Tag Archives: new evidence

Missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 ‘deliberately crashed’ in 2014, shows new evidence

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The sudden disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on March 8, 2014 was a deliberate attempt to crash the plane, said a report by The Independent, citing the discovery of a landing gear door of the ill-fated plane by a Madagascar fisherman. It further, suggested that the pilot “deliberately downed” the aircraft resulting in the loss of lives of all 239 passengers onboard.

The report said the gear door, found at the home of a fisherman named Tataly 25 days ago, was the material evidence that explains how the pilot “intended to destroy” the plane. It quoted British engineer Richard Godfrey and an American MH370 wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson to support the claim.

“The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris item lead to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible. The crash of MH370 was anything but a soft landing on the ocean,” Godfrey was quoted as saying.

MH370

File photo of MH370; A Madagascar fisherman found door gear of MH370, shows new evidence

In 2017, the fisherman found the landing gear door that washed ashore after the tropical storm Fernando and kept it with him for five years without knowing its significance, while his wife used it as a washing board.

“The combination of the high speed impact designed to break up the aircraft and the extended landing gear designed to sink the aircraft as fast as possible both show a clear intent to hide the evidence of the crash,” Independent quoted a report published by the experts as saying.

How MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014?

The Beijing-bound MH370 disappeared off the radar about 40 minutes after take-off from Kuala Lumpur on the fateful night of March 8, 2014 when its communication systems were switched off and the flight changed the route into the southern Indian Ocean.

The probe concluded that the plane crashed in a remote area of about 232,000 kilometers off the sea bed. So far, some suspected fragments of the aircraft have been recovered from beaches in Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa, and Pemba Island (Zanzibar).

Malaysia, Australia, and China, who carried out the first search at a cost of over $151 million, suspended the probe in January 2017. even the US-based seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity, which conducted a second search, yielded no result.

Breastfeeding saved infants in Ice Age, led to bigger breast size in humans: Study

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Breast feeding might have played a criticial role in infant survival during the last ice age, and it might have led to a common genetic mutation in East Asians and Native Americans, which could have affected the shape of their teeth, says a new study.

The genetic mutation, which probably occurred 20,000 years ago, in turn led to more density of mammary ducts in the breasts, potentially providing more fat and vitamin D to infants living in the far north where the scarcity of ultraviolet radiation makes it difficult to produce vitamin D in the skin, said researchers.

If this genetic mutation is due to selection for increased mammary ductal branching, then this would be the first evidence of natural selection among the humans. "This highlights the importance of the mother-infant relationship and how essential it has been for human survival," said Leslea Hlusko, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The gene controlling mammary duct growth also affected the shape of human incisors. The genetic mutation affected the ancestral population living in the far north during the last Ice Age, hence resulting in shovel-shaped incisors among Native Americans and northeastern Asian populations. This trait is rare in others.

The finding helps in understanding the origins of dense breasts among humans, which is a major factor behind the breast cancer.

For the study, Hlusko and her team examined the occurrence of shovel-shaped incisors in archeological populations to estimate the time and place of evolutionary selection for the trait. They found that nearly 100 percent of Native Americans prior to European colonization had shoveled incisors, and about 40 percent of East Asians today have this trait.

"When you have shared genetic effects across the body, selection for one trait will result in everything else going along for the ride," Hlusko said.

The vitamin D connection

Getting enough vitamin D is a big problem in northern latitudes because the sun is low on the horizon all year long. Sun doesn’t shine above the Arctic Circle at all for part of the year. Lack of vitamin D forced Siberians and Inuit to hunt for animal fat but babies were at a loss, thus causing the natural selection in the increased mammary duct.

Previous genetic analysis of living humans concluded that the mutation arose in northern China due to selection for more sweat glands or sebaceous glands during the last ice age but Hlusko said that it is not a satisfying explanation.

The Beringian standstill

The so-called Beringian standstill coincided with the height of the Last Glacial Maximum between 18,000 and 28,000 years ago as the climate became drier and cooler. People who had been living in Siberia moved into Beringia, where they were isolated and the species with locally adaptive traits arose.

Hlusko and her colleagues outlined many threads of evidence in their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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Photograph of human upper incisors with significant "shoveling," anatomical variation influenced by the EDAR V370A allele alongside an increase in mammary duct branching.(Christy G. Turner, II, courtesy G. Richard Scott)

First human migration out of Africa began 90,000 years ago, far wider than previously thought: Study

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A bone, identified instantly as a human middle finger by an archaeologist in Saudi Arabia turned out to be 88,000 years old sending the scientists into ecstasy. The excavation was led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The bone is the oldest fossil of Homo Sapiens species to ever be found outside of Africa and the Levant or the present Middle-East.

