporary freshwater lakes.

The period of surface water freshening began close to the PETM. At this time, around 55 million years ago, relative sea-level fall, tectonic uplift and volcanic activity meant that the North Sea was temporarily isolated from surrounding oceans. Tectonic uplift raised Western Scotland by around 2-3 km, causing a land bridge to form between the Faeroe-Shetland and Roackall basins.

With circulation between the North Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean restricted, the waters of the North Sea became significantly fresher. This freshening was increased as rivers and precipitation flowed into the isolated North Sea. The result was a significant drop in the diversity of life in the North Sea, with the microorganism foraminifera being particularly affected.

credited to scientificblogging.com

It is 400 years since Galileo Galilei demonstrated his telescope, which would lead him to make new astronomical observations

Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble.

A refinement of models first devised in the Netherlands, Galileo's slim, brown stick was puny even by the standards of something one might buy in a hobby shop today. But his eight-powered telescope, and the more powerful models he soon produced, when pointed skywards led Galileo to a series of groundbreaking conclusions.

The moon was not, as long believed, completely smooth. Another planet, Jupiter, also had moons. Meanwhile Venus showed a range of moon-like phases, something which could not happen if both it and the sun orbited the Earth.

This latter phenomenon had been predicted by Nicolaus Copernicus when, nearly a century before, he had proposed the notion of a planetary system with the sun at the centre, not the Earth.

Galileo's discoveries were, perhaps predictably, not best welcomed by the Catholic church, and he spent the final decade of his life under house arrest.

It was certainly a revelation which upset the orthodoxies – and the churches – at least as much as Darwin's, and perhaps merits a bit more of a fuss, although museum-goers in Philadelphia and Stockholm can view one of Galileo's very early telescopes, on loan this year from Florence. A good deal more people are likely to be alerted thanks to Google's day-long adaptation of their main page logo to a Google Doodle in honour of the event.

credited to guardian.co.uk

Evidence that early modern humans living on the coast of the far southern tip of Africa 72,000 years ago employed pyrotechnology – the controlled use of fire – to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacturing process, is being reported in the Aug. 14 issue of the journal Science.

"Our illumination of the heat treatment process shows that these early modern humans commanded fire in a nuanced and sophisticated manner," says lead author Kyle Brown, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cape Town, and field and lab director in Mossel Bay, South Africa, for ASU's Institute of Human Origins.

"We show that early modern humans at 72,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa, were using carefully controlled hearths in a complex process to heat stone and change its properties, the process known as heat treatment," explains Brown.

"Heat treatment technology begins with a genius moment – someone discovers that heating stone makes it easier to flake," says Curtis Marean, project director and a co-author on the paper. Marean is a paleoanthropologist with the Institute of Human Origins and a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"This knowledge is then passed on, and in a way unique to humans, the technology is slowly ratcheted up in complexity as the control of the heating process, cooling and flaking grows in sophistication," Marean says.

This creates a long-chain technological process that the researchers explain requires a complex cognition, and probably language, to learn and teach.

The heating transformed a stone called silcrete, which was rather poor for tool making, into an outstanding raw material that allowed the modern humans to make highly advanced tools.

The eureka moment

The focus of Brown's research involves experimentally replicating the types of tools and production debris found at African archaeological sites to understand how and why people made and used these tools.

"In numerous field surveys with co-author David Roberts, who is a leading expert on silcrete formation, we were unable to locate stone outcrops with material that matched the fine-grained texture and often reddish color of the silcrete artifacts we excavated at Pinnacle Point," Brown says. "The silcrete we had collected was just not suitable for tool production."

Most of the silcrete they found was intensively flaked. It was unusual to find a piece larger than a few centimeters. However, one day in 2007, while Brown and Marean were at the Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) they found a huge flake of silcrete embedded in ash – the largest piece of silcrete they had ever seen on an archaeological site, nearly 10 centimeters in diameter.

"It looked like it had been accidentally lost in a fire pit," Brown notes. He recalls how many of the silcrete tools from the site had a sheen or gloss that reminded him of tools he had examined in North American collections that were heat-treated.

"That is when we developed the heat treatment idea," Marean says. "The co-association of the ash cemented to the silcrete, the red color of the silcrete, and its inexplicably large size was the genesis conditions of our eureka moment."

