Who can get the last word?

Hi, guys.

No last word for you

I guess the stethoscope was cold.

I wish I could carve things like that.

not the same without Hole

yes

let's all go rep him at dawgs

Latest Mars Image in Color, showing Mt. Sharp

I would, but I can't because I have to spread it around an assload more. I wasted it on a post about hot dogs

22 foot - 2500 pound Crocodile

The people in a village on the Niger River in Africa were losing fellow villagers at such a rapid rate, that they had to call in the Army to hunt down the culprit. A 22 foot, 2500 pound Crocodile

Fucking murderers. They should have airlifted the Croc somewhere else.

I want to touch it.

The USA pays each Gold Medalist 25,000 dollars, but you have to pay taxes on that, an actual gold medal is worth about 1000 dollars.

4 years of work and you get 25 geez. Sounds like a fair trade off.

That is chicken feed compared to what Phelps and Lochte will get in endorsements. Phelps does a lot of good charity work at least.

Kovar is out of control over there...

Ancient Feces Found In Cave Dispels First American Theory

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...nd-in-cave-dispels-first-american-theory.html

Ancient feces found in Oregon caves are proof humans inhabited North America more than 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, a discovery that may change theories on how the continent was populated, researchers said.
The findings from Oregon’s Paisley Caves contained DNA and were dated 12,300 B.C., according to a paper on the findings published today in the journal Science. That evidence predates the Clovis people and challenges the theory that they were the first North Americans, said Dennis Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist and the paper’s lead author.
Spearheads were also found in the newer excavation of the caves, and researchers say those tools -- called Western Stemmed projectile points - show that the caves’ inhabitants developed independently of the Clovis. The tools, along with the DNA from the coprolites, or feces, also suggest that the Clovis weren’t the founding peoples of the Americas, researchers said.
“I believe that everything we’ve got indicates that we do have pre-Clovis human coprolites in the Paisley caves,” Jenkins said in a telephone interview. “It’s beyond reasonable doubt that we have pre-Clovis DNA.”
Today’s paper describes a second analysis of Paisley Caves findings, after initial results were disputed in 2008 by other archaeologists. Those scientists challenged the results, saying water could have carried newer DNA into older sediment and that excavators might have contaminated evidence with their own DNA.
Paul Goldberg and Francesco Berna, both archaeologists from Boston University whocontested the original results, hadn’t read the findings as of today and said they couldn’t comment on the validity of the results.
Same Results

Jenkins and his group returned to the caves, gathered new samples, tested them at several independent labs and checked rodent pellets found nearby for human DNA contamination, which would have suggested leaching. Though samples were handled bare- handed last time, this time collectors wore full body suits. The results remained similar.
Tools similar to those discovered in the Oregon caves have been found elsewhere, though they were a development on Clovis technology, said Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and an author on the study. Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers were now able to show that the Paisley spearheads are concurrent with the oldest Clovis points, though slightly newer than the oldest feces.
“It suggests that there was not one, but two, early societies in America,” Willerslev said in a phone interview. “Western stem has been known in America for a long time, but everybody thought that it was much younger.”
Big Game

Based on their shape and sharpness, Jenkins said he believes the points could have been used to hunt big game, including mastodons and woolly mammoth. He said researchers found elephant-family proteins on other stones in the caves that he believes were used as tools.
The idea that Paisley Cave inhabitants developed separately from the Clovis, whose oldest U.S. sites are in Montana, South Dakota and Florida, might support a theory of multiple migrations into the Americas, Jenkins said.
The people might have been seafarers who followed kelp ’forests’ rich with marine life and surrounded by calm seas from Asia to enter western North America, he said, while Clovis may have migrated from a Siberian land bridge.
“It certainly implies, to me at least, that the coastal migration theory should be taken very seriously,” he said.
Modern Resemblance

DNA analysis suggests that the people were Asian and genetically resemble modern Native Americans, and further analysis of more hard-to-extract core DNA may show what contemporary people they are related to, Willerslev said.
Further feces analysis may have bearing on modern medicine, he said. Bacteria that lived in the feces, or ’gut flora,’ provide clues to a person’s diet and state of health, he said. That means analysis could show what a human’s gut flora would look like in the absence of processed foods.
“It’s super important to people’s health,” he said. “It would put out a base.”
The Paisley Cave findings are the oldest human remnants discovered in the Americas, Willerslev said, though he said scientists believe that a site with human artifacts in Mount Verde,Chile, comes from approximately the same date.
“I believe that we are going to find older sites, and I say that because if we have people in the Paisley caves who seem to be well adapted to their environment,” Jenkins said. “What we find in the poop suggests that they knew their environment very well and they had been in their area for some time.”
Evidence that people immigrated to North America by sea may solve questions about the Chile settlement, Jenkins said. Because Chile is so far South, scientists have questioned how they could be the earliest found remains of a people believed to have migrated from Siberia.
“It raises its stock, if you will, another notch at least,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jeanna Smialek in New York at jsmialek@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

Fatty, go visit these caves.

