An older Neandertal from about 50,000 years ago, who had suffered multiple injuries and other degenerations, became deaf and must have relied on the help of others to avoid prey and survive well into his 40s, indicates a new analysis published Oct. 20 in the online journal PLoS ONE.
“More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” said Erik Trinkaus, study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Known as Shanidar 1, the Neanderthal remains were discovered in 1957 during excavations at Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan by Ralph Solecki, an American archaeologist and professor emeritus at Columbia University. Read more.
This is Simone Segouin, an incredible resistance fighter. Her first mission was to steal a Nazi’s bike, and thereafter went on with her team to derail a train, blow up bridges, arrest 25 Nazis in a single day, and, well, liberate France. She’s still alive at the age of 90.
A bug in a lizard and the lizard in the snake fossil.
About 48 million years ago, an ancestral iguana was having a rather wonderful day in prehistoric Germany. It had just managed to ingest a rather colorful insect, after all, and who doesn’t like a good lunch? However, little did this scuttling Geiseltaliellus maarius know that it just consumed its last meal.
It was at this moment that a juvenile Palaeopython fischeri snake decided to strike. More related to modern boa than the python, this tree-dwelling snake slithered out from the shadows and pounced, managing to successfully gobble up both the lizard and its lunch.
Sadly, it must have got lost on the way back to its arboreal residence, because it fell into the Messel Pit, a formerly active volcanic lake spewing out highly acidic sulfur dioxide, suffocating carbon dioxide. If anything became overwhelmed by these gasses, it would have likely stumbled into the broiling, bubbling, liquid haze, and sunk down into oxygen-poor waters.
(excerpt - click the link for the complete article)
The human brain has been sculpted over the course of millions of years of evolution, so you’d think it’s been debugged pretty well.
But it’s still left with so many mental glitches.
Just take a look at this terrifying atlas of all the mental traps that plague our everyday thinking. (Click here for an enlarged version.)
Buster Benson, a product manager at Slack, used the massive information provided by thousands of Wikipedians over the years to make an easy-to-navigate list of cognitive biases. His post on Medium got a lot of attention from readers, one of whom was John Manoogian, an internet entrepreneur and engineer. Manoogian, amazed by the amount of information that was there, decided to turn the list into a visual map.
“You look at this overwhelming array of cognitive biases and distortions, and realize how there are so many things that come between us and objective reality,” Manoogian told The Huffington Post. “One of the most overwhelming things to me that came out of this project is humility.”
Manoogian has set up a print-on-demand system where people can order a poster version of the atlas. Since its creation two weeks ago, the response has been great, he said.
(excerpt - click the link for the complete article)
The standing rock tribe are being silenced about what is going on up there with the Dakota access pipe line.
I beg of you to help me get the topic out. It will affect millions of lives. The pipe will leave into the tribes only source of drinking water. We are trying so hard to get this out on twitter and facebook, but we are being silenced.
Today a security team came into the middle of a peaceful native american protest and numerous people got maced and bitten by the dogs.
I want you all to take a look at the terror on these young girls faces. Then I want you to take a look at the two aggressive dogs. When did it become OK to use dogs against children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters OUR freakin people!!! The police will only let a dog go if the suspect runs or the suspect is violent and causes a threat to the public of the officer. Do you see a weapon in these young girls hands? Do these girls look dangerous? The answer would be no. No they don’t. The people with the dogs aren’t even police officers! They are security guards. They couldn’t even keep control of their own dogs leading to them being attacked also.
Most of you won’t even bat an eyelid at my posts, others will be annoyed because of my constant posting.This is happening right this second and threatening millions of lives. I have to help. We can only break the silence if you join us in this fight. Just sharing my post helps the reality of the situation get out there. I now beg of you to share this post in support of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Give them a bigger voice. Help them shout this from the roof tops. Please… Rachael <3<3#NoDAPL
In what archaeologists are calling the “missing link to Stonehenge”, the world’s first “eco” home, and the oldest settlement yet found in the prehistoric monument landscape has been discovered. Built from the roots of a fallen tree, the “environmentally sensitive” dwelling is shaking up previously held notions about Mesolithic people of Britain.
