It seems the Neandertal wore jewelry.  Who knew?  Excerpt:

Neanderthals hunted mammoths, bison and other powerful animals for food — yet their fiercest foes may have been the massive eagles they snared to make jewellery. The talons of white-tailed eagles found at a Neanderthal site in Croatia show cut marks and patterns of wear that suggest the claws were donned as personal ornaments.

“They’re very powerful birds. It takes a certain amount of bravery and foolishness, even, to catch one of these things,” says David Frayer, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, whose team describes the claws in paper published on 12 March in the journal PLoS ONE.  With wing spans of around 2 metres, the birds are Europe’s largest aerial predator.

The 130,000 year-old talons were discovered more than a century ago in a rock shelter near the town Krapina in northern Croatia. Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger, a geologist, dug them up between 1899 and 1905 as part of a trove of animal remains, stone tools and Neanderthal bones and teeth. He sent them to a colleague for identification, and probably never saw the talons again, thinks Frayer: “The cut marks are so obvious that someone like Gorjanović would have seen them.”

It’s not too surprising that the Neandertal have recently been found to be far more advanced than we thought only a few decades ago.  They were anything but shambling, stupid brutes once dismissed as “cave men” but rather hardy, intelligent people who survived for half a million years in a savage wilderness, even in Ice Age Europe.  They had language, they had brains larger than ours, they specialized in hunting the largest game in their Paleolithic world.

And, True Believers, if your ancestry has any background from Europe or western Asia, you carry some of their genes.  Now there’s an interesting tidbit for contemplation.

Thanks once again to The Other  McCain for the Rule Five links!

Now this is cool:  Hunters Find A Frozen 10,000 Year Old Baby Woolly Rhino.  Excerpt:

Admit it, the little fella is pretty cute for spending ten centuries frozen in the ice, getting chewed on by scavengers. In September, two hunters boating down a stream in Siberia noticed some wavy, auburn locks poking out of the permafrost—a dead reindeer, they thought. After realizing their mistake, they liberated the rhino’s body from the thawing soil and stored it through the worst of the winter. Last week, they delivered the body to the Sakha Republic Academy of Sciences.

Sasha is one of the few woolly rhinos yet discovered, and the only calf. Experts estimate she was just 18 months old when she died. Her discovery should help researchers better understand woolly rhinos’ living conditions, how they developed as they grew, and how they’re related to living rhino species.

The question is this:  Will they be able to recover any DNA?

There has been a lot of discussion over the wisdom of possibly cloning a rhino or, say, a mammoth.  Granted this would be different than cloning some animal that has been made extinct by human action, such as the passenger pigeon.  The woolly mammoth and the woolly rhino were Ice Age animals that were not able to easily adapt to a warmer, deglaciated world.

I’d still like to see it done.  Any resulting animals would by necessity be few in number and carefully confined; there is no change that there would be herds of mammoths or rhinos roaming Alaska or Siberia, and no mammoth hunting expeditions (pity, that.)  So why not try?

We used to be a people that conceived of and accomplished great things.  Why not this?

No, that’s not a typo in the title.  Ever wonder what would happen if a nuke went off over Manhattan?  This should give you some idea.  Excerpt:

Within tens of minutes, everything within approximately five to seven miles of Midtown Manhattan would be engulfed by a gigantic firestorm. The fire zone would cover a total area of 90 to 152 square miles (230 to 389 square kilometers). The firestorm would rage for three to six hours. Air temperatures in the fire zone would likely average 400 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit (200 to 260 Celsius). 

After the fire burned out, the street pavement would be so hot that even tracked vehicles could not pass over it for days. Buried, unburned material from collapsed buildings throughout the fire zone could burst into flames when exposed to air—months after the firestorm had ended.  

Those who tried to escape through the streets would have been incinerated by the hurricane-force winds filled with firebrands and flames. Even those able to find shelter in the lower-level sub-basements of massive buildings would likely suffocate from fire-generated gases or be cooked alive as their shelters heated to oven-like conditions.

The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else.  Tens of miles downwind of the area of immediate destruction, radioactive fallout would begin to arrive within a few hours of the detonation.

Holy shit.

Why bring this scenario to the fore now?  It’s startlingly relevant; the Obama Administration is brokering a kick-the-can deal that will make it easier for Iran to build their much-anticipated nuclear weapon.  Once Iran has their nukes, how long will it be before one goes off over a Western city?  And, for the bunch of apocalyptic shitbags running Iran, what more tempting target than New York?

Granted they don’t have (yet) delivery systems that are even up to Cold War Soviet standards, which the scenario above describes.

But we know someone that does.

Talk about your Axis of Evil.

The last nuke torched off in anger was over Nagasaki in August of 1945, but it was only the last so far.  There will, inevitably, be another.  And it almost certainly won’t be an American nuke.  The question is this:  What will our response be when that drastic event happens?

