The Joy Of Seeing Your Gooey Innards

18 seconds of embodied cosmic weirdness. It's an MRI of baritone Michael Volle singing Wagner's "O du, mein holder Abendstern" (Oh Thou, my fair evening star). It's both beautiful and gross at the same time, which is exactly the point. Even our highest aspirations are always grounded in the raw stuff of the world.

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South African Cave Yields Strange Bones Of Early Human-Like Species

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of an unusual human-like creature that lived long ago. Exactly how long ago is still a mystery — and that's not the only mystery surrounding this newfound species.

The bones have a strange mix of primitive and modern features, and were found in an even stranger place — an almost inaccessible chamber deep inside a South African cave called Rising Star.

"It is perhaps one of the best known caves in all of South Africa," says Lee Berger, who studies human evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

In 2013, some local cavers found some fossils inside Rising Star cave. Berger had asked them to be on the lookout, so they brought him photos.

"And there I saw something I perhaps thought I'd never see in my life," recalls Berger. "That is, clearly primitive hominin remains lying on the floor of a cave."

A jaw and a skull were just sitting there in the dirt — usually such bones are encased in rock.

Berger was excited, but he knew he personally could never reach this fossil site. To get into the cave chamber, you have to climb a steep, jagged rockfall called Dragon's Back, then wiggle through a small opening that leads to a long, narrow crack.

The crack is only about 7 ½ inches wide, and goes down more than 30 feet. Squeezing through it is the only way to reach the chamber of bones at the bottom.

Since he couldn't go, Berger sent in his tall, skinny 16-year-old son. "When he came out after 45 minutes, he stuck his head out. And to tell you how bad I am, I didn't say: 'Are you OK?' I said: 'And?' And he says, 'Daddy, it's wonderful.' "

Berger got funding from the National Geographic Society to excavate the site. And he advertised for research assistants on Facebook — for skinny scientists who weren't claustrophobic. Six women took the job.

They worked in the chamber almost like spacewalkers, communicating with researchers outside, via cameras and about 2 miles of fiber optic cable. The team in the chamber used paintbrushes and toothpicks to gently unearth fossil bones — there were more than 1,550 of them, an incredible treasure trove. The researchers describe their find Thursday in a journal called eLife.

"Often I was wondering, 'How on Earth are we going to get that fossil out?' because the density of bones in that chamber was so great, it was like a puzzle to get each fossil out," says Becca Peixotto, one of the scientist-cavers and a doctoral student in anthropology at American University.

The bones come from at least 15 individuals, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was on the team that studied the bones.

"We have every age group represented" among the fossils, he says. "We have newborns; we have children of almost every age; we have adults and old adults."

He says these creatures were short — less than 5 feet tall — and thin. They have a particular combination of features that has never been seen before. "It's a new species to science," says Hawks. Researchers have named it Homo naledi, because "naledi" means "star" in a local South African language.

"They have a very small brain. They are not human-like at all in their brain," Hawks says. "It's around a third the size of a human brain today."

But the creatures had feet like us, and walked in a very human-like way. Their hands were also like ours, but their fingers were more curved.

The researchers also tackled this question: How did these human-like creatures get into such a crazy spot? It looks as though the cave chamber has always been hard to reach.

There are no animal bones there, except for a handful of bits from birds and mice. There's no evidence that a carnivore dragged the human-like creatures in, or that they somehow got washed in. And there's no evidence of a mass death, such as a cave accident.
Berger believes someone had to have put the bodies there.

"Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its dead in a repeated, ritualized fashion in this deep underground chamber," he says.

That's quite a claim — that kind of ritual has been thought to be unique to modern humans or our very close relatives.

And really, the whole discovery — from the bones to their bizarre location — has perplexed experts on human evolution.

"To be honest, I would really distrust anyone who thinks they understand what the significance of these finds is," says Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University.

Usually scientists can tell how old fossilized bones are, but in this case the geology of the cave gives no clues. The bones could be less than 100,000 years old or several million years old.

"These folks do not have an age, yet they have some remarkable fossils, and the context of them is also remarkable," says Wood. "It's not only remarkable, it's also rather weird. But nonetheless, the fossils are important. So the community is, I think, struggling to work out what it all means."

He notes that only a small section of the cave chamber has been excavated, and it looks like many more bones are down there.

"There is the potential for thousands of specimens in that cave," says Wood. "Intellectually, it's a real puzzle. And I think it's going to take scientists quite a time to get their heads around what the real significance of these discoveries is." npr

What's Better For Afghanistan's Future: Buddha Tours Or A Copper Mine?

