News Briefs 01-10-2010
Posted by G.C at 08:26, 01 Oct 2010“Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.”
- The end of time, in our time?
- A crack in the heliosphere.
- When solar wind and magnetic fields collide.
- The threat to 80% of the world’s water supplies.
- Thank heavens for cosmic accidents.
- Decline in pollination directly linked to decline in food supplies.
- Moving objects with light.
- Will a Brazilian aboriginal skull rewrite history? More here.
- Dreaming into the fifth dimension.
- An artificial glimpse of Hawking radiation.
- 50,000 year-old evidence of humans unearthed in Papa new Guinea.
- Mars’ methane mystery.
- We will not got to the Moon.
- The newly found ‘lost’ letters of DNA forefather, Francis Crick.
- The common language of dolphins.
- Dinosaurs get a lift.
- Whale shark population takes hit from Gulf oil spill.
- Ancient, five-foot red penguins, unveiled.
- New footage of Apollo landing to screen privately in Sydney.
- An asteroid to keep an eye on.
- Another year, another round of Ignobel awards.
- See Stonehenge via Google’s Ancient Streetview.
- Lucas announces 3-D Star Wars to prove he's still out of good ideas.
Thanks to RPJ!
Quote of the Day:
“The real scientist is ready to bear privation and if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.”
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
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Comments
22 November 2004
5 days 8 hours
Another one of these findings that suggests two migrations to the Americas. Well, two ancient migrations, we're not counting the European migration here, and also not the Viking extended vacations in Canada.
Which brings us to another conclusion based on literally seconds of research:
These occasional findings of isolated remains don't indicate multiple migrations, the Clovis people have that correct. This aboriginal was just a tourist.
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We are the cat.
12 April 2007
4 hours 20 min
Last week I accompanied my nephew Adolfo to the National Museum of Anthropology, because he had to make a school report about the origins of humans in America.
It had been years since I visited that part of the museum —the temporal exhibitions are held in a hall near the entrance— and, although the information presented had clearly been updated from the obsolete "one migration from Siberia" theory I received when I was in school, it was still something of a mess.
The museum showed there was evidence of human habitation as older as 30,000 years, along with many sites encountered in South America that predated the Clovis. And 30,000 years is still a conservative number, if you consider the evidence that's been found in Presa Valsequilla (Puebla, Mexico) with footprints left on volcanic ash that are at least 50,000 years old.
And there was nothing about possible migrations coming from Europe across the Atlantic, or even a mention of the Kennewick man. And certainly nothing about possible cometary impacts ending the Clovis culture and killing all the megafauna —there was only the mention that the mammoths died... and people had to switch to other diets.
All in all, it left an impression of me of confusion and uncertainty. Of a work very much in progress. In fact, I would have appreciated if there had been some text admitting our ignorance on just how the first Americans arrived here.
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
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@red_pill_junkie
23 October 2006
1 week 6 days
"Watch out for the guy with the fish and no bathing suit."
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas
6 April 2010
6 hours 41 min
...and the one with the strange look on his face ;)
...I forgot how I got here but everyone seems to be heading off in that direction. I hope someone brought food. I have a feeling this is going to be a long journey................
23 October 2006
1 week 6 days
Not all of this is in my book, but here goes my best current guesses:
C mt DNA, ancestral to all Iroquoian people -via Berringia sometime after 50,000 BCE, spreading to the tip of South America
B and D my DNA - from SE Asia via boat, either coastal or direct, most likely direct, sometime after 60,000 BCE
A mt DNA, ancestral to Siouxian and Algonquian peoples, across Berringia sometime after 30,000 BCE, the Algonquian along the coast, hunting sea turtle, the Sioux hunting the inland coastal strips.
mt DNA group nearly extinct, ancestral to Savanah River peoples - from the Sahara River region of Africa to Pedra Furuda Brazil around 35,000 BCE, then bringing Clovis tech across the Caribbean to North America, where it was rapidly adopted by other peoples
X mt DNA - via the North Atlantic 8,350 BCE
If you have not read "Man and Impact in the Americas" yet, many think it is a great book. I suggest investing in a signed first edition as soon as you can, or reading it for free via interlibrary loan.
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas
12 April 2007
4 hours 20 min
Whoa... now that is quite unorthodox.
What about the evidence of stone tools that are very similar to the Solutrean style found in France?
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
_______________
@red_pill_junkie
22 November 2004
5 days 8 hours
Let me be a little more serious about the tourist part.
Most of these migrations could have happened with 2-way communication. That is not too hard when people travel on foot, or along coastlines. Even when skipping across 100 miles or so of more or less open sea, there can be communication back to where they came from.
So one interesting part is to what extent that happened, and if not, why not.
Organized movement of significant groups across the middle of the Atlantic is different. Assuming these things were not accidental (and if accidental, the number of people could not have been large), how did they know where they were going? Was the destination known in some other way?
Further assuming that there were tradewinds in the same general direction as today, it would have been very hard to get back across the middle of the Atlantic. Was the climate sufficiently different at any time, so that there were no easterly tradewinds, or not for the whole year?
Or did the Saharan people travel along the edges, all the way up north and down south? That would not require any single large hops in their route.
Perhaps people were just a lot more mobile than we now think. Which brings back the tourists, loosely speaking.
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We are the cat.