Why crying babies are so hard to ignore Ever wondered why it is so difficult to ignore the sound of a crying baby when you are trapped aboard a train or aeroplane? Scientists have found that our brains are hard-wired to respond strongly to the sound, making us more attentive and priming our bodies to help whenever we hear it – even if we're not the baby's parents. "The sound of a baby cry captures your attention in a way that few other sounds in the environment generally do," said Katie Young of the University of Oxford, who led the study looking at how the brain processes a baby's cries. She scanned the brains of 28 people while they listened to the sound of babies and adults crying and sounds of animal distress including cats meowing and dogs whining. Using a very fast scanning technique, called magnetoencephalography, Young found an early burst of activity in the brain in response to the sound of a baby cry, followed by an intense reaction after about 100 milliseconds.
Livius. Articles on Ancient History Oldest Javelins Predate Modern Humans, Raise Questions on Evolution Charles Q. Choi The oldest known stone-tipped projectiles have been discovered in Ethiopia. The javelins are roughly 280,000 years old and predate the earliest known fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, by about 80,000 years. These javelins are some 200,000 years older than previous examples of similar weapons, suggesting that modern humans and their extinct relatives had the know-how to create these sorts of complex thrown projectiles much earlier than often thought. Scientists investigated stone tools unearthed at the Gademotta Formation on the flanks of an ancient, large collapsed volcanic crater in central Ethiopia's Rift Valley. "Today, the area represents a ridge overlooking one of the four lakes in the vicinity, Lake Ziway," said researcher Yonatan Sahle, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley. The oldest artifacts at the site are roughly 279,000 years old. Pointed artifacts with damage suggesting they were used in spears are common at the site.
Map Collections The Library of Congress Search by Keyword | Browse by Geographic Location Index | Subject Index | Creator Index | Title Index The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress holds more than 4.5 million items, of which Map Collections represents only a small fraction, those that have been converted to digital form. The focus of Map Collections is Americana and Cartographic Treasures of the Library of Congress. These images were created from maps and atlases and, in general, are restricted to items that are not covered by copyright protection. Map Collections is organized according to seven major categories. Searching Map Collections The mission of the Library of Congress is to make its resources available and useful to Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The Library of Congress presents these documents as part of the record of the past. Special Presentations: Places in History
Oldest Human Footprints in North America Discovered The footprints tell the story of a hunter-gatherer who marched through a marshy basin in the Chihuahuan Desert long before the Mesoamerican civilizations like the Mayans dominated the Mexican landscape. “To my knowledge the oldest human prints previously reported in North America are around 6,000 years old,” Nicholas Felstead, a geoarchaeologist at Durham University in the U.K., said in a statement, according to Western Digs. Felstead, who spearheaded the new study of the tracks, was able to date the footprints because they were preserved in travertine, a sedimentary rock containing small traces of uranium. Since scientists know the rate at which uranium decays, becoming thorium, researchers were able to determine the footprints’ age by measuring the ratios of the two elements. According to their study, published in the Feb. 2014 edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, North America’s oldest footprints were made around 10,550 years ago.
Annenberg Media Exhibits: Collapse Hundreds of years ago in what is now modern Honduras, Copán was a thriving civilization, a center of the cultural life of the Maya. Tens of thousands of people made their home in the Copán Valley. Yet despite its importance, Copán went into decline. Across the vast territory of the ancient Maya, other important sites were sharing a similar fate. Classic Maya civilization was collapsing. Why did this great civilization fall? can combine with external causes (such as war or natural disaster) to bring about a collapse. Join us as we explore the collapse of four ancient civilizations. Ready to get started? "Collapse" is inspired by programs from Out of the Past, a video series from Annenberg Media.
