Although Mars presents a barren, dusty landscape with no signs of life so far, its geological features such as deltas, lakebeds, and river valleys strongly suggest a past where water once flowed abundantly on its surface. To explore this possibility, scientists examine sediments preserved near these formations. The composition of these sediments holds clues about the early environmental conditions, the processes that shaped the planet over time, and even potential signs of past life.
In one such analysis, sediments collected by the Curiosity rover from Gale Crater, believed to be an ancient lake formed approximately 3.8 billion years ago due to an asteroid impact, revealed organic matter. However, this organic matter had a significantly lower amount of the carbon-13 isotope (13C) relative to carbon-12 isotopes (12C) compared to what is found on Earth, suggesting different processes of organic matter formation on Mars.
“If the estimation in this research is correct, there may be an unexpected amount of organic material present in Martian sediments. This suggests that future explorations of Mars might uncover large quantities of organic matter,” says Ueno.
More information: Yuichiro Ueno et al, Synthesis of 13C-depleted organic matter from CO in a reducing early Martian atmosphere, Nature Geoscience (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01443-z
Space scientists led by the University of Leicester have combined evidence from simulations, observations and analysis of meteorites to recreate the orbital instability caused as the giant planets of our solar system moved into their current locations, known for 20 years as the Nice model.
The findings are published in the journal Science and presented at the European Geological Union General Assembly in Vienna.
At the beginning of the solar system, the giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—had more circular and more compact orbits than they do today. Previous research has established that orbital instability in the solar system changed that orbital configuration and caused smaller planetesimals to be dispersed. Many of these collided with the inner terrestrial planets in what scientists have termed the Late Heavy Bombardment.
Lead author Dr. Chrysa Avdellidou from the University of Leicester School of Physics and Astronomy said, “The question is, when did it happen? The orbits of these planets destabilized due to some dynamical processes and then took their final positions that we see today. Each timing has a different implication, and it has been a great matter of debate in the community.”
“What we have tried to do with this work is to not only do a pure dynamical study but combine different types of studies, linking observations, dynamical simulations, and studies of meteorites.”
They focused on a type of meteorite known as enstatite chondrites, which have a very similar composition to Earth and very similar isotopic ratios, which means they were formed in our neighborhood. By making spectroscopic observations using ground-based telescopes, they linked those meteorites to their source: a family of fragments in the asteroid belt known as Athor.
This suggests that Athor was originally much larger and formed closer to the sun and that it suffered a collision that reduced its size out of the asteroid belt.
To explain how Athor ended up in the asteroid belt, the scientists tested various scenarios using dynamical simulations, concluding that the most likely explanation was the gravitational instability that shifted the giant planets to their current orbits. Analysis of the meteorites showed that this occurred no earlier than 60 million years after the solar system began to form.
Previous evidence from asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit has also put constraints on how late this event occurred, with scientists concluding that the gravitational instability must have occurred between 60 and 100 million years after the birth of the solar system, 4.56 billion years ago.
Previous evidence has shown that Earth’s moon was formed during this period, with one hypothesis being that a planetesimal known as Theia collided with Earth, and debris from that collision formed the moon.
Timing of the orbital instability is important as it determines when some of the familiar features of our solar system would develop—and may even have had an impact on the habitability of our planet.
Dr. Avdellidou added, “It’s like you have a puzzle, you understand that something should have happened, and you try to put events in the correct order to make the picture that you see today. The novelty with the study is that we are not only doing pure dynamical simulations, or only experiments, or only telescopic observations.”
“There were once five inner planets in our solar system and not four, so that could have implications for other things, like how we form habitable planets. Questions like, when exactly did objects come delivering volatile organics to our planet to Earth and Mars?”
Marco Delbo, co-author of the study and Director of Research at Nice Observatory in France, said, “The timing is very important because a lot of planetesimals populated our solar system at the beginning. And the instability clears them, so if that happens 10 million years after the beginning of the solar system, you clear the planetesimals immediately, whereas if you do it after 60 million years, you have more time to bring materials to Earth and Mars.”
More information: Chrysa Avdellidou et al, Dating the Solar System’s giant planet orbital instability using enstatite meteorites, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adg8092
This photo provided by researcher Roman Garba shows a heavily weathered flake artifact at the Korolevo I archaeological site in August 2023. Stone tools found in the area are the earliest evidence of early human presence in Europe, dating back to 1.4 million years ago, according to research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, March 6, 2024. Credit: Roman Garba via AP
Ancient stone tools found in eastern Europe may be the oldest known evidence of early human presence in Europe, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The chipped stones, deliberately fashioned from volcanic rock, were excavated from a quarry in Korolevo in the 1970s. Archaeologists used new methods to date the layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the tools to more than 1 million years old.
“This is the earliest evidence of any type of human in Europe that is dated,” said Mads Faurschou Knudsen, a geophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of the new study.
