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A prehistoric creature found in the Canadian Rockies has been named Siphusauctum gregarium, which is both a new genus and species. It lived 500 million years ago, when the area now nickenamed the “Tulip Beds” was underwater.
Siphusauctum has a long stem, with a calyx – a bulbous cup-like structure – near the top which encloses an unusual filter feeding system and a gut. The animal is thought to have fed by filtering particles from water actively pumped into its calyx through small holes. The stem ends with a small disc which anchored the animal to the seafloor. Siphusauctum lived in large clusters, as indicated by slabs containing over 65 individual specimens.
Lorna O’Brien, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto and her supervisor Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, report on the discovery today in the online science journal PLoS ONE.
“Most interesting is that this feeding system appears to be unique among animals. Recent advances have linked many bizarre Burgess Shale animals as primitive members of many animal groups that are found today but Siphusauctum defies this trend. We do not know where it fits in relation to other organisms,” said O’Brien.
(Image credit: Royal Ontario Museum)
Imagine a dragonfly the size of a seagull! You would have seen them 300 million years ago, as well as other B-movie sized insects. Why did they grow so large back then? A new theory says it’s because of oxygen, which insects absorb through their surface area. Wilco Verberk of Plymouth University found that insect larvae are very sensitive to oxygen levels compared to adult insects -and there was a lot more oxygen present in the Carboniferous period.
It’s likely the larvae of many ancient insects also passively absorbed oxygen from water and were not able to regulate their oxygen intake very well—a big danger when oxygen levels were so high.
One way to decrease the risk of oxygen toxicity would have been to grow bigger, since large larvae would absorb lower percentages of the gas, relative to their body sizes, than small larvae.
“If you grow larger, your surface area decreases relative to your volume,” Verberk explained.
Read more about the study at National geographic News. Link
(Image credit: Ned M. Seidler, National Geographic)
The idea of giant bunny rabbits may remind you of Night of the Lepus, but this is no movie -it’s prehistory. A new species called the Minorcan King of the Rabbits (Nuralagus rex) has been discovered on the island of Minorca. It weighed over 26 pounds and had rather small ears compared to rabbits we know today. These rabbits flourished on the Mediterranean island between 5 and 3 million years ago.
“N. rex was a very robust and peculiar rabbit,” project leader Josep Quintana told Discovery News. “Surely he was a very calm and peaceful animal that moved with slow, but powerful, movements.”
Quintana, a scientist at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology, and colleagues Meike Kohler and Salvador Moya-Sola describe the giant fossil rabbit in a Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper. They believe the rabbit lost the ability to hop, because the long, springy spine typical of modern bunnies was replaced by a short, stiff backbone.
The researchers think N. rex spent most of its days peacefully digging, searching for roots and tubers to eat.
Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Meike Köhler)
If you haven’t studied dinosaurs since you were an elementary school student, you have some catching up to do! As paleontologists find more and different fossils, our body of knowledge about the prehistoric reptiles has changed. Take the Stegosaurus, for example. What we thought we knew just a few years ago is different from what we think we now know.
Fossil footprints and detailed studies of its anatomy have proven that Stegosaurus didn’t drag its tail on the mud, but actually walked erect, like an elephant, with its tail held horizontally, parallel to the ground. Its back wasn’t as arched as they had us believe, and the neck was not carried horizontally as usually depicted, but upright, like a bird’s.
Also, the tail spike cluster (known among paleontologists as the “thagomizer”) didn’t actually point upwards, but sideways. This made the tail a much deadlier and more efficient weapon; to stab an attacking predator, Stegosaurus only had to swing its tail horizontally; punctures matching the Stegosaurus’ tail spikes have been found in the bones of predatory dinosaurs from the same age and place, proving once and for all that Stegosaurus wasn’t any less dangerous than the ankylosaurs that would evolve later.
