The Menga dolmen (Antequera, Malaga, Spain), listed in UNESCO World Heritage since July 2016, was designed and built with stones weighting up to nearly 150 tons, thus becoming the most colossal stone monument built in its time in Europe (c. 3800–3600 BC).

Our study (based on high-resolution geological mapping as well as petrographic and stratigraphic analyses) reveals key geological and archaeological evidence to establish the precise provenance of the massive stones used in the construction of this monument.

These stones are mostly calcarenites, a poorly cemented detrital sedimentary rock comparable to those known as 'soft stones' in modern civil engineering. They were quarried from a rocky outcrop located at a distance of approximately 1 km.

In this study, it can be inferred the use of soft stone in Menga reveals the human application of new wood and stone technologies enabling the construction of a monument of unprecedented magnitude and complexity.

We conclude that the location of the quarries and geological features was an additional critical factor for the emplacement of Menga. The use of soft stones such as calcarenites allowed Late Neolithic communities to work gigantic stones.

Neolithic communities display a deep knowledge of the geotechnical and geological properties of the stones used and the quality of the terrain chosen as foundation.

They avoided marls, clays and unconsolidated lithologies for stone movement and monument emplacement.

They carefully selected the substrate, used pillars and avoided water infiltration, among others, in order to prevent deterioration of these soft stones and ensure the stability of the dolmen. For this purpose, a waterproof tumulus was created.

The quarrying and transportation of the massive stones from Cerro de la Cruz to the hill of Menga must have demanded intensive planning, highly accurate logistics and enormous labour investments

Machine learning and careful observation suggest that some of the animals’ calls are specific to individuals, similar to a person’s name.

Elephants seem to use personalized calls to address members of their group, providing a rare example of naming in animals other than humans.

The researchers analysed recordings of 469 rumbles using a machine-learning technique. The model correctly identified which elephant was being addressed 27.5% of the time — a much higher success rate than when the model was fed with random audio as a control. This suggests that the rumbles carry information that is intended only for a specific elephant.

Next, Pardo and his colleagues played recordings of these calls to 17 elephants and compared their reactions. The elephants became more vocal and moved more quickly towards the speaker when they heard their ‘name’ compared with when they heard rumbles directed at other elephants. “They could tell if a call was addressed to them just by hearing that call,” says Pardo.

Around two million years ago, Earth was a very different place, with our early human ancestors living alongside saber-toothed tigers, mastodons, and enormous rodents. And, depending on where they were, they may have been cold: Earth had fallen into a deep freeze, with multiple ice ages coming and going until about 12,000 years ago.

This paper is the first to quantitatively show there was an encounter between the sun and something outside of the solar system that would have affected Earth's climate.

Normally, the heliosphere filters out most of these radioactive particles. But without protection, they can easily reach Earth. According to the paper, this aligns with geological evidence that shows increased 60Fe (iron 60) and 244Pu (plutonium 244) isotopes in the ocean, on the moon, Antarctic snow, and ice cores from the same time period. The timing also matches with temperature records that indicate a cooling period.

The paper introduces the term "cryptoterrestrials" to refer to an ancient human culture—more technologically advanced than our own—that survived the cataclysms and has lived since in hiding.

A speculative new paper suggests that advanced "cryptoterrestrials" could be living secretly on Earth or in its near environs, like the moon.

It suggests the existence of a bizarre group of "intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the moon)." 

The study has been accepted for publication in Philosophy and Cosmology.

The Knocker, Knacker, or Tommyknocker (US) is a mythical, subterranean, gnome-like creature in Cornish and Devon folklore. The Welsh counterpart is the coblyn.

It is closely related to the Irish leprechaun, Kentish kloker and the English and Scottish brownie.

The Cornish described the creature as a little person 2 ft 0 in (0.61 m) tall, with a disproportionately large head, long arms, wrinkled skin, and white whiskers. It wears a tiny version of standard miner's garb and commits random mischief, such as stealing miners' unattended tools and food. 

Cornish miners believed that the diminutive Knockers beckoned them toward finding rich veins of tin. As miners changed from independent, family-owned operators to hired laborers for large industrialized companies, there was an increased concern for safety, reflected in the knockers new role. They knocked on the mine walls to warn of impending collapse.