He said it’s not certain which early human ancestors fashioned the tools, but it may have been Homo erectus, the first species to walk upright and master the use of fire.
“We don’t have fossil remains, so we can’t be sure,” said Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author.
The chipped stone tools were likely used for cutting meat and perhaps scraping animal hides, he said.
The researchers suggest the tools may be as old as 1.4 million years, but other experts say the study methodology suggests that they may be just over 1 million years old, placing them in roughly the same date range as other ancient tools unearthed in Spain.
Credit: Roman Garba via AP
Credit: Roman Garba via AP
The very earliest stone tools of this type were found in eastern Africa and date back to 2.8 million years ago, said Rick Potts, who directs the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program.
12.18.23 Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.
Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.
These images depict a period approximately 6,000–11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.
This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified more than 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.
These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganization of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.
As a team of climate modelers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession—the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.
Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.
Earth’s changing orbit
The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.
On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.
The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.
Eccentricity and the ice sheets
In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.
The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.
The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.
Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.
CR 721 Billy: “But what I still have to say with regard to the land of Egypt in early times and thus long before antiquity and the time of the Pharaohs, is the following: At that time the country looked completely different from what it does today, for on the one hand I can remember that the Nile had another large river branch to the left of its course, which flowed through a very large and long valley, whereby the Nile itself also ran much more westwards than is the case today. There was also a large city in the great valley, where I also saw ‘long skulls’. From the Nile and also from its tributary, far into the western land, there were countless pyramids of various sizes, as also everything was full of life, whereby also villages and cities were many huge palm forests, fertile gardens and fields, and so at that time everything looked completely different from today. There were also many animals in the vastness of the land and in the forests and vast green areas, such as antelopes, giraffes, elephants, lions, crocodiles and all kinds of other animals and creatures, before the desert areas formed and these life-forms moved away or died out. Over all the millennia, all the villages, cities and pyramids and the fertile gardens, fields and palm forests that at that time reached far into the western land and as far as the Mediterranean Sea also disappeared. Most of what existed at that time has been buried metres deep under the desert sands advancing from the west over the last millennia.”
Palaeoloxodon antiquus roamed the landscapes of Europe and Western Asia 800,000 to 100,000 years ago. With shoulder heights of up to 4 meters and body masses of up to 13 tons, the European straight-tusked elephant was the largest land-living animal at the time, significantly larger than today’s African and Asian elephants and even bigger than the extinct woolly mammoth.
“We have estimated that the meat and fat supplied by the body of an adult Palaeoloxodon antiquus bull would have been sufficient to satisfy the daily calorie intake of at least 2,500 adult Neanderthals,” explained Gaudzinski-Windheuser. “This is a significant number because it furnishes us with new insights into the behavior of Neanderthals.”
So far, for instance, researchers had generally assumed that Neanderthals associated in groups of no more than 20 individuals. However, the information now obtained in relation to the systematic exploitation of straight-tusked elephants indicates that Neanderthals must have gathered, at least temporarily, in larger groups or mastered techniques that allowed them to preserve and store large quantities of foodstuffs—or both.
Hunting the now extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) was widespread among Neanderthals, concludes a research team consisting of members of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), also based in Mainz, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The study has recently been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers closely examined the bones of elephants that are approximately 125,000 years old that were discovered in Gröbern in Saxony-Anhalt and Taubach in Thuringia, Germany, decades ago. They were able to identify cut marks made by stone tools used by the Neanderthals that indicate that the animals must have been hunted before they were extensively butchered.
by Jonas Siehoff, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Pelvic bone of a Palaeoloxodon antiquus found in Gröbern. Credit: Lutz Kindler, LEIZA
It was two years ago, during the analysis of bones found at the Neumark-Nord site in a former lignite mine in Saxony-Anhalt, that the same team discovered the very first evidence that Neanderthals actively hunted straight-tusked elephants, the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene. That study was published in Science Advances in early 2023.
“The results of the more recent examination of the bones from Gröbern and Taubach now show that the hunting of these elephants by Neanderthals was not an isolated phenomenon but must have been a more regular activity,” emphasized Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Professor of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at JGU and Director of the Archaeological Research Center and Museum of Human Behavioral Evolution MONREPOS in Neuwied, an institute run under the aegis of LEIZA.
Gaudzinski-Windheuser was extensively involved in the investigation of the bones from Gröbern and Taubach as well as the previous study of the bones from the Neumark-Nord site.
In a follow-up project, the researchers hope to learn more about how Neanderthals hunted these massive elephants and how their hunting activities impacted these and other prey animals as well as their environments.
More information: Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al, Widespread evidence for elephant exploitation by Last Interglacial Neanderthals on the North European plain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2309427120
Cosmic Love News… Making a second appearance in front of Mexican Congress and a nationwide television audience, Jaime Maussan and a slew of medical experts presented further scientific evidence and confirmed with unanimous agreement that these humanoid bodies are authentic yet still of unknown origin.