Paranthropus boisei: 1.34-Million-Year-Old Hominin Found in Tanzania A 1.34-million-year-old partial skeleton of the Plio-Pleistocene hominin Paranthropus boisei – including arm, hand, leg and foot fragments – found at the Olduvai Gorge site in Tanzania represents one of the most recent occurrences of the hominin before its extinction in East Africa. A forensic facial reconstruction of Paranthropus boisei. Image credit: Cicero Moraes / CC BY-SA 3.0. Paranthropus boisei was a long-lived species of archaic hominin that first evolved in East Africa about 2.3 million years ago. The first skull of Paranthropus boisei, dated to 1.75 million years old, was discovered in 1959 at Olduvai by the anthropologist Dr Mary Leakey. During Olduvai excavations in 2010-2011, anthropologist Dr Charles Musiba of the University of Colorado Denver with colleagues unearthed the partial skeleton of a large adult individual who is represented by various teeth and skeletal parts. “The size of the arm bones suggests strong forearms and a powerful upper body.
ChronoZoom ChronoZoom is an educational tool for teachers and students who want to put historical events in perspective. A great many resources have been created already in ChronoZoom for your enjoyment and enlightenment. Start Exploring Use ChronoZoom to get a perspective of the extensive scale of time and historical events relative to what happened around the world. New Teacher Resources RT @MSFTResearch: See how #Chronozoom helps students “think historically” & travel though time with 3 newly created curriculum modules http… #chronozoom is a valuable tool for illustrating Climate Change: @metanexus Anyone can author their small or Big History on the 14 Billion year timeline at - an open source project. @BillGates Congratulations to the Big History Project. RT @BillGates: Big History is my favorite course ever. You don't have any favorite timelines yet.
Light skin mutation stems from one ancestor All instances of a gene mutation that contributes to light skin color in Europeans came from the same chromosome of one person who most likely lived at least 10,000 years ago, according to researchers. While the genetics of skin color is largely unclear, past research using zebrafish by Penn State’s Keith Cheng identified a key gene that contributes to lighter skin color in Europeans and differs from West Africans. In 2005, Cheng reported that one amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is a key contributor to the skin color difference between Europeans and West Africans. “The mutation in SLC24A5 changes just one building block in the protein, and contributes about a third of the visually striking differences in skin tone between peoples of African and European ancestry,” says Cheng, professor of pathology. Lighter skin color may have provided an advantage for the better creation of vitamin D in the lesser sunlight characteristic of northern latitudes. Source: Penn State
Welcome - The Flow of History Jimmy Nelson Photographs Vanishing Tribes in Before They Pass Away Photographer Jimmy Nelson in Papua New Guinea I’ve been fascinated by tribal cultures for over 20 years, ever since I interviewed my grandfather about our family history and learned we had American Indian blood on both sides. In the years since, I’ve traveled to indigenous communities in Dominica, South Africa, Tahiti, the Peruvian Amazon and numerous other destinations in an effort to learn from the tribal cultures there. So you can imagine how much photographer Jimmy Nelson‘s new book, Before They Pass Away, resonated with me on a personal level. The project began in 2009, when the British photographer set out on a journey to visit and photograph 31 secluded, visually unique tribes. “I wanted to witness their time-honoured traditions, join in their rituals and discover how the rest of the world is threatening to change their way of life forever,” Nelson says. A Nenets (a.k.a. Let’s start off talking about the origins of this project. Our world is changing at breakneck speed.
World History Archaeologists discover the earliest complete example of a human with cancer (17 March 2014) Lytic lesion in the spinous process of the 5th thoracic vertebra Archaeologists have found the oldest complete example in the world of a human with metastatic cancer in a 3,000 year-old skeleton. The findings are reported in the academic journal PLOS ONE. The skeleton of the young adult male was found by a Durham University PhD student in a tomb in modern Sudan in 2013 and dates back to 1200BC. Analysis has revealed evidence of metastatic carcinoma, cancer which has spread to other parts of the body from where it started, from a malignant soft-tissue tumour spread across large areas of the body, making it the oldest convincing complete example of metastatic cancer in the archaeological record. The researchers from Durham University and the British Museum say the discovery will help to explore underlying causes of cancer in ancient populations and provide insights into the evolution of cancer in the past.
A History of the World - Location - Europe