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| METEORITES A RICH SOURCE FOR PRIMORDIAL SOUP |
| Washington, DC—The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generous helpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites. This result suggests that the early solar system was far richer in the organic building blocks of life than scientists had thought, and that fallout from space may have spiked Earth’s primordial broth. |
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| HOBBIT WIELDED BIG TOOLS, CLAY MODEL SHOWS. |
| A clay sculpture of a mature female Hobbit is helping to convince an Australian scientist the small people of Flores could have handled large tools. |
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| EARLY MAN HAD MINING IN MIND |
| An Israeli research team has caught our ancestors in the act of learning to mine raw materials for tools. The discovery suggests that some cave-dwellers were mining flint 300,000 years ago, while their neighbours were still using whatever stones were lying around. |
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| HALLEY'S COMET PORTRAYED ON ANCIENT COIN |
| A rare ancient coin may feature an early record of Halley's comet, researchers say. |
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| HUMAN SETTLEMENTS ALREADY EXISTED IN THE AMAZON BASIN (ECUADOR) 4000 YEARS AGO |
| July 2003 saw a significant discovery in Ecuador by IRD archaeologists: 4000-year-old structures indicating the presence of one of the first great Andean civilizations in the upper Amazon Basin, where their presence had not been suspected. |
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| MYSTERIES OF BOG BUTTER UNCOVERED |
| Chemical detectives have traced deposits of fat in Scottish peat bogs to foodstuffs buried by people hundreds of years ago. The 'bog butter' is the remains of both dairy products and meat encased in the peat, say Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol and colleagues. |
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| MYSTERY ROMAN EMPEROR SHOWS HIS FACE |
| The discovery of a coin appears to confirm the brief rule of Domitianus, a mystery Roman emperor whose very existence had been doubted, according to a museum curator. |
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| MAYAN CITY PLAYED POLITICS WITH NEIGHBOURS |
| Archaeologists are exploring a ruined kingdom in Guatemala to work out how it survived centuries of conflict in the ancient Mayan Indian world before being abandoned to the jungle more than 1200 years ago. |
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| ANCIENT INSECTS BUZZ INTO HISTORY BOOKS |
| Scientists have discovered the remains of a 400 million-year-old insect, the oldest ever located, in a fossil unearthed in Scotland in the early 1900s. |
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| CATAPULTING MATHS TO A NEW HEIGHT |
| People who made ancient catapults combined mathematics and engineering skills to create the most powerful weapons of their time, according to a new report. |
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| UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ARCHAEOLOGIST, COLLEAGUES HOT ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT PERSIAN WARSHIPS |
| An international research team including a University of Colorado at Boulder professor has mounted a deep-water search off the northern coast of Greece in search of a fleet of Persian warships presumed lost in a massive ocean storm in 492 B.C. |
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| ASTRONOMERS UNRAVEL A MYSTERY OF THE DARK AGES |
| Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago – a comet colliding with Earth. |
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| DA VINCI INVENTED PLASTICS TOO |
| Leonardo da Vinci not only anticipated the aeroplane, the life jacket, the intercom and the robot, he created the first natural plastic, according to an Italian scholar. |
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| CAVE-DWELLING MICHAELANGELOS |
| Three tiny figurines carved out of mammoth ivory, unearthed in a cave in southwestern Germany, have demonstrated that Early Man was far from primitive in his artistic skills. |
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| INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES CAME FROM TURKEY |
| Evolutionary biologists have waded into the stormy debate over when and where Indo-European languages originated. |
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| TEETH CLEANING: AN ANCIENT HABIT |
| Cleaning your teeth may be the oldest human habit, according to a palaeontologist whose experiments suggest early humans used grass stalks as tooth picks. |
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| HUMAN BODY LICE REVEAL THE BIRTHDATE OF FASHION |
| Humans only started wearing clothes as little as 40,000 years ago, according to a new genetic study which has calculated when the human body louse evolved - a creature which needs clothes to lay its eggs on. |
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| METHANE ERUPTION BLAMED FOR MASS EXTINCTION |
| A massive explosion of colourless, odourless natural gas erupting from the ocean depths may have caused the worst mass extinction in the Earth's history some 251 million years ago, according to U.S. geologists. |
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| FOSSILS RAISE DOUBTS ABOUT FIRST AMERICANS |
| Fossilised skulls from a long-extinct tribe found in Mexico have reignited a debate about how early humans colonised the Americas after emerging in Africa and trekking across Asia. |
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| DEEP CARBON COULD TRIGGER MASS EXTINCTION |
| A vast reservoir of carbon is stashed beneath the Earth's crust and could be released by a major volcanic eruption, unleashing a mass extinction of the kind that last occurred 200 million years ago, German geologists report. |
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| DINOSAURS DOOMED EVEN BEFORE IMPACT: SCIENTISTS |
| The dinosaurs were probably heading for extinction even before an asteroid strike wiped them out 65 million years ago, argue New Zealand scientists. |
