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Using the radiocarbon dating of 27 mud wasp nests, collected from over and under 16 similar paintings, a University of Melbourne collaboration has put the painting at 17,500 and 17,100 years old. “This makes the painting Australia’s oldest known in-situ painting,” said Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Damien Finch who pioneered the exciting new radiocarbon technique. “This is a significant find as through these initial estimates, we can understand something of the world these ancient artists lived in. We can never know what was in the mind of the artist when he/she painted this piece of work more than 600 generations ago,...

The perfectly preserved remains of an Ice Age cave bear have been discovered in the Russian Arctic -- the first example of the species ever to be found with soft tissues intact. The astonishing find was made by reindeer herders on the Lyakhovsky Islands, which are part of the New Siberian islands archipelago in Russia's Far North. The bear could be as much as 39,500 years old. Prior to this, only the bones of cave bears had been unearthed, but this specimen even had its nose intact, according to a team of scientists from the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in...

Separately at least one preserved carcass of a cave bear cub found on the mainland of Yakutia, with scientists hopeful of obtaining its DNA. More details of the finds are to be announced soon. Until now only the bones of cave bears have been discovered. The new finds are of ‘world importance’, according to one of Russia’s leading experts on extinct Ice Age species. Scientist Lena Grigorieva said of the island discovery of the adult beast: 'Today this is the first and only find of its kind - a whole bear carcass with soft tissues. 'It is completely preserved, with...

The identification of the earliest dogs is challenging because of the absence and/or mosaic pattern of morphological diagnostic features in the initial phases of the domestication process. Furthermore, the natural occurrence of some of these characters in Late Pleistocene wolf populations and the time it took from the onset of traits related to domestication to their prevalence remain indefinite. For these reasons, the spatiotemporal context of the early domestication of dogs is hotly debated. Our combined molecular and morphological analyses of fossil canid remains from the sites of Grotta Paglicci and Grotta Romanelli, in southern Italy, attest of the presence...

Fossils and stone tools show that hominins made it to Wallacean islands at least one million years ago, including the famous 'Hobbit,' or Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores. When our own species arrived 45,000 years ago (or perhaps earlier), it is thought to have quickly developed the specialized use of marine habitats, as evidenced by one of the world's earliest fish hooks found in the region..." This new paper uses stable carbon isotopes measured from fossil human teeth to directly reconstruct the long-term diets of past populations. Although this method has been used to study the diets and...

Along with locations in North and South America, Greenland, Western Europe, and the Middle East, we can now add southern Africa to the list of places where scientists have uncovered evidence of a calamitous event that happened 12,800 years ago. This evidence of a 12,800-year-old platinum spike in Africa is the first to be found on the continent, and it’s yet further evidence in support of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. According to this theory, either a comet or asteroid struck Earth during the Pleistocene, triggering an impact winter that saw temperatures plummet around the globe. The associated loss of...

RNA -- the short-lived transcripts of genes -- from the "Tumat puppy", a wolf of the Pleistocene era has been isolated, and its sequence analyzed in a new study by Oliver Smith of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues publishing on July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The results establish the possibility of examining a range of RNA transcripts from ancient organisms, a possibility previously thought to be extremely unlikely because of the short lifespan of RNA. DNA, which encodes the "hard copy" of genes, is known to survive for thousands of years under favourable conditions. But RNA...

Last summer, a Russian man was strolling along the shore of the local Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia when he came upon a grisly sight: the severed head of an ancient wolf. The head had been well preserved by the permafrost and still sported a full head of hair and sharp fangs. The man, Pavel Efimov, handed the ancient head over to scientists, who dated it to over 40,000 years ago, or the end of the Pleistocene epoch, according to The Siberian Times. Their analysis also revealed that the wolf was fully grown and was between 2 and 4 years old...

In the first study, researchers led by Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, sequenced the whole genomes of 34 individuals who lived in Siberia, the land bridge Beringia, and Alaska from 600 to nearly 32,000 years ago. The oldest individuals in the sample -- two men who lived in far northern Siberia -- represent the earliest known humans from that part of the world. There are no direct genetic traces of these men in any of the other groups the team surveyed, suggesting their culture likely died out about 23,000 years ago when the region became too...

