Futurity.org » prehistoric Earth

200 million-year-old self-segregation

Richard Lewis-Brown — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:21:19 +0000

BROWN (US) — Just like buying a house today, climate and location were major factors in where animals lived 200 million years ago.

Even without geographic barriers like mountains and ice caps, animals living on Pangaea, a continent with the landmass equivalent of Earth, confined themselves to specific regions.

Wasps: Nesting with the dinosaurs

Carol Clark-Emory — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:49:04 +0000

EMORY (US) — Fossil evidence suggests wasps were nesting with dinosaurs as long as 75 million years ago, a new study reports.

Scientists say the discovery at the Two Medicine Formation in northwestern Montana offers clues about the plants that may have been flowering in the area and the climate at the time.

Glimpse of prehistoric Earth in Arctic rock

Cynthia Lee-McGill — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:38:32 +0000

McGILL (CAN)—Geochemical evidence from volcanic rocks collected on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic suggests that a region of mantle beneath the Earth’s surface has largely escaped billions of years of melting and geological churning.

The discovery appears to offer clues to the early chemical evolution of the Earth.

10,000-year-old weapon unearthed in ice melt

Jim Scott CU-Boulder — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:54:42 +0000

U. COLORADO (US)—A melting ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone National Park has uncovered an atlatl—a spearlike hunting weapon lost in the snow ten millennia ago.

Researchers believe that climate change has increased global temperatures and accelerated melting of permanent ice fields exposing organic materials that have long been entombed in the ice.

Pre-humans in Africa evolved to beat the heat

Lisa De Nike-JHU — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:57:02 +0000

JOHNS HOPKINS (US)—In the Turkana Basin of Kenya the average daily temperature has reached the mid-90s or higher, year-round, for the past 4 million years, which may explain in part why pre-humans learned to walk upright, lost the fur that covered the bodies of their predecessors, and became able to sweat more.

“The ‘take home’ message of our study,” says Benjamin Passey, assistant professor of earth science at Johns Hopkins University, “is that this region, which is one of the key places where fossils have been found documenting human evolution, has been a really hot place for a really long time, even during the period between 3 million years ago and now when the ice ages began and the global climate became cooler.”

Prehistoric high society embraced city living

Steve Koppes-Chicago — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:06:28 +0000

Abbas Alizadeh, an archaeologist for the University of Chicago, passes a piece of pottery to Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute (right), who is a leader of the expedition to Tell Zeidan in Syria. The site is the largest yet found for the Ubaid culture, which immediately preceded the formation of urban civilization in the ancient Middle East and the emergence of powerful political leaders and social inequality.

U. CHICAGO (US)—A prehistoric society that formed the foundation of urban life in the ancient Middle East spawned a social elite that engaged in trade with far-flung regions and used stone seals to mark ownership of goods—all before pack animals were domesticated or the invention of the wheel.

A team of archaeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute has joined a team of Syrian colleagues in excavating the long-known, but previously unexcavated mound of Tell Zeidan, one of the largest sites of the Ubaid culture in northern Mesopotamia, which has already yielded evidence of trade in obsidian, rich agricultural production, and the development of copper processing.

Life thrived in early Earth’s cooler temps

Sherylon Carroll-Texas A&M — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:12:50 +0000

The cooler temperatures on early Earth mean that conditions for life were much easier, and that life that did exist at the time was not under as much stress as previously believed. Geobiologist Mike Tice says the situation could be compared to the geysers currently found in Yellowstone National Park. The hundreds of hot spring pools in the park, such as the one pictured above, vary considerably in temperature.

STANFORD/TEXAS A&M/YALE (US)—Billions of years ago, the Earth’s climate was far cooler—perhaps by more than 50 degrees than previously believed—which could mean conditions were more conducive for life all over the planet, new findings suggests.

A team of researchers examined rocks from the Buck Reef Chert in South Africa that are known to be about 3.4 billion years old, among the oldest ever discovered, and found features in them that are consistent with formation at water temperatures significantly lower than previous studies had suggested.