Science Megathread

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Predicting drought in the American West just got more difficult

People hoping to get a handle on future droughts in the American West are in for a disappointment, as new USC-led research spanning centuries shows El Niño cycles are an unreliable predictor.

Instead, they found that Earth's dynamic atmosphere is a wild card that plays a much bigger role than sea surface temperatures, yet defies predictability, in the wet and dry cycles that whipsaw the western states. The study, published Monday in Science Advances, is a detailed assessment of long-term drought variability.

The findings are significant for water management, agriculture, urban planning and natural resources protection. Recent droughts have claimed many lives and caused damaging crop losses, making drought forecasting a high priority. Meanwhile, the West faces rapid population growth at the same time that forecasts show dry times ahead due to global climate change.

"The main finding is not terribly hopeful for short-term drought prediction," said Julien Emile-Geay, a study author and associate professor of Earth sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "We found that, historically speaking, year-to-year droughts in the western United States were less predictable than previous studies have claimed."

New study examines 1,000 years of droughts in the West and beyond.

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They've narrowed it down -the age of the Earth's inner core is between 1 billion and 1.3 billion years old:

The age of the Earth's inner core revised

By creating conditions akin to the center of the Earth inside a laboratory chamber, researchers have improved the estimate of the age of our planet's solid inner core, putting it at 1 billion to 1.3 billion years old.

The results place the core at the younger end of an age spectrum that usually runs from about 1.3 billion to 4.5 billion years, but they also make it a good bit older than a recent estimate of only 565 million years.

What's more, the experiments and accompanying theories help pin down the magnitude of how the core conducts heat, and the energy sources that power the planet's geodynamo—the mechanism that sustains the Earth's magnetic field, which keeps compasses pointing north and helps protect life from harmful cosmic rays.

"People are really curious and excited about knowing about the origin of the geodynamo, the strength of the magnetic field, because they all contribute to a planet's habitability," said Jung-Fu Lin, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences who led the research.

The results were published on August 13th in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Was anyone else aware that Stonehenge (when it was still complete, and not in ruins) had special acoustic effects?  

Stonehenge enhanced sounds like voices or music for people inside the monument
Scientists created a scale model one-twelfth the size of the ancient site to study its acoustics

Welcome to Soundhenge. Better known as Stonehenge, this ancient monument in southern England created an acoustic space that amplified voices and improved the sound of any music being played for people standing within the massive circle of stones, a new study suggests.

Because of how stones were placed, that speech or music would not have projected beyond Stonehenge into the surrounding countryside, or even to people standing near the stone circle, scientists report in the October Journal of Archaeological Science.

To explore Stonehenge’s sound dynamics, acoustical engineer Trevor Cox and colleagues used laser scans of the site and archaeological evidence to construct a physical model one-twelfth the size of the actual monument. That was the largest possible scale replica that could fit inside an acoustic chamber at the University of Salford in England, where Cox works. This room simulated the acoustic effects of the open landscape surrounding Stonehenge and compacted ground inside the monument.

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Land conservation could play a huge part in solving human-induced climate change:

Protecting half the planet could help solve climate change and save species
A new map shows where new land protections could complement existing conserved areas

Earth faces two interrelated crises: accelerating loss of biodiversity and climate change. Both are worsened by human development of natural lands that would otherwise allow species to flourish and would store atmosphere-warming carbon, stabilizing the climate.

A new study argues that nations can help avert the biodiversity and climate crises by preserving the roughly 50 percent of land that remains relatively undeveloped. The researchers dub that conserved area a “Global Safety Net,” mapping out regions that can meet critical conservation and climate goals in a study published September 4 in Science Advances.

(...) Much of the land identified as important for biodiversity also stores a lot of carbon, underlining the connection between conservation and climate goals. But the researchers found an additional 4.7 percent of land, including forests in the northeastern United States, that would help keep climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere.

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Ocean carbon uptake widely underestimated

The world's oceans soak up more carbon than most scientific models suggest, according to new research.

Previous estimates of the movement of carbon (known as "flux") between the atmosphere and oceans have not accounted for temperature differences at the water's surface and a few metres below.

The new study, led by the University of Exeter, includes this - and finds significantly higher net flux of carbon into the oceans.

It calculates CO2 fluxes from 1992 to 2018, finding up to twice as much net flux in certain times and locations, compared to uncorrected models.

"Half of the carbon dioxide we emit doesn't stay in the atmosphere but is taken up by the oceans and land vegetation 'sinks'," said Professor Andrew Watson, of Exeter's Global Systems Institute.