Generally considered benevolent, they were also tricksters who would hide tools and extinguish candles.

They are similar to the coblynau of Welsh miners.

The JWST has detected a key building block of life at the dawn of the universe, upending what we know about the first galaxies.

The discovery — a cloud of carbon in a distant and compact galaxy as it appeared just 350 million years after the Big Bang — marks the earliest detection of an element other than hydrogen in the universe.

Astronomers classify elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals. That's because, aside from hydrogen and trace amounts of lithium, these elements were forged inside the fiery furnaces of stars and distributed throughout the universe by star explosions called supernovas. 

This process of heavy element production and seeding was once thought to take many star lifetimes before elements heavy enough to form planets were widely available. But the new discovery has challenged this preconception.

Gene flow from Neandertals has shaped the landscape of genetic and phenotypic variation in modern humans. We identify the location and size of introgressed Neandertal ancestry segments in more than 300 genomes spanning the last 50,000 years.

We study how Neandertal ancestry is shared among individuals to infer the time and duration of the Neandertal gene flow.

We find the correlation of Neandertal segment locations across individuals and their divergence to sequenced Neandertals, both support a model of single major Neandertal gene flow.

Our catalog of introgressed segments through time confirms that most natural selection–positive and negative–on Neandertal ancestry variants occurred immediately after the gene flow, and provides new insights into how the contact with Neandertals shaped human origins and adaptation.

In summary, the majority of positive and negative selection on Neandertal ancestry happened very quickly, and left clear signals in the genetic diversity of the first modern humans outside Africa. Only a smaller proportion of variants became adaptive later on.

On Feb. 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus touched down near the Moon's South Pole and popped out four antennas to record radio waves around the surface—a moment University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns hails as the "dawn of radio astronomy from the Moon."

"We viewed Earth as an exoplanet, or a planet orbiting another star," Burns said. "That enables us to ask: What would our radio emissions from Earth look like if they came from an extraterrestrial civilization on a nearby exoplanet?"

As Odysseus was traveling to the Moon, one of the ROLSES antennas slightly overheated and popped out of its housing on the lander. (A selfie from the spacecraft shows the antenna sticking out in space). It turned out to be a stroke of good luck, Burns said.

The team used the accident to look back at Earth and record radio waves emanating from the planet for nearly an hour-and-a-half. Human technologies, including cell phones and broadcast towers, churn out radio radiation on a near constant basis.

Burns noted that scientists may be able to look for similar fingerprints coming from planets far away from our own—a potential sign of intelligent life.

Because NASA is going to send two or three landers to the Moon every year, we have a way to upgrade our instruments and learn from what goes wrong in a way we haven't been able to do since the early days of the space program.

By performing tricks for birds, monkeys and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world

To help pay for his undergraduate education, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin had an unusual summer job: cruise ship magician. “I was that guy who comes out at dinnertime and does random magic for you,” he says. But his latest magic gig is even more unusual: performing for Eurasian jays at Cambridge University’s Comparative Cognition Lab.

Birds can be harder to fool than tourists. And to do magic for the jays, he had to learn to do sleight-of-hand tricks with a live, wriggling waxworm instead of the customary coin or ball. But performing in an aviary does have at least one advantage over performing on a cruise ship: The birds aren’t expecting to be entertained. “You don’t have to worry about impressing anybody, or tell a joke,” Garcia-Pelegrin says. “So you just do the magic.”

In just the last few years, researchers have become interested in what they can learn about animal minds by studying what does and doesn’t fool them.

Archaeologists are often described as “stumped” or “baffled” by their discoveries. But, in reality, specialists have a good grasp of what most historical objects were created for. But there are a few exceptions to this rule.

The following list is a selection of intriguing mystery objects. They’re a great example of why digging up the past continues to hold great fascination for professionals and public alike.

1. Neolithic stone balls

2. Roman dodecahedra

3. Neolithic chalk drums

4. Bronze age “lock-rings”

5. Romano-British cosmetic grinders

The Tyrannosaurus rex has a big reputation for its puny little arms, but as paleontologists dig up more of its family members, the species is grappling with some competition.