And that’s just the first of ten dinosaurs we once thought we knew. Link -via the Presurfer
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The following is an article reprinted from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
by Lorenzo L. Love
Yreka, California
illustrations by Peaco Todd
It has often been said that the dog was the first animal domesticated by humans. The date of this has long been placed at 14,000 to 20,000 years before present. Recent analysis of mitochondrial DNA of dogs, wolves, and other canines show that dogs had actually split off from wolves 135,000 years ago. I propose that not only have paleontologists been mistaken about the date of the domestication of dogs, dogs were not even the first animals to be domesticated. This place of honor belongs to the ancestors of the common house cat, Felis catus.
The cat was the first animal to be domesticated, more than 4 million years ago, long before the genus Homo evolved. And in fact it was the cat, or rather the loss of cats, that molded and shaped the evolution of Homo. (If “domestication” doesn’t sit well with you when applied to the relationship between a prehuman primate and a cat, think of it as a quasi-symbiotic relationship.)
There are many unexplained matters in the early history of hominines. How could the australopithecines survive in Pliocene Africa? No tools for hunting, too small and weak to complete with other scavengers, teeth (in the gracile form) unadapted for plant eating, they seem to have been unable to even feed themselves. And the slow and small australopithecines would have been easy prey for the first large carnivore to come along. Where did they spend the night? In spite of their disadvantages, australopithecines managed to survive almost unchanged for 2 million years. How? And why did these survivors suddenly evolve into a new genus, Homo, just then the large carnivores were dying out? The answer to all these questions: the Pliocene Pussy Cat.
more …
A pterosaur fossil found in Liaoning Province, China, yields fascinating information about the prehistoric reptiles. Scientists believe the Darwinopterus pterosaur laid the now-fossil egg after it died.
Scientists think the adult was an expectant pterosaur mother that somehow broke her left wing, causing her to fall into the lake and drown. The body sank to the bottom and eventually expelled the egg.
“During the decay process, you get a buildup of gases and pressure inside the carcass, and that tends to expel things out,” said study co-author David Unwin, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in the U.K. The egg “didn’t go very far. It just came out of the body and sat there.”
In addition to the associated egg, the fossil has a larger pelvis than other known Darwinopterus fossils, which is consistent with the animal being a female.
Chemical analysis of the egg suggests that, instead of laying hard-shell eggs and watching over the chicks, as most birds do, pterosaur mothers laid soft-shell eggs, which they buried in moist ground and abandoned.
The fossil gives clues as to how the eggs were formed and hatched, and since this is the first conclusively female fossil, we’re finding out more about sex differences in pterosaurs. Read more at National Geographic News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image courtesy of Lü Junchang, Institute of Geology, Beijing)
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When you think of prehistoric cats, you probably think of Smilodon, the saber-toothed tiger. There were plenty of other big cat species you may have never heard of, like the Xenosmilus, the cave lion, or the American lion. Pictured here is Machairodus kabir, which probably resembled a modern tiger with the addition of huge fangs. Oh, and it weighed over a thousand pounds! Link -via the Presurfer
Scientists have unearthed the fossilized remains of a prehistoric bird with a wingspan of 17 feet! The Latin name given to the new species, Pelagornis chilensis means “huge pseudoteeth” because it had bony tooth-like projections.
The enormous wingspan gave P. chilensis certain advantages, like the ability to travel long distances and reach areas of the open ocean thick with potential prey. The researchers think it feasted on fish and squid, and may have trolled its hunting grounds with its lower beak skimming the water until its teeth could clamp down on a wriggling meal. But lead researcher Gerald Mayr says that a 17-foot wingspan is probably close to the maximum for a flying bird.
The bird flew over South America between 10 and 5 million years ago, which means it may have been seen by our hominid ancestors. Link
Previously: Argentavis magnificens
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Belgian scientist Olivier Lambert has discovered a new species of whale, a prehistoric sperm whale that was a real killer. Leviathan melvillei was the size of modern sperm whales, with a very big difference:
Today’s sperm whale has no functional teeth in its upper jaw and only small ones in its lower jaw (which are mostly used in fights). It feeds through suction, relying on a rush of water to carry its prey into its open mouth. But Leviathan’s mouth was full of huge teeth, the largest of which were a foot long and around 4 inches wide. This was no suction feeder! Leviathan clearly grabbed its prey with a powerful bite, inflicting deep wounds and tearing off flesh as killer whales do, but with a skull three times bigger.