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Experts reveal major holes in international ozone treaty
Major holes in ozone hole treaty must be addressed to avert stronger climate change and serious risks to human health, experts warn

A new paper, co-authored by a University of Sussex scientist, has revealed major holes in an international treaty designed to help repair the ozone layer, putting human health at risk and affecting climate.

Evidence amassed by scientists in the 1970s and 1980s showed that the depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere was one of the first truly global threats to humanity.

Chemicals produced through economic activity were slowly drifting to the upper atmosphere where they were destroying the ozone layer, which plays an indispensable role in protecting humanity and ecosystems by absorbing harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

In 1987, countries signed up to a treaty to take reparative action, known as the 'Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which was eventually ratified by all 197 UN member states.'

But in a paper published today in Nature Communications, experts have flagged major gaps in the treaty which must be addressed if the ozone layer is to be repaired and avert the risks posed to human health and the climate.

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Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

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I really hope this is not another one of those 'just around the corner' 'light at the end of the tunnel'-type stories regarding nuclear fusion...  

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest
A series of research papers renews hope that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achievable.

Scientists developing a compact version of a nuclear fusion reactor have shown in a series of research papers that it should work, renewing hopes that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achieved and eventually contribute to the fight against climate change.

Construction of a reactor, called Sparc, which is being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is expected to begin next spring and take three or four years, the researchers and company officials said.

Although many significant challenges remain, the company said construction would be followed by testing and, if successful, building of a power plant that could use fusion energy to generate electricity, beginning in the next decade.

This ambitious timetable is far faster than that of the world’s largest fusion-power project, a multinational effort in Southern France called ITER, for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That reactor has been under construction since 2013 and, although it is not designed to generate electricity, is expected to produce a fusion reaction by 2035.

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So now we know that what made our species (Homo sapiens) so adaptable and innovative as we were evolving in Africa wasn't just (natural) climate change -it was plate tectonics as well:

Surprising leap in ancient human technology tied to environmental upheaval
Sediment core evidence reveals the critical factors that may have given rise to strikingly complex behaviors some 320,000 years ago, around the time the first members of our species appeared.

For 700,000 years, our species’ ancient relatives in East Africa led rather stable lives, relying on an enduring set of skills and survival strategies. They made large, simple hand axes from nearby stones, perhaps using them to slice up prey, cut down branches, or dig for tubers.

But by 320,000 years ago—around the same age as the earliest fossil evidence of Homo sapiens—these early humans drastically changed their ways. They began crafting smaller, more nimble points that could fly through the air as projectiles, some made from obsidian gathered from many miles away. They collected red and black pigments—substances later humans frequently used in symbolic ways such as cave painting.

Now a new study in Science Advances suggests that one major reason behind this sudden shift in behavior lies underground: tectonic activity that fragmented the landscape.

Scientists have long pointed to changes in climate, such as the onset of wet or dry periods, as the key driving force behind the adaptation of our early ancestors. The new study puts this idea to the test by examining a detailed record of environmental changes over almost a million years, etched into a 456-foot-long core of sediment layers extracted from an ancient lake.

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It wasn't only men doing the hunting, as evidence suggests that women were routinely hunting big game alongside them:

This Prehistoric Peruvian Woman Was a Big-Game Hunter
Some 9,000 years ago, a 17- to 19-year-old female was buried alongside a hunter’s toolkit

(...) Per the paper, the hunter was not a unique, gender nonconforming individual, or even a member of an unusually egalitarian society. Looking at published records of 429 burials across the Americas in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs, the team identified 27 individuals buried with big-game hunting tools. Of these, 11 were female and 15 were male. The breakdown, the authors write, suggests that “female participation in big-game hunting was likely non-trivial.”

As Bonnie Pitblado, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who was not involved in the study, tells Science magazine’s Ann Gibbons, “The message is that women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted.”

The concept of “man the hunter” emerged from 20th-century archaeological research and anthropological studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies. In present-day groups like the Hadza of Tanzania and San of southern Africa, men generally hunt large animals, while women gather tubers, fruits and other plant foods, according to Science.

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Slightly unnerving, no?

Earth faster, closer to black hole in new map of galaxy

Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. But don't worry, this doesn't mean that our planet is plunging towards the black hole. Instead the changes are results of a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on new observation data, including a catalog of objects observed over the course of more than 15 years by the Japanese radio astronomy project VERA.