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| VANISHED INCA MAY HAVE USED BINARY CODE LANGUAGE |
| The vanished Inca civilisation of the Andes, long thought to have no writing, invented a seven-bit binary code to store information more than 500 years before the invention of the computer, argues an American anthropologist. |
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| CELTIC ARRIVED IN BRITAIN, FRANCE WITH FARMERS |
| A new method of analysing language supports the idea that farmers carried Celtic to the British Isles, Ireland and France in a single wave 6,000 years ago, researchers report. |
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| ANOTHER METEOR STRIKE BLAMED FOR EXTINCTIONS |
| A large meteorite collided 380 million years ago into what is now the Moroccan desert and may have caused one of the five known mass extinctions of life on Earth, researchers report. |
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| MUMMY OF ANCIENT EGYPT'S NEFERTITI FOUND? |
| The mummy of Queen Nefertiti, a co-ruler of Ancient Egypt and stepmother to the legendary boy king Tutankhamun, may have been found, archaeologists have announced. |
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| SCIENTISTS USE DNA FRAGMENTS TO TRACE THE MIGRATION OF MODERN HUMANS |
| Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals. |
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| ANCIENT DUNG REVEALS A PICTURE OF THE PAST |
| The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. |
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| HEBREW UNIVERSITY EXCAVATIONS STRENGTHEN DATING OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDINGS TO DAVID, SOLOMON. |
| A new, laboratory-based affirmation of the existence of a united Israelite monarchy headed by kings David and Solomon in the 10th century B.C.E. has been revealed as the result of excavations carried out by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archeology. |
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| EXTINCT REPTILE SPECIES LIVED ON IN AUSTRALIA |
| An ancient hippo-like reptile, extinct elsewhere, existed in Australia for another 110 million years – alongside the dinosaurs that wiped them out in other places, palaeontologists have found. |
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| DA VINCI, MONET USED TRICKS NEW TO SCIENCE |
| Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is just one of the tricks used by great artists who knew how the human eye works - knowledge that scientists are only now starting to understand, according to an American neurologist. |
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| LIONS DEVELOPING A TASTE FOR HUMANS |
| Eating humans is learned behaviour passed down through generations of lions, suggests surprising new American research. |
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| DINOSAURS EXPERIENCED CLIMATE CHANGES BEFORE K-T COLLISION |
| Climate change had little to do with the demise of the dinosaurs, but the last million years before their extinction had a complex pattern of warming and cooling events that are important to our understanding of the end of their reign, according to geologists. |
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| CURSE OF TUTANKHAMEN FINALLY LAID TO REST |
| After 80 years, the curse of Tutankhamen's tomb - credited with a host of untimely deaths since its discovery - has finally been disproven by an Australian epidemiologist. |
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| ONCE BIG BAD WOLF, NOW MAN'S BEST FRIEND: SCIENCE STUDIES TRACE DOGS' ORIGINS |
| Domesticated dogs first appeared in East Asia, spread across Asia and Europe, and then accompanied their two-legged companions into the New World 12,000-14,000 years ago. This scenario is suggested by two reports in the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
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| NEANDERTHALS USED BOTH HANDS TO KILL |
| Neanderthals and early humans knew how to make spears but they didn't know how to throw them. Instead, they had a limited hunting strategy, and used their spears merely to stab animals they had already trapped or ambushed. This finding by a team of anthropologists provides an important insight into a defining moment in our ancestors' development, when early humans evolved from hunters who killed at close-quarters to sophisticated killers capable of bringing down large beasts from a distance. |
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| DISSECTS MUMMY-HID SCROLL |
| During the second century B.C., a mummy-maker took a scroll of poetry and used it as stuffing for a corpse. The roll of papyrus remained hidden inside the mummy's chest cavity until its rediscovery in the early 1990s. Today, what was once treated like trash survives as the oldest surviving example of a Greek poetry book, as well as an important source of information about the past. |
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| PENN MUSEUM ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNCOVER 3700 YEAR OLD 'MAGICAL' BIRTH BRICK AT MAYOR'S RESIDENCE JUST OUTSIDE ABYDOS, EGYPT |
| July 2002-University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologists have discovered a 3700-year-old "magical" birth brick inside the palatial residence of a Middle Kingdom mayor's house just outside Abydos, in southern Egypt. The colorfully decorated mud birth brick-the first ever found-is one of a pair that would have been used to support a woman's feet while squatting during actual childbirth. |
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| MUDDY MAYAN MYSTERY MADE CLEARER BY RESEARCHERS WORKING IN THE 'BAJOS' |
| A team of scholars led by University of Cincinnati professors Nicholas and Vernon Scarborough found evidence of a major environmental transformation that helps to explain a puzzle that has stumped Maya scholars for decades. Why would the Maya live in an area where the primary water source is little more than mud half of the year? |
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| A HEADY DISCOVERY |
| A seven-million-year-old human skull has been found in the African republic of Chad.
