Tag: earliest
One of the world’s earliest farming villages housed surprisingly few people
A farming-fueled baby boom long thought to have sparked the rise of ancient cities in southwest Asia turns out to have been a bust.
At a massive site in southern Turkey called Çatalhöyük, large numbers of multi-roomed, mud-brick structures cluster in several parts of a settlement that covers an area equivalent to nearly 26 U.S. football fields. Since its discovery in the 1960s, population estimates for the ancient settlement have ranged from 2,800 to 10,000.
A rare 3-D tree fossil may be the earliest glimpse at a forest understory
With its fluffed, spiraling top and thin trunk, the Sanfordiacaulis densifolia tree looks like it came straight out of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. But this isn’t a truffula come to life. It’s a 3-D rendering of a 350 million-year-old fossil that shows something very few other fossils in the world ever have — both a trunk and the leaves of a tree species from a somewhat fuzzy time period in plant history, researchers report February 2 in Current Biology