Footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years.
Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico provide the earliest unequivocal evidence of human activity in the Americas and provide insight into life over 23,000 years ago.

The findings are described in a Science journal article co-authored by University of Arizona archaeologist Vance Holliday.

"For decades, archaeologists have debated when people first arrived in the Americas," said Holliday, a professor in the UArizona School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences. "Few archaeologists see reliable evidence for sites older than about 16,000 years. Some think the arrival was later, no more than 13,000 years ago by makers of artifacts called Clovis points. The White Sands tracks provide a much earlier date. There are multiple layers of well-dated human tracks in streambeds where water flowed into an ancient lake. This was 10,000 years before Clovis people."

Researchers Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, with the U.S. Geological Survey, used radiocarbon dating of seed layers above and below the footprints to determine their age. The dates range in age and confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years.

This corresponds to the height of the last glacial cycle, during something known as the Last Glacial Maximum, and makes them the oldest known human footprints in the Americas.

Shell beads found in a cave in Morocco are at least 142,000 years old. The archaeologists who found them say they're the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of human communication.

The necklace, nametag, earrings or uniform you chose to put on this morning might say more than you realize about your social status, job or some other aspect of your identity.

Anthropologists say humans have been doing this - finding ways to communicate about themselves without the fuss of conversation - for millennia.

But shell beads recovered from a cave in western Morocco, determined to be between 142,000 and 150,000 years old, suggest that this behavior may go back much farther than previously thought. The finding, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, was made by a team of archaeologists that includes Steven L. Kuhn, a professor of anthropology in the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The beads, Kuhn and his colleagues say, are the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of nonverbal human communication, and they shed new light on how humans' cognitive abilities and social interactions evolved.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," Kuhn said. "They're the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait. They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

How does this ancient form of communication show up today? It happens often, Kuhn said.

"You think about how society works - somebody's tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, 'What's your problem?'" Kuhn said. "But if you see they're wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it's a police officer pulling you over."

Kuhn and an international team of archaeologists recovered the 33 beads between 2014 and 2018 near the mouth of Bizmoune Cave, about 10 miles inland from Essaouira, a city on Morocco's Atlantic coast.

A southeast Alabama man was killed in a dog attack while he was out walking.

Phenix City police were dispatched at 2 a.m. Tuesday to the 100 block of 17th Avenue on a report of a dog bite, said Capt. Darryl Williams. When officers arrived on the scene, they found the 70-year-old victim on the ground with a serious injury to his left arm.

Frank J. Cobb was treated on the scene and then transported to Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital. He was later moved to an Atlanta hospital where he died.

Two members of a nomadic family were injured while over 400 goats and sheep died when the lightning struck the upper reaches of Naranag in Kangan area of Ganderbal district Tuesday night, officials said.

Some nomadic families had camped at Laman Naranag area on their way back home from the seasonal pastures in the higher reaches when the lightening struck them.

An official said that the injured family members were brought to Trauma Hospital Kangan for treatment.

He said that both were stable and had sustained minor injuries.

An unprecedented spate of fatal tiger attacks in a forest range of Gadchiroli district has struck terror in 18 villages in the region.

A sub-adult tiger, aged just about two years, is suspected to have killed seven persons, all men, in the Porla range within a month. Such a spate of attacks is unprecedented, say wildlife officials.

Officials, however, have confirmed that only four of the attacks are by the two-year-old tiger. They are still unsure about whether the other three victims, too, had died due to an attack by this tiger.

The earlier known instances of attacks by Pandharkawda tigers Avni, which was shot dead in 2018, and Rajura tiger RT1, were spread over one-and-a-half years.

Gadchiroli Conservator of Forest Ashok Mankar told The Indian Express, "A two-year old tiger, who was separated from its mother a couple of months ago, has killed at least four persons, beginning August 15. We have the camera trap evidence for the same."

John Fortin was wrapping up a day of haying on his family beef farm on Saturday evening and happy he had beat the rainstorm.

