Earliest paint 'workshop' discovered
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Archaeologists say a South African cave contains evidence of a 100,000-year-old workshop with tools and ingredients used to mix some of the world's first paint.
A team of African, European and U.S. researchers made the discovery at Blombos Cave, 200 miles east of Cape Town, The New York Times reported Thursday.
In the cave they found stones for pounding and grinding dirt enriched with a kind of iron oxide into a colorful reddish-brown powder known as ocher, along with large abalone shells where the paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula.
Previously, no evidence of paint making had been found older than 60,000 years, so the finding pushes back the date when modern Homo sapiens starting using paint for symbolic and decorative purposes, the researchers said.
The findings suggest early humans were beginning to develop conceptual abilities even 100,000 years ago.
In an article published in the journal Science, scientists said it marked "a benchmark in the evolution of complex human cognition."
Drought can permanently change ecosystems
CORVALLIS, Ore., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Frequent and severe drought has pushed some desert ecosystems into catastrophic change from which many species won't recover, a U.S. scientist says.
Oregon State University zoologist David Lytle said he worries climate change, over-pumping of aquifers for urban water use and land management practices may permanently affect which species can survive, a university release said Thursday.
"Populations that have persisted for hundreds or thousands of years are now dying out," David Lytle said. "Springs that used to be permanent are drying up. Streams that used to be perennial are now intermittent. And species that used to rise and fall in their populations are now disappearing."
Lytle examined the effect of complete water loss on aquatic insect communities in a formerly perennial desert stream in Arizona's French Joe Canyon before and after severe droughts in the early 2000s.
The stream completely dried up in several years, creating a rapid "regime shift" in which some species went extinct locally and others took their place.
The ecosystem dynamics are different now and show no sign of returning to their former state, Lytle said.
"Before 2004, this area was like a beautiful oasis, with lots of vegetation, birds and rare species," Lytle said. "The spring has lost a number of key insect species, has a lot less water, and now has very different characteristics."
Studies give new clues to ancient diets
BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers using new technologies to examine early human fossils say their findings challenge long-held assumptions about what our ancestors ate.
Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder have analyzed microscopic pits and scratches on ancient teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in them, to study the diets of early hominids, a university release said Thursday.
The findings give a far different picture of the dietary habits of early hominids than had long been assumed from the physical structure of the skull, jawbones and teeth, CU-Boulder anthropologist Matt Sponheimer said.
The powerful jaws and large molars of one early hominid, Paranthropus boisei, had led to researchers to nickname him "Nutcracker Man," but Sponheimer said his finding show Paranthropus was essentially feeding on grasses and sedges rather than soft fruits or nuts preferred by chimpanzees.
"We can now be sure that Paranthropus boisei ate foods that no self-respecting chimpanzee would stomach in quantity," Sponheimer said. "It is also clear that our previous notions of this group's diet were grossly oversimplified at best, and absolutely backward at worst."
New size limit set for flying dinosaurs
LONDON, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- British paleontologists say they've identified a fossil fragment as part of a giant pterosaur, setting a new upper limit for the size of such creatures.
Researchers from the Universities of Leicester examined the fossil, the tip of a pterosaur snout that had been in the Natural History Museum collections since 1884, and identified it as having been part of the world's largest toothed pterosaur.
Pterosaurs are flying reptiles that lived in the Mesozoic Era alongside dinosaurs between 210 million and 65 million years ago.
"Our study showed that the fossil represented a huge individual with a wingspan that might have reached 7 meters (23 feet,)" David Unwin of Leicester said in a university release Thursday. "This is far larger than, for example, any modern bird, although some extinct birds may have reached 6 meters (20 feet) in wingspan.
"What this research shows is that some toothed pterosaurs reached truly spectacular sizes and, for now, it allows us to put a likely upper limit on that size – around 7 meters in wingspan," Unwin said.