To test their theory, Brown placed some of the silcrete stone beneath their fire pit one evening, building a hot fire over the top.

"When I returned to dig the stone out the following day, the results were amazing. After heating, the silcrete became a deep red color and was easily flaked. Most importantly, it looked exactly like silcrete from site PP5-6. Using heated silcrete we were then able to produce realistic copies of the actual silcrete tools," Brown says.

Barbequing rocks

"Here are the beginnings of fire and engineering, the origins of pyrotechnology, and the bridge to more recent ceramic and metal technology," Brown says.

According to Marean, the silcrete bifaces are re-usable tools with many potential functions: effective hunting weapons, excellent knives and items of value for exchange.

"This explains why people would invest so much effort at wood collection and heat treatment for their production," Marean says.

And, the hearths used to test their theory "were designed to mimic what people in the past may have done. So, not only did we heat silcrete, but we barbecued (a 'braai' in South Africa) steaks and chops at the same time as measuring the temperature profiles with our thermocouple," Marean says.

Symbolic behavior and modern human origins

"Our discovery shows that these early modern humans had this complex cognition," Brown says.

"This expression of cognitive complexity in technology by these early modern humans on the south coast of South Africa provides further evidence that this locality may have been the origin location for the lineage that leads to all modern humans, which appeared between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in Africa," explains Marean.

"There is no consensus as to when modern human behavior appears, but by 70,000 years ago there is good evidence for symbolic behavior," he says. "Many researchers are looking for technological proxies for complex cognition, and heat treatment is likely one such proxy.

"Prior to our work, heat treatment was widely regarded as first occurring in Europe at about 25,000 years ago," Marean says. "We push this back at least 45,000 years, and, perhaps, 139,000 years, and place it on the southern tip of Africa at Pinnacle Point."

The African location was at the center of another discovery by Marean – the documentation of the earliest evidence for exploitation of marine foods and modification of pigments – reported in the Oct. 17, 2007, journal Nature.

"Combined, these results sharply advance our knowledge of modern human origins, and show that something special in human cognition was happening on the coastline of South Africa during this crucial final phase in human origins," Marean says.

He adds that some time around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, "these modern humans left the warm confines of Africa and penetrated into the colder glacial environment of Europe and Asia, where they encountered Neanderthals.

"By 35,000 years ago these Neanderthal populations were mostly extinct, and modern humans dominated the land from Spain to China to Australia," Marean says.

"The command of fire, documented by our study of heat treatment, provides us with a potential explanation for the rapid migration of these Africans across glacial Eurasia – they were masters of fire and heat and stone, a crucial advantage as these tropical people penetrated the cold lands of the Neanderthal," says Marean.

NSF, others fund SACP4

Other members of the research team and co-authors of "Fire As an Engineering tool of Early Modern Humans," include David Baun, University of Cape Town; Andy I.R. Herries, University of New South Wales and University of Liverpool; Zenobia Jacobs and Michael C. Meyer, University of Wollongong, Australia; Changal Tribolo, CNRS-University of Bordeaux, France; David L. Roberts, Council for Geoscience, Republic of South Africa; and Jocelyn Bernatchez, Institute of Human Origins, ASU.

They work together on the South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project, known as SACP4, which is directed by Marean, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Hyde Family Foundation, and supported by Arizona State University research and academic units including the Institute of Human Origins, Institute for Social Science Research, and School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"Our team, working at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay, is a leader in revealing the process of how we became who we are today, and we are doing this with state-of-the-art fieldwork and laboratory analysis at this locality," Marean says.

He notes the specifics of the discovery involved combining thermoluminescence, magnetic analysis, optically stimulated luminescence dating, experimental stone tool production, mechanical testing, and field archaeology.

credited to Arizona State University (2009, August 14). Early Modern Humans Used Fire To Engineer Tools From Stone; Complex Cognition Older Than 72,000 Years?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 24, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/08/090813142137.htm

The bones of an ancient hominin may hold evidence of the earliest known bacterial infection, according to a team of international researchers who diagnosed the skeleton with a disease called brucellosis.

The discovery of the infection may provide insight into the eating habits of these early human ancestors.

Consisting of 18 mostly incomplete bones, the skeletal remains were found decades ago in the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg, South Africa.

The partial skeleton, known as Stw 431, belonged to an adult individual — probably a male — of the late Pliocene hominin species Australopithecus africanus.