Leviathan was at the very top of the food chain and it must have needed a lot of food. While modern sperm whales mainly eat squid, Lambert thinks that Leviathan used its fearsome teeth to kill its own kind – the giant baleen whales. At the same point in prehistory, baleen whales started becoming much bigger and they were certainly the most common large animals in the area that Leviathan lived in. Lambert thinks that the giant predator evolved to take advantage of this rich source of energy. He says, “We think that medium-size baleen whales, rich in fat, would have been very convenient prey for Leviathan.”
This whale swam off the coast of Peru 12 million years ago. There’s lots more about Leviathan melvillei at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
The Cro Magnon were said to be the precursor to the Homo sapiens, however we know very little about their religion, traditions, and way of life. What we do know is that their cave drawings were strategically placed in inaccessible areas. What were they trying to accomplish and what did the drawings mean?
What’s interesting about the Cro Magnon cave drawings is that the animals are quite lifelike in their orientation, yet the people drawn were not. Furthermore, the animals painted-bison, horses, wild boar, and bears-depict arrows and spears plunging into their bodies at the most critical points during a hunt. This same action is shared with the Native Americans, who similarly shot arrows into certain points within the animals to provide the animal with a swift death.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
Giants once roamed the earth, meaning many species of animals that are familiar to us have enormous extinct ancestors. Cracked looks at seven of them, some of which have been previously featured individually at Neatorama. Take a look at Argentavis magnificens.
As if answering the dare to make us feel more inadequate, the world gave us Argentavis magnificens, the largest flying bird in recorded history. These beasts possessed a wingspan between 19- and 26-feet, and a wing area of 75-feet, which you may notice is only slightly smaller than a Lear Jet. In addition to its staggering size and 240-pound weight, the bird is believed to have swallowed prey as large as cattle in one fell swoop.
Link -via Gorilla Mask
A strange assortment of prehistoric crocodilyform fossils have been found in Africa. Crocodilyforms are ancient cousins of today’s alligators, crocodiles, and caimans.
For instance, the rodent-like RatCroc had buckteeth for rooting through the ground after tubers or simple animals.
The flat-bodied PancakeCroc was the “ultimate sit-and-wait predator,” Sereno said. The animal would lie motionless and “wait for something stupid” to swim into its rail-thin, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) jaws, which were lined with rows of spiky teeth.
DuckCroc had a long, smooth, sensitive nose to poke through vegetation as well as hook-shaped teeth to snag frogs and small fish in shallow water.
And the plant-eating DogCroc had lanky legs that meant it was likely spry enough to run into the water if threatened.
By far the mightiest of the lot, BoarCroc was a 20-foot-long (6.1-meter-long) “saber-toothed cat in armor” that ate dinosaurs for dinner.
DuckCroc and DogCroc were previously known to scientists, and the rest are new discoveries by a team headed by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. The expedition found fossils of all five in Niger and Morocco. Link (with video) -via Digg
(image credit: Mike Hettwer/National Geographic)
Paleontologists Bill and Kris Parsons of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York found a dinosaur skull in Montana in 1997. In the years since, they’ve excavated the rest of the skeleton of a new dinosaur called Tatankacephalus cooneyorum.
“These were big dinosaur versions of a Sherman tank,” Bill Parsons said. “They were armored and they withstood whatever came at them, and they just kept going.” T. cooneyorum was about 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 meters) in length.
And this dinosaur had its share of protection, with two sets of stubby horns, one on the cheeks and the other around its eyes, two thick domes at the back of the skull and thickened areas around the nasal region.
