People flock to the Paleo diet in order to eat like our ancestors—but incidentally, the original paleo diet drove a flock of birds to extinction, as researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have discovered the first reliable evidence that humans (Homo sapiens) played an enormous role in the extinction of massive flightless birds in Australia some 50,000 years ago.
Once again, archaeology has shown that ancient humans were far more advanced than we like to give them credit for—in this case, showing us that math principles that weren’t developed until the 14th century in Europe were actually in use 1,400 or more years earlier in Babylon.
Hawaii is looking to increase its murder rate….But maybe not in the way you think.
The ‘alalā, or Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis), has been extinct in the wild since 2002, but a conservation program out of San Diego Zoo Global managed to preserve the species in their Hawaiian bird centers, and through careful breeding brought the population up from its lowest point of about 20 crows.
Following this bottleneck, scientists have grown concerned about a lack of genetic diversity in the ‘alalā.
Read the rest online at redOrbit.com
It’s theorized that humans first began to interact with what would become modern cats as early as the beginning of farming—some 10,800 years ago, around the Levant or Anatolia regions…
But the rise of cats in China is a bit more perplexing than this simple timeline. There is evidence of domesticated cats in China as far back as 5,500 years ago—but it’s long been unclear whether these cats were imported from the Near East, or whether they simply arose in China also thanks to the rise of agriculture.
Eight museum employees involved with a botched attempt to repair damage to King Tut’s burial mask are being charged with “gross negligence” and violation of the professional rules of the workplace, Egyptian authorities said Saturday.
The 3,300-year-old mask is currently on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where its beard was broken off in 2014—which the staff blamed on an accident during cleaning, but later investigators blamed the damage on old age. Regardless of how it happened, the eight employees involved attempted an extremely hasty repair using epoxy.
Scott Kelly, the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS), conducted the world’s first Ask Me Anything (AMA) from space.
AMAs—which are a sort of online press conference with users on Reddit—have featured hordes of celebrities, thinkers, politicians, and the like, ranging from Psy to Bill Nye. Of course, none of them have been floating in zero gravity before.
The plague has decimated Europe across the centuries, with waves of the disease resurging every few hundred years in pandemics—including the third pandemic of the plague, which began in the 19th century and is ongoing to this day…
Now, an international team led by the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany may just have found some of those answers, because according to their research, the plague didn’t just die off—but hid somewhere on the European continent in between waves for hundreds of years.
Dr. Sergio Canavero, the man who wants to perform the first ever human head transplant, has announced that he has successfully performed the full procedure on a monkey.
Read online at redOrbit.com (WARNING! Image may be disturbing to some readers.)
In west Turkana, Kenya, where an ancient lagoon once provided life to those around it, a gruesome massacre of 27 prehistoric hunter-gatherers has been unearthed—extending the timeline of human warfare back to 10,000 years ago.
We may finally get definitive clues as to how the Pyramids of Giza were built, thanks to cosmic particles known as muons.
Susanna Pilny 