Analysis of the bones, believed to be 1.5 million to 2.5 million years old, showed that two vertebrae were dotted with lesions. A previous study concluded the damage was caused by trauma.

But Ruggero D'Anastasio, a palaeoanthropologist at the University "Gabriele d'Annunzio" in Chieti, Italy, and colleagues contend that the lesions are the result of an acute inflammatory process rather than a traumatic fracture.

"After carefully evaluating all reasonable alternative hypotheses, we suggest that the position, gross morphology and the radiological appearance of the lesions ... seem to be more consistent with the pathological condition of early brucellosis," the researchers wrote in the journal PLoS ONE.

Brucellosis is a debilitating disease whose symptoms include recurrent fevers, joint pain, weakness and profuse sweating.

Primarily found in animals such as sheep or goats, brucella is often contracted from unpasteurized milk and cheese.

The disease is relatively rare today in developed countries, although it is still present in areas such as North Africa and the Middle East.

"As for this Australopithecus africanus individual, the infective agent could have been Brucella abortus. Zebras, antelopes and other South African fauna can carry this bacterial species, which causes spontaneous abortion," D'Anastasio told Discovery News.

According to the researcher, the hominin may have contracted brucellosis by eating fetal tissue from an infected animal.

"The hypothesis of brucellosis in this australopith has important implications: This is the most ancient case of an infectious disease in a hominin and could also potentially be some of the oldest evidence for meat-eating," D'Anastasio said.

According to Matt Sponheimer, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who specializes on the ecology of early human ancestors in Africa, the study is certainly far from establishing that any australopith regularly consumed meat.

Yet the possibility of some animal food consumption in australopiths is not unexpected.

"Our closest living relations, the chimpanzees, frequently consume animal foods. Given the omnivory of Homo sapiens and our closest living relatives, a similar penchant for animal products among our close fossil kin might be expected," Sponheimer told Discovery News.

According to the anthropologist, far more important would be some indication of the kinds of animal foods consumed, when and why they were consumed, and the relative importance of these foods in their diet.

"We are still a long way away from answering such questions. After all, it is hard enough to get most people to remember what they had for lunch yesterday, much less asking the same of fossils that are millions of years old," Sponheimer said.

credited to msnbc.msn.com

London's oldest known timber structure could be the city's earliest "boardwalk," archaeologists say. Preserved for more than 5,700 years, the structure was found in an ancient peat bog next to the Belmarsh prison in Plumstead, a suburb of East London near the banks of the River Thames.

At the time the timbers were laid down, the Thames was made up of numerous interweaving tributaries and channels, which flowed through a vast marshland.

The structure was most likely built to keep people's feet dry as they ventured across the soggy ground near the river.

"It probably provided access into a resource-rich area full of birdlife and plants and [was] close to the river for fishing," Sygrave said.

Marsh Trackways

The boardwalk is one of just a handful of similar ancient structures that exist in the U.K.

The oldest known timber trackway in the country is the Sweet Track, which was built about 6,000 years ago across marshes in what is now Somerset.

But the Belmarsh structure is London's oldest, predating by 700 years a timber trackway found in the city's Docklands area in 2002.

The newfound platform is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) by 6.5 feet (2 meters). It was made from split alder or hazel logs that were each about four inches (ten centimeters) wide.

The wood beams were found 15 feet (4.7 meters) underground near the remains of a now dry river channel, the team said.

But it's not clear how far people might have traveled to reach this boardwalk, the excavation team said, since no prehistoric settlements have been found nearby.

Further analysis of the structure as well as ancient preserved plant material found around it should help clarify the trackway's purpose.

Prison Dig

Archaeologists found the structure during excavations carried out before construction of a new prison building.

The structure may extend farther into the ancient bog, but the complexity of the excavation meant it would take too much time and money to investigate further.

Instead, any additional timbers will remain buried, and the excavated area will be preserved under special glass flooring in the new building.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

With the tell-tale sheen of heat-treated rock, a 72,000-year-old cache of stone weapons found in Africa suggests humans began using fire to create tools nearly 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new study says. Scientists had thought people began manipulating fire to create tools in Europe about 25,000 years ago.

