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Ice Age: New Findings & Theories

ramonmercado

CyberPunk
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Source: University Of Wisconsin-Madison
Date: 2006-01-10
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 233340.htm

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Ice Age Clues Unearthed From Construction Hole

Long before the finishing touches are made to UW-Madison's Microbial Sciences Building, a small but significant bit of science has emerged from the hole where the $120 million, 330,000 square-foot structure is emerging.

Using relatively new dating techniques and ancient glacial till and lake sediments gathered from the enormous, 35-foot-deep pit where the building is now rising, Wisconsin geologists have obtained the first reliable dates for the last time a massive ice sheet enveloped what are now Madison and the UW-Madison campus.

"I could have taken a guess at when the ice was here last," says Dave Mickelson, emeritus professor of geology and geophysics. "But it would only have been a guess."

Mickelson, however, and fellow geologist Tom Hooyer of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, can now move beyond guesswork. Their studies of the glacial relics retrieved from the campus construction site have effectively dated the last glacial epoch of the region to about 25,000 years ago.

Previously, the only reliable dates obtained from physical evidence were for areas far to the south of Madison, in Illinois where during the last ice age expansive spruce forests covered the landscape and left organic evidence that could survive the ages and be radiocarbon dated. Ice Age Dane County, says Mickelson, was tundra, little more than permafrost and grass. There were no trees to leave a record.

Wisconsin may have been subjected to as many as 15 episodes of glaciation beginning more than 700,000 years ago. Each time, in response to geological and astronomical events, ice accumulated into vast sheets that ebbed and flowed over the landscape. The last episode, known as the late Wisconsin glaciation, covered much of northern North America with an ice sheet perhaps two or three miles thick at its center over Canada, and occurred between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago. The ice was responsible for sculpting much of the landscape of the northern U.S., including such prominent features as the Great Lakes and New York's Finger Lakes.

Working with University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Steve Foreman, Mickelson and Hooyer were able to date sediment that was laid down in a lake near the ice margin, a lake that encompassed parts of the UW-Madison campus and the city that are now high and dry. This lake was then covered by the glacier as the ice advanced to its westernmost extent near Cross Plains.

"This lake must have been at least 20 feet higher than Lake Mendota is now," says Hooyer.

To date the sediment, the researchers used a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence. The technique depends on the ability of minerals found in the sediment to record the time since they were exposed to sunlight. When tiny grains of minerals are exposed to sunlight, as they might be when suspended in the water column of a glacial lake, their clocks are reset. When the sediments are buried, electrons begin to accumulate within the minerals at a predictable rate, jumpstarted by ionizing radiation from surrounding sediment. Exposing the mineral sample to light under controlled conditions in the laboratory allows scientists to measure the number of electrons that have accumulated, and determine the length of time since burial.

"Exposure to sunlight zeroes the clock," Mickelson explains. "Once reburied, the electrons build up again in the mineral" and the clock begins to keep time again.

Using the technique, Mickelson, Hooyer and Foreman were able to definitively date the presence of the last glacier that covered most of Wisconsin with a massive sheet of ice.

For Mickelson, the work is validation for time spent haunting local and campus construction sites over the years in an effort to get a glimpse of geological history. He had noticed the ancient lake sediment at least twice before, once in the early 1970s when UW-Madison's Weeks Hall was under construction, and again when Grainger Hall was built in the early 1990s.

When the glaciers were melting away, runoff trickled into a large lake known as glacial Lake Yahara, which extended roughly from Stoughton to Cherokee Marsh to Middleton, and also covered parts of what is now the UW-Madison campus. The runoff carried sediment, including tiny mineral grains, which settled to the bottom of the lake and were buried over time.

"It is not unreasonable to think we had a big lake here (on campus) when the ice advanced as well," Mickelson says. "Sediments from this older lake are the sediments we are dating".

