What some researchers think are 130,00 year old human marks Credit: The New York Times
Prehistoric humans — perhaps Neanderthals or another lost species — occupied what is now California some 130,000 years ago, (emphasis added) a team of scientists reported on Wednesday.
The bold and fiercely disputed claim, published in the journal Nature, is based on a study of mastodon bones discovered near San Diego. If the scientists are right, they would significantly alter our understanding of how humans spread around the planet.
The earliest widely accepted evidence of people in the Americas is less than 15,000 years old. Genetic studies strongly support the idea that those people were the ancestors of living Native Americans, arriving in North America from Asia.
If humans actually were in North America over 100,000 years earlier, they may not be related to any living group of people. Modern humans probably did not expand out of Africa […]
Neanderthals and Denisovans probably enjoyed the view from Denisova cave, too.
Credit: arsTechnica
Humans, modern and otherwise, have lived in Denisova Cave in Siberia for tens of thousands of years, where they left behind a treasury of archaeological artifacts. The cave is famous for giving its name to Denisovans, a species of human closely related to Neanderthals. But Neanderthals have lived there, too.
In the cave’s Main Gallery, stone tools had been left behind by people who lived thousands of years ago. Those people were probably Neanderthals, according to a paper in Science this week: The soil says so. Even though no Neanderthal bones have been found with the tools, the paper’s authors are the first to be able to detect the presence of humans based on DNA found in the soil. This allows them to paint a much more detailed picture of the past, in Denisova Cave and elsewhere.
“This is a game changer for researchers studying our hominin past,” says Christian Hoggard, an archaeologist at Aarhus University who wasn’t involved with the story. His […]
A hobbit
Credit: BGR
Humans have always been endlessly fascinated with our evolutionary history, and discovering a new species of human that once roamed the Earth is certainly cause for interest. When scientists announced the discovery of a tiny hobbit-like bipod called Homo floresiensis in Indonesia way back in 2003, they thought perhaps it was simply an evolutionary fork of the well-documented Homo erectus, but now they’re not so sure. New research by the Australian National University suggests that the “hobbits” evolved from a much earlier human species, painting an even more interesting picture of their existence.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Human Evolution, ruled out a number of theories as to the origin of Homo floresiensis, including the possibility that it was simply a singular dramatic mutation of Homo sapiens. These ancient humans were extremely small compared to what we consider normal today, measuring only about three-and-a-half feet in height, which made determining their specific origin a matter of much scientific curiosity.
To accomplish the task, researchers thoroughly […]
Excerpted from the book “Deviate” by Beau Lotto, to be published on April 25, 2017, by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright 2017 Beau Lotto.
When you open your eyes, do you see the world as it really is? Do we see reality?
Humans have been asking themselves this question for thousands of years. From the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave in “The Republic” to Morpheus offering Neo the red pill or the blue bill in “The Matrix,” the notion that what we see might not be what is truly there has troubled and tantalized us. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we can never have access to the Ding an sich, the unfiltered “thing-in-itself ” of objective reality. Great minds of history have taken up this perplexing question again and again. They all had theories, but now neuroscience has an answer.
The answer is that we don’t see reality.
The world exists. It’s just that we don’t see it. We do not experience the world as it is because our brain didn’t evolve to do so. It’s a paradox of sorts: Your brain gives you the impression that your perceptions are objectively real, yet […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
