In the northwest of Canada, fossils have been discovered that may turn out to be the remains of the oldest multicellular animal on Earth. If this is confirmed, the generally accepted history of evolution will have to be rewritten, since it is now believed that multicellular animals arose 350 million years later. Read about this and other discoveries that overturn well-known ideas about science in the Rambler collection.
Canadian fossils
The 890 million-year-old find resembles the skeleton of a modern horned sponge. The skeleton of this creature is made of proteins and is usually not preserved in a fossil state, but under certain conditions the skeleton is limy. The oldest known sponge is 485 million years old. Russian experts from Moscow State University said that the find cannot be reliably attributed to sponges, it resembles the consequences of the disintegration of the bacterial shells that created the fossil. Such “meshes” were encountered earlier.
Sopkargaly mammoth
The mammoth, discovered on Taimyr in 2012, is officially named Sopkargalinsky, but is better known as the mammoth Zhenya (the name was given in honor of the schoolboy Yevgeny Salinder, who discovered it). This is an adult male 15-16 years old. The remains are about 45 thousand years old. Judging by the characteristic marks on the skeleton, ancient hunters could have killed Zhenya with a spear. If this is true, it will turn out that people came to this region about 30 thousand years earlier than previously thought. Further studies of Taimyr are needed to confirm or refute this theory.
The Sopkargaly mammoth had a congenital feature – one tusk is undeveloped. On the second, traces of the impact of tools remained, while the carcass was very well preserved (the remains in this state had not been seen by scientists for more than 100 years). This suggests that mammoths were hunted not for meat, but for tusk extraction.
The oldest teeth
In 2017, archaeologists discovered a set of teeth in Germany that probably belonged to a previously unknown species of ancient people. They do not belong to any of the previously known European or Asian species. They are closest to the Australopithecines found in Ethiopia, but at least 4 million years older.
The head of the research team, Herbert Lutz, said that this is “not only a great success, but also a great mystery.”
The site of an ancient man in Yakutia
In September, scientists began a new study of the ancient man's site Diring-Yuryakh in Yakutia. Its age can reach 3 million years. If this is so, all ideas about ancient history may turn upside down, and the theory according to which the ancestral home of man is in Africa will be refuted. It is possible that Homo habilis appeared in Europe earlier.
Stone bracelet
In 2008, in the Denisovskaya cave in Altai, scientists found a bracelet made of chloritolite mineral. It is at least 40 thousand years old. There were other jewelry in the same cultural layer, but the bracelet turned out to be the most complicated.
The manufacturing technique is far ahead of specialists' ideas about the technologies available to ancient man in the Paleolithic. The bracelet has a neat hole, probably for a pendant, and it appears to have been cracked once and sealed with an unknown material. Probably, the decoration was detachable and consisted of two parts. Perhaps it was only worn on special occasions. For the manufacture, tools were used, similar to a modern rasp and drilling machine, and drills, scientists previously believed that such technologies for making jewelry appeared only 10 thousand years ago. In addition, they believed that the Denisovans were an undeveloped civilization, did not know how to think abstractly and did not have a culture in the modern sense, but the presence of such complex decorations refutes this thesis.
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