Category: Discoveries

Cost World

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An international expedition has discovered giant monitor lizards and 40 unidentified species of rats, bats, frogs, and fish tucked inside the crater of an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea. Photo essay of some of the critters here.

Just as interesting is the story of the expedition’s logistics. With the volcano situated deep in the rainforest 15 miles from the closest village, the explorers first had to drop some Adam Smith on the residents:

They also had to explain to local hunter-gatherers the concept of paying them to help establish a base camp near the village. Elders, trackers and boatmen were among 25 local people employed by the international team of 25 scientists and filmmakers, who also required a cook, a medic and a climbing expert to help them scale trees.

Concerned not to eat the village out of food, the scientists employed local people to plant sweet potatoes and a spinach-like crop in preparation for their expedition in January, reducing the amount of corned beef and rice flown in via helicopters, the only means of transport to the village.

I once heard an archaeologist say the reason more work wasn’t done at Meroë — the land of the Black Pharaohs — was racism. The real answer is cost and logistics. One of my frustrations with the portrayal of Egyptian archaeology on television is that camera crews only show the pyramids at Giza or the Valley of the Kings, never venturing into the oases or past the First Cataract of the Nile. To do so would involve leaving behind the convenience of Cairo and Luxor, which is another way of saying they’d have to spend more money. Now imagine scraping together the funds to delve into the deep deserts of Sudan without the profit motive of prime time behind you.

It’s telling that BBC camerafolks accompanied the Papua New Guinea expedition. Not that I begrudge them; if anything, universities should do away with their grant-writing seminars and instead school their field scientists in how to pitch TV execs. Maybe then we’d see more Meroë in the news.

Froggy photo by Ulla Lohmann for the BBC.

More Death From Above

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A new study says a comet did to the mammoth what an asteroid did to the T-rex:

Space rocks that slammed into the glaciers of eastern Canada some 12,900 years ago likely helped wipe out mega-animals like woolly mammoths and possibly the continent’s first human inhabitants called the Clovis people, according to a new study that adds to evidence that a trio of factors were involved.

The new evidence comes from recently discovered nano-sized diamonds, which researchers say are the strongest clues to date for an argument that could explain the region’s die-off during the late Pleistocene epoch.

This still isn’t a silver bullet. Like the overkill hypothesis, it doesn’t explain why some American megafauna went extinct while others — bison, moose, bighorn sheep — live on to this day.

I interviewed John Harris, the chief curator at the Page Museum in Los Angeles, a few years ago for a story. He told me that Pleistocene juniper twigs pulled from the brea showed distinct evidence of carbon starvation. This suggested that plant resources were diminished, which in turn affected herbivores and their predators. “When you review the herbivores that survived you’ll note they comprise ruminants (bison, deer) and omnivores (peccaries). Horses, ground sloths and proboscideans are hind-gut fermenters that failed to survive,” Harris said. If you’ve ever walked behind a horse, you know it leaves a lot of undigested plant matter in its path. Cud-chewers digest plants more efficiently; omnivores have a greater variety of food on which they can live.

Did the atmospheric results of the comet cause carbon starvation? So far so good, but it still doesn’t explain megafauna extinctions in other parts of the world. What I really want to know is why horses went extinct in North America but survived in Eurasia. Was the comet felt here more than there?

Eyes in the Sky Find Hidden Forest, Dope

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A conservationist tinkering with Google Earth discovered a 27-square-mile forest chock full of new species:

The mountainous area of northern Mozambique in southern Africa had been overlooked by science due to inhospitable terrain and decades of civil war in the country.

However, while scrolling around on Google Earth, an internet map that allows the viewer to look at satellite images of anywhere on the globe, scientists discovered an unexpected patch of green.

A British-led expedition was sent to see what was on the ground and found 7,000 hectares of forest, rich in biodiversity, known as Mount Mabu.

Full story here. The best kind of Eye in the Sky here.

Meanwhile, police in Switzerland recently used Google Earth to harsh the mellow of a couple of local pot farmers. Dude! So not cool.

New People of the Earth

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Mexican archaeologist Carlos Hernández believes artifacts found 15 years ago are products of a previously unidentified culture that also constructed a nearby stepped pyramid:

Based on the artifacts’ discovery near the pyramid, “it is likely that the Huapalcalco pyramid has been built by people from this new culture,” Hernández said.

Thomas Charlton, an archaeologist at University of Iowa, has worked in the state of Hidalgo.

He said that ample evidence—including the new artifacts—links a new pre-Hispanic culture to the Huapalcalco pyramid.

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis [that] near the Valley of Tulancingo, there is a site that looks like it existed between the fall of the Teotihuacan and the beginning of the Tula [Toltec],” Charlton added.

“We know that there’s an occupation [from this time] near Tulancingo.

“After the Teotihuacan, there were all sorts of smaller states throughout Mexico. It’s part of the cycle after the fall of an empire.”

That can’t be right. Didn’t Brian Fagan, in People of the Earth (10th ed., 2001), summarize the discovery of the Assyrian, Sumerian, and other civilizations, then comment: “Today, there are no more unknown civilizations to be unearthed”?

Photo credit Carlos Hernández Reyes via National Geographic.