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437 million years old scorpion fossil found


Ohio State University
Thu, 16 Jan 2020 13:00 UTC
Scorpion Fossil
© Andrew Wendruff
The fossil (left) was unearthed in Wisconsin in 1985. Scientists analyzed it and discovered the ancient animal's respiratory and circulatory organs (center) were near-identical to those of a modern-day scorpion (right).
Columbus, Ohio — Scientists studying fossils collected 35 years ago have identified them as the oldest-known scorpion species, a prehistoric animal from about 437 million years ago. The researchers found that the animal likely had the capacity to breathe in both ancient oceans and on land.

The discovery provides new information about how animals transitioned from living in the sea to living entirely on land: The scorpion's respiratory and circulatory systems are almost identical to those of our modern-day scorpions — which spend their lives exclusively on land — and operate similarly to those of a horseshoe crab, which lives mostly in the water, but which is capable of forays onto land for short periods of time.

The researchers named the new scorpion Parioscorpio venator. The genus name means "progenitor scorpion," and the species name means "hunter." They outlined their findings in a study published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

"We're looking at the oldest known scorpion — the oldest known member of the arachnid lineage, which has been one of the most successful land-going creatures in all of Earth history," said Loren Babcock, an author of the study and a professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

"And beyond that, what is of even greater significance is that we've identified a mechanism by which animals made that critical transition from a marine habitat to a terrestrial habitat. It provides a model for other kinds of animals that have made that transition including, potentially, vertebrate animals. It's a groundbreaking discovery."

The "hunter scorpion" fossils were unearthed in 1985 from a site in Wisconsin that was once a small pool at the base of an island cliff face. They had remained unstudied in a museum at the University of Wisconsin for more than 30 years when one of Babcock's doctoral students, Andrew Wendruff — now an adjunct professor at Otterbein University in Westerville — decided to examine the fossils in detail.
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Propaganda

"Hitler's professional agent": Declassified CIA docs detail Ukraine's "national hero" Stepan Bandera's war crimes

Tom Winter
Fort Russ
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
Bandera

Statue of Stepan Bandera in Lvov
Following up on this news item from Novorosinform, your volunteer translator searched for and found the relevant documents. Read them here..

And I follow up with a translation of the news article which was the starting point:

The CIA has declassified documents on Bandera's atrocities and aiding Hitler

Near Kiev, a priest called an APU militant a "fratricide" and drove his family out of the temple

The CIA has published in open access a report on the activities of the Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stepan Bandera, who is called "Hitler's professional agent." This was reported by the TV channel "Star".

Comment: See also:

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People

Two megalithic groups in Spain found to have different diets, child-rearing and burial practices

Bob Yirka
Phys.org
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
Basque
© Javier Ordoño
Alto de la Huesera megalithic grave (Basque Country, northern Spain), one of the sites analyzed in the study.
A team of researchers from the U.K., Belgium and Spain has found evidence that two groups of people in Late Neolithic Europe living approximately 5,500 years ago belonged to two distinct communities. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their study of isotopes from two burial sites and what they found.

Several years ago, scientists studying the remains of two groups of Late Neolithic people living within four to six kilometers of one another in what is now the Rioja Alavesa region in Spain concluded that the two groups were actually just one group — they suggested the distance between the two groups was due to status and wealth. The researchers had come to this conclusion because of the way the two groups buried their dead. Those that lived in the foothills used caves. Those in the valley created megalithic gravesites. In this new effort, the researchers found evidence that suggests the two groups were actually separate communities.

Comment: It's interesting to learn just how differently the daily lives of the two groups living in such close proximity of each other must have been, but then similar findings correlating geographic location and health were documented by Dr Weston A Price even up to recent times.

Judging from the results, the cave folk had the more optimal diet and child weaning practices, and, so one wonders, just what compelled the valley folk to eat more carbohydrates and stop weaning earlier?

What's also significant is that the researchers demonstrate that those eating a higher carbohydrate diet suffered worse health overall - and similar proofs are abundant throughout health and historical research - which makes it all the more incredible that governments worldwide continue to recommend high carbohydrate diets for optimal health when, evidently, this is not the case:

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Microscope 1

Mt Vesuvius victim's brain 'turned to glass' as hundreds more baked to death - studies

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 18:39 UTC
Herculaneum
© REUTERS/Ciro De Luca
Herculaneum
The A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, destroyer of Pompeii, also decimated the neighboring seaside town of Herculaneum. There, scores of people died more slowly than once thought, according to a new study.

When Vesuvius erupted, hundreds of Herculaneum residents fled to a nearby beach and perished while trying to escape; some experts previously concluded that the intense heat of melted rock, volcanic gases and ash, known as pyroclastic flows, vaporized the victims instantly.