Taking advantage of the deep construction pit for the new Microbial Sciences Building, Mickelson and Hooyer were able to obtain samples of the sediment for testing, and to refine the dates for when Madison last experienced an Ice Age.
 
Ice Age Horses May Have Been Killed Off by Humans, Study Finds
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

May 1, 2006
Some 12,000 years ago, North American mammoths, ancient horses, and many other large mammals vanished within the short span of perhaps 400 years.

Scientists cannot be sure what killed them, but a new study suggests that humans aren't off the hook just yet.




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The large animals' disappearance at the end of the Pleistocene era (50,000 to 10,000 years ago) happened at about the same time that many large animals, or megafauna, went extinct around the globe.

Victims included species such as the saber-toothed cat and the diprotodon—a rhinolike beast that was the world's largest marsupial.

Now a new study of the fossil record fuels the debate about the cause of the creatures' fate.

In North America two major events occurred at about the same time as the megafaunal extinctions: The planet cooled, and early humans arrived from Asia to populate the continent.

For decades scientists have debated which of these factors was responsible for widespread megafaunal extinctions.

Was the climate change simply too much for the animals to withstand? Or did the ancient mammals succumb to human hunting pressure?

Many experts suggest a combination of these factors and perhaps others, such as disease.

"It's hard to see this as one of those things where a single piece of evidence will make it obvious what happened," said Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

"The phenomenon that people are trying to explain is not something that happened in one place at one time. It happened across the globe, at different times on different continents. I think that there are clearly multiple factors involved."

Humans Not Exonerated

Previous research had suggested that Alaska's caballoid horse species became extinct some 500 years before the first humans arrived.

Those dates would mean that overhunting could not have contributed to the extinction of Alaska's ancient horses—though humans could have contributed to the demise of North American mammoths, which stayed on the scene for perhaps another thousand years.




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Humans to Blame for Ice Age Extinctions, Study Says
Lions, Elephants to Roam the U.S. Plains?
Photos: Ice Age Cave Art

But Andrew Solow, a geostatistician at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and colleagues have published a statistical evaluation of the fossil record that suggests that humans shouldn't be exonerated just yet.

Their data, to be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that horses did disappear before mammoths, though only by perhaps 200 years.

Their findings also suggest that both species may not have gone extinct until after human arrival—so human hunting may well have played a role in their demise.

"You can't just take the latest fossil remains [and assign their date] as the time of extinction," Solow said. "There's a sampling issue.

"We constructed a confidence region—that's the set of dates that you can't rule out with confidence as the extinction times."

Those dates suggested the possibility that both caballoid horses and mammoths survived well past the generally accepted arrival dates for humans.

The results don't identify the cause of the extinctions, and experts say a fossilized "smoking gun" seems unlikely.

"Even if a fossil told you that [species] survived past the arrival of humans, it's still the case that there was climate change going on as well as hunting pressure," Solow said.

"I think the notion that there was a single cause is probably not right. It's probably more complicated than that."

The Smithsonian's Wing believes that the complicated circumstances leave paleobiologists and others with their work cut out for them to determine just why so many of the world's large animals vanished.

"I think that leaves everyone with a big job to do to investigate new sites, date remains, date human occupations, and try to do the best that they can," he said.

"It may take a long time to accumulate enough evidence. But this is the kind of thing that has to happen."

Ice Age

Edit to amend title.
 
Okay, as stupid and misleading headlines go, that one's more annoying than amusing. And I'm afraid the reportage is of the sort that gives people an entirely wrong impression of the field.

Since we don't know when humans arrived in North America; since we don't understand the mechanisms of mass extinction; and since we don't have more than the vaguest notion of the timing of the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions - of course we can't rule humans out as a factor. But we can't exactly find ourselves guilty, either!

This sort of slow, incremental work to gather the data that will eventually make hypotheses such as Overkill testable (though in its original form Overkill has already been falsified and I wish people'd get over it) isn't dramatic, but it's very important, and I wish reporters would discuss that angle instead of pretending there's a revelation hidden in here somewhere. Actually I don't suppose the reporter wrote the headline, so maybe I shouldn't be too hard on him.

