The paper, by Professor Joao Zilhao and colleagues, builds on his earlier research which proposed that, south of the Cantabro-Pyrenean mountain chain, Neanderthals survived for several millennia after being replaced or assimilated by anatomically modern humans everywhere else in Europe. Although the reality of this ‘Ebro Frontier’ pattern has gained wide acceptance since it was first proposed by Professor Zilhao some twenty years ago, two important aspects of the model have remained the object of unresolved controversy: the exact duration of the frontier; and the causes underlying the eventual disappearance of those refugial Neanderthal populations (ecology and climate, or competition with modern human immigrants). Professor Zilhao and colleagues now report new dating evidence for the Late Aurignacian of Portugal, an archaeological culture unquestionably associated with modern humans, that firmly constrains the age of the last Neanderthals of southern and western Iberia to no younger than some 37,000 years ago. This new evidence therefore puts at five millennia the duration of the Iberian Neanderthal refugium, and counters speculations that Neanderthal populations could have remained in the Gibraltar area until 28,000 years ago. These findings have important implications for the understanding of the archaic features found in the anatomy […]
Last week, the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, published an acerbic essay about the difference between true deficit hawks and showy ‘deficit peacocks.’ You can identify deficit peacocks, readers were told, by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending. One week later, in the State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending. Wait, it gets worse. To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: ‘American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.’ Obama now: ‘Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.’ What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Mr. Obama’s advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb […]
President Obama’s call Wednesday, in his State of the Union Address, for a ‘new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants’ was panned by some environmentalists and Democratic backers. Move.org, a progressive advocacy group, asked 10,000 members to rate how they felt — from awful to great — during President Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday. They more most upset when he called for new nuclear power plants and offshore oil drilling. It was considered the worst part of his 71-minute speech by 10,000 members of MoveOn, a non-profit progressive advoacy group that has raised millions of dollars for Democratic political candidates. They had signed up to evaluate the speech live and every few seconds would hit a button to reflect how they felt about it, ranging from ‘awful’ to ‘great.’ ‘The most definitive drop in enthusiasm is when President Obama talked about nuclear power and offshore drilling,’ says Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s director of political advocacy. ‘They’re looking for clean energy sources that prioritize wind and solar.’ Greenpeace, an environmental group, was also disappointed. ‘Despite his statement, the president knows better,’ Daniel Kessler, the group’s press officer, says in a commentary posted on its website. […]
Following a series of delays, some physicists have begun to ask if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is being sabotaged by the future. Aoife Crowley investigates this strange hypothesis to see if God really does hate Higgs Bosen particles. Picture the scene. In an unspecified but not too distant future, we are doomed. A giant blackhole has opened up in the centre of the universe, and it’s only a matter of time before the entire cosmos is swallowed. The remnants of mankind have turned feral, eking out an existence in caves, or perhaps on islands made out of rubbish, like that film Waterworld. Who knew that a simple flick of a switch way back in 2010 could set in motion the chain of events that led to such disaster? Luckily, due to that very same machine that caused our downfall, wormholes and wrinkles in time are now abundant. Our only hope is to send something back to change the past. And so, the human race entrusts the future of the universe to a bird, carrying a chunk of baguette. As the noble bird soars through the wormhole, a species holds its breath. But we’ll return […]
President Obama doled out $8 billion in federal stimulus money Thursday to build and improve rail lines in 31 states, helping fund high-speed service between Richmond and Washington and replacement of a 19th-century tunnel through Baltimore. The almost $140 million for the regional projects was a pittance in contrast to the big-ticket items funded elsewhere. California will receive $2.3 billion and Florida $1.3 billion to build high-speed rail lines linking San Francisco and San Diego, and Orlando and Tampa. ‘There is no reason why other countries can build high-speed rail lines and we can’t,’ Obama said Thursday in Tampa, chosen as the backdrop to announce the winners among 45 applicants whose requests totaled $50 billion. Obama promised his Tampa audience that once the line to Disney World is completed, he will return to ride it. In the meantime, he said, the rail projects will put Americans to work. ‘It creates jobs immediately, and it lays the foundation for a vibrant economy in the future,’ Obama said. Advocates of rail travel and transport relished the moment. ‘This is the biggest single investment in intercity rail service in our lifetime,’ said John Horsley of the American […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
