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Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

Laili rock shelter on the island of Timor, north of Australia, appears to provide the smoking gun to rule out what was once considered the obvious route for one of the greatest and least understood migrations in human history. In the process, it may tell us something important about how people first arrived on Timor itself, and islands like it.The ancient presence of humans in Australia provides a major puzzle for anthropologists, particularly since it became clear how far back that began. Australia’s wildlife proves it was never connected by a land bridge to Southeast Asia, so the first inhabitants must have had the capacity to cross wide expanses of water. Yet interaction with what is now Indonesia apparently stopped, only resuming far more recently.Initially, it was widely believed that the first Australians reached their new home from Timor, now referred to as the “southern route.” Although today this requires crossing hundreds of kilometers of water, during the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower, Australia stretched much further northwest.However, for some time Professor Sue O’Connor of the Australian National University and other anthropologists have been raising questions about this path. There is no evidence of human habitation on Timor prior to around 50,000 years ago. Meanwhile, the oldest stone tools in Australia have been found in a layer of sediment deposited at Madjedbebe 65,000 years ago.Around a dozen sites of human habitation on Timor have been excavated, with no signs of an earlier human presence. However, O’ Connor told IFLScience that at most of these sites, the oldest evidence of humans sits directly on bedrock. “If the human presence is at the base of the cave a big erosion event may have removed all the sediment,” leaving uncertainty as to what was there before.However, at Laili on Timor’s north coast, O’Connor and co-authors of a new study found layers thick with tools, the remains of fire, and fishbones dating back to around 44,000 years ago, then a sudden shift. Below were meters of yellow sediment, with no signs of human presence other than the occasional younger tool or bone that had been pushed down. The contrast between this yellow sediment and the darker layers above formed through the mixture of ash makes this “a non-occupation layer” in O’Connor’s words, showing the site was definitely not occupied 55,000 years ago.Multifunctional stone tools found in layer 20 at Laili, the first human that shows evidence of human presence, in stark contrast to what is below.Image Credit: Shipton et al/Nature Communications. CC BY 4.0Theoretically, people might have been in Timor at the time, but chosen to live elsewhere, but O’Connor considers this unlikely. Laili holds the oldest evidence of humans on Timor yet, found after many searches. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine inhabitants ignoring such an attractive site for long. It sits near a large river that would have provided fresh water, and is within walking distance of the sea, where Timor’s residents would have got most of their food before agriculture. Where other sites sometimes have only a few signs of humans in their oldest inhabited layers, suggesting occasional use by small bands of people, Laili is rich with signs of humanity from the first dark layer.In some places, the evidence of ancient human presence is now submerged, after attractive coastal plains sunk when the Ice Age ended. However, O’Connor told IFLScience that Timor is different, plunging to the edge of the continental shelf almost immediately offshore. Geologic activity has also been raising the island, almost keeping place with sea level. “Laili Is 4 kilometers [2.5 miles] from the sea today; 45,000 years ago it would have been 5 kilometers [3.1 miles],” she said. There’s little scope for former sites to be lost.This leaves two explanations for Australia’s habitation. Either the dates at Madjedbebe are wrong, as a few anthropologists claim, and Australia was also uninhabited until about 45,000 years ago, or people got there another way.Supporters of the first idea note that it is the sediments, not the tools, that were dated at Madjedbebe. Perhaps humans arrived much later, but deliberately or accidentally buried tools in older deposits. Alternatively, they arrived via the “northern route”, crossing the Wallace Line to Sulawesi and then island hopping to New Guinea, connected to Australia at the time.Humans besides Homo sapiens lived on Sulawesi 200,000 years ago, but the oldest signs of our own species are a similar age to O’Connor’s finds on Timor. However, Sulawesi is a much larger and less explored island. It’s plausible humans were there long before they started painting the walls.O’Connor also told IFLScience that Sulawesi would have been a much more attractive location for humans looking to expand beyond mainland Southeast Asia. It has plenty of game such as deer, pigs, and possums that would have been familiar to arrivals from the mainland. “Timor has nothing but rats and bats,” O’Connor told IFLScience. Indeed, the absence of large mammals is part of the reason most caves there lack pre-human sediment, as cave users can track in mud or leave droppings.Timor’s sparse resources might not have mattered if people got there by chance, but the team doubts that was the case. “The traditional view held by researchers is that early humans who were making these significant water crossings were stumbling upon these islands by mistake, largely because it was so long ago,” co-author, ANU’s Dr Shimona Kealy, said in a statement. “Their arrival on Timor was no accident. This was a major colonization effort, evident through the sheer number of people who were making the journey. It’s a testament to these peoples’ level of maritime technology and the boats they created, but also their confidence and competence in braving maritime crossings.”The work is published open access in the journal Nature Communications. 