Okay, rant over; now to look at the bright side.

It encourages me that someone is focusing on horses, because from the point of view of understanding megafaunal extinction they are extremely interesting. Item: Horses evolved in North America. Item: When horses were reintroduced to North America in historic times, they succeeded very well indeed, establishing a large and viable feral popularion so fast it makes your head spin. Item: At the time of megafaunal extinction, mammoths went extinct in Eurasia and horses did not. Item: At the time of megafaunal extinction, the grassland habitat which horses love so well was (so far as current data indicates) expanding at the expense of less horse-friendly habitats like forest and tundra. Item: As megafauna go, horses are more comparable to more species than charismatic mondomegafauna like the mammoth and the ground sloth.

Put it all together and, if we can figure out what happened to horses, we've got a good chance of figuring out what happened to the others, too. Camelids are another interesting species - they went extinct only in North America, and an attempted historic reintroduction did not pan out.
 
i guess i could have changed the headline, but it was NGs. they usually are more careful about these things. an interesting article and certainly food for thought (puts on nosebag).
 
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V. interesting. PeniG's reply took most of my rant...so, if you'll excuse me...me too (lazy)...hmm, perhaps other megafauna were lazy...damn, written my own extinction obit :lol:
 
Ice Age remains found during A46 widening work
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-no ... e-11094111

A46 dig Ice Age artefacts along with Roman remains have been uncovered

Archaeological remains from the Ice Age have been uncovered by workmen widening the A46 in Nottinghamshire.

Flint tools dating back to 11,000BC were discovered at Farndon during work to turn the road into a dual carriageway.

The stretch from Newark to Widmerpool has already revealed a Roman road and fragments of Roman pottery.

More than 100 archaeologists have worked to ensure important remains have been properly recorded and recovered.

Geoff Bethel, A46 Highways Agency project manager, said: "As the A46 follows the route of the old Roman road, we expected to uncover a number of artefacts from Roman Britain and we were not disappointed; but to uncover such rare flint tools dating back to the end of the Ice Age was very exciting."

The Department for Transport is spending more than £340m improving the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool.

The 17-mile (28km) stretch is designed provide a new, fast link between the A1 and M1.
 
Creswell Crags cave art site gets cash boost
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12938363

Creswell Crags The caves are in cliffs which run for hundreds of metres along a gorge
y
Related Stories

* Caves on world heritage shortlist
* Bid to preserve prehistoric site
* Ice Age cave art site preserved

Ice Age cave art site Creswell Crags is to be given a £38,000 boost from Derbyshire County Council.

The prehistoric attraction on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire has also been nominated as a World Heritage Site.

Creswell Crags, a series of limestone caves occupied between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, has produced numerous tools and unique rock art.

A site spokesman said the money will be used to help run its visitor centre.

The site is recognised as an important European place of cultural, archaeological and scientific interest.
 
A ground-breaking new study on DNA recovered from a fossil of one of the earliest known Europeans - a man who lived 36,000 years ago in Kostenki, western Russia - has shown that the earliest European humans' genetic ancestry survived the Last Glacial Maximum: the peak point of the last ice age.

The study also uncovers a more accurate timescale for when humans and Neanderthals interbred, and finds evidence for an early contact between the European hunter-gatherers and those in the Middle East – who would later develop agriculture and disperse into Europe about 8,000 years ago, transforming the European gene pool.

Scientists now believe Eurasians separated into at least three populations earlier than 36,000 years ago: Western Eurasians, East Asians and a mystery third lineage, all of whose descendants would develop the unique features of most non-African peoples - but not before some interbreeding with Neanderthals took place. ...

http://phys.org/news/2014-11-ancient-dn ... nomes.html
 
Oldest needle found in cave is 50,000 years old

The needle, crafted from the bone an an ancient bird, was made not by Homo sapiens or even Neanderthals , but by a long extinct species of humans called Denisovans, according to Russian experts.

