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April 26, 2017

New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: April 26th, 2017, 10:00pm UTC
An anonymous reader writes: In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it. "The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones. It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. Demere thinks these people were after something else. "The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone," Demere says, "to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Marrow is a rich source of fatty calories. The scientists knew they'd uncovered something rare. But they didn't realize just how rare for years, until they got a reliable date on how old the bones were by using a uranium-thorium dating technology that didn't exist in the 1990s. The bones were 130,000 years old. That's a jaw-dropping date, as other evidence shows that the earliest humans got to the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The study has been published in the journal Nature.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=New+Study+Suggests+Humans+Lived+In+North+America+130%2C000+Years+Ago%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2p5vOr2"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F17%2F04%2F26%2F2239254%2Fnew-study-suggests-humans-lived-in-north-america-130000-years-ago%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/04/26/2239254/new-study-suggests-humans-lived-in-north-america-130000-years-ago?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/04/26/2239254/new-study-suggests-humans-lived-in-north-america-130000-years-ago?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/nAke0AaNbhk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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An Artificial Womb Successfully Grew Baby Sheep -- and Humans Could Be Next

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: April 26th, 2017, 12:00am UTC
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop -- much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that takes the first step toward an artificial womb. One day, this device could help to bring premature human babies to term outside the uterus -- but right now, it has only been tested on sheep. The Biobag may not look much like a womb, but it contains the same key parts: a clear plastic bag that encloses the fetal lamb and protects it from the outside world, like the uterus would; an electrolyte solution that bathes the lamb similarly to the amniotic fluid in the uterus; and a way for the fetus to circulate its blood and exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. Flake and his colleagues published their results today in the journal Nature Communications.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=An+Artificial+Womb+Successfully+Grew+Baby+Sheep+--+and+Humans+Could+Be+Next%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2oJXz5Q"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F17%2F04%2F25%2F2035243%2Fan-artificial-womb-successfully-grew-baby-sheep----and-humans-could-be-next%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/04/25/2035243/an-artificial-womb-successfully-grew-baby-sheep----and-humans-could-be-next?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/04/25/2035243/an-artificial-womb-successfully-grew-baby-sheep----and-humans-could-be-next?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/haKyRHyb0m4" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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