ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

In the Stone Age, some 8,000 years ago, people danced often and in a psychedelic way. This is a conclusion drawn from elk teeth discovered in the Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov burial site in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, whose wear marks and location in the graves indicate that the objects were used as rattlers.

Marine geologists and paleoclimatologists new research findings uncover new information about the underwater ancient cypress forest and the Gulf Coast's past.

Glaciologists analyzed Antarctic ice cores to understand the continent's air temperatures during the most recent glacial period. The results help understand how the region behaves during a major climate transition.

The biggest shark attack in history did not involve humans. A new study by earth scientists has turned up a massive die-off of sharks roughly 19 million years ago. It came at a period in history when there were more than 10 times more sharks patrolling the world's oceans than there are today.

An international team of researchers has now succeeded in reconstructing changes in rainfall in Central Asia over the past five million years. The information preserved within the sedimentary succession provides the missing link for understanding land-water feedbacks for global climate.

Seismic waves generated by earthquakes travel through Earth's solid iron inner core faster in the direction of the rotation axis than along the equator. Scientists created a core growth model to explain this. To fit seismic data, the model predicts that asymmetric growth of the core leads to crystal movement that preferentially aligns iron-nickel crystals north-south. The model implies that the core is only 0.5-1.5 billion years old, a fraction of Earth's age.

Researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics. Tim Waring and Zach Wood found that humans are experiencing a 'special evolutionary transition' in which the importance of culture is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution. Due to the group-orientated nature of culture, they also concluded that human evolution itself is becoming more group-oriented.

Scientists have built the smallest and best acoustic amplifier. And they did it using a concept that was all but abandoned for almost 50 years.