Then he got a call from his neighbor telling him lightning had just struck a tree where eight of Fortin's cows had taken shelter from the rain. All eight had been electrocuted and were dead.

Those eight heifers represent 10 percent of the Fortin Farm's Angus 80-animal beef herd. The loss is a huge economic and emotional blow to the farm in Winslow that has been in the Fortin family for four generations.

"That storm rolled in around 5:30 and only lasted maybe an hour, but there was a lot of lightning close by," Fortin said. "My neighbor calls and says, 'Hey, lightning just hit the big pine tree on top of the hill and I have dead cows over here.'"

Stunning relief carvings of camels in Saudi Arabia are now thought to date back more than 7,000 years - making them more than three times as old as was first suggested. Previously, it was thought the ancient camel sculptures found in the northern province of Al Jouf were about 2,000 years old.

However, chemical analysis and the examination of tool marks helped to show that the carvings at the site were made in the sixth millennium BCE.
It means the remarkable life-size sandstone carvings of camels and other animals, including a donkey, are the world's oldest surviving large-scale reliefs.

"They are absolutely stunning and, bearing in mind we see them now in a heavily eroded state with many panels fallen, the original site must've been absolutely mind blowing," said Dr Maria Guagnin, from the department of archaeology at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the lead author of a new study on the late Stone Age carvings.

"There were life-sized camels and equids two or three layers on top of each other. It must have been an absolutely stunning site in the Neolithic."

Researchers heard about the site about five years ago and before the coronavirus pandemic, Dr Guagnin and other specialists made two visits of about 10 days each to examine the carvings.

The presence of camel reliefs at Petra in Jordan, produced by Nabataeans about 2,000 years ago, had suggested the Saudi carvings may be about two millennia old. However, a stone mason analysing the camel site carvings did not find evidence that metal tools had been used and there was no sign of pottery.

Weathering and erosion patterns, high-tech analysis involving fluorescence and luminescence and radiocarbon dating of remains also indicated an early origin.

"Every day the Neolithic was more likely [as the time when the carvings were made] until we realised it was absolutely a Neolithic site we were looking at," Dr Guagnin said.

Researchers also came from the Saudi Ministry of Culture, King Saud University and France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Four dolphins stranded Friday at Point of Rocks Landing Beach in Brewster, according to Yarmouth Port-based International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Two of the dolphins were already dead when a team led by IFAW assistant research coordinator Kristy Volker arrived.

The remaining two — a pregnant female and a juvenile male — were transported to Herring Cove in Provincetown around 5 p.m., Volker said. Before they were released, the two dolphins were given a physical check that included an ultrasound and a blood test.

In the middle of Sydney's lockdown, scientist Jodi Rowley has been retrieving frozen dead frogs from her doorstep.

Occasionally one will arrive dried and shrivelled up in the post.

She'll pack them in ice in an esky to be taken to her lab at the Australian Museum, where even more samples - green tree frogs, striped marsh frogs and the invasive cane toad among them - are waiting in a freezer for genetic testing.

Rowley and her team, along with scientists at the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health at Taronga zoo and a forensic unit in the NSW department of planning, industry and environment, are trying to solve the mystery of what is killing Australia's frogs.

Since late July, they've collected 1,200 records of dead or dying frogs, about 70% of them in New South Wales and 22% in Queensland.

Ten dogs belonging to the Proprietor of Global Growth Academy, Amokpo, Umuanunwa, Nteje in the Oyi Local Government Area of Anambra State have reportedly pounced on and killed a three-year-old child on the school premises.

The incident was said to have happened around 7.10am on Wednesday, September 15, when the victim, identified as Obinna Ude, was taken to the school by his uncle, Chima Ude, for enrollment.

According to a resident of the community, the three-year-old strayed off while his uncle was filling forms and perfecting the enrollment documentation.

The 10 dogs, on sighting the child, broke out of their cage, pounced on the boy and mauled him.