However, new evidence gathered from the victims' bones suggests that their fate was grimmer — and more lingering. Researchers estimated that temperatures of the pyroclastic flows were likely low enough that death wouldn't have been mercifully instantaneous for people on the beach. Instead, the volcano's victims would have suffocated to death on toxic fumes while trapped in oven-like boathouses, researchers recently reported.

Comment: More on the findings from RT:
A new study by Italian experts, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined the remains of one man in Herculaneum and found that he was inflicted with such extreme temperatures that his brain melted, with the organ later cooling into a kind of glass which was found coating the surface of his exploded skull.


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Info

Ancient genomes point to unique population of hunter-gatherers

Dyani Lewis
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 22 Jan 2020 19:11 UTC
Excavation in Cameroon
© ISABELLE RIBOT
Excavation of a double burial at the Shum Laka rock shelter containing the remains of two boys who lived around 8000 years ago.
Remains from an ancient gravesite in Cameroon have opened a window into the world of the people who lived in western central Africa before farming and herding became widespread.

Africa is the ancient homeland of our species, and the genetic diversity across the continent is unmatched anywhere else on the planet, yet only a handful of sites bearing human fossils have successfully yielded ancient DNA, which is essential for grasping the genetic make-up of prehistoric Africans.

DNA rapidly degrades in tropical conditions and burials were rare prior to the Iron Age, which started around 1500 BCE in Africa.

"There's a tremendous amount of genetic diversity in the past in Africa that we have not been able to see by sampling modern populations," says archaeologist Mary Pendergrast from Saint Louis University, Spain, one of the lead authors of a paper in the journal Nature.

That's where the Shum Laka rock shelter comes in. The site, which lies in the Grassfields region of western Cameroon and bears clear signs of use by human foragers from as long as 30,000 years ago, is unique, says Pendergrast.

Eighteen people, mostly children, were buried there during two periods - 8000 and 3000 years ago respectively. Both communities were hunter-gatherers, and by the later time period they were using pottery and relying heavily on fruit picked from nearby forest trees.

These time points "book-end" an important transition period from the late Stone Age to the Iron Age, says Pendergrast, during which humans took up farming and herding.
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Info

Yarrabubba is Earth's oldest known impact crater

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 21 Jan 2020 18:19 UTC
Yarrabubba Crater
© Google Earth
Evidence that the 70-kilometre wide Yarrabubba crater in outback Western Australia may be the Earth's oldest known meteorite impact structure has been presented in the journal Nature Communications.

Dated at 2.229 billion years, 200 million years older than the next known asteroid strike at Vredefort Dome in South Africa, the impact coincides with the end of a deep freeze known as early Snowball Earth and could have contributed to the ice thawing.

After this time period there are no rock records of large glacial deposits for 400 million years, says lead author Timmons Erickson from NASA Johnson Space Centre, Houston, US.

"Because of this, we were interested in seeing the role that an impact crater could have had during a time of global glaciations and whether an impact could release enough water vapour, a strong greenhouse gas, to significantly warm the planet."

Calculating the impact of the meteorite on an icy continent, they found that it could have sent half a trillion tonnes of water vapour into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to the global ice melt.

This highlights why the timing of "extraterrestrial bombardment" is important, as the authors write, so its effects on the Earth's environment can be understood.

To date, the historical impact record is fragmented, making it hard to understand how meteorites affect the planet - apart from the Chicxulub asteroid that triggered the last mass extinction and could explain the ocean's acidification.
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Blue Planet

6,600 year old aboriginal aquaculture system revealed by Australia's wildfires

Matt Drake
Independent
Tue, 21 Jan 2020 12:31 UTC
Gunditjmara
© Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation
Photograph of the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape and stone-lined channels and pools set up by the Gunditjmara people
Australia's wildfires have revealed an ancient aquaculture system built by indigenous people which is thought to predate the time of the Pyramids of Egypt.

The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape is situated south-west of Victoria and features an elaborate series of stone-lined channels and pools set up by the Gunditjmara people to harvest eels. As of 2019, the site was added to the Unesco World Heritage List.

Some parts of the elaborate system also shows evidence of stone dwellings dating to around 6,600 years ago.

But after a bushfire which was sparked in December and only brought under control last week, extra sites were spotted that were previously hidden under vegetation. The sites are also believed to be part of the aquaculture system.