VERA (VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry, by the way "VLBI" stands for Very Long Baseline Interferometry) started in 2000 to map three-dimensional velocity and spatial structures in the Milky Way. VERA uses a technique known as interferometry to combine data from radio telescopes scattered across the Japanese archipelago in order to achieve the same resolution as a 2300 km diameter telescope would have. Measurement accuracy achieved with this resolution, 10 micro-arcseconds, is sharp enough in theory to resolve a United States penny placed on the surface of the Moon.

(...) Based on the VERA Astrometry Catalog and recent observations by other groups, astronomers constructed a position and velocity map. From this map they calculated the center of the Galaxy, the point that everything revolves around. The map suggests that the center of the Galaxy, and the supermassive black hole which resides there, is located 25800 light-years from Earth. This is closer than the official value of 27700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985. The velocity component of the map indicates that Earth is traveling at 227 km/s as it orbits around the Galactic Center. This is faster than the official value of 220 km/s.

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Greenland's melting ice sheet passed the point of no return
Also in August, in unsettling news, scientists said Greenland's melting ice sheet had passed the point of no return. In fact, glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking, a study suggested.

"Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss," said study co-author Ian Howat, an earth scientist from Ohio State University.

There are mitigating factors that show it's not all our fault:

Newly Discovered Greenland Plume Drives Thermal Activities in the Arctic

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This should answer the question, 'where did we come from?' from a purely scientific perspective:

Discovery boosts theory that life on Earth arose from RNA-DNA mix

Chemists at Scripps Research have made a discovery that supports a surprising new view of how life originated on our planet.

In a study published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, they demonstrated that a simple compound called diamidophosphate (DAP), which was plausibly present on Earth before life arose, could have chemically knitted together tiny DNA building blocks called deoxynucleosides into strands of primordial DNA.

The finding is the latest in a series of discoveries, over the past several years, pointing to the possibility that DNA and its close chemical cousin RNA arose together as products of similar chemical reactions, and that the first self-replicating molecules—the first life forms on Earth—were mixes of the two.

The discovery may also lead to new practical applications in chemistry and biology, but its main significance is that it addresses the age-old question of how life on Earth first arose. In particular, it paves the way for more extensive studies of how self-replicating DNA-RNA mixes could have evolved and spread on the primordial Earth and ultimately seeded the more mature biology of modern organisms.

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The melting of large icebergs is a key stage in the evolution of ice ages


source: Cool Antarctica

A new study, in which the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute (IACT) (CSIC-UGR) participated, has described for the first time a key stage in the beginning of the great glaciations and indicates that it can happen to our planet in the future. The findings were recently published in the scientific journal Nature

The study claims to have found a new connection that could explain the beginning of the ice ages on Earth

Antarctic iceberg melt could hold the key to the activation of a series of mechanisms that cause the Earth to suffer prolonged periods of global cooling, according to Francisco J. Jiménez-Espejo, a researcher at the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute (CSIC-UGR), whose discoveries were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.

It has long been known that changes in the Earth's orbit, as it moves around the Sun, trigger the beginning or end of glacial periods by affecting the amount of solar radiation that reaches the planet's surface. However, until now, the question of how small variations in the solar energy that reaches us can lead to such dramatic shifts in the planet's climate has remained a mystery.

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Warm oceans helped first human migration from Asia to North America

New research reveals significant changes to the circulation of the North Pacific and its impact on the initial migration of humans from Asia to North America.

The international study, led by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and published Dec. 9 in Science Advances, provides a new picture of the circulation and climate of the North Pacific at the end of the last ice age, with implications for early human migration.

The Pacific Ocean contains around half the water in Earth’s oceans and is a vast reservoir of heat and carbon dioxide. However, at present, the sluggish circulation of the North Pacific restricts the movement of this heat and carbon dioxide, limiting its impact on climate.

The international team of scientists used sediment cores from the deep sea to reconstruct the circulation and climate of the North Pacific during the peak of the last ice age, roughly 21,000 years ago. Their results reveal a dramatically different circulation in the ice age Pacific, with vigorous ocean currents creating a relatively warm region around the modern Bering Sea.

“Our data shows that the Pacific had a warm current system during the last ice age, similar to the modern Atlantic Ocean currents that help to support a mild climate in Northern Europe,” said lead author James Rae, a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews.

The warming from these ocean currents created conditions more favorable for early human habitation, helping address a long-standing mystery about the earliest inhabitants of North America.

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Scientists find unexpected animal life far beneath Antarctica’s floating ice shelves
The discovery of what appear to be sponges in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of ice has biologists baffled.

