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    Did the people of Easter Island independently invent writing?

    A wooden tablet from Rapa Nui with Rongorongo glyphs carved into itSilvia Ferrara
    This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
    When we think about the invention of writing, we generally think about Eurasia and Africa. It might bring to mind Mesopotamia in western Asia and the invention of cuneiform, or perhaps Egyptian hieroglyphics.
    As a rule, we don’t think about isolated Pacific islands. But maybe we should. On Rapa Nui in… More

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    How neuroscience can help you make tough decisions – with no regrets

    jonkrause.com
    LIFE, it could be argued, is like a long game of blackjack. In one common version of this, each person is initially dealt two playing cards. The aim is for your hand to add to 21, or as close to this as you can get without busting. Players can either “stick” with their existing hand or “twist” – asking to be dealt another card to add to their total. The risk, of course, is that you exceed 21 and are eliminated.
    This may sound far removed from everyday choices, but many of our most important life decisions boil down to such dilemmas. Should I stay put or take the leap and move house? Should I remain in my job or start my own business? Should I put up with an unsatisfying relationship or try my luck at love another time? In each case, we must weigh the security of what we have against a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, alternative.
    The inherent uncertainty of these dilemmas leaves many of us dithering in analysis paralysis, so that we end up lingering in the status quo, never giving ourselves the chance to win big. Some people, in contrast, are too easily swayed by the lure of the new: they gamble too readily, until their impulsive behaviour has lost them everything. If either of these scenarios sounds familiar, help may be close by. Thanks to a growing understanding of our underlying cognitive biases and how to escape them, we now have evidence-based strategies to think about these quandaries more rationally – and so play the hand life has dealt us to our best advantage.
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    Stick or twist: How to improve the outcomes of your big life decisions

    jonkrause.com
    LIFE, it could be argued, is like a long game of blackjack. In one common version of this, each person is initially dealt two playing cards. The aim is for your hand to add to 21, or as close to this as you can get without busting. Players can either “stick” with their existing hand or “twist” – asking to be dealt another card to add to their total. The risk, of course, is that you exceed 21 and are eliminated.
    This may sound far removed from everyday choices, but many of our most important life decisions boil down to such dilemmas. Should I stay put or take the leap and move house? Should I remain in my job or start my own business? Should I put up with an unsatisfying relationship or try my luck at love another time? In each case, we must weigh the security of what we have against a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, alternative.
    The inherent uncertainty of these dilemmas leaves many of us dithering in analysis paralysis, so that we end up lingering in the status quo, never giving ourselves the chance to win big. Some people, in contrast, are too easily swayed by the lure of the new: they gamble too readily, until their impulsive behaviour has lost them everything. If either of these scenarios sounds familiar, help may be close by. Thanks to a growing understanding of our underlying cognitive biases and how to escape them, we now have evidence-based strategies to think about these quandaries more rationally – and so play the hand life has dealt us to our best advantage.
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    Indigenous Australians have managed land with fire for 11,000 years

    Aboriginal people use fires to manage the landscapePenny Tweedie/Getty Images
    Indigenous Australians have been managing the environment with fire for at least 11,000 years, according to an analysis of sediment cores retrieved from an ancient lake.
    Michael Bird at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, says the findings suggest that a return to an Indigenous regime of more frequent but less intense fires could reduce the risk of catastrophic bushfires and improve environmental management.

