Category: Science

Archaeologists digging in Mexico City have unearthed the long-fabled Huey Tzompantli — a tower of human skulls thought to measure about 200 feet in diameter.

The tower was described in contemporary accounts of the Spanish conquistadores when they captured the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City.

The tower is located at the edge of the Templo Mayor, an edifice dedicated to the Aztec god of sun, war, and human sacrifice, according to a report by The Atlantic.

In the account of Andres de Tapia, a Spanish follower of Hernan Cortes during his conquest of Mexico in 1521, the tower was constructed of tens of thousands of skulls “placed on a very large theater made of lime and stone, and on the steps of it were many heads of the dead stuck in the lime with the teeth facing outward.”

What the archaeologists did not expect to find were so many skulls belonging to women and children. Researchers previously believed that young male warriors were mostly chosen as sacrificial victims. As a result, the discovery is raising new questions about the Aztec Empire’s culture of human sacrifice.

“We were expecting just men,” said Rodrigo Bolanos, a biological anthropologist working on the dig, in a report by Reuters, adding, “Something is happening that we have no record of, and this is really new, a first in the Huey Tzompantli.”

So far, researchers have discovered more than 650 skulls that were covered in lime to cement them together. Only a quarter of the excavation is completed.

Archaeologists have discovered the living quarters of Sally Hemings — the enslaved African American woman who bore six of Thomas Jefferson’s children — at Jefferson’s Monticello estate. The room, 13 feet long and just under 15 feet wide, was adjacent to Jefferson’s bedroom.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and was the third president the United States.

“This discovery gives us a sense of how enslaved people were living,” said Gardiner Hallock, director of restoration for Monticello, in a report by NBC News. “Some of Sally’s children may have been born in this room.”

Historians hit on a possible location for Hemings’ living quarters by studying a description related by one of Jefferson’s grandsons, who said Hemings’ room was in Monticello’s south wing.

Monticello’s director of archaeology, Fraser Neiman, said digging revealed the original brick fireplace, hearth, and early 19th century floors.

“This room is a real connection to the past,” Neiman said. “We are uncovering and discovering and we’re finding many, many artifacts.”

Gayle Jessup White is Sally Hemings’ great-great-great-great niece and also works at Monticello’s Community Engagement Officer.

“As an African American descendant, I have mixed feelings — Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder,” White said, in the NBC News report. I am appreciative of the work that my colleagues are doing at Monticello because this is an important American story. But for too long our history has been ignored. Some people still don’t want to admit that the Civil War was fought over slavery. We need to face history head-on and face the blemish of slavery and that’s what we’re doing at Monticello.”

An analysis of a set of human-like footprints in ancient rock beneath Crete has researchers baffled due to one critical detail: The rock is 5.7 million years old. There were not supposed to be fully evolved humans in Crete—or anywhere on Earth, for that matter—until less than a million years ago, according to the scientific consensus.
Gerard Gierlinski of the Polish Geological Institute found the footprints in 2002 and spent the next decade-and-a-half analyzing them before publishing the results just this month in the latest edition of Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. The study notes numerous human-like features in the footprint: five toes, including a big toe similar to ours, as well as a distinct ball on the sole. There is also evidence of an upright posture and toenails instead of claws.
None of these features were supposed to appear for another four million years, at least, according to researchers. Also, there were not supposed to be any humans or apelike ancestors of humans anywhere outside Africa.
Until now, the earliest known footprints of hominids that show upright posture date back 3.7 million years ago and are located in present-day Tanzania. There is an earlier set of footprints dating back 4.4 million years ago, but its discoverers said that it very closely resembles an ape’s footprint and shows none of the human-like traits of Gierlinski’s find.
Gierlinski posits that there was another human-like creature that was roaming the Earth eons before any of the known hominids. This creature might have likewise made it to present-day Crete long before any currently known hominids left the African savanna.
“As Crete is some distance outside the known geographical range of pre-Pleistocene (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago) hominins we must also entertain the possibility that they represent a hitherto unknown late Miocene primate that convergently evolved human-like foot anatomy,” the study states.

African wild dogs use sneezing as a way to determine how many members of the pack are ready to move and hunt, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

There are many ways animals communicate, but there is no doubt this is one of the more unusual. Researchers first noted the behavior while conducting a separate study on the dog’s characteristics.

Researchers found that the more sneezes — or “audible rapid nasal exhalations” — the dogs emitted, the more likely the pack would be to set out on its next hunt. The team came to this conclusion after watching five packs in Botswana engage in a total of 68 gatherings.

Not only are the sneezes used for communication, but they differ based on an individual dog’s social standing as well.

“Rallies never failed when a dominant…individual initiated and there were at least three sneezes, whereas rallies initiated by lower ranking individuals required a minimum of 10 sneezes to achieve the same level of success,” stated the study’s authors, according to NPR.

However, while this process is interesting, the sneezes are hard to properly analyze because they do not count as true votes. This is because each dog is not limited to one sneeze and scientists are not sure if each one is voluntary or some are a natural reaction.

Even so, the findings are important because they shed light on a new process. While the dominant members of a pack hold more power than others, every member has a say in certain decisions depending on how many sneezes they can muster.

African wild dogs are not the only species that makes unique sounds to help with decision making, but they are the only one that uses sneezing as their voting method. Researchers seek to follow up on the study by looking at other animals, and they hope the new findings will bring light to the canines, which are one of the most endangered species in the world.

“They’re absolutely gorgeous animals focused on cooperation and their pack family unit,” says study co-author Reena Walker, a student at Brown University, according to National Geographic. “The more people who are aware [of] how amazing these animals are, the better.”

Scientists working on the Greek island of Crete have found distinctly human-like footprints that are 5.7 million years old — a discovery that is challenging accepted theories of human evolution because they date back long before human ancestors are thought to have left Africa.

The footprints, found embedded in rock in an area called Trachilos in western Crete, show that the creature was bipedal, had five toes, and sported an especially human-like big toe that is similar to those of modern humans in size, shape, and position.

The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.

“Human feet have a very distinctive shape, different from all other land animals,” wrote Uppsala University, in a statement. “The combination of a long sole, five short forward-pointing toes without claws, and a hallux (“big toe”) that is larger than the other toes, is unique.”

By contrast, the 3.7 million-year-old Laetoli footprints from Tanzania, believed to have been made by Australopithecus, lack arches and have narrower heels than modern humans, while the 4.4 million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus from Ethiopia has a more ape-like foot.

“What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints,” says co-author Prof. Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, in the statement.

When the Trachilos footprints were made, during the late Miocene, Crete was still attached to the Greek mainland and savannah-like environments stretched from North Africa around the eastern Mediterranean.

“This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate,” says Ahlberg. “Whether the human origins research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive evidence of the presence of hominids in the Miocene of Crete remains to be seen.”