Who was first? New info on North America's earliest residents

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-paisley-caves-20120712,0,7874773.story



By Thomas H. Maugh II

Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2012, 11:25 a.m.

New evidence from caves in Oregon may finally put to rest the long-held theory that the early people who made Clovis spear points were the first inhabitants of North America.
The new evidence indicates that a second group of people that made what are known as western stemmed projectile points arrived on the North American continent at least as early as those who made the Clovis points, and perhaps even earlier. The new finds provide strong support for growinggenetic evidence that indicates the Americas were populated in at least three waves of immigration beginning at least 15,000 years ago.
"Our evidence puts the final blow to the Clovis First theory," said geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. "Culturally, biologically and chronologically, the theory is no longer viable."

The accumulation of new data represents "almost a revolution in our understanding of the early colonization of the Americas," said Brooks Hanson, an editor at the journal Science, in which the newest data was published Thursday.

The distinctive fluted Clovis spear points were first discovered in 1932 at Blackwater Draw, near the village of Clovis, N.M. They have subsequently been found throughout the eastern and Southern United States, and artifacts associated with them have been dated to about 13,000 years ago.

It has long been held that the points were made by people who immigrated to North America from Asia across the Bering land bridge, a route connecting Siberia and Alaska exposed when ocean levels fell during the most recent ice age. A second, technologically distinct spear point known as the western stemmed projectile point has been found throughout much of the western United States, and Clovis proponents have argued that it was a descendant of the Clovis technology. The two types of spear points differ primarily in how they are attached to the shaft of the spear.

The first crack in the Clovis First theory came in 2008 when Willerslev, archaeologist Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon, and their colleagues reported they had found 14,300-year-old human coprolites in the Paisley Caves of Oregon. Coprolites are essentially desiccated human feces. The team found other artifacts with the coprolites, but no Clovis points.
Critics, however, argued the coprolites had been contaminated, perhaps by the excavators or by animals urinating at the site. The critics also argued the stratigraphy of the site may have been scrambled by rodents burrowing through the sediments. Essentially, they claimed, the results were bogus.
The Paisley Caves, originally discovered in 1938 by University of Oregon anthropologist Luther Cressman, are in the Summer Lake basin about 220 miles southeast of Eugene on the east side of the Cascade Range. The eight caves, which face to the west, are wave-cut shelters on the shoreline of Lake Chewaucan, whose levels have risen and fallen with climate change.
Angered by the criticism, Jenkins and his students have revisited the caves during each of the last three summers. They wore full body suits, face masks and gloves to prevent human contamination of samples -- even though they had analyzed DNA of all the archaeologists and lab workers involved with the earlier study to rule out contamination.
The team also drilled small core samples through several different regions of the caves, dating each layer of sediment to show the layers had not been jumbled. Organic samples destined for radiocarbon dating were soaked in distilled water to remove potential contaminants. The distilled water itself was also dated to determine when foreign materials might have been introduced. They also found western stemmed projectile points, but no Clovis points.
Their conclusions: the same as before. The human sample dating was accurate and the western stemmed projectiles were 12,800 to 13,000 years old -- at least as old as the oldest dated Clovis points.
"From our dating, it appears to be impossible to derive western stemmed points from a proto-Clovis tradition," Jenkins said. ""It suggests that we may have here in the western United States a tradition that is at least as old as Clovis, and quite possibly older. We seem to have two different traditions co-existing in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years."
The increasingly older ages of human habitation of the continent suggests at least some of the new immigrants could not have crossed the Bering land bridge -- it was covered with water when they came.

University of Oregon archaeologist Jon Erlandson has been accumulating evidence -- much of it from the Channel Islands off the California coast -- that some of the first immigrants might have been a seagoing people that migrated along the coast lines of Asia and North America, exploiting wildlife found in kelp beds along the coast. Many of their potential camp sites and shelters, however, would have been flooded by rising sea levels and are no longer accessible.

Intriguingly, stemmed projectiles that could be attached to spears originated in Asia about 4,000 to 5,000 years before the points in the Paisley Caves were created, but archaeologists have never found either Clovis points or western stemmed points on that continent. The lack of evidence thus suggests that the technology for making both was uniquely American.
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Twitter/@LATMaugh