Free Republic

The strange squid was captured on April 17 by the crew of NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer during a scientific voyage studying an ocean area never explored before. The mission has been conducting both scientific research and capturing images of deep-sea habitats in the western Gulf of Mexico that likely found nowhere else. “Dive 04 targeted an unnamed mound in East Breaks (EB) 1009, an area of the Gulf of Mexico that had never before been explored using deep-sea submersibles. The closest historical dive to the site was a single 2009 survey that autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry conducted over 12 kilometers...

Researchers had previously theorised that it was an increase in population that drove behavioural innovations which in turn led to the creation of these artefacts and eventually, the expansion out of Africa. However, by examining mollusc shells from Stone Age sites, Richard Klein of Stanford University and Teresa Steele of University of California, Davis, have determined that a significant population increase did not occur until the Later Stone Age (LSA), after the out of Africa migration had already begun... The researchers found that the median size of MSA shells was larger than that of LSA shells. This showed that selection...