It was found in Denisova Cave - after which the grouping was named - during annual summer excavations which have been in progress here for more than three decades.

Scientists "found the sewing implement - complete with a hole for thread - during the annual summer archaeological dig at an Altai Mountains

The cave - used by Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans - was used by early man for at least 288,000 years.

Can this be right or is it a misprint? There's a few others in the Mirror article.

In recent years it has provided a succession of revelations about our origins, notably a discovery by DNA analysis that our ancestors crossbred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A bracelet found in the cave in 2008 is also seen as being made by Denisovans. It has been dated to around 40,000 years ago.

Scientists found that a hole had been drilled in part of the bracelet with such precision that it could only have been made with a high-rotation drill similar to those used today.
 
"New evidence suggests human presence in a Yukon cave during the last ice age 24,000 years ago."


https://www.hakaimagazine.com/artic...ans-north-america-10000-years-earlier-thought
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/artic...ans-north-america-10000-years-earlier-thought
more at link above
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The bones came from excavations led by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars between 1977 and 1987 and have been in storage at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. At the time, Cinq-Mars and his team concluded that the Bluefish Caves showed evidence of occasional human use as much as 30,000 years ago. That is so much older than anything else found in the Americas that Cinq-Mars’s conclusions were widely disputed, and the three small caves were largely left out of discussions about the peopling of the Americas.

The idea of researching such a controversial site appealed to Bourgeon: “Alaska, Yukon, bone accumulations, caves, the first peopling. … That was it. That was the Spell of the Yukon!” she said by email.

Bourgeon sent six pieces of bone that showed evidence of stone-tool cuts to a lab in Oxford, England, for radiocarbon dating. The youngest, it turned out, was a 12,000-year-old caribou bone. The most ancient: the 24,000-year-old horse jaw bone.

The finding—published in the journal PLOS One—makes the Bluefish Caves the oldest known archaeological site in North America by a margin of almost 10,000 years—and confirms much of Cinq-Mars’s work.

Previously, the oldest accepted human occupations were at three sites in Alaska and one just over the border in Yukon, all dating to about 14,000 years ago.
 
The Ice Age‏@Jamie_Woodward_
Burial of a boy and girl at Sungir, Russia ~27,000 years ago. Together, these burials contained over 10,000 ivory beads. Modern experiments suggest each bead took about 40 minutes to make – a quite staggering investment #IceAgeDeath Illustration by Libor Balák #Russia

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7:17 PM - 12 Jan 2018
 
Frozen Foal.

This is the first picture of an ancient foal dug out of the permafrost in the Batagai depression - also known as the ‘Mouth of Hell’ - in the Yakutia region of Siberia.

Head of the world famous Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, Semyon Grigoryev, said: ‘The foal was approximately three months old (when it died).

‘The unique find was made in the permafrost of Batagai depression. The foal was completely preserved by permafrost.

‘The extra value of the unique find is that we obtained samples of soil layers where it was preserved, which means we will be able to restore a picture of the foal’s environment.’

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The Ice Age foal lived up to 40,000 years ago, it is understood.

It was buried at a level of around 30 metres in the tadpole-shaped depression, which is a ‘megaslump’ one kilometre long and around 800 metres wide.

‘We will report the exact time when it lived after studying the soil samples,’ said the scientist.

‘The foal has completely preserved dark-brown hair, its tail and mane, as well as all internal organs.

‘There are no visible wounds on its body.

‘This is the first find in the world find of a pre-historic horse of such a young age and with such an amazing level of preservation.’

https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/the-foal-that-came-in-from-the-cold-after-40000-years/
 
Ice age wolf cub & caribou dug up in Yukon

Two mummified ice age mammals – a wolf pup and a caribou calf – were discovered by gold miners in the area in 2016 and unveiled on Thursday at a ceremony in Dawson in Yukon territory.

