Free Republic

A multi-national team of researchers from Bournemouth University and Guangzhou University has found five handprints and five footprints in Quesang, on the Tibetan Plateau, dating from 169,000-226,000 years ago, in the middle of an Ice Age.The prints were preserved in freshwater limestone deposited around a hot spring – known as travertine. Judging by the size and height of the prints, the analysis suggests that they were carefully placed by children around the age of seven to twelve years of age.Dating of the prints was conducted using a radiometric method based on the decay of uranium found in the travertine, providing...

In 2015, archaeologists discovered a single human cranium (a skull without a lower jaw) in a gypsum cave in Northern Italy called Marcel Loubens cave. Caves are known to have been used for funerary practices in ancient Italy, but the fact that there are no other human remains in this cave has raised questions about how this skull came to be there, inspiring the researchers in this study to conduct a detailed analysis on the bone.The structure of the bone indicates that it belonged to a woman between 24 and 35 years old at death. Carbon dating places the remains...

Credit: Mathieu Duval ========================================================================= First direct dating of an early human tooth confirms the antiquity of Homo antecessor, western Europe's oldest known human fossil species. A previous find from the unit TD6 of Atapuerca Gran Dolina archaeological site in northern Spain has yielded more information about our early human lineage. An international team of researchers from Australia, China, France and Spain has conducted the first direct dating study of a fossil tooth belonging to Homo antecessor (H. antecessor), the earliest known hominin species identified in Europe. The study shows that H. antecessor probably lived somewhere between 772 000 and 949...

Researchers find that the most common dating method can produce “spuriously old” dates.A team from Europe took a closer look at how uranium-lead ages are determined, and found problems. One of the assumptions going into dating zircons (zirconium silicate crystals encasing uranium that decays to lead) is that the clock is “reset” when the parent rock under goes the high heat and pressure of metamorphism. This team found that nanosphere inclusions of extraneous metallic lead (Pb) can confuse the dating technique, making the rock look older than it is. Writing in PNAS, they say:Zircon (ZrSiO4) is the most commonly used...

A group of physicists in Germany claims to have discovered a way of speeding up radioactive decay that could render nuclear waste harmless on timescales of just a few tens of years. Their proposed technique – which involves slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin – could therefore avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories, a hugely expensive and politically difficult process. But other researchers are sceptical and believe that the technique contradicts well-established theory as well as experiment. The leader of...