In the bitterly cold waters of the Arctic Ocean, scientists have discovered a strange and unique coral that’s “almost certainly a new species.”When you think about corals, you might imagine tropical temperatures, crystal-clear waters, and clownfish. However, corals are incredibly diverse and inhabit many different ecosystems across the planet, from the idyllic atolls of the Pacific to the darkest depths of the ocean. There's even an abundance of Arctic corals located along the edge of the continental shelf where water temperatures are just above zero degrees Celsius (32°F).The latest discovery was made by a team of researchers from the The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census that’s currently on a mission to document the depths of the Arctic Ocean. They set off from Tromsø in northern Norway on May 3 aboard the ship RV Kronprins Haakon and will be wrapping up their expedition this week.The potentially new species of coral were found living on the stalk of a crinoid, also known as sea lilies. Ocean Census released a video of their experts discussing the discovery – and, as you can see, they’re pretty excited about it.                   “We've seen very, very few corals since we've been here in the Arctic. On the dive today, we saw lots of these crinoids growing, and what we found on this crinoid is a coral living on the crinoid stalk. It's almost certainly a new species,” Professor Alex Rogers, Principal Investigator at Ocean Census, explains in the video.“It really demonstrates coevolution in the deep sea but also how effective the remotely operated vehicle [ROV] is. We get the specimens in such good condition that those sorts of relationships are actually preserved,” Rogers added.The curious coral is just one of the expedition's finds over the past few weeks. They previously explored the Svyatogor Ridge, a site at a depth of around 3,700 meters (12,140 feet) within the Arctic mid-ocean ridge system that’s loaded with hydrothermal vents. In this strange environment, rich in methane and sulfur, their ROV snooped around the array of chemosynthetic communities that live here, including tube worms and shelled bivalve mollusks.The coral was found living on the stalk of a sea lily.Image courtesy of Ocean Census & Martin HartleyThe expedition is especially significant because this environment is facing several existential threats. Along with being impacted by climate change, some of these unique habitats are being eyed-up for deep-sea mining. This would essentially involve dredging the seafloor looking for nuggets of rare metals, like lithium and cobalt, potentially causing irrevocable damage to the fragile ecosystems that dwell here.“Understanding every aspect of our ecosystem holds immense significance. Today, we possess new tools, empowering us to uncover discoveries previously beyond our reach. Innovations such as eDNA analysis, advancements in taxonomy, and machine learning represent sophisticated means of gathering essential information,” Jan-Gunnar Winther, Pro-rector for Research and Development at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Specialist Director at the Norwegian Polar Institute located in Tromsø, said in a statement.“With our current capabilities to amass vast amounts of data and consolidate it effectively, there lies tremendous potential. If this data is made accessible and shared widely, not just by those who collected it, it could have a profound impact on scientific understanding,” Winther added.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has resumed sending back science data, six months after it began sending garbled patterns of zeroes and ones. Voyager 1 has traveled further than any human-made object, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space. While doing this, it has continued to send back useful data to Earth, helping us learn about the space between stars outside of our own Solar System. All this while working with just 69.63 kilobytes of memory, and running partly on code written in the archaic computer language Fortran 5."The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd explained to NPR. "It's remarkable that they keep flying, and that they've flown for 46-plus years."With such a mission, you'd expect the occasional challenge, even before you take into account the high-radiation environment it is heading through. And the Voyager 1 mission has certainly faced its share of challenges."Normal operations were interrupted last year when Voyager 1 began sending a signal back to Earth that contained no science or engineering data," NASA explained in a statement. "The team eventually determined the issue stemmed from a small portion of corrupted memory in the flight data subsystem, one of the spacecraft’s three computers."On May 17, NASA sent commands to the aging probe. It takes 22.5 hours for a signal to reach the spacecraft, before another 22.5 hours for a return signal, meaning there was a tense wait to see if the fix had worked.     Fortunately, the fix appears to have worked, with several systems now functional once more."The plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument are now returning usable science data," NASA added. "As part of the effort to restore Voyager 1 to normal operations, the mission is continuing work on the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument."Fingers crossed that other instruments can be fixed, and Voyager can continue to send back useful data, before the plutonium-powered system that powers the craft eventually runs out of juice.