It is extremely rare for fur, skin and muscle tissues to be preserved in the fossil record, but all three are present on these specimens, which have been radiocarbon-dated to more than 50,000 years old.

The wolf pup is preserved in its entirety, including exceptional details of the head, tail, paws, skin and hair. The caribou calf is partially preserved, with head, torso and two front limbs intact.

“To our knowledge, this is the only mummified ice age wolf ever found in the world,” said Grant Zazula, a local palaeontologist working with the Yukon government

“Hopefully further research on this ‘pup-sicle’ might yield some ancient DNA” that could provide new information about the wolf populations that lived in the Yukon at this time. “For example, where did they come from, and how are they related to modern wolves?”

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Ice-Age secrets revealed.

Twenty thousand years ago, in the thick of an Ice Age, Earth looked very different. Because water was locked up in glaciers hundreds of feet thick, which stretched down over Chicago and New York City, the ocean was smaller—shorelines extended hundreds of miles farther out, and the remaining water was saltier and colder.

A University of Chicago scientist led a study that recently announced the discovery of the first-ever direct remnants of that ocean: pockets of seawater dating to the Ice Age, tucked inside rock formations in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

"Previously, all we had to go on to reconstruct seawater from the last Ice Age were indirect clues, like fossil corals and chemical signatures from sediments on the seafloor," said Clara Blättler, an assistant professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, who studies Earth history using isotope geochemistry. "But from all indications, it looks pretty clear we now have an actual piece of this 20,000-year-old ocean."

Read more at https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blog...ver-ancient-seawater.html#COeiyJOPQmiFTHIw.99
 
Don't laugh, there used to be hyenas in the Arctic.

Modern hyenas stalk the savannas of Asia and Africa, but the animals’ ancient relatives may have had snowier stomping grounds: the Arctic.

Two fossilized teeth, collected in Canada in the 1970s, confirm a long-held hunch that ancient hyenas ventured into North America via the Bering land bridge, scientists say.

The teeth belonged to members of the extinct genus Chasmaporthetes, also known as the “running hyena” for their unusually long legs, researchers report June 18 in Open Quaternary. Like wolves, the creatures could sprint over long distances. That ability that may have enabled the hyenas to make the long trek to America from Asia. Running hyena remains crop up across the southern United States and central Mexico. But before the Arctic discovery, a more than 10,000-kilometer gap lay between them and their closest relatives in Mongolia.

“This new Arctic find puts a dot right in the middle of that,” says paleontologist Jack Tseng of the University at Buffalo in New York. “It actually confirms previous hypotheses about how hyenas got to the New World.”

https://www.sciencenews.org/article...tm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest_Headlines
 
Puppy from 14,000 years ago frozen in ice with slice of extinct rhino in stomach

The puppy was famously found at Tumat, in the Sakha Republic of Siberia, in 2011.

Since then a second frozen puppy was found nearby and its stomach is now to be examined closely.

The young creature, officially known as a prehistoriccanine, was either a dog or a wolf and had hairy tissue in its stomach thanks to its final meal.

Genetic analysis by Stockholm's Natural History Museum earlier confirmed the hairy skin inside the canine was woolly rhino and not - as suspected - cave lion.

At 14,400 years old, it means the mummified puppy ate one of the last animals from a species which died out around this time.

Dr Sergey Fedorov, from Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University, said: "I am very happy that DNA analysis has confirmed this as a woolly rhino.

Professor Love Dalen, an expert in evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a joint venture between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, earlier explained how scientists revealed the puppy’s last meal had been rhino.
“We have a reference database and mitochondrial DNA from all mammals, so we checked the sequence data against that and the results that came back -- it was an almost perfect match for woolly rhinoceros," he told CNN.

He said: "This puppy, we know already, has been dated to roughly 14,000 years ago.

“We also know that the woolly rhinoceros (became) extinct 14,000 years ago.

