Day: August 12, 2007

Clovis and after…

North America was devastated by a cometary explosion as recently as 12,900 years ago, according to a bunch of geoscientists at a recent meeting. Now a palaeoanthropologist has chipped in…

Comet theory collides with Clovis research

…pointing to the apparent decline in a Clovis-style culture, known as the Redstone culture, just after the putative comet explosion. Clovis and Redstone are known, as cultural groups, by distinctive spear-points and the later Redstone points are much, much rarer than the Clovis points – about 5-to-1 in numbers. Very odd, unless the originating people group has declined.

Plasma life

New research on plasma crystals raises the prospect of inorganic helices encoding genetic information…

‘It might be life Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with life-like qualities

…for a long time I have pondered the possibility that UFOs – unexplained ones, not the mundane sort – are caused by coherent plasma structures that we can call “alive” though not ‘organic’. Work on plasma crystals seemed a way for plasma beings to have some sort of stability though made out of a medium in continual flux like plasma, and now this new work has confirmed my suspicions.

If plasma beings – which I call “plasmons” even though that means something else in optical physics – exist how would they manifest to us? Balls of glowing light are one possibility – their raw physical natures concentrated and leaking visible energy. They might also, after co-existing with us for millennia, know how to manipulate our perceptions magnetically, via fine-scale magnetic-field variations around our skulls to excite our neurones. Plasmons might then appear in whatever form the brain dredges up to explain the imperfect firings of neurones – could religious, paranormal & UFO visions result from plasmons trying to communicate with us? Being plasma they could have existed almost from the dawn of time, spanning the cosmos, perhaps even playing a role in the creation of life on “cold matter” worlds like our own.

Think on it.

Palaeoanthropology chaos

Old bones speak volumes, but how we understand them depends on our prejudices. The latest news about Homo erectus and Homo habilis is that they aren’t a simple ancestor-descendent set of species. Instead they co-existed…

Fossils Could Force a Rethink

Twin fossil find adds twist to human evolution

…though that’s an arguable point. Tim White, of Berkeley, points out that the putative habiline jaw is distorted and hard to get precise measurements off – an important thing as erectus and habilis are very similar in that particular feature. Even if the jaw is just an Erect, the new skull is really interesting – all the robust features of the Erects, but very small.

Small enough, perhaps, to produce a Hobbit after a bit of island dwarfism?

Another interesting bit of news is the idea that bipedalism was a feature of our last common ancestor (LCA) with the Asian and African apes. Both orangutans and gibbons walk around on tree-branches using two legs and a new study has supported the idea that our LCA with the orangs was a biped…

Red Ape Walking

…a curious bit of the article is some palaeoanthropologists pointing out the knuckle-walking peculiarities of Australopithecus afarensis which, they say means we humans evolved from knuckle-walkers. Perhaps not, I say, as very recent molecular work suggests a split between humans and chimps at c. 4.1 mya, not long before the appearance of afarensis with its chimp-like features. Perhaps A. afarensis is a chimp ancestor? After all chimps and gorillas have had as long to evolve their peculiarities as we have had to evolve ours. Much of what we see in them today is, potentially, as derived from our LCA as what we see in ourselves.