Cenozoic

After 10,000 years of extinction, this is when woolly mammoths will walk the Earth again

Walking the equivalent of twice around the world during a life-lasting 28 years, one wooly mammoth whose steps have been traced by researchers has proven the huge beast was a long-distance wanderer.

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Fossils found in New Zealand show that an ancient penguin was giant in size - reaching 1.77 meters in height and weighing 100 kg, the Associated Press and the France press reported.

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered a 9.7 million-year-old set of fossilised teeth they say could trigger the “rewriting” of human history.
The dental remains were found by scientists sifting through gravel and sand in a former bed of the Rhine river near the town of Eppelsheim.

A new examination of two 7.2 million-year-old fossils from southern Europe suggests that humans split off from the great apes several hundred thousand years earlier than we thought.

Chang et al. / Nature Communications / NPG

A research team led by German and Bulgarian scientists has claimed that the genealogical split between the great apes and humans happened several hundred thousand years earlier than originally thought, and in an entirely different location.

Prehistoric humans — perhaps Neanderthals or another lost species — occupied what is now California some 130,000 years ago, a team of scientists reported on Wednesday.

Plenty of previous evidence shows that humans hunted mammoths during the late Pleistocene, with some studies arguing that our species hastened the mammoths’ extinction.

However, a Siberian discovery shows a mammoth hunt high in the Arctic around 45,000 years ago, almost ten millennia before humans were thought to have walked that area.

A newly-discovered paleolithic elephant butchering site was found by joint researchers from the Ephorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Paleoanthropology group of the University of Tubingen. The area, called Marathousa 1, is at Megalopolis, Greece and is believed to be one of the oldest archeological sites in Greece.

A farmer living in the southern Turkish province of Kahramanmara??s Türko?lu district has found a number of pieces thought to be the fossil of an ancient elephant.