The debate around the evolution of modern humans has sparked up new arguments after new information has come to light about Homo sapiens fossils found in East Africa. When looking at the origins of Homo Sapiens, better known as modern humans, we know that the oldest remains on record have been found at Djebel Irhoud in Morocco and date to approximately 315.000 years ago. I would like to note that the fossils from Morocco that are the oldest that we currently know of, are being contested by anthropologists as they do not believe these fossils to have belonged to Homo sapiens. But with that said, for a long time it was thought that the oldest remains were found in Ethiopia at the Kibish Omo site, dated to approximately 195.000 years ago. Well, on January 12th 2022 a new paper was published in Nature with more information and new dates on the Kibish Omo site, this pushes back the timeline considerably, by at least 35,000 years. So let’s take a quick look into the Omo Kibish site, a geological formation located in South-western Ethiopia, where in 1967 Homo sapiens fossils were found. Omo 1 refers to the group of fossils that were found by the late Kenyan Palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey who unfortunately passed away on January second 2022. These fossils were believed to not be older than 195,000 years, but new research into the geochemical fingerprints of a thick layer of ash found above the sediments containing the fossils showed that these fossils were deposited before the eruption of a volcano approximately 230,000 years ago. So the way these fossils are dated is through the use of single-crystal isotope dating applied to stratigraphically associated volcanic ash beds, otherwise known as tephra beds. The volcanic remains were dated by collecting pumice rock samples from the tephra beds and grinding them to sub millimetre size. Each volcanic eruption has its own fingerprint, an evolutionary story below the surface, that shows the path the magma followed. Once you’ve crushed the pumice rock you free the minerals within and that makes it able for researchers to date then and identify the chemical signature of the volcanic glass that holds the minerals together. The tephra beds at the Omo Kibish site have now revealed a date that the volcanic eruption occurred at least 233,000 years ago, which means that the fossils in the sediment underneath the tephra bed date to at least the same age. But as you can imagine they are older than the volcanic eruption as the fossils were already in or on the ground when the eruption occurred as they are found underneath the tephra beds. #HomoSapiensRemains #JebelIrhoud #OmoKibish Music: Adrian von Ziegler Sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04275-8.pdf https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evoluti ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt8V5zqFjAY

We went to the vet with 4 cats We had to go to the vet yesterday with all 4 of our cats. Mosi our boy needed his yearly vaccinations, Gaia needed a shot against her allergies. Malou had 2 bumps underneath her armpits, but luckily they were gone & were just simply muscle knots, nothing serious. Laila had to be weighed & she has gained half a kilo, she now weighs 2,85 kilograms! Music: Royksopp - Here She Comes Again #vettrip #4catstovet #catstovet ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDnXzAvR0s8