These early engineers likely used some of these tools, mounted on handles, to hunt and butcher wide range of prey, from the aggressive Cape buffalo (Cape buffalo picture) to the tiny mole rat, according to the authors of the study, to be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

Birth of Modern Humanity?

This sophisticated control over fire reflects advanced smarts, and marks the turning point when we became "uniquely human," said study leader Kyle Brown, an archaeologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

"These people were extremely intelligent," Brown said. "These are not the image of the classic cavemen, of brutish people that are stumbling around the landscape and, in spite of themselves, surviving.

"These are the people that [may have] even colonized the rest of the world," he said.

As part of the study, the researchers replicated the processes the early Africans likely would have used to make the stone tools. Heated over a fire pit, the silcrete flaked and took on a glossy red color.

Such craftsmanship required thinking ahead, a sign of high intelligence, Brown said. People had to collect firewood, build the fire, work the stone, and then afix the handle to the stone using natural adhesives.

"Because [this is] such a sophisticated technology, this is something that would involve language to pass it on to the next generation," he added.

But paleoanthropologist John Shea isn't convinced by the idea that "heat treating" stone was a sign of the transition to modern human behavior. "People rush immediately to look for evidence of a transforming event in the course of Homo sapiens evolution to distinguish modern humans from so-called early ones," said Shea, of Stony Brook University.

"My position is that you shouldn't assume this transformative event—you have to prove it," Shea said.

To begin with, scientists would need to verify that the various human species preceding H. sapiens in South Africa did not also heat-treat stones.

Even so, Shea praised the study, saying it will inspire people to seek out other heat-treated stone tools undetected in the African record.

Showing Off?

The tools were apparently created during a burst of cultural growth, when the human population was slowly recovering from a severe glacial period.

At the South African sites, humans were designing jewelry, such as shell beads, and grinding up ochre to paint themselves and decorate their caves, study leader Brown said.

Heat-treating stone could have been "one of the technologies in their toolkits that allowed [them] to adapt to different areas as they expanded out of Africa," Brown said.

But heat treatment probably didn't improve the tools, and may have even made them more likely to shatter, Stony Brook's Shea said.

Instead the flashy artifacts might have been ways that "some humans showed off that they had time on their hands," Shea said.

"Going into woods with a bunch of arrows that would shatter on impact is another way of saying, I'm a really good hunter; I don't need backup."

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites to be inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain near the end of the last Ice Age. According to new radio carbon dating by Oxford University researchers, outlined in the latest issue of Quaternary Science Review, humans were living in Gough's Cave 14,700 years ago.

Technological advances have allowed researchers at Oxford University and London's Natural History Museum to date the bones more accurately. Previous radiocarbon dates suggested a wide span of occupation of within 1000-1500 years. The new dates show a much narrower range of dates, corresponding precisely to climate warming, providing evidence that the archaeological material in the cave could have accumulated over perhaps as little as two to three human generations, centred on 14,700 years ago.

Dr Tom Higham, Deputy Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, commented: 'In the past, radiocarbon dates have often been influenced by contamination that modern techniques can remove much more effectively. The new results have transformed our understanding of this site because at last we have a chronology we can rely on and which we can link to climatic events here and in the wider world.'

Dr Roger Jacobi, of the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, who led the research, said: 'This is the biggest advance which we have made in understanding the story of the Palaeolithic use of this remarkable cave, and it is one which has implications for our understanding of many other British archaeological sites.'

Many of the human remains bear patterns of cutmarks, which have been interpreted as evidence of cannibalism. These were previously thought to have belonged to a more recent period of activity than that associated with the hunting of horses and red deer.

Professor Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum Palaeontologist, commented: ' We were puzzled that the human bones we excavated in Gough's Cave about 20 years ago, including those that may have been cannibalised, seemed to be up to a thousand years different in age. The new dating methods show instead that the butchery and consumption of both horses and humans occurred in a very short space of time, about 14,700 years ago. So as Europe rapidly defrosted, family groups probably followed herds of horses into Britain across grasslands where the North Sea is today.'

