Cave fossils are early Europeans

The bones are said to display modern
and Neanderthal features.

Archaeologists have identified fossils belonging to some of the earliest modern humans to settle in Europe.

The research team has dated six bones found in the Pestera Muierii cave, Romania, to 30,000 years ago.

The finds also raise questions about the possible place of Neanderthals in modern human ancestry.

Details of the discoveries appear in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The human bones were first identified at the Pestera Muierii (Cave of the Old Woman) cave in 1952, but have now been reassessed.

Interesting mix
Only a handful of modern human remains older than 28,000 years old are known from Europe.

Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis and colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates directly from the fossils and analysed their anatomical form.

The results showed that the fossils were 30,000 years old and had the diagnostic features of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

But Professor Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features that were characteristic of our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis).

The Point Of Icicles

Contemplating some of nature's cool creations is always fun. Now a team of scientists from The University of Arizona in Tucson has figured out the physics of how drips of icy water can swell into the skinny spikes known as icicles.

Deciphering patterns in nature is a specialty of UA researchers Martin B. Short, James C. Baygents and Raymond E. Goldstein. In 2005, the team figured out that stalactites, the formations that hang from the ceilings of caves, have a unique underlying shape described by a strikingly simple mathematical equation.

However, stalactites aren't the only natural formations that look like elongated carrots. Once the researchers had found a mathematical representation of the stalactite's shape, they began to wonder if the solution applied to other similarly shaped natural formations caused by dripping water.

So the team decided to investigate icicles. Although other scientists have studied how icicles grow, they had not found a formula to describe their shape.

Surprisingly, the team found that the same mathematical formula that describes the shape of stalactites also describes the shape of icicles.