Animal life was not what scientists were expecting to find in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of floating Antarctic ice, but it seems to have found a way with the discovery of sea creatures living in the extreme environment.

Geologists taking sediment cores from the seafloor beneath the giant Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf on the southern edge of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea discovered what biologists believe are types of sponge. The finding was published Monday in Frontiers in Marine Science.

The geologists were more than 150 miles from the open ocean when they bored a hole through the 3,000-foot-thick ice with a hot-water drill and lowered a coring device and a video camera into the dark seawater below it.

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Land conservation could play a huge part in solving human-induced climate change:

Protecting half the planet could help solve climate change and save species
A new map shows where new land protections could complement existing conserved areas

Earth faces two interrelated crises: accelerating loss of biodiversity and climate change. Both are worsened by human development of natural lands that would otherwise allow species to flourish and would store atmosphere-warming carbon, stabilizing the climate.

A new study argues that nations can help avert the biodiversity and climate crises by preserving the roughly 50 percent of land that remains relatively undeveloped. The researchers dub that conserved area a “Global Safety Net,” mapping out regions that can meet critical conservation and climate goals in a study published September 4 in Science Advances.

(...) Much of the land identified as important for biodiversity also stores a lot of carbon, underlining the connection between conservation and climate goals. But the researchers found an additional 4.7 percent of land, including forests in the northeastern United States, that would help keep climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere.

As a follow-up:

There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way.
Dozens of countries are backing an effort that would protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have been disregarded, or worse, in the past.

With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.

But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much.

In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous people put their bodies on the line to protect native lands threatened by loggers and ranchers. In Canada, a First Nations group created a huge park to block mining. In Papua New Guinea, fishing communities have set up no-fishing zones. And in Guatemala, people living in a sprawling nature reserve are harvesting high-value timber in small amounts. In fact, some of those logs could end up as new bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“If you’re going to save only the insects and the animals and not the Indigenous people, there’s a big contradiction,” said José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, who leads an umbrella group, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin. “We’re one ecosystem.”

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...and there was light:

How did early life on Earth start? It could have been lightning, study says


Cloud-to-ground lightning during a storm in Iowa. Kevin Skow/NOAA Photo Library

Lightning strikes could have sparked life on the early Earth, a new study suggests.

According to the research, billions of years ago, the bolts blasting into Earth would have unlocked the necessary minerals for the basis of life to begin.

“This work helps us understand how life may have formed on Earth and how it could still be forming on other, Earth-like planets,” said study lead author Benjamin Hess of Yale University.

The emergence of life on Earth was dependent on a precise cocktail of critical ingredients, one of which is phosphorus, a key component of DNA, RNA and cell membranes.

Phosphorus is essential to life and plays a key role in all life processes from movement to growth and reproduction.

"Specifically, phosphorus forms the backbone of the double helix structure of DNA and RNA, and phosphorus is part of the lipid layers which make up the cell wall, or membrane. So, phosphorus is needed for molecules that form basic cell structures and control key cell functions like reproduction," Hess told USA TODAY.

Prior to this study, it had been thought that meteorites provided the needed ingredients for life on Earth to begin.

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Physicists Discover the Elusive Odderon, First Predicted 50 Years Ago

Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery.

The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the name for a compound of three gluons that gets exchanged between protons (or a proton and its antimatter twin, the antiproton) when they collide violently but aren’t destroyed. Gluons are subatomic particles so named because they “glue” together other particles called quarks; quarks are the tiny things that make up the bigger particles like protons and neutrons that form the atoms we all know and love.

Gluons are funny in that they don’t like to be alone; they’re almost always found together. When it’s an even-numbered group of gluons (two, four, etc.), we call it a pomeron. When the number of gluons in the group is odd (three, five, etc.), well, you guessed it: That’s an odderon. The odderon, for mysterious reasons, is very rarely produced, and though hints of it have popped up over the decades, the evidence was never quite strong enough to say it existed for sure. But the generally accepted theory of quantum physics says odderons should exist, so scientists have continued to hunt for them.

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Knowing what we now know of quantum physics, what could Yoda be referring to by 'the Force'?  

Gluons, maybe?

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The remains of another ancient planet are believed to have been found within our own planet, from the same cataclysmic impact that created our Moon:

Remains of impact that created the Moon may lie deep within Earth


An artist's rendering of the collision that created the moon (Paul Wootton/ /Science Photo Library/Corbis)

Scientists have long agreed that the Moon formed when a protoplanet, called Theia, struck Earth in its infancy some 4.5 billion years ago. Now, a team of scientists has a provocative new proposal: Theia’s remains can be found in two continent-size layers of rock buried deep in Earth’s mantle.