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    It has long been known that Australia’s first peoples, who are thought to have been on the continent for 65,000 years, carefully managed the landscape with fire to make it easier to move around and hunt prey. They also figured out that this benefited some animals and plants that they preferred and reduced the risk of more dangerous fires.
    However, it has been difficult to establish how long this has been happening for, says Bird. That is because most waterways completely dry out in the dry season each year and the carbon in their sediments is destroyed.
    Girraween Lagoon, near Darwin in the Northern Territory, is a massive sinkhole covering an area of about 1 hectare that has stayed permanently wet for at least 150,000 years. As the climate changed over millennia, so, too, did the vegetation around the sinkhole. “From Girraween Lagoon, we have got 150,000 years’ worth of sediment that has never dried out,” says Bird.
    By analysing sediment cores from the lagoon’s bed, Bird and his colleagues were able to study three key metrics: the accumulation of micro-charcoal particles, the proportion of burnt material in the charred vegetation matter and a measure of the amount of the different kinds of carbon that remain after burning.
    The first two metrics allow researchers to infer the intensity of fires, while the third indicates whether fires were cool enough to leave traces of grasses preserved.
    Prior to the arrival of people, natural fires in the savannahs of northern Australia were ignited by lightning late in the dry season, when vegetation and the landscape had almost fully dried out. This kind of higher-intensity fire combusts biomass more completely, particularly fine fuels such as grass and litter, leaving less charred remains from grasses.
    Indigenous fire regimes, on the other hand, burn frequently but with much less heat, affect small areas and are limited to the ground layer, promoting a mosaic of vegetation and helping to protect biodiversity.
    Bird says the more recent layers in the cores show clear evidence of more frequent fires and grasses that haven’t been fully combusted, indicating cooler fires. These kinds of fires are a sharp departure from the previous natural pattern of fires and provide the tell-tale fingerprint of Indigenous fire management, he says.
    Researchers collect sediment cores at Girraween Lagoon in Northern Territory, AustraliaMichael Bird
    This signal can be seen in sediments dating back to at least 11,000 years ago, the study found, but before that point the metric for the proportion of grasses and tree remains becomes harder to study. Bird says there are hints of a human burning signal from as early as 40,000 years ago, but the evidence isn’t as clear-cut.
    “It means that for at least 11,000 years, the savannah has grown up with humans,” he says. “The biodiversity has grown up with that fire regime. Take that kind of burning away and you start to see significant problems with biodiversity.”
    David Bowman at the University of Tasmania, Australia, says the paper highlights the twin importance of climate and humans in shaping fire regimes.
    “Separating climate from anthropogenic – and importantly Indigenous – fire management is a hugely important topic,” he says. “We are battling to counteract climate-driven wildfires globally and such a deep-time perspective will be an invaluable addition to current research and development of sustainable fire management.”

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    Ukraine may have been first part of Europe colonised by early humans

    Korolevo quarry in Ukraine, one of the oldest hominin sites in EuropeRoman Garba
    Molecular dating has revealed that an area in Ukraine was occupied by humans 1.4 million years ago, making it one of the oldest hominin sites in Europe and possibly the oldest.
    The site, at Korolevo in western Ukraine, has been studied since the 1970s. A large number of stone tools have been found buried in layers of sediment beside an outcrop of volcanic rock suitable to be made into tools.

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    “This was like a magnet for bringing the people there, and they were camping nearby,” says Roman Garba at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.
    No bones have been found as the soil is too acidic to preserve them, he says, but it is assumed that the hominins were Homo erectus, a species that evolved around 2 million years ago and spread from Africa to Europe and Asia.
    While it has been clear that early hominins were present at the Korolevo site repeatedly over hundreds of thousands of years, we haven’t known exactly when they were present. But Garba’s team has now dated the oldest layer containing tools to 1.4 million years ago, using a technique called cosmogenic nuclide dating.
    This method relies on cosmic rays that are so energetic that they can split the nuclei of atoms and generate unusual isotopes. However, these isotopes form only on exposed areas, as these cosmic rays don’t penetrate far into solid objects.
    Once objects are buried, radioactive isotopes generated by cosmic rays decay into other isotopes, allowing the time of burial to be determined.
    Another early hominin site in Dmanisi in Georgia has been dated to 1.7 million years ago, while other sites in France and Spain are around 1.2 million years old. This suggests that early humans moved from Africa through Georgia and into Ukraine, then west into the rest of Europe, says Garba, though it is also possible that some crossed the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey.
    It has been suggested that some hominins crossed the Gibraltar Strait to reach Spain when sea levels were lower than present, then moved east into the rest of Europe, but there is no evidence to support this, says Garba.

    While part of Georgia is in Europe geographically and the whole country is seen as part of Europe politically, the site of Dmanisi is geographically located in Asia, says Garba. So he and his team regard Korolevo as the oldest human site in Europe that has been reliably dated.
    “Korolevo represents, to our knowledge, the earliest securely dated hominin presence in Europe,” the paper states.
    “I agree that the new age estimates are important, and they support the idea of an early east-west dispersal,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
    But this was already apparent because four other sites in western Europe have already been dated to around 1.4 million years ago, he says.
    Garba says that while it is possible that these other sites are as old, the dating of them is questionable. “We can’t be as sure about them,” he says. “They are not secure or not robust.”
    “I respectfully disagree,” says Stringer.

    Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More

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    Did the James Webb telescope ‘break the universe’? Maybe not

    Reports that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe may have been exaggerated.

    In its first images, JWST captured what appeared to be gargantuan galaxies in the early universe — ones much too big to be explained by current cosmological theories (SN: 2/22/23). But a new analysis of old data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that those alleged behemoths probably have more prosaic explanations fitting in with our standard understanding of the universe, cosmologist Julian Muñoz and colleagues report in the Feb. 9 Physical Review Letters. More

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    JWST spies hints of a neutron star left behind by supernova 1987A

    Within the dusty cloud left behind by supernova 1987A, the most famous stellar explosion in modern history, astronomers have found compelling evidence for a long-sought neutron star.

