Neat Stuff
Today, 12/29/17 I read through the Jan/Feb 18 Discover, I found a number of things to write about, so that’s what I’m going to do here.
Messy We Are
We start on page10 of the issue where the word is that human evolution was not what you’d call tidy. On page 11 are two stories, both of which deal with what some might call miscegenation, and what other would call bestiality.
In the first apparently a primitive modern human woman mated with a Neanderthal man. They apparently had at least one daughter, and she had daughters of her own. This all daring back to around 220,000 years ago.
In the other story we have a look at a pair of human skulls. Said skulls have mixture of Neanderthal, modern human, and other hominins. The story refers to an unknown human species, but I’m thinkig H. erectus myself.
You get right down to it we are randy gits, ready to fornicate with any one who so much as resembles our species. To sum it up, it appears that both sides of the “out of Africa” and “regional origin” parties are right.
It was found where?
On page 12 is a story about the discovery of mastodon remains. The story says near San Diego, but as I recall it was more in San Diego around 16th and Market.
And with the bones were, apparently, a set of stones used to pound on the mastodon’s bones. There are those who have concluded that this was done by human hunters. As you might expect there are those who don’t like this idea.
What they apparently overlook is the fact that 130,000 years ago Beringia was dry land, and that such animals as the Neanderthals and Denisovans were very much cold adapted.
For we like to think we know, and get a little upset when anyone tries telling us we could be wrong.
Close Relationships
We go on to page 18 where I learned that the 7 terrestrial worlds of the Trappist 1 system appear to be in rather tight orbits. At least when we saw them.
Now they may still be in that arrangement, but I suspect that things have changed in the Trappist system, and most likely to a fair degree. I suspect that were we to find ourselves in theT1 system we’re far more likely to see double planets, planets with giant moons, and maybe even an asteroid belt or two.
Estrangement
On page 52 is a story about the possibility Earth’s equator could become uninhabitable. This is not a new idea really, there was a time when some Europeans were convinced that the equator was much to hot for white men. But what if sometime in the future the equatorial climate gets just too toasty for human habitation. So the populations in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere are genetically isolated and evolution has its ways with us. Picture a time when a southerner expedition comes north for the first time in thousands of years, and the two species can’t stand the sight of each other.
So that’s my post. There are more stores in the latest issue of Discovery, go ahead and have a look.