If the current President is still in the Imperial Mansion, it will almost certainly be anemic and ineffective.  That, True Believers, will be a response that invites more aggression, not less.  If we can learn anything from history, we can learn that.

Thanks once again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!

What the hell is this?  (Image to the left from story.)  Excerpt:

A mysterious haze high above Mars has left scientists scratching their heads.

The vast plume was initially spotted by amateur astronomers in 2012, and appeared twice before vanishing.

Scientists have now analysed the images and say that say the formation, stretching for more than 1,000km, is larger than any seen before.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers believe the plume could be a large cloud or an exceptionally bright aurora.

However, they are unsure how these could have formed in the thin upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere.

Insert the inevitable “I, for one, welcome our alien overlords” meme here.

The Nature story can be found here , behind a paywall for the full story.

History Channel nutbars notwithstanding, this will certainly turn out to be a natural phenomenon.  But this is one of those moments in science that’s exciting – when you look up and the first thing that comes to mind is “what the hell is that?”

The challenge then becomes finding out what the hell it is.

This is interesting for a history buff; it seems if you had sat down for dinner with a late-Republican era Roman family, most of the food may have been surprisingly familiar.  Excerpt:

Let’s pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law and a consul of Rome.

What’s for dinner?

You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat more often and likely in larger quantities.

They had pork chops and a form of bacon. They even served sausages and prosciutto; in other words, a meal not unlike what you’d find in Rome today — or in South Philadelphia.

It would probably have been a more familiar dinner than one eaten in any of the royal courts of Europe 1500 years later.  The Romans had indoor plumbing, the washed their clothing, the wealthier Romans at least were scrupulous about bathing and sometimes made it a social event.

Most of those things fell out of fashion when the Roman Empire fell.  They didn’t call them the Dark Ages for nothing.

Then again, that dinner may have been an interesting place to talk some politics – assuming you speak the archaic Roman strain of Latin.  56 B.C. was towards the end of the Roman Republic, and your hosts’ nephew would be instrumental in the fall of the Republic and the beginning of the totalitarian Roman Empire – although it was Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavian that completed the transformation.  The Republic at the time was suffering from a shrinking currency, a lack of jobs for the common Roman citizens, and an increasing number of citizens on the dole.

Sound familiar?

But at least the food would have been decent.  Better than our earlier ancestors had to put up with.

Was 10,000 BC less stressful than today’s world?  Excerpt:

The picture of human origins may have gotten more complicated.  Excerpt:

Analysis of trace elements in Penghu 1 suggests the hominin probably lived between 10,000 and 190,000 years ago. The jaw and its teeth look unexpectedly primitive for this age, the researchers said. During the Pleistocene Epoch, which lasted from about 2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago, humans generally evolved smaller jaws and teeth, but the new fossil from Taiwan appears larger and more robust than older Homo erectus fossils from Java and northern China.

The researchers said Penghu 1 does resemble a 400,000-year-old fossil from Hexian, in southern China, located about 590 miles (950 km) north of the Penghu Channel. The scientists suggest these fossils together represent a distinct group of archaic humans, although they caution that they do not yet have enough evidence to say whether it is a new species or not.

“We need other skeletal parts to evaluate the degree of its uniqueness,”study co-author Yousuke Kaifu, a paleoanthropologist at Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, told Live Science. “The question of species can be effectively discussed after those steps.”

Or, maybe not.  But that’s how science works; or, at least, how it’s supposed to work.  “Not enough evidence” means “not enough evidence.”  Paleontology is frequently like assembling a massive puzzle from pieces found many miles apart over a period spanning decades; but every find does make the picture just a tiny bit more interesting, if not necessarily clearer.  But it’s also important to note that, just because this fossil is inconclusive, many others are not; the Neandertal, for example, are represented by hundreds of separate sets of remains.

And, it seems, Congressmen may have been around even longer.

Remember the fuss when they decided Pluto wasn’t a planet after all?  Well, now there may be two more planets out past Pluto.  Excerpt:

The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say.

The official list of planets in our star system runs to eight, with gas giant Neptune the outermost.

Beyond Neptune, Pluto was relegated to the status of “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, although it is still championed by some as the most distant planet from the Sun.

In a study published in the latest issue of the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers propose that “at least two” planets lie beyond Pluto.

Their calculations are based on the unusual orbital behaviour of very distant space rocks called extreme trans-Neptunian objects, or ETNOs.

The evidence – sketchy though it is at this point – is nevertheless the same evidence that led to the discovery of Neptune, namely, perturbations in the orbit of known objects.

If these planets are confirmed, I’d propose that one of them be named Prosperine, after the Greek goddess carried away to the underworld by Pluto.  I’d settle for the Roman Persephone, but Prosperine was the tenth planet mentioned in James Blish’s great 1950s sci-fi classic Cities in Flight.

New discoveries should be willing to give a nod to such classics.