Plant resurrected from fruit collected by squirrels 30,000 years ago. It was an ice age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. A team of Russian tests managed to resurrect an entire plant from the fruit tissues.
The oldest pearl in the history of mankind, that goes back to over 7500 years right up to the Neolithic Age, was found in the UAE recently. The report, quoting a French National Centre for Scientific Research statement, said gem specialists believed that the oldest pearl hitherto known goes back to 3000 BC and was found at an antiquity site in Japan. The center added that the pearl, which was discovered lately in the Umm Al Quwain emirate of the UAE, was found to be of 5500 BC time after it was tested by Carbon 14. This pearl along with other pearls found along the southwestern shores of he Arabian Peninsula indicates that this region witnessed the oldest clan hunting activity in the world for the value of pearls aesthetically.
The oldest known paintings aer at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. Ther are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalos, mammoth or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world - in France, India, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, etc.
The hall of bulls in Lascaux, Dordogne, France, is one of the best known cave paintings from about 10,000 to 15,000 BC.
In January 2012, archaeologists from the city-based Deccan College
Postgraduate and Research Institute discovered on of the oldest forms of rock
art called cup marks on a hillock in Chandrapur district of eastern Maharashtra.
These cup marks, found about 3 km from Shankarpur village,
are similar to those found in Dar-Ki-Chattan in Madhya Pradesh, a UNESCO world
heritage site.
Cup marks are small concave depressions about a few
centimeter across, dug into a rock surface.
They are often surrounded by concentric circles carved into the stone
and a linear channel called a gutter usually leads out from the middle.
Based on the surrounding evidence, archaeological experts
believe that the Chandrapur cup marks date between 10,000 and 15,000 BC. They were probably of astronomical
significance marked on the hillock to signify the direction of the sun or the
number of members in a family who ere buried at the site.
ACROSS THE WORLD Cup and ring marks or cup marks are a form of prehistoric art found mainly in Atlantic Europe (Northern England, Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, Portugal, and Galicia in North West Spain and Mediterranean Europe, Northwest Italy, Thessalia Central Greece, Switzerland)
The tip of a girl's 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a
cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing
technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of
human origins. The new view is fast is
supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of
Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other
types that had gone before.
Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans
encountered and bed with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent
times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000
years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, however, lived in Asia
and most likely vanished around the same time.
Their DNA lives on in us even though they ae extinct. In a sense, we are hybrid species.
A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicked
named "the Hobbits" because of they ere so small, also walked the
earth until about 17,000 years ago. It
is not known whether modern humans bred with them because of the hot, humid
climate of the Indonesian island
of Flores impairs the
preservation of DNA. This means that our
modern era, since H floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million
year human history that just one type of human has been alive.
For the first time in Chile, an intact skull and tusks of a giant
primitive elephant that died up to two million years ago have been discovered
beside a river in Padre Hurtaldo, near the capital Santiago.
The skull is in perfect condition, with its four molars and both tusks
of almost four feet in length. Also, a
part of the vertebrae was found inside the skull.
Mastodons were around the same size as modern
elephants, but were much more heavily muscled and had furry coats to protect them
from cold.Unlike mastodons which used
to eat shoots and leaves, mammoths were grazers.Both species appear to have survived until
just a few thousand years ago and early humans would have been familiar with
them.
Dinosaurs may have roamed
among pine trees in the Arctic covered with
weird monkey puzzle forests some 100 million years ago, a new study has
claimed.
Drawing up the first
realistic picture of the fauna in the age of the dinosaurs, researchers from
the Royal Holloway University of London claimed that about 100 million years
ago, the polar-regions had a climate similar to Britain today.
Just before the extinction
of dinosaurs the picture changed again, with magnolia-type trees springing into
life brining blossom and scent to the world for the first time, the researchers
reported in the journal Geology.
The findings have
implications for understanding the long-term effects of global warming, they
added. Research shows that weird monkey puzzle
forests covered most of the planet, especially in the steamy tropics.
"Just before the
dinosaurs became extinct, all that changed.
Flowering trees similar to magnolias took off, bringing color and scent
to the world for the first time."
Studying fossilized tree
rings, the team discovered that trees were growing twice as fast as their
modern ancestors, with the greatest effect closest to the poles.
Plant resurrected from fruit collected by squirrels 30,000 years ago. It was an ice age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. A team of Russian tests managed to resurrect an entire plant from the fruit tissues.
