![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Basics: The Ambivalent Bond With a Ball of Fur
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, our cat, Cleo, died of liver failure. My husband and daughter buried her in the backyard, not far from the grave of our other cat, Manny, who had died just a few months earlier of mouth cancer.
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she’d been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief — not so much its intensity as its specificity.
( Read More )
Fossil DNA Expands Neanderthal Range
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
In the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal divided the world outside Europe between them. That was not the first time that two rival groups carved up the globe. More than 50,000 years ago, all the world outside Africa was divided between two archaic human species.
The Neanderthals held sway in Europe and the Near East, bottling up the troublesome ancestors of modern humans in Africa, and Homo erectus dominated East Asia. But a new discovery suggests that this division of the world may not have been quite so clear-cut.
( Read More )
Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia.
Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates.
Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.
( Read More )
Observatory: In a Primitive Tool, Evidence of Trading in the Pacific
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
East Polynesia, those remote eastern Pacific islands like Tahiti, the Marquesas and the Tuamotus, was the last part of the planet to be settled, reached by peoples from the western Pacific who voyaged over broad stretches of ocean in canoes, starting about 4,000 years ago.
There has always been a question of how expert these ocean travelers were — whether the voyages were lucky accidents or purposeful expeditions. Most anthropologists think these voyagers knew what they were doing, but no one knows for certain, nor whether there was extensive cross-ocean trading among the islands once they were settled.
But Kenneth D. Collerson and Marshall I. Weisler of the University of Queensland in Australia provide some clues, through a study of old stone adzes found on the Tuamotus.
( Read More )
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, our cat, Cleo, died of liver failure. My husband and daughter buried her in the backyard, not far from the grave of our other cat, Manny, who had died just a few months earlier of mouth cancer.
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she’d been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief — not so much its intensity as its specificity.
( Read More )Fossil DNA Expands Neanderthal Range
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
In the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal divided the world outside Europe between them. That was not the first time that two rival groups carved up the globe. More than 50,000 years ago, all the world outside Africa was divided between two archaic human species.
The Neanderthals held sway in Europe and the Near East, bottling up the troublesome ancestors of modern humans in Africa, and Homo erectus dominated East Asia. But a new discovery suggests that this division of the world may not have been quite so clear-cut.
( Read More )Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia.
Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates.
Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.
( Read More )Observatory: In a Primitive Tool, Evidence of Trading in the Pacific
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, October 2, 2007
East Polynesia, those remote eastern Pacific islands like Tahiti, the Marquesas and the Tuamotus, was the last part of the planet to be settled, reached by peoples from the western Pacific who voyaged over broad stretches of ocean in canoes, starting about 4,000 years ago.
There has always been a question of how expert these ocean travelers were — whether the voyages were lucky accidents or purposeful expeditions. Most anthropologists think these voyagers knew what they were doing, but no one knows for certain, nor whether there was extensive cross-ocean trading among the islands once they were settled.
But Kenneth D. Collerson and Marshall I. Weisler of the University of Queensland in Australia provide some clues, through a study of old stone adzes found on the Tuamotus.
( Read More )
