Our ancestors were making stone tools even earlier than we thought—some 700 ka older, dating to 3.3 ma ago, in northern Kenya. “These aren’t the very first tools that hominins made. They show that the knappers already had an understanding of how stones can be intentionally broken, beyond what the first hominin who accidentally hit 2 stones together and produced a sharp flake would have had. I think there are older, even more primitive artifacts out there.”
Tag: science
Scythian vessels with opium, cannabis
The Scythians take some of this hemp-seed, and throw it upon the red-hot stones; immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scythians, delighted, shout for joy, and this vapour serves them instead of a water-bath
these are 2.4 ka old, and were described by herodotus
47% Human & yeast overlap
Humans and baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, last shared an ancestor 1 ga BP. Despite the evolutionary gulf, human genes can substitute for 47% of the genes essential for yeast survival
Converting blood to neural cells
Now we can take easy to obtain blood samples, and make the main cell types of neurological systems in a dish that is specialized for each patient. Until now, no one’s had the ability and required technology to actually test different drugs to find something that targets the peripheral nervous system, and not the central nervous system, in a patient-specific manner
Why males?
why males? why do so many complex organisms have a whole sex which does not bear offspring? One hypothesis is that males are good for purging genetic load via sexual selection. On a genetic level all individuals carry deleterious mutations, which they pass on to their offspring. But, because of sample variance in transmission, there will be a distribution of outcomes in any given set of offspring. By chance some individuals will exhibit a higher load of deleterious alleles, while others will carry fewer alleles. If this load is correlated to traits which are visible to the opposite sex, then excess load every generation can be purged through reproductive skew
Pompeii speaks to us
on the history of the pompeii plaster casts.
It’s impossible to see those 3 cast figures and not feel moved. They’ve been dead for 1800 years, but they are human creatures seen in their agony
Cavemen didn’t live in caves
What tells an archaeologist that Paleolithic people spent less time in caves than we imagined in the past?
1 big clue is seasonal occupation evidence, something archaeologists infer based on things like animal bones. For example, by looking at found animal teeth, we can tell you at what season of the year the animals were killed. Also, certain animals are only available at certain times—fish that spawn at certain seasons of the year, for example. Almost all caves are described by archaeologists as seasonal, namely as autumn or winter occupations. It’s clear that people were in caves for maybe a couple of months a year at the most.
Most Ocean Virus Genes
This flattened curve suggested something profound: that they have probably found almost all the virus genes in the upper oceans of the entire planet
Babysitter Ancestors
And while children evolved to bond with us, we may have evolved to want to care for them. Research suggests that simply witnessing motherhood primes us to act as caretakers, even to babies we didn’t birth. One study from 2000, for instance, found that prolactin, a hormone associated with nurturing, increased in men when they were living with a pregnant woman. Another study from 2010 showed that fathers experienced a bump in oxytocin, a hormone associated with social bonding, after spending time with their newborns.
Quantum Life
the “quantumness” passes from one generation to the next via quantum entanglement. So each individual and its descendants share a powerful bond since entangled particles effectively share the same existence.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 