Ancient Star Dust May Point to Human Origins

[Champ]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Star dust found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean has led German scientists to speculate that a supernova explosion 3 million years ago might possibly have helped bring about human evolution.



Gunther Korschinek and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich in Germany reported on Wednesday they found debris from an exploding supernova that could have changed the climate on Earth around the time that humanity's ancestors first began to walk.


Depending on how far away the supernova was, it might have caused an increase in cosmic rays for about 300,000 years that in turn could have heated up the Earth, they wrote in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters.


The timing of the star explosion coincides with a change in the climate in Africa, when drier conditions caused forests to retreat and the savannah to emerge. Anthropologists and other experts believe this change brought early hominids out of the trees, forcing them to walk upright.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=583&ncid=583&e=10&u=/nm/20041028/od_nm/stardust_dc

[flowomo]

1. reminds me of a song....

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden


(Joni Mitchell/Woodstock for those too young to know) :)

[ladjf]

2. Another contributing factor to the rising temperature was

the closing of the gap between Central and South America which caused equatorial currents to be redirected into the Gulf Stream. That warmed the Northwestern and Western African land masses.

[aquart]

3. Well, okay, but that's 3 million years off.

We were upright about six million years ago. That's when the Ross ice shelf formed and caused the beaches to get longer (wider) and therefore farther from the fresh water supply which forced us back onto land full time. Unfortunately, since we were partially adapted to salt water by then, we were naked and upright, instead of hairy and crouched. But we didn't have the necessary permeable skin to become fully aquatic so there wasn't much choice. We followed the fresh water into the caves. You could spot the cave with the water if there was a python dangling from a tree above it. Pythons have two delights: slithering into shallow incline accessible water, and dangling from trees. In some parts of Africa, it's illegal to kill a python. No one remembers why.

Jumping out of a tree never made any animal stand upright. Give up the savannah theory, boys. We don't eat grass.

Anthropologists: the people who believe six impossible things before breakfast.