"So, potentially, this puppy has eaten one of the last remaining woolly rhinos.”

A twig was also found in it's stomach & one of the pieces of woolly rhino skin was rectangular, suggesting it may have been butchered by people.

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0_PAY-Tumat-Puppys-lunch-1-The-Siberian-Times.jpg
 
Remains of ice age cave bear found preserved in Russian Arctic

Reindeer herders in a Russian Arctic archipelago have found an immaculately preserved carcass of an ice age cave bear, researchers announced on Monday.

The bear, revealed by the melting permafrost, was discovered on the Lyakhovsky Islands with its teeth and even its nose intact. Previously, scientists only had been able to discover the bones of cave bears, that became extinct 15,000 years ago.

In a statement issued by the university, researcher Lena Grigorieva emphasised that this was the first ever discovery of a complete cave bear carcass including soft tissues.

“It is completely preserved, with all internal organs in place, including even its nose,”

A preliminary analysis indicated that the adult bear lived 22,000 to 39,500 years ago.

The head of the bear showing it’s full jaw and teeth still preserved.
 
Newly rediscovered and analyzed ice cores from a Sixties-era military project indicate Greenland's massive ice sheet last melted away around 2 million years more recently than previously believed. This casts doubt on our confidence in how stable the current ice sheet may be and how fast it could disappear.
Top-secret Cold War project found disturbing 'life-like' fossil plants under Greenland

Frozen soil that was collected in Greenland during the Cold War by a secret military operation hid another secret: buried fossils that could be a million years old. Recent analysis revealed plants that were so well-preserved they "look like they died yesterday," researchers said.

U.S. Army scientists dug up the ice core in northwestern Greenland in 1966 as part of Project Iceworm ... An Arctic research station named Camp Century was the Army's cover story for the project. But Iceworm fizzled; the base was abandoned and the ice core lay forgotten in a freezer in Denmark until it was rediscovered in 2017.

When scientists investigated the core in 2019 they discovered fragments of fossilized plants that may have bloomed a million years ago. Greenland's present ice cover was thought to be nearly 3 million years old, but the tiny plant fragments say otherwise, showing that at some point within the last million years — possibly within the last few hundred thousand years — much of Greenland was ice-free. ...

If the new research bears out and most of Greenland's ice vanished relatively recently, that doesn't bode well for the stability of its current ice sheet in response to human-caused climate change. ...

Based on isotope ratios, the study authors determined that the soil — and the plants that grew in it — last saw sunlight between a few hundred thousand and about a million years ago, the researchers reported. ...

"We definitely had an ice-free northwest Greenland in that span of time" ...

FULL STORY:
https://www.livescience.com/plants-under-greenland-ice.html

DETAILS AND ABSTRACT FOR THE PUBLISHED REPORT:
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/13/e2021442118
 
A vast vanishing.

Some of the first modern humans to settle in East Asia more than 40,000 years ago ranged across the vast northern China Plateau for thousands of years, where they hunted red deer and may have encountered Neanderthals and other archaic humans.

But sometime before the end of the last ice age, they vanished. By 19,000 years ago, the landscape was populated by another group of modern humans—the hunter-gatherers who were the ancestors of today’s East Asians, a new study of ancient genomes reveals. That group replaced the early modern humans in northern East Asia, the researchers suggest.

This population turnover in ice age East Asia eerily echoes what happened around the same time in Europe. There, the first modern humans arrived 45,000 years ago, only to be replaced by other groups of hunter-gatherers 19,000 to 14,000 years ago at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). “It’s exciting to see some real parallels in Europe and Asia,” says population geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School, who was not part of the new study. “There’s enough genomes now to show that there were real population replacements in East Asia, as well as Europe.”

