Where the Modern Meets the Ancient

Science Fridays

      Today's post is so late, due to a thunderstorm, and accompanying power outage.  Power's back on, so here it is.  

      Many of my Science Friday posts have been about either, space exploration, technologies, or palaeontology.  The subject of today's post combines all three.  The studies of palaeontology have been getting quite a boost with help from the other branches of science. 
      The space program has been extremely helpful by turning some of their cameras and equipment inward and looking at the Earth.  Using satellites they have been able to discover ancient cities, that have been lost and forgotten about for millennia.  Even some novices have found as yet undiscovered ancient structures just using Google Earth.  They have been spotted in clearings out in the middle of wild places. 

      In jungle regions such as the Yucatan, in Mexico, where the foliage is too thick to see anything through it the satellite images don't find anything.  That's where other cameras come in handy.  Looking down from space they use infrared imaging to scan the jungle and forest landscapes.  Many of the ancient cities were made of stone.  Being much colder than the surrounding vegetation these ancient, abandoned cities, and other structures.  South-east Asia has many ancient sites (in phenomenal numbers) that have not been discovered yet.  Unfortunately for the world of palaeontology, some of these countries aren't too keen on having any western surveillance aircraft flying over their airspace, nor even surveillance satellites pointing at them. 

      While looking for settlements even more ancient than the first cities researchers have utilized such techniques as seismic imaging.  Using technologies such as this they have been able to locate ancient foundations and even 10,000 year old post holes.  
      Chemical spectral analysis has been used to determine where exactly a person has lived or even traveled.  "Otzi," the mummified corpse they found in a glacier in the Alps was analyzed in this way to determine his place of origin, and to learn where he had traveled.  Both he and the grain he was carrying (and had eaten before he died) where run through chemical spectral analysis.  Plants pick up the local chemicals in the soil they grow in.  Anything that eats those plants picks up those specific chemicals and unique isotopes too.  In this way it works as a fingerprint to pinpoint location.  

      DNA research has made great leaps and strides in the last two decades.  Looking at minor differences between DNA strains, the palaeontologist can understand who various people groups are related to.  In this way migrations of people groups have been tracked.  In fact, due to DNA studies much of what was previously written on the subject has been turned on its head, and needs to be rewritten.  Through DNA research we have learned for instance that all Native Americans have Asian DNA, which they had always suspected, but they also found out that the very first people to come to America were hunter-gatherers from western France.  They learned that the Semitic races all came out of sub-Saharan Africa, and that groups of them went out to over run all of Europe.  Through these studies they also learned that all the Indo-European peoples came out of north-central Asia.  
      Even ages of various people groups can be determined through DNA analysis.  This is because mitochondrial DNA has a very specific rate of change.  This way they can tell when one group separated from another.  

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      In other science news for this week, the World Science Festival started in New York this week.  Major topics for discussion at this years festival include such things as the study of extra-solar planets, the studies of cosmic sands to understand the origins of the Solar System, and multiple universes, or as they call it "The Multiverse."