Christened 'Toumai', which means 'hope of life' in the local Goran language, the find is said to be the most important fossil discovery in living memory. |
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| UC SAN DIEGO ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER LARGEST BRONZE AGE METAL FACTORY IN MIDDLE EAST |
| Working in a remote desert area in southern Jordan, archaeologists from the University of California, San Diego have discovered the largest Early Bronze Age metal factory in the Middle East, dating to ca. 2700 BC. The discovery was reported in the June 2002 issue of the British journal, Antiquity. |
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| THE ROMANS PREFERRED SMALL-SCALE SOLUTIONS TO AQUEDUCTS AND SEWERS |
| Contrary to common opinion, the Romans had several systems for the supply and drainage of water. The Romans preferred small-scale provisions such as cesspits, wells and rainwater tanks. The residents only constructed a water supply network or a sewerage system if these were not effective. |
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| NOAH'S FLOOD HYPOTHESIS MAY NOT HOLD WATER. RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE PROFESSOR PART OF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH GROUP REFUTING POPULAR THEORY. |
| In 1996, marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman published a scientifically popular hypothesis, titled Noah's Flood Hypothesis. The researchers presented evidence of a bursting flood about 7,500 years ago in what is now the Black Sea. This, some say, supports the biblical story of Noah and the flood. |
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| REWRITING THE ‘BIBLE OF EGYPTOLOGY’ |
| An Australian Egyptologist has been studying the tombs of the vast Giza cemetery and is re-writing the history of ancient Egypt.
Professor Naguib Kanawati of the Australian Centre for Egyptology at Macquarie University has been recording and interpreting the scenes and hieroglyphs which chronicle the lives of government officials, priests and bureaucrats as far back as the 4th Dynasty, the age that saw the construction of the Great Pyramids. |
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| HUMAN ANCESTOR AUSTRALOPITHECUS DID INDEED WALK UPRIGHT |
| Was Australopithecus ancestral to humans? Were they merely cousins in the evolutionary chain? Or simply a stage between apes and humans? Among various debates about these early hominids is the argument whether or not they could stand and walk upright like people do. |
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| HUMANS LIVE A DOG'S LIFE |
| A new theory claims that many human behaviours are a result of our long-standing relationship with dogs, and vice versa. |
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| ETHIOPIAN FOSSIL SKULL INDICATES HOMO ERECTUS WAS SINGLE, WIDESPREAD SPECIES 1 MILLION YEARS AGO |
| Berkeley - A million-year-old Homo erectus skull found in Ethiopia indicates that this human ancestor was a single species scattered widely throughout Asia, Europe and Africa, not two separate species, according to an international group of scientists who discovered the skull in 1997. |
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| CATACLYSM 3.9 BILLION YEARS AGO WAS CAUSED BY ASTEROIDS, NOT COMETS, RESEARCHERS SAY |
| The bombardment that resurfaced the Earth 3.9 billion years ago was produced by asteroids, not comets, according to David Kring of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Barbara Cohen, formerly at the UA and now with the University of Hawaii. Their findings appear today in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union. |
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| A REFINED APPROACH TO MEASURING TIME OFFERS CLUES TO EARTH'S BEGINNINGS |
| Researchers using refined techniques to study minerals from meteorites now believe it took about 20 million years for the Earth to coalesce from the materials already gathered around our sun as the solar system. Recent estimates had pegged the interval closer to 50 million years. |
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| REMAINS OF SEVEN TYPES OF EDIBLE NUTS AND NUTCRACKERS FOUND AT 780,000-YEAR-OLD ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE |
| The remains of seven types of 780,000-year-old nuts have been found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel’s Hula Valley. The nuts and the stone tools found with them are the first evidence that various types of nuts formed a major parts of man’s diet 780,000 years ago and that hominins (prehistoric men) had developed an assortment of tools to crack open nuts during the Early-Middle Pleistocene Period, according to researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, who explained that the nuts were anaerobically preserved because the site has been waterlogged since its destruction. |
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| DARWIN AND THE WORLD’S FIRST ECOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT |
| Scientists examining the work that influenced Charles Darwin have rediscovered the details of what may be the world’s first ecological experiment. |
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| UPM ARCHAEOLOGIST ASSERTS THAT ENIGMATIC IVORY STATUETTE MAY BE PART OF THE THRONE OF THE FAMED KING MIDAS |
| UPM archaeologist Keith Devries asserts that enigmatic ivory statuette, uncovered in Greece in 1939, may be part of the throne of the famed King Midas
It isn’t made of gold, but a well-known and much-discussed ivory statuette of a lion-tamer, found in 1939 at Delphi, may very well be part of the throne given to the god Apollo by the famous King Midas of Phrygia. |