Further sites will be re-examined using the same approach to test whether humans returned to Britain at the time of climate warming or whether they came back before this period. More accurate dating might be possible through applying isotopic methods directly to the human teeth from the site, as well as to those of the prey animals, because this will allow a better assessment of whether the animals were hunted in a warmer or colder period. At present, the radiocarbon dates are not sufficiently precise enough to answer this key question. The work is part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

credited to University of Oxford (2009, August 12). When Did Humans Return After Last Ice Age?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 13, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/07/090727130600.htm

The remains of a 9,000-year-old hunter-gatherers' house, uncovered during construction at an airport, have been unearthed in Great Britain's Isle of Man. The house was surrounded by buried mounds of burnt hazelnut shells and stocked with stone tools, according to archaeologists working on the project and a report in the latest British Archaeology.

It is the earliest known complete house on the Isle of Man and one of Britain's oldest and best-preserved houses, according to the report. The find also offers a glimpse of domestic life 4,000 before Stonehenge.

Based on the many ancient shells found surrounding its exterior, the home's first inhabitants must have eaten a lot of hazelnuts.

"There were presumably so many hazelnuts near the house as a result of processing and consumption of these within the building," project manager Fraser Brown of Oxford Archaeology North told Discovery News.

"They may have been burnt because the shells were discarded into a fire after consumption of the fruit," he added. "When the hearth sweepings were cleaned from the building, the burnt nutshells and all else were cleaned to the periphery. Hazelnuts would have been an abundant and highly nutritious source of food that could easily be gathered in the autumn and stored for consumption through lean winter months."

A pit containing the structure's remains is about 23 feet wide and 12 inches deep. A ring of postholes around the edge, along with carbonized timbers, suggests the building's supports were about 6 inches thick.

In addition to the hazelnut shell mounds, the archaeologists also found a few hammer and anvil stones as well as approximately 14,000 flint artifacts that the researchers say once made up stone tools, such as fishing spears.

The hunter-gatherer residents "probably had a permanent base near the sea so that they could have easy access to marine resources, but given the small size of the Isle of Man, it would have been a simple matter to foray inland to exploit the different resources available there."

Once the residents arrived at the island by boat, they probably would have not strayed far from home since "they could obtain all that they needed locally," which could be the reason they set up a permanent home.

Remains of another hunter-gatherer home, found over two decades ago just 492 feet from this latest discovery, also contained a hearth, small stone tools and numerous hazelnut shells.

Mike Pitts, an archaeologist who is also the editor of British Archaeology, still wonders why burnt hazelnut shells would have been buried so prominently around the houses.

"Perhaps the smell of the burnt shells had some significance?" Pitts speculates. "Was it comforting, redolent of good meals, or could it have had a more complex, ritual meaning?"

Andrew Johnson, curator of Field Archaeology at Manx National Heritage in the Isle of Man, helped to monitor the recent excavation work.

Johnson told Discovery News, "I would regard the finds as being of national importance for the Isle of Man, and certainly of international significance in that they add to what at present is only a very small number of Mesolithic buildings found in Northwest Europe."

credited to msnbc.msn.com

A 17-member team has found what may be the smoking gun of a much-debated proposal that a cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago ripped through North America and drove multiple species into extinction. In a paper appearing online ahead of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Oregon archaeologist Douglas J. Kennett and colleagues from nine institutions and three private research companies report the presence of shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in 12,900-year-old sediments on the Northern Channel Islands off the southern California coast.

These tiny diamonds and diamond clusters were buried deeply below four meters of sediment. They date to the end of Clovis -- a Paleoindian culture long thought to be North America's first human inhabitants. The nano-sized diamonds were pulled from Arlington Canyon on the island of Santa Rosa that had once been joined with three other Northern Channel Islands in a landmass known as Santarosae.

The diamonds were found in association with soot, which forms in extremely hot fires, and they suggest associated regional wildfires, based on nearby environmental records.

Such soot and diamonds are rare in the geological record. They were found in sediment dating to massive asteroid impacts 65 million years ago in a layer widely known as the K-T Boundary. The thin layer of iridium-and-quartz-rich sediment dates to the transition of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, which mark the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era.

"The type of diamond we have found -- Lonsdaleite -- is a shock-synthesized mineral defined by its hexagonal crystalline structure. It forms under very high temperatures and pressures consistent with a cosmic impact," Kennett said. "These diamonds have only been found thus far in meteorites and impact craters on Earth and appear to be the strongest indicator yet of a significant cosmic impact [during Clovis]."