In an arm wrestle with a newly found abelisaurid, the T. rex could have actually come out on top. Its stubby, weak upper limbs likely look practically buff next to those of Koleken inakayali – a carnivorous, bipedal dinosaur whose bones were recently found preserved in Patagonia.

K. inakayali was not found with arm bones, but based on the rest of the skeleton's proportions, it probably had similar sized arms to Carnotaurus.

With immobile elbows and only rudimentary wrist joints, these unbendable appendages would have probably flopped against their girthy chests as they ran. Not even their four digits were capable of grasping objects.

A new abelisaurid dinosaur from the end Cretaceous of Patagonia and evolutionary rates among the Ceratosauria

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cla.12583

Holme I and II were contemporary, adjacent Early Bronze Age (EBA) oak-timber enclosures exposed intertidally at Holme-next-the-sea, Norfolk, England, in 1998. Holme I enclosed a central upturned tree-stump, its function and intent unknown. Holme II is thought a mortuary structure. Both are proposed here best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC when their timbers were felled.

Holme I is thought erected on the summer-solstice, when the cuckoo traditionally stopped singing, departing to the ‘Otherworld’. It replicated the cuckoo’s supposed overwintering quarters: a tree-hole or the ‘bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the tree-stump, remembered in folklore as ‘penning-the-cuckoo’ where a cuckoo is confined to keep singing and maintain summer.

The cuckoo symbolised male-fertility being associated with several Indo-European goddesses of fertility that deified Venus - one previously identified in EBA Britain.

Some mortal consorts of these goddesses appear to have been ritually sacrificed at Samhain.

Holme II may be an enclosure for the body of one such ‘sacral king’.

The inaugural components of Holme I were aligned with sunrise on the summer solstice when Venus remained visible symbolising a hieros gamos with the Sun and creating a period of ‘ritual-time’ when the inaugural components were erected. It was also the date when the cuckoo, symbolising fertility, traditionally stopped singing, returned to the Otherworld and the summer went with it. The monument’s form appears to imitate two supposed winter dwellings of the cuckoo remembered in folklore: a hollow tree or ‘the bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the upturned oak-stump at its centre. 

Holme II was probably erected in the autumn of the same year. A sacred enclosure to contain the body of a warrior, a champion of a local goddess of fertility and sovereignty, associated with the cuckoo and the planet, Venus. He has similarities with the Late Iron Age sacral kings of Ireland and those in northern Britain who were titled ‘cuckoo’. The champion was deemed to have failed in his cosmic responsibility to maintain the fertility of the land and its peoples sacrificed to the goddess, in the hope that she would end the cold spell. He was probably sacrificed at Samhain, his bier orientated with sunrise on that date when Venus was still visible.

Space Elevators: Pros, Cons, and the Japan Company Trying to Build One

A space elevator could make it much cheaper and faster to get goods to other planets, like Mars.

The Obayashi Corporation based in Japan announced in 2012 plans to begin building one by next year.

Not only would it cost $100 billion, there are huge technological and organizational challenges.

Imagine a long tether linking Earth to space that could launch us to orbit at a fraction of the cost and slingshot us to other worlds at record speed.

That's the basic idea behind a space elevator.

According to some designs, space elevators would shuttle cargo to orbit on electromagnetic vehicles called climbers. These climbers could be remotely powered — like through solar power or microwaves — eliminating the need for on-board fuel.

The lore of the so-called walking palm (Socratea exorrhiza) has persisted since at least 1980 when anthropologists John H. Bodley and Foley C. Benson detailed the plant's unbelievable behavior in a scientific paper.

According to Bodley and Benson, when toppled by falling trees or branches some palms in eastern Peru can "right themselves and "walk" out from under the obstacle", away from their point of germination.

The palms were said to chase sunlight through the forest using the dozen or so roots that spring from their elevated trunks.

Sometimes, these roots sit several meters above the ground, and as Bodley explained all those decades ago, when they break away or rot, newer legs can probe patches of soil that are slightly further away.

To this day, rainforest guides in Latin America commonly tell tourists that walking palms can shift their position as much as 20 meters a year.

