Humanity’s Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals
Neanderthals lived and thrived in Europe for 250,000 years. Then humans showed up. Within 10,000 years, they were extinct. How did humans crowd them out, evolutionarily?
A new theory says that the beginnings of paleolithic dog domestication could have given early humans an edge:
Dogs would help humans to identify their prey; but they would also work, the theory goes, as beasts of burden — like the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred large, strong dogs specifically for hauling strapped-on packs. (Paleolithic dogs were large: They had, their skeletons suggest, a body mass of at least 70 pounds and a shoulder height of at least 2 feet — which would make them, at minimum, the size of a modern-day German shepherd.) Since transporting animal carcasses is an energy-intensive task, getting dogs to do that work would mean that humans could concentrate their energy on more productive endeavors: hunting, gathering, reproducing.
(via scinerds)
Rare tyrannosaurus skeleton to be auctioned
The Tyrannosaurus bataar was uncovered in the Gobi Desert roughly eight years ago and has an estimated value of $950,000