The new study started with an ancient mystery. DNA from a male jawbone in Tianyuan Cave near Beijing proved that modern humans arrived in East Asia some 40,000 years ago. They were still there 34,000 years ago, according to DNA from a female skullcap found in Mongolia’s Salkhit Valley. But after that, their trail went cold: From 34,000 to 9000 years ago, the fossil record has a massive gap across the China Plateau, which extends from Mongolia to northern China and eastern Russia. By 12,000 years ago, newer styles of stone toolkits and pottery appeared in the region, but archaeologists debated who had made them—new migrants or the descendants of the earlier group. “There were definitely modern humans living in East Asia 40,000 years ago, but who knows what happened to them?” says paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/last-ice-age-wiped-out-people-east-asia-well-europe
 
I found this intriguing ice age related possibility in a foot note from the book The Alchemy of Color by Spike Bucklow (pp 179-180—it's a long foot note):

The Portuguese used ancient sea routes to trade with various tribes in Africa. The sea routes were rediscovered routes that had been used by the Carthaginians two thousand years before. "The Carthaginians' knowledge of ocean currents and winds may represent some of the last traces of a long-lost civilization" which existed before the last ice age. The conjecture of ancient knowledge from before the ice age rests on a Turkish map from 1513 AD, which shows the coast of Antarctica, buried under ice and "inaccessible for the whole of recorded history" until the 20th century. It is impossible to prove what knowledge the Carthaginians had access to since the Romans destroyed the library and "around half a million scrolls" when they conquered Carthage. Tantalizing.
 

28,000-year-old lion cub looks like it's just sleeping

She, along with another cave lion cub, were discovered frozen in the Siberian Arctic. Their teeth, skin, soft tissue and organs are mummified.

Even Sparta's claws are sharp enough to pose a risk to the scientists studying her.

These incredibly well-preserved remains will allow researchers to study the cubs' DNA, revealing more about the unique features of extinct cave lions.

Meanwhile, more research has concluded that Neanderthals, our Stone Age cousins who were contemporaries of cave lions, were painting in caves long before modern humans.
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Woolly mammoth and other Ice Age remains found in Devon

Found in a cave.

The bones, including those of a woolly rhinoceros, wolf and hyena, are thought to date to the last Ice Age - about 30,000 to 60,000 years ago.
The developers of Sherford, a new 5,500-home town which is being built, instigated archaeological work at the start of construction in 2015, which has continued ever since.

He said: "Construction happening at Sherford is the sole reason these findings have been discovered and it is remarkable that they have laid undisturbed until now.

The archaeological team has so far found the partial remains of a woolly mammoth and a woolly rhinoceros, along with a virtually complete wolf skeleton and the partial remains of a hyena, horse, reindeer, mountain hare and red fox.

The bones are now undergoing academic analysis but are expected to be given to the care of Plymouth's new museum, The Box.
 
Ancient magnetic signatures analysed.

Scientists in Sweden have been studying samples from Jersey to understand more about the Ice Age.

Samples were taken last year from the island's loess and raised beaches to try and increase the scientific data of the time. The samples have since been studied in specialist laboratories in Denmark and Sweden. They were collected by Dr Tom Stevens and Yunus Baykal from Sweden's Uppsala University.

MSc student Anya Hawkins has been looking at magnetic signatures in loess that might indicate wind direction at the time of deposition.

"I'm hoping to be able to reconstruct some of the past wind directions on Jersey from the dust deposits so for the past few weeks I've been working in the lab with lots of samples," she said.
.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-jersey-60361274
 
Ice Age discoveries on Jersey.

Archaeologists have found more than 25 artefacts dating back to Jersey's earliest history.

A group of researchers began surveying the former Ice Age landscapes off Jersey in May 2022. The team at Seymour Tower worked on a section known as Violet Bank - a type of coastal zone known as an intertidal reef.

Project leader Dr Matt Pope said the island's landscape helped educate him and his students about the Ice Age.

"This brilliant land mass had everything from the great Ice Age site of St Brelade through to La Houge Bie, to the later material. We're developing effectively a really high level archaeological field school, teaching students and putting them in contact with your incredible heritage."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-jersey-61745941
 
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