Comment: Extreme weather and human expansion have been revealing numerous and diverse ancient sites, some discoveries reflect just how sophisticated ancient civilizations really were: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Colosseum

Ancient wonders: Five little-known archaeological sites in the UK

Mary-Ann Ochota
The Guardian
Mon, 20 Jan 2020 07:00 UTC
Mên-an-Tol
© Paul Williams/Alamy Mên-an-Tol, Penwith Moor, near Madron, Cornwall
Mên-an-Tol, known locally as the Crick Stone, in Cornwall England.
The name means "stone with a hole" in Cornish and the site is probably about 4,000 years old, dating from the bronze age. There are more stones hidden under the turf. What's clear is that you're in an ancient landscape - there's a neolithic enclosure on the hillside, bronze-age barrow burials and the Boskednan Nine Maidens stone circle nearby. Some 400 metres to the north of the Mên-an-Tol is the Mên Scryfa, probably a bronze-age standing stone that was reused some time between 450-650AD as a grave marker. It's inscribed with RIALOBRANI CVNOVALI FILI in Roman lettering, meaning "Rialobranus, son of Cunovalus". Rialobran, or Ryalvran, is a native Cornish name, and may mean "royal raven".

These stones have borne witness to so much: the introduction of metallurgy, the arrival and departure of the Romans, the rise and fall of local leaders. But the legends that really stick are the ones that mark the drama of normal lives - crawl through the Holed Stone and your longing for a baby will be rewarded, they say; pass your baby through the stone, and you'll protect them from rickets, consumption or fever. A portal to a safer future, drawn from a timeless past.

Comment: For more on the Brits before Rome, see: Ruins suggest Britons had bathhouses before Roman occupation

And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Family

Not your REAL dad: If you come from poverty & live in a city good odds your family tree is full of cuckolds, says pioneering study

Peter Andrews
RT
Sun, 19 Jan 2020 09:54 UTC
father and son
© Getty Images / Westend61



Comment: "A cuckold is the husband of an adulterous wife. In evolutionary biology, the term is also applied to males who are unwittingly investing parental effort in offspring that are not genetically their own." - Wikipedia


Lower-class city-dwellers were many times more likely to become cuckolds than any other class, according to a groundbreaking study that has lifted the lid on 500 years of cheating in Western Europe.

The study authors did this by comparing comprehensive family trees pieced together from church and civil records from Belgium and the Netherlands, stretching back to the 16th century. They also analysed the Y chromosomes — which are passed largely unchanged from father to son — of over 1,000 adult men in from those countries. According to family trees, each of the 500 or so pairs of these men shared a common paternal ancestor, i.e. a great-great-great (etc.) grandfather.

Therefore, each of these men should have shared a Y chromosome with their distant cousin; if they didn't, then somewhere along the line a different baby daddy must have come into the picture. Comparing the DNA with the family trees allowed the researchers to estimate overall cuckoldry rates, and see how they varied between socioeconomic classes.

Comment: See also:

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Георгиевская ленточка

A History Lesson For Westerners Parrotting The Lie That Stalin 'Colluded With Hitler to Start WW2'

Michael Jabara Carley
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC

Comment: Around Christmas time, Russian president Putin lost his calm - a rare event - when he described Jozef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin from 1934-39, as "a bastard and anti-Semitic pig." Putin wasn't rushing to defend the honor of European Jews per se, rather the historical memory of Russia's invasion by Nazi Germany during WW2.

Historical revisionism of that war in recent decades has produced a new 'official' version in the West, signalled for instance by the European Parliament last September claiming that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Moscow and Berlin had "paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War," thus suggesting the USSR jointly caused the war with Nazi Germany.

As it happens, Nazi Germany did cause the war with the connivance and support - sometimes explicit - of other powers, but as the following history lesson from a Canadian historian explains, those powers were western powers - together with their lackeys in eastern Europe - aiding and abetting Germany's intentions against the USSR...


WWII
On August 23rd the Canadian Prime Minister's office issued a statement to remember the so-called "black ribbon day," a bogus holiday established in 2008-2009 by the European Parliament to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in 1939.

Various centre-right political groupings inside the European Parliament, along with the NATO (read US) Parliamentary Assembly initiated or backed the idea. In 2009, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, meeting in Lithuania, also passed a resolution "equating the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in starting World War II."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement follows along similar lines. Here is an excerpt:
"Black Ribbon Day marks the sombre anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 to divide Central and Eastern Europe, the infamous pact set the stage for the appalling atrocities these regimes would commit. In its wake, they stripped countries of their autonomy, forced families to flee their homes, and tore communities apart, including Jewish and Romani communities, and others. The Soviet and Nazi regimes brought untold suffering upon people across Europe, as millions were senselessly murdered and denied their rights, freedoms, and dignity [italics added]."
As a statement purporting to summarise the origins and unfolding of the Second World War, it is a parody of the actual events of the 1930s and war years. It is politically motivated "fake history". It is, in fact, a whole cloth of lies.

Comment: Now you know the truth about who caused WW2, and why Western elites today, once again hell-bent on projecting all the deviance swirling around inside their heads onto Russia, are pushing BS narratives about it...

us ambassador poland putin nazis
Other articles by or referencing Prof. Carley:

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