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has spied indirect hints of a powerful source of X-rays — likely some type of neutron star — coming from the core of the supernova remnant, researchers report February 22 in Science. The findings are part of a 37-year-old quest to determine what happened in the aftermath of the closest supernova in nearly 400 years and could provide insights into how a neutron star behaves mere decades after its birth.

    “Supernova 1987A is truly a unique laboratory to study supernovas,” astronomer Patrick Kavanagh said February 17 in a news conference at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver. It’s “the gift that keeps on giving, with new observations continually yielding new discoveries,” said Kavanagh, of Maynooth University in Ireland.

    It’s rare for scientists to have observations of a giant star before it explodes in a supernova — but they got lucky with supernova 1987A. On the left is the blue supergiant before the explosion. On the right is the explosion itself.David Malin, AAT

    On February 23, 1987, telescopes around the world got a front-row seat to a spectacular supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way (SN: 2/8/17). Such explosions occur when a star at least eight times the mass of the sun dies. Located at the astronomically close distance of 160,000 light-years, supernova 1987A, as it came to be known, was visible with the naked eye in the night sky for months afterward. The energetic explosion generated tremendous amounts of neutrinos, a handful of which ended up in detectors on Earth. It was the first time such ghostly particles had been seen coming from beyond the solar system.

    Since then, scientists have wondered whether the iron core of the blue supergiant star that led to 1987A collapsed into an ultradense neutron star or shrank all the way down to a black hole. The fact that neutrinos escaped the event favors the neutron star possibility, but whatever was left behind has yet to be spotted. That’s partly because the original star’s outer layers, now traveling away from the explosion at 10,000 kilometers per second, create a thick haze of dust that obscures the area. More

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    Ancient bronze hand may offer clue to the origins of Basque language

    An ancient bronze hand found at Irulegi in northern SpainJuantxo Egana
    Inscriptions found on a 2000-year-old metal hand may be written in a language related to modern-day Basque. If this interpretation is correct, it could help explain the origins of the Basque language – one of the biggest mysteries in linguistics.

    However, other linguists say there isn’t enough evidence to link the inscriptions with Basque.Advertisement
    The bronze hand was found in July 2021 on a hilltop called Irulegi in the Pyrenees in northern Spain. Archaeologists had been digging there since 2007, first to uncover a medieval castle and then to explore a much older settlement from the Iron Age.
    That settlement was founded between 1500 and 1000 BC. It came under attack, possibly by the Romans, and was abandoned in the first century BC.
    The Irulegi hand is a sheet of bronze 14 centimetres long, 12.8 cm wide and just 0.1 cm thick, with a greenish patina. On the back of the hand are four lines of text, which were first scratched in and then re-written by punching dots into the metal.
    Most of the words can’t be linked to any known language, but the first word is “sorioneku”. Mattin Aiestaran at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and his colleagues argue that this is similar to the Basque word zorioneko, which means “of good fortune”. Additionally, the last word is “eráukon”, which they compare to the Basque verb zeraukon.
    The Irulegi hand, bearing an inscription in a mysterious languageMattin Aiestaran, et. al.
    The hand was probably meant to signify or attract good luck, perhaps by appealing to a deity, says Mikel Edeso Egia at the Aranzadi Science Society in Donostia – also called San Sebastián – in Spain, which supported the excavations.
    The researchers further argue that the hand is evidence of languages related to Basque being spoken in northern Spain for 2000 years. Whereas most languages spoken in Europe today belong to the Indo-European language family, Basque doesn’t. “It’s not related to any other language that we know of,” says Edeso Egia. Previous research has tentatively linked Basque to a group of people called the Vascones who, according to classical sources, lived in the Pyrenees.
    However, the idea that the inscriptions on the hand are in a language related to Basque isn’t universally accepted. After the hand was first described in a 2022 book, linguists Céline Mounole at the University of Pau and the Adour Region in France and Julen Manterola at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz published a critique.
    “The evidence is not enough,” says Manterola. This is partly because there are so few words on the Irulegi hand: not enough to properly compare it with known languages, he says.
    Furthermore, the link with Basque rests almost solely on the similarity of “sorioneku” and zorioneko. “We can’t really relate any of the other words with historical Basque,” says Mounole.
    Even that similarity may be misleading, says Manterola. Similar phrases in Basque have changed in predictable ways over the centuries to reach their current forms, but if “sorioneku” became zorioneko, it must have followed a very different path.
    “We are hoping that more inscriptions will appear,” says Mounole. “In this case, we would be able to know more about this language and its possible relation with the Basque language.”

    Topics:archaeology/language More