Evidence of Interbreeding Between Early Human Species

According to National Geographic, for some time researchers have suspected that two ancient human species, Neanderthals and Denisovans, interbred. It wasn’t until paleogeneticist Viviane Slon, of the Max Planck Institute, received the results from a 90,000-year-old flake of bone she had tested (and five other sample tests from the same “child”) that this was confirmed. Slon has published her findings in the scientific journal Nature and it’s groundbreaking as nobody …

1,000-Year-Old Macaw Breeding Community in the American Southwest

Piles of macaw bones found in Arizona and New Mexico—well outside the bird’s native range in South and Central America—have been dated to between 900 and 1200 CE. New findings—based on an analysis of mitochondrial genomes—have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that this is the result of breeders inside an an undiscovered pre-hispanic settlement from this time. It is likely that …

We Pay Attention Four Times Per Second

Two new studies in the scientific publication Neuron—authored by research teams from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley—posit that attention does not hone in like a spotlight, rather, it strobes in and out four times per second. “Perception is discontinuous,” says Sabine Kastner of Princeton Neuroscience Institute, but it is not flickering on and off entirely. Rather, we cycle between “periods of maximum focus and periods of …