prehistoric (Page 10)

In Tamil Nadu, on India’s East Coast, geneticists Spencer Wells and R.M. Pitchappan have found strains of genes that were present in early man when he first left Africa 60,000 years ago. When these first humans came to that part of India, some of them decided to stay and their progeny are still there today. “These gene pools are unique and very accurately map the path a population has taken, leaving behind original communities to grow into independent groups but with a common ancestor,” says Pitchappan.
read more

New radiocarbon testing on 27 skulls that were found in Mexico 100 years ago shows some of them are almost 13,000 years old, the oldest found so far in the Americas. Domestic tools 14,500 years old have been discovered in Chile, but no human remains were found with them. The two oldest skulls are long and narrow, while more recent skulls are short and broad, like those of American Indians. This suggests that a race of narrow-headed humans were living in the Americas before the arrival of the ancestors of present-day Native Americans. Before this, archeologists thought Indians were the first people to arrive on the continent, by way of a temporary land bridge from Asia.
read more

A giant, prehistoric-looking bird has been sighted in Southwest Alaska. Pilot John Bouker says the bird?s wingspan is as big as the wing on his Cessna 207, which is 14 feet. He’d heard rumors about the bird, but says, “I didn’t put any thought into it.” That was before he looked out of the left window of his plane and saw it about 1,000 feet away. “The people in the plane all saw him,” he says. “He’s huge, he’s huge, he’s really, really big. You wouldn’t want to have your children out.”
read more

Scientists from Japan and Russia want to create a safari park featuring real mammoths and woolly rhinoceros that will be open to tourists in the next 20 years. They plan to travel to Siberia to look for the frozen carcasses of dead prehistoric animals and take DNA from them, that can be transplanted into their living relatives, such as elephants and rhinos. These animals will hopefully give birth to the same kind of creatures that roamed the Earth 20,000 years ago.
read more