It is commonly accepted that the dinosaurs were driven to extinction by the drastic change in Earth’s climate brought about by the impact of a massive asteroid that occurred 66 million years ago. There is, however, evidence that the planet’s environment was already being upended by massive volcanic activity onread more
An analysis of 29 prehistoric footprints found on the west coast of Canada have revealed that they are 13,000 years old, making them the oldest known footprints in North America. While older archeological remains have been uncovered elsewhere on the continent, this find adds to the body of evidence that modern humans were present on North America’s west coast well before the end of the last Ice Age, in this case over 2,500 years before the current geological era, the Holocene, began.
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The definitive dating of the remains of the extinct hominin Homo naledi has been completed, and the results have left researchers’ original assumptions about the age of the creature in the dust: initially thought to be 2.5 million years old, the remains have been found to be only one-tenth of that age, at roughly 250,000 years — meaning that this species co-existed with modern humans.
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It’s sometimes easy to forget that as humans, we’re not the only technologically-capable species present on Earth at the moment: many of our animal brethren make and use tools to shape their immediate environment, such as birds building nests as structures to raise their young in, beavers building dams to flood areas for security from predators, prairie dogs possessing a language that contains a vocabulary of hundreds of words, and chimpanzees shaping sticks to dig and hunt for ants.
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