We have three stories for you this morning. Not only because the stories themselves are intriguing. But because they illustrate the scientific method at its best. Persistence. Careful collection of the data, Thoughtful analysis. And above all this” Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” It’s from the first of today’s features. But it runs like a thread through all of them, and much else that is done by scientists, and all true scholars everywhere. It is of course the antithesis of the claims of conspiracy theorists, hucksters and plain incompetents everywhere.

Floods in the Mediterranean We’ve known the idea that the Mediterranean Sea was once a hot dry basin, a sort of desert land. Until one fine day about five million years ago when a truly humungous great flood burst through the Straits of Gibraltar, turning the whole, thing into that vast lake suitable for swimming, sailing and other watersports which it remains to this day. The proponents of the theory, Daniel Garcia Castellanos and Paul Carling were careful to say this Zanclean Flood was just that, a theory, Until recently they found that the alignment of hills in Sicily. plus the way that rocks of the right age were lying around there, confirmed it nicely. Detective work worthy of Comissario Montalbano, that island’s most famous son!

Awesome Jaw About 20 years ago, a large ugly looking jaw was dredged up off the coast of Taiwan. No one knew exactly how old it was or how it fitted into the jigsaw of human evolution. Now some incredibly skilful work extracting and analysing proteins from it have revealed it to belong to a Denisovan, that intriguing third branch of modern humanity Here’s Nature Briefing: Mysterious Taiwan Fossil is Denisovan

A fossilized jawbone discovered more than 20 years ago belonged to an ancient group of humans called Denisovans. Named Penghu 1, the jawbone was dredged up by fishing crews 25 kilometres off the west coast of Taiwan. The confirmation that the bone belonged to a Denisovan — the result of more than two years of work to extract ancient proteins from the fossil — expands the known geographical range of the group, from colder, high-altitude regions to warmer climates.Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Science paper

Standoffish Saharans Moving forward from the dawn of humanity to the dawn of agriculture, Chris Melore of the Mail has an intriguing story about the ancient proto-Neolithic populations of North Africa. Careful molecular detective work has revealed that they tended to keep themselves isolated from the population flows across the rest of the world which were happening about 7000 years BP. And this has quite profound implications for how agriculture and herding must have spread. One school has always held that Neolithic techniques were carried as cultural tropes by tribes who migrated out of the fertile crescent (a bit like the way particular European customs and technologies were carried to North America) The other school always held that local people came up with these ideas for themselves, perhaps with a bit of help from conversations with early travellers and traders. This evidence of isolated North Africans invented stock breeding and grazing economies independently is a definite plus for the second school and its ways.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14600327/Newly-mummies-reveal-new-human-ancestor-broke-humanity-thousands-years-ago.html

Careful thoughts, provisional conclusions. This is what we are all about here, and we hope you are too. Perhaps more people could be like this, if they had been given a fairer life. It is a thought we will pursue in the next blog

#neolithic #paleolithic #geology #agriculture #denisovan ##dna #protein