The age of this event also matches the extinction of the pygmy mammoth on the Northern Channel Islands, as well as numerous other North American mammals, including the horse, which Europeans later reintroduced. In all, an estimated 35 mammal and 19 bird genera became extinct near the end of the Pleistocene with some of them occurring very close in time to the proposed cosmic impact, first reported in October 2007 in PNAS.

In the Jan. 2, 2009, issue of the journal Science, a team led by Kennett reported the discovery of billions of nanometer-sized diamonds concentrated in sediments -- weighing from about 10 to 2,700 parts per billion -- in six North American locations.

"This site, this layer with hexagonal diamonds, is also associated with other types of diamonds and with dramatic environmental changes and wildfires," said James Kennett, paleoceanographer and professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"There was a major event 12,900 years ago," he said. "It is hard to explain this assemblage of materials without a cosmic impact event and associated extensive wildfires. This hypothesis fits with the abrupt cooling of the atmosphere as shown in the record of ocean drilling of the Santa Barbara Channel. The cooling resulted when dust from the high-pressure, high-temperature, multiple impacts was lofted into the atmosphere, causing a dramatic drop in solar radiation."

The hexagonal diamonds from Arlington Canyon were analyzed at the UO's Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories, a world-class nanotechnology facility built deep in bedrock to allow for sensitive microscopy and other high-tech analyses of materials. The analyses were done in collaboration with FEI, a Hillsboro, Ore., company that distributes the high-resolution Titan microscope used to characterize the hexagonal diamonds in this study.

Transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopes were used in the extensive analyses of the sediment that contained clusters of Lonsdaleite ranging in size from 20 to 1,800 nanometers. These diamonds were inside or attached to carbon particles found in the sediments.

These findings are inconsistent with the alternative and already hotly debated theory that overhunting by Clovis people led to the rapid extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age, the research team argues in the PNAS paper. An alternative theory has held that climate change was to blame for these mass extinctions. The cosmic-event theory suggests that rapid climate change at this time was possibly triggered by a series of small and widely dispersed comet strikes across much of North America.

credited to esciencenews.com

Excavations led by a University of Toronto archaeologist at the site of a recently discovered temple in southeastern Turkey have uncovered a cache of cuneiform tablets dating back to the Iron Age period between 1200 and 600 BCE. Found in the temple's cella, or 'holy of holies', the tablets are part of a possible archive that may provide insights into Assyrian imperial aspirations. "The assemblage appears to represent a Neo-Assyrian renovation of an older Neo-Hittite temple complex, providing a rare glimpse into the religious dimension of Assyrian imperial ideology," says Timothy Harrison, professor of near eastern archaeology in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations and director of U of T's Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP). "The tablets, and the information they contain, may possibly highlight the imperial ambitions of one of the great powers of the ancient world, and its lasting influence on the political culture of the Middle East." The cella also contained gold, bronze and iron implements, libation vessels and ornately decorated ritual objects.

Partially uncovered in 2008 at Tell Tayinat, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Palastin, the structure of the building where the tablets were found preserves the classic plan of a Neo-Hittite temple. It formed part of a sacred precinct that once included monumental stelae carved in Luwian (an extinct Anatolian language once spoken in Turkey) hieroglyphic script, but which were found by the expedition smashed into tiny shard-like fragments.

"Tayinat was destroyed by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III in 738 BCE, and then transformed into an Assyrian provincial capital, equipped with its own governor and imperial administration," says Harrison. "Scholars have long speculated that the reference to Calneh in Isaiah's oracle against Assyria alludes to Tiglath-pileser's devastation of Kunulua – ie, Tayinat. The destruction of the Luwian monuments and conversion of the sacred precinct into an Assyrian religious complex may represent the physical manifestation of this historic event."

The temple was later burned in an intense fire and found filled with heavily charred brick and wood which, ironically, contributed to the preservation of the finds recovered from its inner chambers. "While those responsible for this later destruction are not yet known, the remarkable discoveries preserved in the Tayinat temple clearly record a pivotal moment in its history," says Harrison. "They promise a richly textured view of the cultural and ethnic contest that has long characterized the turbulent history of this region."

TAP is an international project, involving researchers from a dozen countries, and more than 20 universities and research institutes. It operates in close collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Turkey, and provides research opportunities and training for both graduate and undergraduate students. The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), and receives support from the University of Toronto

credited to esciencenews.com

A walking bat in New Zealand took its marching orders from an ancestor, a new fossil-bat discovery reveals.