Prior to this discovery, it was thought that early migration into Eurasia remained restricted to the Mediterranean forests of the Levant, on the doorstep of Africa.

The middle finger bone fossil found at the Al Wusta site shows that there were both multiple dispersals out of Africa, and these spread further than previously known.

General view of the excavations at the Al Wusta site, Saudi Arabia. The ancient lake bed (in white) is surrounded by sand dunes of the Nefud Desert.(Michael Petraglia)

Found in the Nefud desert in 2016 by Iyad Zalmout, a scientist with the Saudi Geological Survey, as a part of the excavations at the Al Wusta site, the finger joint just lying in the sand, it did not match the Neanderthals and was sent to the University of Cambridge, where specialists made 3D scan to confirm it as Homo Sapiens.

The 3.2cm-long middle finger, along with other samples found at the Al Wusta site, was sent to the Australian National University in Canberra where researchers conducted uranium series dating to confirm that it was 88,000 years old.

Project Lead Michael Petraglia said, “The Arabian Peninsula has long been considered to be far from the main stage of human evolution. This discovery firmly puts Arabia on the map as a key region for understanding our origins and expansion to the rest of the world. As fieldwork carries on, we continue to make remarkable discoveries in Saudi Arabia.” The results of this study were published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The ancient fossils ever found was 120,000 years old, found in China but their human origin was not dated precisely so far.

Oldest 8500-year-old Copper Smelting Unit Unearthed in Turkey

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A team of archaeological scientists have found the earliest copper smelting event at the Late Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, confirming the claim of the site’s archaeological importance.

Whether metallurgy was such an exceptional skill to have only been invented once or repeatedly at different locations is therefore still contentious. The proponents of the latter have just provided conclusive evidence of the incidental nature of what was held to be the key find for the single origin of metallurgy claim.

Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the re-examination of a c. 8,500-year-old by-product from metal smelting, or ‘slag’, from the site of Çatalhöyük presents the conclusive reconstruction of events that led to the firing of a small handful of green copper minerals.

“From the beginning of our study it was clear that the small handful of ‘slag’ samples were only semi-baked. This indicated a non-intentional, or accidental copper firing event, but the ‘eureka’ moment of how and why that happened arrived quite late”, says Dr Miljana Radivojevic, lead author and researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research of the University of Cambridge.

“The co-authors had a lengthy debate about why the semi-baked copper minerals were deposited in a burial, but then when our pigment specialist (Camurcuo?lu) mentioned earlier examples of green and blue copper pigments in graves and our excavation specialist (Farid) reported firing events that charred bones and materials in the shallow graves, the penny started to drop”, she explains.

“The native copper artefacts from the site of Çatalhöyük were not chemically related to this non-intentionally produced metallurgical slag sample”, adds Professor Ernst Pernicka, of the University of Heidelberg, further strengthening the claim these authors elaborated in the article.

Professor Thilo Rehren, of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, explains the significance of these results: “The invention of metallurgy is foundational for all modern cultures, and clearly happened repeatedly in different places across the globe. As we have seen, not every piece of semi-molten black and green stuff from an excavation is necessarily metallurgical slag. Only materials science methods, in combination with good archaeological records, can distinguish between debris from intentional metal smelting and accidental waste from a destructive fire”.

“It has been a long journey for the materials now identified as vitrified copper minerals to be recognised as once important solely for their colour properties, and we can finally put this debate to rest”, comments Professor Ian Hodder, from Stanford University, who has been directing the excavations of Çatalhöyük for the past 25 years.

Earlier, remains of a majestic female statue was uncovered at the archaeological site of Tayinat in Turkey. Excavations led by University of Toronto archaeologists in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border have unearthed a beautifully carved head and upper torso of a female figure. The remnants are largely intact, although the face and chest appear to have been intentionally – possibly ritually – defaced in antiquity.

The preserved remnants are made of basalt and measure 1.1 metres long and .7 metres wide, suggesting the full figure of the statue would have been four to five metres high. The lower body is missing. The statue was found within a monumental gate complex that would have provided access to the upper citadel of Kunulua – later Tayinat – the capital of the Iron Age Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 1000-738 BCE). The site is approximately 75 kilometres west of the Syrian city of Aleppo.