A series of tracks created roughly 14,000 years ago has revealed stunning new insight into the ways ancient humans explored dark, potentially treacherous cave systems during the Stone Age. Researchers say at least 180 hand and footprints line the clay-rich floor of Italy’s cave of Bàsura in the famous Toirano caves, indicating ancient humans crawled barelegged through low tunnels as they searched for food and even explored for fun. The group that left behind these tracks thousands of years ago included a total of five individuals, from adults to children as young as 3 years old, who navigated the dark...

Although researchers have long known that the last two interglacial periods experienced warming in the Arctic... Just beyond the northwest edge of the vast Greenland Ice Sheet, Northwestern University researchers have discovered lake mud that beat tough odds by surviving the last ice age. The mud, and remains of common flies nestled within it, record two interglacial periods in northwest Greenland. Although researchers have long known these two periods -- the early Holocene and Last Interglacial -- experienced warming in the Arctic due to changes in Earth's orbit, the mix of fly species preserved from these times shows that Greenland...

It's like the underside of the island got a good roasting in the distant past and still has the big scar to prove it. That hotspot, by the way, is the one which today is building Iceland in the middle of the North Atlantic. The plume of broiling rock rising from deep inside the Earth has broken through the thin ocean floor at Iceland's location and is now creating new land with regular eruptions of lava. Greenland's warm NW-SE band is reported by a team of researchers led by the US space agency (Nasa) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS)....

A meteor hit Earth and exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force in July, but the Air Force has made no mention of the event. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed an object of unspecified size traveling at 15.1 miles per second (54,360 miles per hour) struck the ground in Greenland, just 27 miles north of Thule Air Base, on July 25. The base is mainly used to detect missile launches. Director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists Hans Kristensen tweeted about the impact, but the US Air Force has not reported the event. Kristensen argues it’s...

The Air Force said Friday that there was no damage to Thule Air Base in Greenland after a large meteor fell nearby last week. The fireball incident occurred just miles from the remote military base on July 25 and entered the atmosphere with a 2.1 kiloton force, according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The Air Force 21st Space Wing monitors missile launches and space activity via sensors at Thule, and directed any questions to NASA, which did not immediately provide a statement.

A meteor hit the earth and exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force last month, but the US Air Force has made no mention of the event. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed an object of unspecified size travelling at 24.4 kilometres per second struck earth in Greenland, just 43 kilometres north of an early missile warning Thule Air Base on the 25th of July, 2018. Director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen, tweeted about the impact, but America’s Air Force has not reported the event.Mr. Kristensen argues it’s concerning there was no public warning...

Around 13,000 years ago, the Earth burned. A swarm of comet debris from the Taurid meteor stream had blasted the Americas and parts of Europe; the worst day in prehistory since the end of the ice age. Many species of large animal were exterminated by the conflagration and ensuing cataclysms. And those that survived the initial onslaught could do little against the floods, acid rain, and starvation that followed.

Following the discovery of the 19.2-mile wide Hiawatha impact crater beneath the northwest margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Dr. Joe MacGregor of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues explored satellite and aerogeophysical data in search of additional such craters and found a possible second impact crater that is 22.7 miles wide and 114 miles southeast of the Hiawatha crater. The discovery is described in a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. ..." Following the finding of that first crater, Dr. MacGregor and co-authors checked topographic maps of the rock beneath Greenland’s ice for signs of other craters....

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, also known as Clovis comet hypothesis, posits that the hemisphere-wide debris field of a large, disintegrating asteroid (or comet) struck North America, South America, Europe, and western Asia approximately 12,800 years ago. This event triggered extensive biomass burning, brief impact winter, climate change, and contributed to extinctions of late Pleistocene megafauna. Controversial from the time it was proposed, this hypothesis continues to be contested by those who prefer to attribute the end-Pleistocene reversal in (global) warming entirely to terrestrial causes. Now, University of California, Santa Barbara’s Professor James Kennett and co-authors present further geologic and...

When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be... the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning)... suggests a possible triggering mechanism for the abrupt changes in climate at that time, in particular a...

About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus. The effects of such a supernova—and possibly more than...