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| CHRISTMAS STAR COVER-UP |
| An american astronomer claims he has found the first mention of the star of Bethlehem outside the Bible. The reference is in a 4th-century manuscript written by a Roman astrologer and Christian convert called Firmicus Maternus. |
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| WATER QUALITY WAS ISSUE IN ANCIENT ROME, SAYS SCHOLAR. AQUEDUCTS WERE TECHNOLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL MARVELS. |
| Can the great technological feats of the early Romans still inform urban planning today? Professor Christer Bruun of classics says they can in the area of water conservation. |
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| ARCHAEOLOGISTS REWRITE TIMELINE OF BRONZE AND IRON AGES, INCLUDING EARLY APPEARANCE OF ALPHABET |
| Using information gleaned from the sun's solar cycles and tree rings, archaeologists are rewriting the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The research dates certain artifacts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean decades earlier than previously thought. And it places an early appearance of the alphabet outside Phoenicia at around 740 B.C. |
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| THE OLDEST RECORD OF EPILEPSY |
| Ezekiel's visions may owe as much to disease as to divine inspiration. The Bible may contain the oldest recorded case of temporal lobe epilepsy. Ezekiel, the prophet whose visions are recorded in a book of the Old Testament, apparently had all the classic signs of the condition. |
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| MUMMY-MAKERS USED ELABORATE RECIPES |
| The process of embalming in Ancient Egypt was more sophisticated than previously thought, new analysis shows.
Richard Evershead and Stephen Buckley of the University of Bristol completed a chemical analysis of 13 mummies. They found that embalmers used a wider variety of ingredients, and changed their techniques more frequently, than other research has shown. |
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| RAFTING RODENTS FROM AFRICA MAY HAVE BEEN ANCESTORS OF SOUTH AMERICAN SPECIES |
| Forty million years ago, rodents from Africa may have colonized South America by rafting or swimming across the Atlantic, Texas A&M University biologists theorize by studying the evolution of rodents, looking at their genes instead of their fossils - an approach that promises to revolutionize the field of evolutionary biology. |
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| WEALTH OF NATIONS DEPENDS ON JACK FROST, RESEARCH FINDS |
| Why do the rich get richer and the poor stay poor? When it comes to nations, the answers may include frost, according to a study that for the first time links economic and new global climate data. |
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| NEW RESEARCH SHEDS LIGHT ON THE CRUEL FATE THAT AWAITED OFFICIAL SCRIBES FOR MAYA KINGS WHO HAD BEEN CONQUERED BY RIVALS. |
| "The fact that these king's scribes were specifically targeted for torture and execution showed the importance they played in Maya society."
These scribes - the rough equivalent of today's public relations writers - would have their fingers broken and then be executed after their kings were defeated in battle. |
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| THE ANCIENTS WERE RIGHT - DELPHI WAS A GAS! |
| The Oracle of Delphi was the most important shrine in ancient Greece and was considered the center of the world. It was a crucial pilgrimage for those seeking guidance from Apollo's mouthpiece, the Pythia, who gave cryptic answers to such matters as timing for planting crops, preparing for war, or resolving a moral dilemma. |
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| ASTRONOMERS FIND LINK BETWEEN EARLIEST ILLUSTRATION OF SUNSPOTS IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN AND AN OBSERVATION OF AURORA IN MEDIEVAL KOREA |
| Scientists at the University of Warwick and the University of Durham have linked the very first historical illustration of sunspots, recorded in Medieval England in 1182, with the appearance of the aurora borealis 5 days later in Korea. |
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| SOIL SUGGESTS EARLY HUMANS LIVED IN FORESTS INSTEAD OF GRASSLANDS |
| Carbon isotope evidence in almost 6-million-year-old soils suggests that the earliest humans already were evolving in - and likely preferred - humid forests rather than grasslands, report a team of scientists working in Ethiopia. |
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| INDIAN CASTE GROUPS HAVE DIFFERING GENETIC RELATIONSHIPS TO EUROPEANS AND ASIANS |
| A new study of genetic data shows that the ancestors of Indian men came from different parts of the world than those of Indian women and produced modern upper caste Indian populations that are genetically more similar to Europeans and lower caste populations that are more similar to Asians. |
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| A MYSTERY OF THE LEGENDARY NASKA'S LINES IN PERU SEEMS TO BE RESOLVED |
| One of the byway South American civilizations created these mysterious pictures about 2,000 years ago. On the amplitudes of the Naska, a Peruvian desert, these lines drawn over the red docks of the desert depict over 100 known plants and animals, geometrical figures, as well as a lot of unknown separate straight lines. There are a plenty of theories available which try to explain the sense of the drawing and the reason why these pictures had been drawn at all. But nobody has known so far their real destination. |
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