But the discovery of fossils of a now extinct walking bat in northwestern Queensland, Australia, suggests that the modern-day bats descended from 20-million-year-old Australian relatives.

"We were amazed to find they were virtually identical to the bats in New Zealand today," said study leader Sue Hand, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The fossil bat had a similar groove in its elbow as its modern counterpart. This supports a specialized muscular system that allows bats to launch from the ground, where they spend about 40 percent of their time.

Unlike their modern relatives, the ancient bats had plenty of predators, Hand said, including marsupial lions and carnivorous kangaroos.

But the quick little bats, measuring up to three inches (eight centimeters) long, would have easily escaped capture.

"They're very agile on the ground, quick to fly, and reasonably aggressive," Hand said.

Bat Die-Off

The New Zealand bats "were in a perfectly good position to exploit a predator-free niche," she added.

Gaining the ability to walk and burrow opened up new food opportunities for the mammals, she added.

"Being on the ground allowed it to have an incredibly broad diet—an advantage when things became colder."

About 15 million years ago, when Australia underwent a climatic shift that made the continent cooler and drier, the Australian walking bats seemed to have died off.

Of the 1,100 known present-day bat species, the lesser short-tailed bat and the American common vampire bat are the only two known to walk on the ground.

The vampire bat is still thought to have evolved its walking ability independently, probably because walking allows the bat to chase after injured prey on the ground.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

Early relatives of spiders that lived around 300 million years ago are revealed in new three-dimensional models, in research published today in the journal Biology Letters.

Scientists at Imperial College London have created detailed 3D computer models of two fossilised specimens of ancient creatures called Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii, closely related to modern-day spiders. The study reveals some of the physical traits that helped them to hunt for prey and evade predators.

The researchers created their images by using a CT scanning device, which enabled them to take 3,000 x-rays of each fossil. These x-rays were then compiled into precise 3D models, using custom-designed software.

Both Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestivicii were around the size of a 50 pence piece and they roamed the Earth during the Carboniferous period, 359 – 299 million years ago. This was a time before the dinosaurs, when life was emerging from the oceans to live on land. During this period, the world’s continents were merging together near the equator to form one supercontinent and the first tropical rainforests were playing host to a diverse range of species.

Previous studies of the fossilised remains of Cryptomartus hindi allowed scientists to see some features of the creature, which had four pairs of legs and looked similar to a spider.

In the new study, the researchers' computer models reveal that Cryptomartus hindi's first two legs were angled towards the front of the body, which suggests that it used its legs to grab its prey before killing them. The researchers believe this find suggests the Cryptomartus hindi was an ambush predator, living in logs and fronds, waiting for prey such as insects to walk by before catching and killing them. This stance is seen in modern day crab spiders, which sit on the edge of flowers and wait for insects to land so that they can grab them.

The scientists also discovered that Cryptomartus hindi had ball-like growths at the base of its limbs, called coxal endites. The scientists believe the coxal endites could be an evolutionary hang-over from their last common ancestor, who probably used the growths at the base of their limbs to help them grind their food. These coxal endite-type growths can still be seen today in species such as horseshoe crabs, which use them to grind up their prey before pushing it into their backward-facing mouths.

The bones — believed to date from the 3rd millennium B.C. — were discovered in May as art hunters were carrying out routine checks of the region's archaeological areas, Carabinieri art squad official Raffaele Mancino said.

Archaeologists believe the warrior was likely killed by an arrow, part of which was found among his ribs, Mancino said. There was also a hole in the back of the skull, and six vases and two daggers were found buried nearby.

The tomb of the warrior, nicknamed "Nello" after the archaeologist who found him, could be part of a wider necropolis lying just a few steps from the sea, Mancino told a news conference.

"We will check the area to see whether this tomb is isolated and the warrior was buried here because this was the battlefield where he died," Mancino said. "Or maybe there is a bigger necropolis, as we indeed believe."

The tomb, hidden in the bushes on a public beach in Nettuno, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Rome, was excavated in less than one day to preserve it from sea water erosion, Mancino said. Part of it has already been damaged.

The warrior's bones will be examined and eventually put on display, officials said.

The beach remains open, though the area of the discovery has been cordoned off.

credited to msnbc.msn.com