Ross Coulthart reveals the night that convinced him to investigate UFOs

A rare exoplanet that should have been stripped down to bare rock by its nearby host star's intense radiation somehow grew a puffy atmosphere instead—the latest in a string of discoveries forcing scientists to rethink theories about how planets age and die in extreme environments.

The findings could help scientists better understand how atmospheres like Earth's might evolve. Scientists predict that in a few billion years the sun will expand into a red giant star that will swell up and engulf Earth and the other inner planets.

We don't understand the late-stage evolution of planetary systems very well, this is telling us that maybe Earth's atmosphere won't evolve exactly how we thought it would

Puffy planets are often composed of gases, ice, or other lighter materials that make them overall less dense than any planet in the solar system. They are so rare that scientists believe only about 1% of stars have them.

Bronze cauldrons were used by the inhabitants of the Mongolian steppe around 2,700 years ago to process animal blood and milk. This is shown by a protein analysis of archaeological finds from this period.

Scattered across the Eurasian steppe, archaeologists repeatedly come across metal cauldrons from the Bronze Age during excavations. However, it was previously unclear exactly what they were used for.

Various historical accounts of the steppe dwellers claim that they regularly drank blood.

The researchers suspect that blood was collected in the cauldrons during slaughtering to make blood sausages—a practice similar to contemporary culinary customs in Mongolia.

In addition to blood proteins, the cauldrons also contained traces of milk, particularly from domestic cattle and yaks.

This shows that yaks were domesticated and milked in Mongolia much earlier than previously assumed.

Contrary to popular belief, people in the ancient world did not have extremely short lifespans. Although the average life expectancy in the ancient world was between 20 and 30, this statistic is skewed by very high rates of infant mortality. Almost everyone who survived childhood would live to middle age, and it was not uncommon for people to reach their 60s and 70s.

Geriatric Care

Greco-Roman physicians understood many of the health concerns associated with old age, including eyesight and hearing problems, arthritis, and an increased susceptibility to respiratory illness. They were also aware of mental challenges in the extremely old, such as memory issues and senility. Ancient physicians believed that these changes were because the humors within the body became unbalanced, creating a deficiency of heat.

The Role of the Elderly in Ancient Society

As men and women entered old age, their position in Greek and Roman society changed. Most people earned their subsistence through hard physical labor, such as farming and weaving, which became difficult in old age. However, most people did not have the means to retire. These concerns were less important for the upper classes, who relied on income generated by their servants and estates. For the wealthy, old age could be a time of leisure and retirement.

Aristocratic men often continued their careers in law and politics well into old age, benefiting from years of accumulated experience and reputation. In ancient Athenian democracy, other Greek city-states, and the Roman government, many political offices had minimum age requirements, preventing young and irresponsible candidates from holding them. The Spartan Gerousia and Roman Senate both originated as councils of elders.

China's Chang'e 6 mission travels back to earth from the dark side of the moon

“I saw something in the sky, and then an individual on the ground who spoke to me,”  He described the entity — a possible extraterrestrial? — as a “blonde-haired, blue eyed dude” dressed in all white. “I wasn’t on psychedelics or anything,” Humphrey laughed, but the encounter left him shaken.

“I had trouble sleeping after, but I wasn’t harmed,” Humphrey said. “I took it as an experience where the line blurred between reality and spiritual woo-woo stuff.”

Humphrey’s mind-bending night was the kind of thing many would keep private, or to the deepest trenches of UFO Reddit. But last weekend, two thousand fellow seekers gathered at the Renaissance Esmeralda resort to try to make sense of their similar encounters and beliefs.

They had much to discuss. The topic of UFOs has gone from fringe to urgently mainstream in just a few years. The highest reaches of the government, military, media and entertainment have taken serious interest in the phenomenon.

The audience was there — according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, two-thirds of Americans believe that extraterrestrial life exists, and more than half believe that military-reported sightings are evidence of alien life.

“There are thousands of fascinating stories for producers here. It’s not just like that Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’,” Harary said. “We’ve got a guy who is a multimillionaire businessman who said he’s met with the Pleiadians ever since he was 5, and hey, I believe him.”

