Christian Tryon, a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, knew stone tools, but he didn’t know teeth.He was looking at a photograph of just that, ancient dentition recovered from a decades-old archaeological site in Lebanon. The photograph had come from the papers of a close associate of Rev. J. Franklin Ewing, the original expedition leader.The Trail to EgbertAt first, Tryon thought the teeth belonged to the remains of an ancient child named “Egbert” by Ewing, bones l ...read more
Around 6 to 8 million years ago, deep in the rainforests of Africa, humans shared a distant ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. Since then, a lot has happened. We climbed down from the trees, stood upright, learned to hunt, found fire and spread across the globe. But how? How does human evolution actually work?Toward the end of the Miocene — a geological epoch that occurred from 23 to 5.3 million years ago — humans began to diverge as their own distinctive primate from a common ancestor ...read more
Earlier this year, the world was transfixed by the appearance of balloon-like objects looming over continental United States and other parts of the world. These unidentified flying objects caused such a fear and furor that many were tracked avidly, some disappeared magically and at least one was shot down by the US military.These objects are poorly understood so an important role for researchers is to bring the steely eye of science to bear on the issue of what these things really are.Now we hav ...read more
Marking an engagement or the big wedding day itself with a ring is part and parcel of many cultures today. But you may be surprised to learn that wearing the ring on the fourth finger of the left hand is a tradition dating back at least a thousand years.It’s a practice that’s thought to stem from the belief that a vein ran from this finger all the way to the heart — the vena amoris. This idea is often attributed to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, but the origins of the ring itse ...read more
Science is constantly improving and teaching us marvelous things about ourselves and the world around us. Our understanding of the sciences bends and molds with the times and is impacted by the humans who study it. And humans are, well, human — which means while we can make incredible discoveries, we're also prone to making mistakes. We carry with us biases that can lead to bad science. Here are five cases where scientists got it completely wrong.1. Humoral Theory(Credit: Book illustration i ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
