Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that walked the walk, squeezed with ease, and became immortalized in amber.
First, ancient artifacts in Turkey might rewrite the history of early human migrations into Europe. Then: a Cretaceous insectarium, badminton in space, a breakthrough in quantum sensing, and block parties for chimps.
Before we get to that, though, I wanted to share that my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens is available for preorder and will be out on September 30! It’s a one-stop primer for the diverse meanings of aliens to people, touching on their precursors in myths, their massive footprint in pop culture, our fascination with UFOs, and the real scientific effort to find extraterrestrial life, which is now entering its most exciting phase. If you like the Abstract, I think you’ll enjoy my book, too! To follow updates about First Contact (or my work in general), I also just launched the BeX Files, a personal newsletter to accompany the book.
This bridge is made for walking
Early humans may have walked to Europe on a now-submerged land bridge that stretched across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to mainland Greece hundreds of thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene period, the Ice Age that ended about 12,000 years ago.
The discovery of 138 artifacts at ten sites around Ayvalık in western Turkey provides “the first systematic dataset from a region previously unexplored in the context of Pleistocene archaeology,” according to a new study.
While humans and Neanderthals are known to have entered Europe via the Levant and Balkan regions, the excavation of tools at Ayvalık hints at an entirely new route into the continent for these early explorers of the Paleolithic (the anthropological equivalent to the geological Pleistocene age). During this time, vast glacial ice sheets in the region caused sea levels to drop roughly 330 feet lower than they are today, potentially allowing periodic passage to early humans searching for new horizons.
“These findings reveal a previously undocumented Paleolithic presence and establish Ayvalık as a promising locus for future research on early human dispersals in the northeastern Aegean,” said researchers led by Hande Bulut of Düzce University in Turkey.
The team discovered many flaked stone tools, used as cutting instruments, including objects from the Levallois tradition that dates back 450,000 years and is associated with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For context, Neanderthals were present in Europe many hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens, which arrived within the last 100,000 years, so both groups may have used this land bridge.
It’s difficult to pin down a rough age for these tools because of Ayvalık’s coastal geology, which has basically erased their stratigraphic context. In other words, the region is so dynamic that the tools can’t be linked to a clear geological layer, which is one of the main ways archaeologists establish age estimates.
“While the absence of absolute dates and stratified contexts poses interpretive limitations, the data contribute significantly to our understanding of Paleolithic occupation in western Anatolia and its role in broader Aegean dynamics” and “underscore the region’s potential to contribute to broader debates on Aegean connectivity and technological evolution during the Pleistocene,” the team said.
It’s tantalizing to imagine the journeys of these ancient humans whose ghostly footprints may now lie beneath the Aegean waves.
In other news…
A tableau of a lost world
Paleontologists have discovered beetles, flies, pollen, and spider webs that date back 112 million years and are eerily preserved in amber fossils from Ecuador. Though amber fossils have been found all around the world, these specimens are the first to come from South America, opening a rare window into the insects and plants that lived in the ecosystems of the supercontinent Gondwana.
“This discovery and the associated plant remains in the amber-bearing rocks, enhance our understanding of the Gondwanan arthropod fauna and flora inhabiting forests along its western margin during a time interval of major ecosystem transformation,” said researchers led by Xavier Delclòs of the University of Barcelona.
With their extraordinary detail, amber fossils are like sepia-filtered snapshots of the deep past (and they make great cane ornaments for delusional tycoons too—a thriving market these days!).
The Space Shuttle(cock) program
If humans aspire to live on the Moon or travel to Mars, they’re going to have to avoid being bored out of their gourd for long periods of time. A possible solution: badminton. The sport had positive mental and physical health benefits for participants who spent months in a simulated lunar base in Hawaii, according to a new study.
“These findings underline that badminton, although underexplored in space psychology literature, holds promise as a feasible and beneficial activity for astronauts,” said authors Aagam Jain and Pushpdant Jain of VIT Bhopal University in India.
The authors noted that existing studies on “shuttlecock dynamics” in normal gravity “may inform adaptations for reduced gravity settings.” Badminton in lunar gravity? Can’t wait! The winner is the first to smash the birdie into orbit.
A juice that’s worth the quantum squeeze
Kamba, Mitsuyoshi et al. “Quantum squeezing of a levitated nanomechanical oscillator.” Science.
Scientists have demonstrated “quantum squeezing” for the first time with a nanoparticle, a breakthrough that paves the way to “exploring quantum mechanics at a macroscopic scale,” according to a new study.
Quantum squeezing sounds like a cuddle party for atoms, but it is actually a way for scientists to navigate the pesky quantum world, where simply observing phenomena can influence results. Quantum “squeezers” get around uncertainties by enhancing precision measurements of one property, such as a particle’s position, in exchange for losing precision of another, like its velocity.
Though quantum squeezing has been achieved in the laboratory many times, a team has now applied it to a nanoscale glass particle, which is a big object for the quantum world. The glass was trapped in laser light and chilled down to near its lowest-energy state, allowing for precision measurements through squeezing while it levitated.
“Manipulating the motion of macroscopic objects near their quantum mechanical uncertainties has been desired in diverse fields, including fundamental physics, sensing, and transducers,” said researchers led by Mitsuyoshi Kamba of the University of Tokyo. “Our work shows that a levitated nanoparticle offers an ideal platform.”
An update on chimp sangria
Maro, Alexey et al. “Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees.” Science Advances.
Wild chimpanzees may be consuming up to two standard alcoholic beverages a day, a finding that suggests an attraction to alcohol in primates has deep evolutionary roots. While it’s well-established that chimps devour these fruity librations—see our past story on chimp sangria—scientists have now measured the ethanol (alcohol) content of these fruits for the first time during field observations of wild chimps in Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire.
“Chimpanzees typically eat ~4.5 kilograms of fruit per day” which is a full ten pounds and corresponds to “the equivalent of 1.4 (±0.9) standard drinks,” said researchers led by Alexey Maro of the University of California, Berkeley. The results support the “drunken monkey” hypothesis that suggests hominid ancestors of chimps and humans adapted to drinking alcohol tens of millions of years ago.
In addition to confirming this shared compulsion to imbibe, the researchers also observed some interesting behaviors at these boozy chimp gatherings. Fermented figs “attract large groups of chimpanzees,” they note “which in turn results in increased social interactions for both sexes and in social activities such as territorial boundary patrols and hunts.”
Thanks for reading! See you next week.