Bill Parsons suspects T. cooneyorum was covered with hundreds or even thousands of bony plates equipped with spikes and a tail tipped with a club, similar to other ankylosaurs. Such protection, along with a swinging clubbed tail, would have kept at bay any of the small dinosaurs around at the time, Parsons said.
T. cooneyorum dates from around 112 million years ago. Link -via the Presurfer
(image credit: Bill Parsons)
Fossils of flying reptiles come in two versions: the older long-tailed pterosaurs and the more recent short-tailed versions. The fossil gap between the two was a mystery until 20 skeletons of a new species were discovered early in 2009 in northeast China. The new pterosaur was named Darwinopterus in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
“Darwinopterus came as quite a shock to us,” explained David Unwin part of the research team and based at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. “We had always expected a gap-filler with typically intermediate features such as a moderately elongate tail – neither long nor short – but the strange thing about Darwinopterus is that it has a head and neck just like that of advanced pterosaurs, while the rest of the skeleton, including a very long tail, is identical to that of primitive forms”.
The discovery lends credence to the theory that evolution is not an even process, but contains periods of rapid evolution. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth)
Fifteen years ago, Berkeley scientist Tim White and a team of researchers from Ethiopia and America found bones of a hominid older than the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy (A. afarensis). The team collected 110 bones, enough to reconstruct the skeletons of what was unveiled today as Ardipithecus ramidus. These bones date from 4.4 million years ago! Carl Zimmer points out several ways that this prehistoric species tells us new things about the development of humans. For example, in some animal species (including apes), male canine teeth are much bigger than the female version. These are the species in which competition for females often turns violent.
White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.
There have been a couple of hominid bones found that are even older than Ardipithecus, but none with enough fossils to even begin reconstructing a skeleton. Link -via Metafilter
David Derbyshire writes in The Daily Mail that ancient Britons may have developed a sophistated land navigation system among various sites and markers. Amateur archaeologist Tom Brooks has analyzed 1,500 prehistoric sites and found a pattern:
He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles – these are triangles with two sides the same length.
This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.
Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
Mr Brooks added: ‘The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
At the link, you can see a map illustrating Brooks’ hypothesis.
Image by flickr user Danny Sullivan used under creative commons license.
In a cave in the nation of Georgia, American, Israeli, and Georgian scientists discovered the oldest human-worked fibers ever known. The flax remnants date to about 30,000 years ago:
Flax was growing wild at the time. And it turns out not only to be a source of edible grain, but of fiber. These fibers were twisted — a sure sign that the flax had been spun.
Flax fibers woven together make linen, but in this case, linen doesn’t mean crisply pressed summer suits. Bar-Yosef says the fibers they found in the cave were probably braided together, macrame style.
“You can make headgear, you can make baskets, you can make ropes and strings, and so on,” he says.
Bar-Yosef didn’t find any of those objects in the cave — that’s too much to hope for 30,000 years later. But the researchers report in Science magazine that they did find evidence that the fibers were knotted and dyed — black, gray, turquoise and even pink. That’s consistent with other artifacts that show an artistic flair among these early people.
Photo: Eliso Kvavadze/NPR
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The following is a reprint
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader
Plunges Into the Universe.
Why should dinosaurs have all the fun? Here are a few prehistoric critters
that are every bit as bizarre as the strangest of the dinos:
Opabinia
Artist's rendering of Opabinia. Image: ArthurWeasley [Wikipedia]
Opabinia regalis fossil from the Burgess shale on display at
the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Image: Jstuby [Wikipedia]
It might be a distant cousin of shrimp salad or it might be unrelated
to anything alive today. Although it looked like something out of a science
fiction movie, this weird four-inch-long animal lived in the sea that
covered what is now Canada about 530 million years ago. Instead of legs,
it had 14 pairs of oarlike gills used for swimming. But the real strangeness
was saved for the head. It had five eyes - two pairs on stalks and another
sitting in the middle of the top of the head. In front of all these eyes
was a long flexible nozzle with a claw at the end. Scientists think the
claw captured food and carried it to the mouth.