About an hour's drive south of Kabul, there's a vast Buddhist archaeological site dating back at least 1,500 years. It happens to be sitting on top of one of the biggest untapped copper deposits in the world, potentially worth billions of dollars.

 Nearly a hundred ancient Buddhist shrines like this one have been uncovered by archaeologists at Mes Aynak, south of Kabul.

 The ground at Mes Aynak is so rich in copper that rock and bones — like this skeleton found lying near a Buddhist shrine — are stained greenish-blue.

By the time archaeologists uncovered this statue of the Buddha at Mes Aynak, its head was gone — likely broken off by looters.

Eight years ago, the Afghan government made a deal with a Chinese conglomerate to mine the copper, but mining hasn't begun and likely won't for several more years. The area in which the copper is located, Logar Province, presents challenges in both security and infrastructure: no reliable water or power supply, no railway for transporting copper and increasing threats from the Taliban.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that Afghanistan holds $1 trillion in mineral wealth but none of it has ever been developed. This could represent a huge and much-needed source of revenue for a country long dependent on foreign aid. But given other countries' experience with the so-called "resource curse," concerns have been raised over whether Afghanistan's natural resources can or will be exploited responsibly. Part of the concern has centered on whether extracting copper at Mes Aynak must result inevitably in the destruction of a spectacular archaeological site that has been compared to Machu Picchu and Pompeii. Historical riches like this, advocates argue, represent a different kind of wealth and could hold the key to a thriving tourism industry in the future.

Villagers have been hired to help archaeologists with the excavation.

npr

Jacopo Berengario da Carpi

Jacopo Berengario da Carpi: Isagogae breues, perlucidae ac uberrimae, in anatomiam humani corporis a communi medicorum academia usitatam

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It doesn't take a degree in human anatomy to realise that there is something unusual about the Cohuna skull. With its flat, sloping forehead and prominent brow ridge, it looks distinctly primitive.

For decades, the prehistoric Cohuna skull and others like it have occupied a central and contentious role in answering one of the most important questions in human evolutionary studies: where did our species, Homo sapiens, come from?

Most anthropologists now agree that the skulls don't demand a rewrite of the human evolution text books, but this, paradoxically, has made them all the more intriguing. It confirms that they owe their strange appearance not to the blind hand of evolution but to the guiding hand of humanity. Australia's ancient inhabitants were among the first in the world to deliberately transform the shape of their own skulls - and their motives for doing were probably not as strange as they might at first appear.

The skull was a source of controversy from almost the moment it was ploughed up in a field near the town of Cohuna in Victoria, Australia, in 1925. Some researchers enthusiastically proclaimed its strange shape and the generous coating of minerals encrusted around it showed that it predated all then known human skulls, and must therefore have belonged to one of our earliest ancestors. 

Sceptics, who pointed out it was found in geologically recent soil not far below the surface, were just as certain it did not. They soon won the argument. Genuinely primitive and ancient human skulls were discovered in Africa around this time, and over time anthropologists came to accept that it was there, rather than in Australia, that humanity had evolved long ago. The Cohuna skull was clearly unusual and its anomalous shape was difficult to explain, but it was quietly forgotten….

By now it was possible to estimate the age of fossils using carbon dating: the Kow Swamp specimens were about 9,000 to 13,000 years old, while the Nacurrie skull was about 11,000 years old. The Coobol Creek remains were about 14,000 years old. This makes the fossils prehistoric, just as the enthusiasts in the 1920s had suspected. But the sceptics had been correct too as human fossils found in Africa were dated at between 3 and 4 million years old. Even our species, Homo sapiens, comfortably predates the strange Australians, as skulls with all the features of modern humans are found in rocks as old as 160,000 years.

The age of the Australian skulls did raise a question, though. Their distinctive sloping foreheads and prominent brow ridges are very like those of an ancient human species called Homo erectus, that lived between 2 million and 140,000 years ago. Why did the Australian skulls look so eerily like this long-dead species? bbc

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The smallest intact ceratopsid skeleton was recently unearthed in Alberta

The smallest intact ceratopsid skeleton was recently unearthed in Alberta
Credit: Philip J. Currie, Robert Holmes, Michael Ryan Clive Coy, Eva B. Koppelhus

The toddler was just 3 years old and 5 feet (1.5 meters) long when it wandered into a river near Alberta, Canada, and drowned about 70 million years ago. The beast was so well-preserved that some of its skin left impressions in the nearby rock.

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Natural history of the quadrupeds; skeleton of a monkey, engraving in the 200-and-some-volume Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter, a 50-year-long re-edit of Diderot’s Encyclopédie that began in 1782. 

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