Posts Tagged ‘archaeology’

Is this an Australian lion?

Posted: February 16, 2016 in Science
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We are indebted to the BBC for this fascinating story. Australia is rightly famous for its scary fauna – now it appears it might have been an even scarier place to inhabit in the distant past.

 

An artist's illustration of Thylacoleo carnifex, Australia's marsupial lion

Source: Museum Victoria / Artist: Frank Knight An artist’s illustration of Thylacoleo carnifex, Australia’s marsupial lion.

The discovery of claw marks in a bone-filled cave in Australia suggests an extinct, “anatomically bizarre” predator was able to climb trees and rocks, meaning it would have been a threat to humans, writes Myles Gough.

Apparently, Australia’s extinct marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex, was the continent’s top predator at the time of human arrival 50,000 years ago.

Weighing more than 100kg, the animal had sharp claws and a powerful jaw, and shearing teeth that could rip through the flesh of its prey, which included giant kangaroos, rhinoceros-sized herbivores known as diprotodon, and possibly early humans.

But while experts agreed on the marsupial lion’s fearsomeness, whether or not they could climb rocks and trees has been a source of scientific contention. Some have speculated that the lions’ anatomy would lend itself to climbing, while others argued they would have been too heavy to clamber up to high places.

Now palaeontologists at Flinders University say they have found the answer in a cave in Western Australia where marsupial lions left thousands of scratch marks.

A reconstructed skeleton of the marsupial lion, which weighed up to 100kg

Image copyright Gavin Prideaux, Flinders University A reconstructed skeleton of the marsupial lion, which weighed up to 100kg …

‘Significant threat to humans’

The scratch marks, mostly made by juveniles and clustered on a near-vertical rock surface leading to a now-sealed exit, suggest two things about the lions: they were skilled climbers, and they reared their young inside caves.

“[Our findings indicate] the [marsupial] lions were running up and down these rock piles to get out of the cave, and they weren’t using the lower-gradient, longer route,” says associate professor Gavin Prideaux, who supervised the research.

“We can be confident now and say that they could climb.

“And if they could climb really well in the dark, underground, there’s no reason they couldn’t climb trees.

“They would have been a very significant threat to people when they first arrived in Australia.

“What we’re dying for are different lines of evidence that shed light on the behaviour or ecology of these animals, and that’s what we’ve been presented with in the form of these claw marks.”

The team’s findings, which reinforce some contentious ideas about the behaviour of these “highly adapted” and “anatomically bizarre” predators, have been published in Nature’s open-access journal Scientific Reports.

Identifying the scratch marks

An almost complete skeleton of a marsupial mammal was discovered inside Western Australia's Flightstar Cave

Image copyright Gavin Prideaux, Flinders University An almost complete skeleton of a marsupial mammal was discovered inside Western Australia’s Flightstar Cave

The claw markings were found inside the Tight Entrance cave near the Margaret River.

In the mid-90s, bones inside the cave were identified as belonging to extinct megafauna, dating from 30,000 to 150,000 years old, says Prof Prideaux. Between 1996 and 2008, he went on numerous expeditions to the cave to collect fossils, and during that work discovered the scratch marks.

“We had the feeling that they were probably Thylacoleo scratch marks, but we had to test it,” he says.

Prof Prideaux and his honours student, lead author Samuel Arman, established a list of seven species of animal that could have been responsible.

It included the extinct marsupial lion, as well as Tasmanian tigers and Tasmanian devils, which used to live on the mainland, wallabies, koalas, possums and wombats.

Mr Arman left scratch pads inside zoos and wildlife parks, and collected tree bark to get sample claw markings from the living animals, which he compared to those inside the cave.

Lions and devils

This helped the researchers narrow their list to two key suspects: marsupial lions and Tasmanian devils. But they needed another clue.

 

Tasmanian Devil

Image copyright Getty Images Zoo tests helped the scientists rule out Tasmanian devils as being behind the scratches

 

“We went through the more than 10,000 bones we collected from the cave to look for evidence for bite marks or little chewed-up bones [which are] absolute hallmarks of devil dens,” says Prof Prideaux. “We found zero of that.”

“This is more consistent with what we’ve inferred about the behaviour of Thylacoleo from its dental morphology, and that is, it was primarily a meat eater and not a bone cruncher.”

Mr Arman also reconstructed a skeletal hand of the marsupial lion and made mock scratches on modelling clay that “perfectly matched” the large ones found in the cave.

The animals, which went extinct around 46,000 years ago, lived all across the vast continent. Prof Prideaux suspects similar claw markings exist in caves elsewhere, but have yet to be discovered.