For decades, seismologists have puzzled over these two blobs, which sit below West Africa and the Pacific Ocean and straddle the core like a pair of headphones. Up to 1000 kilometers tall and several times that wide, “they are the largest thing in the Earth’s mantle,” says Qian Yuan, a Ph.D. student in geodynamics at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe. Seismic waves from earthquakes abruptly slow down when they pass through the layers, which suggests they are denser and chemically different from the surrounding mantle rock.

The large low-shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs), as seismologists call them, might simply have crystallized out of the depths of Earth’s primordial magma ocean. Or they might be dense puddles of primitive mantle rock that survived the trauma of the Moon-forming impact. But based on new isotopic evidence and modeling, Yuan believes the LLSVPs are the guts of the alien impactor itself. “This crazy idea is at least possible,” says Yuan, who presented the hypothesis last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

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Does everyone remember Christian fundamentalist claims that humans lived alongside dinosaurs?  They were wrong about humans, obviously, but there is a possibility they weren't entirely wrong as far as our distant ancestors are concerned:

Did ancient primates walk alongside T. rex? New evidence backs up theory.
The oldest known primate fossils were dated to just after the extinction event 66 million years ago—suggesting some primate ancestors lived even longer ago.


Image credit: Andrey Atuchin

Shortly after an asteroid strike triggered a cataclysmic extinction event 66 million years ago, a group of mammals with a proclivity for climbing trees and eating fruit began to thrive. These animals—the early relatives of primates—would give rise to a lineage that led to the first monkeys, including great apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and eventually, humans.

Now, scientists have discovered fossils of the oldest known primate among a cache of unusual teeth tucked away in a museum drawer for decades. Some of these teeth, recently described in the journal Royal Society Open Science, belonged to the new species Purgatorius mckeeveri, a pint-sized precursor to modern primates that lived 65.9 million years ago, just 100,000 years after the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period.

“It reconfigures our view of evolution,” says Gregory Wilson Mantilla, lead author of the study and a biology professor at the University of Washington who studies early mammals.

The discovery also bolsters a theory that the ancestors of primates lived alongside the dinosaurs—and somehow survived the extinction event that killed off about three-quarters of life on Earth. Two of the teeth in the new study belonged to a second, previously known species, Purgatorius janisae, which also lived 65.9 million years ago. And if two ancient primate species existed at this time, some unknown animal must have come before.

“The critical thing about there being two species is it drags the origin of the group further back,” says Mary Silcox, a paleontologist with the University of Toronto who was not involved with the study. “They have to have come from somewhere.”

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NASA measures direct evidence humans are causing climate change

It may come as a surprise, given the extensive body of evidence connecting humans to climate change, that directly-observed proof of the human impact on the climate had still eluded science. That is, until now.

In a first-of-its-kind study, NASA has calculated the individual driving forces of recent climate change through direct satellite observations. And consistent with what climate models have shown for decades, greenhouse gases and suspended pollution particles in the atmosphere, called aerosols, from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for the lion's share of modern warming.

In other words, NASA has proven what is driving climate change through direct observations — a gold standard in scientific research.

"I think most people would be surprised that we hadn't yet closed this little gap in our long list of evidence supporting anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change," says Brian Soden, co-author of the study and professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

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Ancient eggshells and a hoard of crystals reveal early human innovation and ritual in the Kalahari


The archaeological site at a rock shelter in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert. More than 100,000 years ago, people used the so-called Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter for spiritual activities. (Photo by Jayne Wilkins)

A rockshelter in South Africa’s Kalahari documents the innovative behaviours of early humans who lived there 105,000 years ago. We report the new evidence today in Nature.

The rockshelter site is at Ga-Mohana Hill — a striking feature that stands proudly above an expansive savanna landscape.

Many residents of nearby towns consider Ga-Mohana a spiritual place, linked to stories of a great water snake. Some community members use the area for prayer and ritual. The hill is associated with mystery, fear and secrecy.

Now, our findings reveal how important this place was even 105,000 years ago, documenting a long history of its spiritual significance. Our research also challenges a dominant narrative that the Kalahari region is peripheral in debates on the origins of humans.

We know our species, Homo sapiens, first emerged in Africa. Evidence for the complex behaviours that define us has mostly been found at coastal sites in South Africa, supporting the idea that our origins were linked to coastal resources.

This view now requires revision.

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https://twitter.com/BBCPallab/status/1379883999909326850