The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang, Indonesia, have no human activity since the late 19th century, according to Farley and Farley
The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang in Indonesia would be far older than Egypt’s great pyramids — if they’re even human constructions at all.
The paper was published, but it was not what was written in it. He says that the conclusions of the paper about the site and its age are not justified.
Gunung Padang comprises five stepped stone terraces, with retaining walls and connecting staircases, that sit atop an extinct volcano. Natawidjja and his colleagues investigated the site using various ground-penetrating techniques.
They identified four layers, which they believed to be separate phases of construction. The innermost layer is a hardened lava core, which has been “meticulously sculpted”, according to the paper.
Dibble says that there is no clear evidence that the buried layers were built by humans and were not the result of natural weathering and movement of rocks over time. “Material rolling down a hill is going to, on average, orient itself,” he says. But Natawidjaja says that the column-shaped stones were too large and orderly to have simply rolled there: “The neatly arranged, shaped and massive nature of these rocks, some weighing up to 300 kilograms, dismisses the likelihood of transportation over significant distances.”
The authors also report finding a dagger-shaped stone. “This object’s regular geometry and distinct composition, and its materials unrelated to the surrounding rocks, signify its manmade origin,” says Natawidjaja. Dibble thinks it’s unlikely that the rock was shaped by humans. He says there isn’t any evidence that it is man-made.
The paper did not provide evidence that an advanced civilization existed during the last ice age according to Bill Farley. The 27,000-year-old soil samples from Gunung Padang, although accurately dated, do not carry hallmarks of human activity, such as charcoal or bone fragments, he says. Archaeological records show that the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to complex societies occupying large settlements occurred after the commencement of the Holocene 11,700 years ago. The site of atalhyk is what is now Turkey2.
Farley believes that the people should celebrate Gunung Padang for its value, rather than because it can be used in a narrative about the development of civilization.
Natawidjaja hopes the controversy won’t hurt the community. “We are really open to anyone researchers around the world would like to come to Indonesia and do some research programme on Gunung Padang,” he says. We don’t have a lot of knowledge about our human history.
DeepCell: A tool to segment a baby’s brain to learn language while listening to their mother’s voice, with an application to the wake-up of a swimming shark
This is normal for deep-sea species of whipnose anglerfish, which have been spotted swimming belly-up. “Just when you think they couldn’t get any weirder, anglerfish outdo themselves,” says biologist Pamela Hart. Whipnose anglerfish live in the lightless depths of the ocean. Females use their long fishing-rod-like noses to lure in prey, which they then glow in the dark. According to the researchers, this position allows the fish to not bite themselves if they accidentally take down a large animal.
Babies learn their native language while listening to their mothers voice while still in the womb. In a study of 33 newborns, the infants’ brain activity showed more signs of learning after listening to recordings of their native language than of other, similar languages. This doesn’t mean that babies are necessarily disadvantaged if they don’t have prenatal exposure to speech or if they learn a different language after birth, however. According to the study co-author, newborn babies can learn languages that they weren’t exposed to in the normal way.
Scientists are using deep-learning methods to teach computers to perform a task that humans excel at: picking out specific elements, such as cell nuclei, from the dense, messy background of biological material. Attempts to teach the skill of ‘segmentation’ started with image-analysis tools trained and optimized for a particular experiment — for example, detecting mouse liver cells labelled with a specific fluorescent dye. Now scientists are working on easy-to-use, universal image-recognition algorithms to spot cellular features across a range of images — even 3D volumes. “Better data, better labels — that’s the secret,” says systems biologist David Van Valen, who led the development of a popular segmentation tool called DeepCell.
Source: Daily briefing: Furore over ‘oldest pyramid’ claim
Climate protesters can influence what people think, but not necessarily what they think about sand drawings, a sociologist, economist and psychologist
“Protesters cannot tell people what to think, but they might be able to influence what people are thinking about,” write sociologist Dana Fisher, economist Oscar Berglund and psychologist Colin Davis. Highly visible confrontational tactics are often seen as a nuisance, but it’s wrong to assume that this turns people away from the cause, argue the authors. At the same time, publicity does not necessarily translate into greater public concern. The trio suggests that large numbers and disruptive actions are necessary for more direct outcomes from climate protest.
Sand drawing, a tradition practised in Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean, produces complex figures drawn with a single finger stroke across a grid. The drawings have strict rules that can be described in a graph theory. A sequence of edges called a cycle, which is a sequence of edges that begin and end at the same spot, is what mathematicians call a design. The results raise questions about the way mathematics is done in other cultures, according to Da Silva.