Giant marsupials, reptiles and flightless birds that once roamed Australia became extinct about 40,000 years ago, later than had been thought and some 5,000 years after humans arrived, a new study suggests.
Controversy has long surrounded when such creatures became extinct in Australia. New equipment that can date teeth and bones has solved the puzzle, Australian researchers said in the latest issue of the journal Science.
“For a long time, we couldn’t measure bone and teeth, or how old they [animals] were when they died, that is, when they went extinct,” paleontologist Barry Brook at the University of Adelaide in southern Australia said.
One of the new techniques used in the latest research was uranium thorium dating, which can gauge when uranium was taken up into the animal’s teeth when it was still alive.
DISCOVERY
The question as to when the last of these creatures died in Australia surfaced when other researchers began finding fossils, along with stone tools, in Cuddie Springs in New South Wales about 100 years ago and again over the past 30 years.
They analyzed surrounding sediment and found that they dated back to 30,000 years ago, contradicting evidence elsewhere in Australia that showed that the animals became extinct far earlier, or at least 40,000 years ago.
The major theory up to now has been that humans forced the extinction of the creatures. People arrived in Australia between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago.
“But now that we have new methods to date the bone itself, we can know how long ago the animals died rather than how long ago since the bones were last buried,” Brook said.
REDEPOSITED
He said the bones in Cuddie Springs were probably dug up in a flood and redeposited in their final resting place, together with the stone tools, 10,000 years after the animals died. This finding is important because it fits in with the theory that these creatures could not withstand the pressure of the encroaching humans, who arrived about 47,000 years ago.
“If they had been living together for 15,000 years, it would really undermine the idea that people had a quick, dramatic impact and wiped them out,” Brooks said. “The youngest fossil we have is 42,000 years ago and the best evidence of people spreading around Australia is 47,000 years ago, the overlap should be a maximum of 4-5,000 years.”
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened