Latest Neogene Stories

The extinction of mammoths and other megafauna that came after humans spread out across the New World may be one explanation of a sharp decline in global temperatures more than 12,750 years ago, researchers reported on Sunday. Roughly a hundred species of grass-eating giants that once flourished on the North American landscape released massive quantities of methane during their lifetime. As a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It may not have...

In just two centuries, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time period that could alter the planet for millions of years, according to a group of prominent scientists that includes a Nobel Laureate. They say the dawning of this new epoch could lead to the sixth largest mass extinction in the Earth's history. Their commentary appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Environmental Science & Technology.Jan...

Researchers show how world has changed Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner "“ who suggest that the Earth has entered a new age of geological time.The Age of Aquarius? Not quite - It's the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. (web issue March 29; print issue April 1)And they add that the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction...

Scientists have used a clay sculpture to recreate the face of the earliest known European.Using an incomplete skull and jawbone retrieved seven years ago by potholers in a cave near the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, Richard Neave, a forensic scientist in the UK, successfully reconstructed the head of the ancient European ancestor.Scientists are unsure of whether the bone fragments belonged to a male or female, but radiocarbon analysis dates the find to between 34,000 and 36,000 years...