Six years ago, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a Tesla into space, in a stunt that even the most hardened Musk haters would grudgingly admit is pretty cool.The Roadster has since been on one hell of a journey, currently moving away from Earth at the impressive speed of 25,290 kilometers per hour (15,715 miles per hour), with an arguably more impressive fuel efficiency of 10,671 kilometers per liter (25,100 miles per gallon), at the time of writing. Since its launch on February 6, 2018, the car has orbited the Sun 4.1 times according to tracker Where Is Roadster, rolling over as it goes. In 2018, we got a close look at the vehicle as it made a close approach to Earth.       IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.Keeping an eye on the car isn't exactly astronomers' most pressing concern (for instance, what the hell is going on with all those vanishing stars), but a few have tried to calculate the fate of the vehicle, and whether it poses a threat to the Earth.In 2018, a paper did just this, though it was a difficult task due to the car's eccentric orbit."The Roadster bears many similarities to Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs), which diffuse through the inner Solar System chaotically through (i) repeated close encounters with the terrestrial planets, and (ii) the effects of mean-motion and secular resonances," the team explain in the paper. "Initially, NEAs reach their orbits from the more distant main belt via strong resonances (such as the secular 6 resonance or the strong 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter). When entering these escape routes, many NEAs are driven onto nearly-radial orbits that plunge into the Sun."This puts impact likelihood with terrestrial planets at relatively low, at slightly more than 2 percent. The Tesla, however, is a little different."The initial Tesla orbit grazes that of the Earth, so one might expect an initial period with enhanced collision probabilities with the Earth before it is randomized onto a more NEA-like trajectory," the team continued. "It is therefore unclear whether the Tesla is likely to diffuse to distant, strong resonances and meet the same fate as the wider NEA population, or whether it would first strike one of the terrestrial planets."Looking at the Tesla's orbit, which crosses the orbit of Mars and Earth, the team was able to predict the likelihood it would crash into the terrestrial planets (including our favorite one, Earth).     The car will make another close approach in 2047 at about 5 million kilometers (3.1 million miles). Beyond 100 years, repeat close encounters with the planets make long-term predictions of the car's chaotic orbit "impossible". "However, using an ensemble of several hundred realizations, we were able to statistically determine the probability of the Tesla colliding with the Solar system planets on astronomical timescales," the team wrote.On a much longer timescale, the team calculated that the car has roughly a 22 percent probability of hitting Earth, a 12 percent chance of colliding with Venus, and about the same probability of hitting the Sun as hitting Venus. Fortunately for Musk, this will happen on a timescale of millions of years, and is unlikely to affect Tesla stock prices.The Starman placed in the vehicle, assuming it is still intact and somehow achieves sentience, may pray for a sooner impact. While traveling through space, the dummy has listened to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" over 624,000 times in one ear, and "Life On Mars?" has played in his other ear more than 841,000 times.The study is published in Aerospace.