Ancient squids dominated the ocean 100 million years ago, fossil discovery technique reveals
One of the study's most striking discoveries was how common squids were in ancient oceans. The team found that squid fossils far outnumbered those of ammonites and bony fishes. Ammonites are extinct shelled relatives of squids and have been considered among the most successful swimmers of the Mesozoic era.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-ancient-squids-dominated-ocean-million.html
These Canadian rocks may be the oldest on Earth
Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of dust and gas soon after the solar system existed. Primordial rocks often get melted and recycled by Earth's moving tectonic plates, making them extremely rare on the surface today. Scientists have uncovered 4 billion-year-old rocks from another formation in Canada called the Acasta Gneiss Complex, but the Nuvvuagittuq rocks could be even older.
Earliest evidence of rice cultivation in Remote Oceania:
This study addresses the long-standing question of whether the first Pacific Islanders transported rice with them from the Philippines across 2300 kilometers of open sea, representing the longest known ocean voyage of the time. During this early period, rice was restricted to special ritual events in the Marianas. The early voyage apparently was planned with provisions of rice at 3500 years ago.
Whose story is being told – and why? Four questions museum visitors should ask themselves these school holidays
Museums tend to enjoy a high level of trust among the public. They’re widely seen as neutral, factual sources of historical knowledge.
But like all forms of storytelling, museums present the past in particular ways. They narrate events from a certain group’s or individual’s perspective and explain why events unfolded in the way they did.
Altiplano agricultural origins was a process of economic resilience, not hardship: Isotope chemistry, zooarchaeology, and archaeobotany in the Titicaca Basin, 5.5-3.0 ka
Results in this study challenge the current view that the transition to food-producing economies entailed diet-breadth expansion and increased plant-food consumption.
Rather, the Andean Altiplano case reveals surprising dietary stability across the transition from foraging to farming economies.
Both forager and early farmer diets were primarily composed of C3 plants with lesser caloric contributions from large mammals, including camelids and deer.
Surprisingly, this subsistence regime was maintained for some four millennia despite human population growth across the Archaic and Formative periods at the Altiplano. Although it is likely that during this transition period in Kaillachuro and Jiskairumoko, there was a gradual and flexible integration of domestic crops into the diets of Archaic foragers, reflecting a mosaic subsistence transition rather than an abrupt shift to agriculture.
The Andean case thus represents a remarkable case of economic resilience in the face of demographic and economic transformation.
Evidence for expanding trade networks and archery technology during the Terminal Archaic Period suggests that social and technological innovations are the likely explanations for subsistence stability across the forager-farmer transition.
This feat of resilience not only allowed Andean Altiplano populations to maintain previously successful dietary regimes but also resulted in the domestication of plants and animals that would go on to fuel the later emergence of urban centers, intensive agricultural strategies, and some of the world’s most expansive socioeconomic systems, including the Tiwanaku and Inca phenomena.
Prevailing models of agricultural origins tend to envision that economic hardship drove the transition from foraging to farming economies. Growing human populations and the depletion of high-ranked animal resources forced humans into increasingly intensive and dependent relationships with plant foods. Current evidence from the Andean Altiplano (High Plateau, 3800 masl) identifies the Terminal Archaic Period (5.0–3.5 cal. ka) as the period of economic transition from Archaic foraging economies to Formative Period agro-pastoral economies. Consistent with models of agricultural origins, isotope chemistry (δ13Ccollagen, δ13Capatite, δ15Ncollagen) of human bone samples from 16 individuals from the Terminal Archaic sites of Kaillachuro and Jiskairumoko (5.3–3.0 cal. ka) indicates that C3 plants comprised approximately 84% of the dietary protein. Archaeobotanical data show that chenopods may have been the most important subsistence resource, and zooarchaeological remains indicate that protein was derived from camelid meat. Inconsistent with the working model of plant intensification, the Terminal Archaic diets reported here are statistically indistinguishable from previously published values of Early—Late Archaic (9.0–6.5 cal. ka) individuals in the same region, which also show approximately 84% of protein coming from plants. Rather than being a process of dramatic dietary change and economic hardship, the agricultural transition on the Altiplano appears to have been one of remarkable resilience in which plant:meat ratios remained relatively stable over six millennia, spanning the transition from Archaic foraging and hunting to Formative farming and herding economies. Plant and animal domestication on the Altiplano thus represents a process of economic sustainability rather than one of food insecurity and hardship, as many prevalent agricultural origins models would suggest.
Water-filled pores demonstrate possible mechanism for metabolic processes without cell membranes
In their article, the researchers show that simple heat flow across thin, water‐filled pores can accumulate a wide variety of molecules with different chemical and physical properties, and allow these molecules to interact and form reactions in a confined space, even in the absence of a cell membrane.
In this very simple protocell, there is a thermal gradient that takes over the functions of a cell membrane, but not yet any physical boundary between the reaction and the diluted water.
"Our investigations show that this simple physical mechanism, which would have been very common on early Earth, can perform many functions that would normally require a cell membrane," says principal investigator of the study, Dieter Braun. The results suggest that heated rock pores could have been the natural setting in which biological cells emerged.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-pores-mechanism-metabolic-cell-membranes.html
Looking at life today, it is difficult to imagine how complex biological processes and structures could have developed from simple building blocks. All cellular processes and reactions appear to be closely interdependent and necessarily occur within a cell membrane. There is no known organism that deviates from this pattern. But how did it come about?
A new Cambrian stem-group echinoderm reveals the evolution of the anteroposterior axis
The transition from bilateral to pentaradial symmetry in echinoderms has long proved controversial.
Until now, the paucity of characters unambiguously uniting radial and non-radial fossil forms had hampered efforts to investigate the early evolution of the phylum.
Our novel data on growth in the bilaterally symmetrical echinoderm Atlascystis confirm the presence of ambulacra in non-radial echinoderms, establishing homologies between all known fossil groups and enabling rigorous analyses of their phylogenetic relationships.
This reinforces the critical importance of the fossil record for elucidating the evolutionary assembly of animal body plans.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00681-5?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982225006815%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Fàs agus blas.
Glen Scotia, Ceann Loch Chille Chiarain.
Whisky bars on bonded warehouse at Glen Scotia.
#DihUinneag #FensterFreitag #WindowFriday #Scotland #Campbeltown #Gaelic #Gàidhlig #MastoDaoine
Africa-wide diversification of livelihood strategies: Isotopic insights into Holocene human adaptations to climate change
Highlights
• Livelihood diversification co-evolved with Holocene climate change across Africa
• C3 and C4 food-production strategies followed distinct spatiotemporal pathways
• The breadth and variability of pastoral livelihoods suggests a central adaptive role
• We offer a continental-scale reference for understanding Holocene livelihoods
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(25)00130-7
Ancient canoe replica tests Paleolithic migration theory
Of the two newly published papers, one used numerical simulations to cross one of the strongest currents in the world called the Kuroshio. The simulation showed that a boat made using tools of the time, and the right know-how, could have navigated the Kuroshio. The other paper detailed the construction and testing of a real boat which the team successfully used to paddle between islands over 100 kilometers apart
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-ancient-canoe-replica-paleolithic-migration.html
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