Dr Judith Field, an expert in megafaunal extinctions from the University of New South Wales, says “the methods used to determine the size of the animal making the marks appear well conceived and well executed”.

“It is highly likely these marks were made by Thylacoleo,” she told the BBC. “They are probably the only animal with claws large enough to effect these scratch marks.”

Still, Dr Field expressed some reservations about the study: “Most of the conclusions are speculation,” she said. “Great discovery, and a neat story, but these assertions about their behaviour have yet to be substantiated by empirical data.”

We await more news with interest. Meanwhile, back to killing red-back spiders, swimming with sharks, being bombed by homicidal magpies, avoiding blue-ringed Octopuses, and staying away from Zika virus and Dengue fever -bearing mozzies. Sheesh.

Categorical evidence: the Bible was written long after the events of the early chapters. And it is NOT literally true.

Posted: February 14, 2014 in Religion
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"I just became the most controversial issue in twenty plus centuries of religion. Really, who knew?"

“I just became the most controversial issue in twenty plus centuries of religion. Really, who knew?”

In major news breaking now that will shake up both the Jewish and Christian religions – assuming their adherents are interested in facts rather than merely having a fundamentalist obsession with literal truth – evidence has emerged that the early chapters of the Old Testament were written long after they have sometimes been suggested to have been written. And they are historically inaccurate.

In short, the chapters were not eye-witness accounts, and even if they were brought down by oral tradition, they were later embellished by the actual writers, which contradicts long-held dogma that they were transmitted without a word being changed or added from the earliest story tellers.

Biblical scholars have long been aware many of the stories and accounts in the sacred book were not written by eyewitnesses, and according to new research, further evidence of that historical distance has appeared in the form of a hump-backed camel.

New research using radioactive-carbon dating techniques shows the animals weren’t domesticated until hundreds of years after the events documented in the Book of Genesis.

The research was published by Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University in Israel. They believe camels were not domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean until the 10th century B.C.

And yet, the hump-backed creatures are mentioned repeatedly alongside Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, indicating the Bible’s writers and editors were portraying what they saw in their present as how things looked in the past. These camel stories “do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium,” said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, “but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period.”

While there are conflicting theories about when the Bible was composed, the recent research suggests it was written much later than the events it describes. This supports earlier studies that have challenged the Bible’s veracity as a historic document, for example, by pointing out that the destruction and plundering of Jericho actually occurred some centuries distant from the life of the long-asserted Hebrew general and leader Joshua.

The new biblical questioning wasn’t the focus of the recent research, though, just an after-the-fact observation.

The question over “phantom camels” is not new one, according to TIME magazine. Biblical scholar William Foxwell Albright “argued in the mid-1900s that camels were an anachronism.”

In an opinion piece for CNN, Joel Baden writes that there was no deliberate deception intended on the part of the Bible’s authors.

“Biblical authors,” Baden writes, “simply transplanted the nomadic standards of their time into the distant past. There is nothing deceptive about this. They weren’t trying to trick anyone. They imagined, quite reasonably, that the past was, fundamentally, like their present.”

A similar conclusion was reached by Smithsonian.com author Colin Schultz, who wrote, “these findings don’t necessarily disprove all the stories of the Bible. Rather, knowing that there are camels where there definitely shouldn’t be shows that the Bible’s authors, working thousands of years after the events they were describing were supposed to take place, took a modern lens to these ancient tales.”

At long last, can we focus on the eternal truths in the book that affect how we treat our fellow humans, rather than worrying about every dotted 'i' and crossed 't'?

At long last, can we focus on the eternal truths in the book that affect how we treat our fellow humans, rather than worrying about every dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’?

Nevertheless, the findings confirm again that the Bible is not LITERALLY true.

This should not really come as a surprise to Jews and Christians. Authoritative figures in the Roman Catholic Church have already said it, in plain language. Like their acknowledgement that Adam and Eve never existed.

With this latest finding, it is simply scientifically impossible for us to see the Old Testament as entirely, immovably factual.

And we now also have categorical evidence that the Old Testament authors were operating based on their current world view, which would undoubtedly reflect predominant cultural mores, too.

Here’s the key point: if we can unarguably subtract one fact from the Bible, then it is logically consistent that we can subtract others, too.

For example: the few lines that are (incorrectly in my opinion) supposed to be about homosexuality, which have caused misery, persecution and death for millions of good people down through the centuries.

Or, most dramatically: creationism. Specifically “young Earth” creationism.

Today is a day for celebration. The moment we acknowledge that the Bible need not be literally true to be true, we free humankind from mindless, meaningless intellectual navel gazing, and set free our own critical faculties, to lead us closer to the Divine.

Now, to coin a phrase, that’s Good News for Modern Man.