The meeting began with a call for more open sharing of this type of data, and more international cooperation when researching UFOs or possibly extraterrestrial mummies. They called for an end to ridicule and speculation of the subject which followed their first reveal of mummies to the public.
Various medical experts, doctors, surgeons and forensic experts spoke on their area of focus and recent discoveries. The organic ligaments wrapped around the eggs were a sight to behold. Another example using X rays revealed signs of advanced rheumatism in the foot bones of one of the beings.
Each speaker gave confirmation that the bodies were organic, not manufactured, and contained non human DNA. The DNA sequencing was conducted by multiple universities and cross checked for accuracy. One species had 16 million strands of DNA unknown to Earth science.
It appears they may be in possession of three different species.
the small ET long skull couple, one carrying eggs in different stages of gestation. A rare metal chestplate implant suggests a high level of intelligence, or conscious consciousness like humans.
a small humanoid or primatoid containing DNA from two different primates in addition to its own, suggesting it was intentionally hybridized
a large or tall long skull ET, several times larger than the fifty centimeter original couple
Research on the third specimen is just beginning. The first mummies were extracted in 2015 near Nazca, Peru. Researchers suggested there is more to be discovered at the site of discovery.
More information can be found at gaia.com and the respective universities involved, in addition to the Maussan TV channel on YouTube, which has nearly 1 million subscribers.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The lower chamber of Mexico’s congress once again turned to spectacle Tuesday, devoting hours of its time to a controversial character who pressed the case for “non-human beings” he said were found in Peru.
Less than three weeks after Category 5 Hurricane Otis devastated Acapulco, a port of nearly 1 million people, the Chamber of Deputies spent more than three hours listening to journalist José Jaime Maussan and his group of Peruvian doctors.
Maussan and some Mexican lawmakers became the subject of international ridicule in September when he presented two boxes with supposed mummies found in Peru. He along with others claimed they were “non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution.”
In 2017, Maussan made similar claims in Peru, and a report by that country’s prosecutor’s office found the bodies were actually “recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin.”
The report added the figures were almost certainly human-made and that “they are not the remains of ancestral aliens that they have tried to present.” The bodies were not publicly unveiled at the time, so it is unclear if they are the same as those presented to Mexico’s congress.
On Tuesday, Dr. Daniel Mendoza showed photographs and x-rays of what he said was a “non-human being.” Maussan said it was a “new species” as it did not have lungs or ribs.
Lawmaker Sergio Gutiérrez Luna, from the governing party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said “all ideas and all proposals will always be welcome to debate them, hear them to agree with or not.”
“We’re finding evidence that Mars was likely a planet of rivers,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on a new paper announcing the discovery. “We see signs of this all over the planet.”
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers used numerical models to simulate erosion on Mars over millennia and found that common crater formations—called bench-and-nose landforms—are most likely remnants of ancient riverbeds.
Prior studies of satellite data from Mars had identified erosional landforms called fluvial ridges as being possible candidates for ancient river deposits. Using data collected by the Curiosity rover at Gale crater, the team found signs of river deposits that are not associated with fluvial ridges, but rather bench-and-nose landforms that have never been linked to ancient river deposits.
“This suggests that there could be undiscovered river deposits elsewhere on the planet, and that an even larger section of the Martian sedimentary record could have been built by rivers during a habitable period of Mars history,” Cardenas said. “On Earth, river corridors are so important for life, chemical cycles, nutrient cycles and sediment cycles. Everything is pointing to these rivers behaving similarly on Mars.”
“Our research indicates that Mars could have had far more rivers than previously believed, which certainly paints a more optimistic view of ancient life on Mars,” Cardenas said. “It offers a vision of Mars where most of the planet once had the right conditions for life.
I find the bible and ancient Hebrew books fascinating. 1y
In Genesis 6 the fallen angels saw human women were beautiful so they took them as wives producing hybrid giants called the Nephilim. Goliath’s giant brother had six fingers and six toes. The book of Enoch is still in some bibles like the Ethiopian bible. It said that the fallen angels taught mankind technologies like how to make weapons of war and pharmacy from herbs. It sounded like they may have done genetic experiments. It says they sinned against the animals too. When a Nephilim died, their human body died and their immortal part lived on as a disembodied evil spirit. The bible translated Nephilim names to simply giants. They had names like the Emin, the Zamzummin, the Rephaim, the Anakim the sons of Anak, and the Mitszraim of Egypt. In Hebrew, the plural form fir humans has words ending in “ites”. The humans had names like Israelites or Moabites or Amorites etc. But angelic beings have names ending in “ Im” like cherubim or seraphim etc. The Nephilim also had names ending in “im” too.
So the fallen angels would seem like aliens as they had superior technology. But angels are not from another planet. Angels are from another dimension.
Cosmic Love 