synaptic chaos

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Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University

All Things Considered, February 26, 2009 · Scientists digging in a Kenyan desert have found what they believe to be the oldest humanlike footprints. Several individuals laid them down 1.5 million years ago in what was a muddy track.

The scientists discovered not just one set of footprints, but two. The second set was left about 1,000 years after the first set. “It’s incredible. I’ve never excavated anything like this before,” says team director John Harris of Rutgers University.

Reporting in this week’s issue of the journal Science, the anthropologists say the creatures that made the prints were probably Homo erectus. That’s believed to be a direct ancestor of modern humans, and one that appears to have been built much the way modern humans are.

“The prints match a men’s shoe size of about 9, which gives you a height of about 5 feet 9 inches,” says Brian Richmond of George Washington University, who was part of the excavation team. “Here, we have really compelling evidence that they were walking with a long stride, they had an arch in the foot the way we have, and the arch puts a spring in our step, which makes walking more efficient,” he says.

The region is rich with animal footprints as well, including antelopes, a form of zebra and birds. During the time the prints were made, the region was probably a river valley near a lake.

The evolution of an arch in the foot indicates a spring ligament in the foot, which increases the efficiency of walking by storing some of the energy from the falling weight of the walker in each step, and then returning it up the leg on the rebound. The big toe is also aligned with the other toes, something not found in earlier ancestors and other primates. Its large size is necessary to absorb the walker’s weight as the foot rolls forward and then lifts off the ground before the next step.

Harris says the area where these individuals lived was undergoing a drying period at the time the prints were made. Trees and water might have been growing scarce, so Homo erectus would have had to walk farther for water and food.

Dan Lieberman, an anthropologist at Harvard University, says the footprints confirm that the evolution of the foot was crucial to becoming human. For one thing, it allowed people to run.

“Imagine you are a Homo erectus and you are hungry,” he says. “And you want to kill something for dinner. The weapons available to you are incredibly primitive, so one thing early hominids might have included in their repertoire of hunting strategies was to run animals in the heat.”

Eventually, he says, the prey would collapse and could then be killed.

The scientific team will return to the site next summer. They say the first track ends at a small hill, and they expect to find more prints underneath the hill.

Gregory Bull, AP

“We were completely taken by surprise. We didn’t expect to find this massive funeral complex,” Salvador Guilliem, in charge of the site for the government’s archeology institute, said when the discovery was announced on Tuesday.

Historians think the Aztecs built Tlatelolco in the early 1300s along with the nearby city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire and now the heart of Mexico City, which the Spanish founded after they conquered the Aztecs in 1521.

-Miguel Angel Gutierrez, Reuters

This makes me begin to wonder what archaeologists will discover about our civilization 700 years from now.

A product that lasts forever, is used for seconds and is tossed.

The other day I was talking to my daughter about taste and taste buds. I started to name the ‘five’ areas of taste. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter and…and. Are there only four? I thought there were five. Later, we were at a bookstore so we looked at an human body book for young people and it illustrated the four areas of taste. So that settled it it is four. Until…this morning on the drive in to school on NPR they were talking about taste and my instict was right. There is a fifth sense of taste: Umami.

This colored scanning electron micrograph shows the synapses, or connections, between two nerve fibers (in purple) and a nerve cell (yellow). The picture is magnified 10,000 times.

synapse: [Gk. sunapsis, point of contact, sunaptein, join together : sun-, together + haptein, to fasten.] The point at which a nerve impulse is transmitted from an axon of one neuron to the dendrite of another.

chaos: n. [formless matter Gk. khaos] 1. A state or place of total confusion or disorder. 2. often Chaos. The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space believed, according to some religious cosmological views, to have existed prior to the ordered universe. 3. Obsolete. A vast chasm or abyss.