Hallucigenia
Hallucigenia fossil. Photo: Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History
 This
appropriately named little beast bears no resemblance to any animal alive
or dead. Like Opabinia, it lived in Canada about 530 million
years ago. Hallucigenia is so bizarre that scientists are uncertain
which end is the front and which side is up. The most-accepted version
shows a wormlike body supported by seven pairs of spines. Along the top
of the body were seven long tentacles with two-pronged tips. One end had
a bulbous feature that looked a bit like a head but with no sign of eyes
or mouth. At the other end was a long tube that curved up over the "back,"
which may have been a mouth or an anus.
Carpoids
Bundenbach Carpoid fossil. Photo: Fossil
Museum
Virtually all animals have some kind of symmetry - either bilateral like
humans where your right hand is the mirror image of your left hand, or
radial like a starfish, which looks the same no matter which arm is pointing
up. But carpoids were completely asymmetrical. This distant relation of
the sand dollar lived in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere from 500
to about 350 million years ago. It looked something like a misshapen armored
tadpole, with a bulging body covered with stony plates and a long, segmented
tail that it used for swimming. Some scientists think that carpoids may
have been the ancestors of vertebrates.
Conodonts
Various conodonts. Image: USGS
For more than a century scientists kept finding microscopic, teethlike
objects in marine rocks dating from 510 to 210 million years ago. They
looked like tiny, cone-shaped teeth or combs, but there was no sign of
a jaw or any other bit of skeleton associated with them. There were quite
a few theories about what class of animal these conodonts belonged to,
but it wasn't until about 20 years ago that a fossil of the whole animal
was found. In appearance it was not spectacular. It was long and thin
like a worm, but it had eyes and a low dorsal fin, and the teeth were
located in the mouth. Many scientists now believe that the conodont may
be one of the earliest-known vertebrates.
Ostracoderms Some
of the earliest vertebrates were armored, jawless fish that were most
common between 430 and 370 million years ago. These fish had skeletons
made of cartilage, but their bodies were covered with plates of bone,
so it could be said that they were wearing their skeletons on the outside.
Ostracoderms could be up to 3 feet (1 m) long, but most were under a foot.
Their heads were usually covered by a semicircular shield with two small
holes for eyes. The rest of the body was surrounded by articulated plates
that allowed the animal to swim slowly by moving its tail from side to
side. These animals preferred a quiet environment like a lagoon where
they could drift along the bottom, straining edible particles out of the
mud.
Diplocaulus
Diplocaulus magnicornis. Image: ArthurWeasley [Wikipedia]
This 3-foot (1 m) long amphibian lived in what is now Texas about 270
million years ago. In most respects it looked like a large salamander,
but its head made it unique. The skull was shaped like a boomerang with
two small eyes in the front corners and the wings on either side. Scientists
are not sure why Diplocaulus's head is such an odd shape, but
they think it was either to make the animal swim better near the bottom
of the lakes and streams it lived in - or the wide head made it more difficult
for predators to swallow.
Lystrosaurus
Lystrosaurus georgi. Image: Dmitry Bogdanov [Wikipedia]
Before the age of the dinosaurs, there were a lot of strange-looking
reptiles, but few odder than Lystrosaurus. This 3-foot-long plant-eater
had a squat body and splayed legs like a lizard, but its muzzle was shortened
a bit like that of a bulldog. As if this wasn't attractive enough, from
the corners of its mouth hung two long tusks. The eyes and nostrils were
set high up, making some scientists think that the animal had lived the
way hippos do now, but recent findings show that Lystrosaurus
could also have lived in arid environments that were common about 230
million years ago.
Ambulocetus[YouTube Link] Halfway between the land-dwelling ancestors of whales and the modern marine mammals, Ambulocetus lived in what is now Pakistan about 50 million years ago. This 12-foot-long animal looked a bit like a cross between an otter and an alligator. It had a large head with long jaws and pointed teeth designed for catching and holding fish like an alligator, but the body was more like that of an otter. Scientists think it swam by moving its tail up and down like a modern whale rather than from side to side like a fish.Phorusrhacos About
20 million years ago, South America was an island continent with its own
unique forms of birds and mammals. Because no large mammalian predators
had evolved there, the top carnivore was a bird - Phorusrhacos.