Here, we have evidence that methanol ices exposed to galactic cosmic rays can replicate the colors of Arrokoth.

Organics formed indicate that Arrokoth is rich in sugars including biologically significant ribose and glucose, while aromatic hydrocarbons are essential in producing the ultrared color slopes. Our findings provide insights into the surface evolution of planetesimals in the early Solar System ranging from the Kuiper Belt to Oort’s clouds as repositories of short and long-periodic comets.

The formation of abundant sugar-related molecules dubs Arrokoth as a sugar world and provides a plausible abiotic preparation route for a key class of biorelevant molecules on the surface of KBOs prior to their delivery to prebiotic Earth.

Based on the size of the tibia, experts estimate the dino was 13 to 15 years old when it died and likely weighed around 3,500 pounds (1,587.57 kilograms)—about two-thirds of the size of a full-grown adult.

Ultimately, a Black Hawk helicopter airlifted the plaster-clad mass to a waiting truck to drive it to the Denver museum.

Lyson said more than 100 individual T. rex fossils have been unearthed, but many are fragmentary. It is unclear yet how complete this fossil is. So far, they know they have found a leg, hip, pelvis, a couple of tailbones and a good chunk of the skull.

The public will get to watch crews chip away the rock, which the museum estimates will take about a year.

The fossil remains of a pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation (Jurassic: Tithonian) of Abingdon, Oxfordshire, central England are identified as a partial left first wing finger phalanx. The elongation of the phalanx and distinctive morphology of the proximal articular region, in particular the square outline of the extensor tendon process, permit the specimen to be assigned to Ctenochasmatoidea.

Although fragmentary, it is sufficiently well preserved to determine accurately its dimensions when complete. Morphometric analysis reveals the specimen to represent one of the largest known examples of a Jurassic pterosaur, with an estimated wingspan of at least 3 m, and is one of the first pterodactyloids to be reported from the Jurassic of the United Kingdom.

The wing phalanx from the Kimmeridge Clay of Abingdon is one of the first records of pterodactyloid pterosaurs from the British Jurassic. The specimen is assigned to Ctenochasmatoidea and represents an individual that was between about 3.0 and 4.0 m in wingspan. Consequently, this is the largest pterosaur yet reported from British pre-Cretaceous deposits and one of the largest yet known from the Jurassic, worldwide, only exceeded by an individual from the Upper Jurassic of Switzerland with an estimated wingspan of between 5.0 m

The study highlights the decisive role of testimony in forming our beliefs and understanding of the world, contrary to the notion that direct experience is the main driver of scientific belief.

For example, it finds that people believe in germs because doctors and scientists tell us they exist, even though we cannot see them with our own eyes. Likewise, we infer that people get sick because of germs by learning this causal relation from others rather than discovering this connection through personal observation.

In the research, by reviewing empirical evidence in the past few decades, the team proposed a theoretical model that explains how people come to believe in the existence of invisible entities, such as germs in science or God in religion.

It shows that people's confidence in these phenomena is not because they have seen them directly but because they trust the sources that tell them about them.

Unlike previous models that proposed separate pathways for belief formation in science and religion, this model provides a unified explanation. It argues that others' testimony, rather than direct experience, predominantly shapes beliefs in both domains.

This study provides new multi-proxy indications for management of animals in the period 4240–4050 BC, and potentially as early as 4240–4160 BC, in the Dutch wetlands, which included control over diet and/or grazing environment. The discovery of two distinct dietary groups is, to our knowledge, the only example of this in Early Neolithic Europe.

The reasons for this distinction remain enigmatic and could reflect different management strategies and/or the acquisition of livestock from elsewhere. We aim to explore this through further analyses. The combined evidence from S3 and S4 suggests that domestic cattle and caprines were managed by Swifterbant communities. Loose pig management may also have taken place, with the continued hunting of wild boar and their interbreeding with the Swifterbant suids.

These results have implications for understanding the adoption of farming practices in northern Europe. Indications for livestock management at Swifterbant in combination with cultivated fields points to communities practising agriculture 4240–4050 BC in an area where the start of the Neolithic is generally placed after 4000 BC.