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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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| EARLIEST HOMO SAPIENS FOSSILS DISCOVERED IN ETHIOPIA |
| Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley along with researchers from Ethiopia and several other countries have uncovered fossils of the earliest modern human, Homo sapiens, estimated at 154,000 to 160,000 years old. According to the scientists, the findings provide strong evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals co-existed, rather than the former descending from the latter. |
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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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| WHY HUMANS LOST THEIR SENSE OF SMELL |
| Humans rapidly lost much of their sense of smell as they evolved to place a heavier emphasis on their sense of sight, according to a recent genetics study. |
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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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| HOW AGING CELLS RETIRE |
| Loss of protection at tips of chromosomes may explain why elderly cells cease to divide
As we grow older, our hair turns gray, our bones grow thin and, among other changes, our telomeres shrink. But, more than markers of the passage of time, telomeres, the tips of chromosomes, may harbor answers to the fundamental mechanisms of aging and cancer. |
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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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| SCIENTISTS LOOK TO EUROPE AS EVOLUTIONARY SEAT |
| U of T anthropologist David Begun and his European colleagues are re-writing the book on the history of great apes and humans, arguing that most of their evolutionary development took place in Eurasia, not Africa. |
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| STRANGE ENCOUNTERS OF A REFLECTIVE KIND |
| An Australian neuropsychologist is working on the causes of an unusual condition in which people fail to recognise their own reflections in the mirror. |
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| 'AAAS' SPEAKERS REPORT WORLDWIDE 'EPIDEMIC' OF OBESITY |
| Obesity, considered until recently to be an exclusively "Western" disease, now poses a serious threat to the health of developing nations, particularly children, say scientists studying this emerging "global epidemic of fat." |
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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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| PERCEPTION IS STORED IN SINGLE NEURONES |
| Tuebingen Max Planck researchers discover that our perception of diagnostic features is controlled by single neurones.
Perception is something that must be learned. As we recognize things in our environment we gather experience and this experience in turn colours our perception. This is nothing new, of course. But brain researchers are going one step further to ask how different kinds of information are integrated in the brain and what principles govern how perceived objects are represented there. |
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| DO ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES INCREASE THE RISK OF MISCARRIAGE? |
| The strong magnetic fields produced by some electric appliances and vehicles increase the risk of miscarriage, claim researchers in California. Their findings also suggest that most previous investigations into the health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) have been measuring the wrong thing. |
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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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| 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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| 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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