These flightless birds stood up to 10 feet (3 m) tall and had a head the
size of that of a horse. Although they couldn't fly, they were very fast
runners. They could run down their prey, catch it with their powerful
talons, and tear it apart with their long, hooked beaks. These frightening
birds survived until about 3 million years ago, when a land bridge formed
between North and South America, allowing modern carnivores to invade
South America and give Phorusrhacos a little carnivorish competition.
(Image: Drawing of Phorusrhacos by Charles R. Knight [wikipedia])
Diprotodon
Diprotodon optatum. Image: Dmitry Bogdanov [Wikipedia]
Diprotodon australis in the British Museum of Natural History.
Before humans arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago, marsupials
were larger and more varied than they are today. The largest of all was
the Diprotodon, which was about the size of a hippopotamus. It
looked like a gigantic wombat (one of those furry, bearlike things), and
it ate leaves and grass. It wasn't a fast runner, but it was too large
for any of the native predators to tackle until humans came along. (We're
not pointing fingers or anything, but the Diprotodon became extinct
suspiciously soon after the first humans arrived. Coincidence?)
Glyptodon
Glyptodon asper in Naturhistorisches Museum Wien. Image: Arent
[Wikipedia]
The most heavily armored mammal of all time has to have been the Glyptodon.
About the size of a VW Beetle, this distant relation of the armadillo
roamed the plains of South American until 15,000 years ago. The first
humans in that part of the world encountered these strange beasts and
incorporated them into their legends. Glyptodon resembled a turtle
with patches of fur except that the high, rounded shell was made of many
small plates of bone. It had a long tail with a ball at the end of it
like the mace of a medieval knight.
Moropus
Moropus elatus, on display at the National Museum of Natural
History.
Image: Claire H. [Wikipedia]
When scientists first discovered the Moropus, they couldn't
believe that the horselike head and body belonged with the long claws
and massive feet found nearby. This 10-foot-long distant relative of the
horse looked like a mixed-up bag of spare parts. The head and neck looked
like a stunted giraffe, but the body was more like that of a bear. The
front legs were quite a bit longer than the back legs, and all four feet
were armed with long claws. Some scientists believe that Moropus
fed by rearing up on its hind legs and pulling down branches so it could
strip off the leaves with its long tongue. This animal lived in tropical
Asia until about 12,000 years ago.
Mammuthus
Woolly Mammoth at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia.
Image: Tracy O [Wikipedia]
Everyone
knows what a woolly mammoth looked like - a big hairy elephant with long,
curling tusks. Everyone also knows that they died out at the end of the
last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Guess again. For one thing, the
last mammoths weren't very mammoth; they were about the size of a buffalo.
They lived on Wrangel Island, off the northern coast of Siberia, and survived
after other mammoths became extinct. Scientists believe that the dwarf
mammoths were still around about 4,000 years ago, after the pyramids were
built! |
|
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The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
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 Previously
on Neatorama: Strangest
Dinosaur Names
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A glue formula used by people in South Africa 70,000 years ago required more intelligence than archaeologists normally attribute to Stone Age men. It was made by mixing red ochre with the gum of acacia trees. It turns out that the red ochre serves more than a decorative purpose, as researchers found out when they made some of the glue themselves.
“We discovered that when we used ochre, the glue is much more robust, and the stone tool doesn’t come off the shaft,” said study team member Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
But making the glue wasn’t easy for the ancient Africans.
It was mentally taxing work that would have required humans to account for differences in the chemistry of gum harvested from different trees and in the iron content of ochre from different sites.
“They couldn’t possibly have known about chemical pH or iron content … but they knew that certain combinations of things worked very well,” Wadley said.
![Wikipedia]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wooly_Mammoth-RBC.jpg){kind=link}