Many have been under the impression that the existence of Adam and Eve was a scientific impossibility, yet recent studies by scientists might just have proven the pair’s links to modern humankind.
Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden found within the Bible’s Book of Genesis is one of the most well known stories across the entire world, but it’s previously proven near-impossible to scientifically prove – leaving many to doubt its viability within historical contexts.
Various hypotheses have understood that the source of male Y chromosomes and female mitochondrial DNA were at least ten thousand years apart, yet it appears as if recent studies have offered alternatives to these theories that give weight to the narrative of Adam and Eve.
The story of Adam and Eve might just be more realistic than previously thought (Romain Costaseca/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
While the notion of an ‘Adam’ and an ‘Eve’ in scientific contexts don’t necessarily denote the same meaning as within the Bible, as within science these two names simply denote the common origins of modern humans as opposed to the single earliest instance of human existence, it appears that they were indeed closer together than previously thought.
As shown in Nature, a team led by Paolo Francalacci at the University of Sassari studied the Y chromosomes of 1,200 from Sardinia, creating a bespoke molecular clock from around 7,000 previously unknown Y chromosome variations.
This molecular clock allowed the scientists to uncover key moments within Sardinian history such as the arrival of Africans in the Roman slave trade, but it also indicated that the scientific ‘Adam’ is believed to have existed around 180,000-200,000 years ago, which is similar time frame to that of Eve.
“It’s not so much that we’re shifting the mitochondria down,” explains Carlos Bustamante, a population geneticist at Stanford University, “which we are, a bit – but we’re pushing the Y farther back.”
Contrasting theories also appear to suggest that the most recent common ancestors for modern humans were only two to three thousand years ago. This study, published in Nature, was conducted through a computer simulation in 2004, which used ancestral information to look into the past and find links.
It’s perhaps unlikely that these are the same ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ theorized by both scientists and Christians, but it shows that our common links are perhaps much closer than originally thought.
Adam and Eve in scientific contexts differ from the biblical Garden of Eden story (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
What this actually amounts to, however, is very little from a DNA perspective, as these common ancestors are most likely ‘genetic ghosts’ that we’ve inherited nothing from due to the vast amount of time between then and now.
Many Christians aren’t too bothered about scientific proof when it comes to Adam and Eve though, as comments in a thread on the r/christianity subreddit show.
“It’s hard to find people who have been dead and buried for thousands of years,” one user proposes, whereas another outlines that “many (most?) Christians are comfortable with the idea that the Eden story is not a factual account of what really happened.”
It’s certainly an intriguing discovery though that potentially rewrites much of what we perhaps thought we knew about the origins of humanity – although it might not always fit into the context of a devious snake and a forbidden apple.
Featured Image Credit: ZU_09 / Fausto Baru / Getty
Scientists’ shocking discovery uncovers evidence of liquid water on Mars 742,000,000 years ago
This is a huge step forward in covering Mars’ history
Scientists have discovered evidence of water that was once on Mars millions of years ago.
Around 11 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into Mars, blasting chunks of the planet into space.
One of these pieces eventually crash-landed on Earth and is now known as the Lafayette Meteorite – one of the rare meteorites that can be directly traced back to Mars.
Water was on Mars, we know it. But scientists have struggled to piece together when, how and what happened to it.
Now, one major clue has advanced the discovery.
An international team of scientists, including two from Purdue University‘s College of Science, managed to date minerals in the Lafayette Meteorite and found they formed about 742 million years ago.
The lead author, Marissa Tremblay, assistant professor in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), explained that some Martian meteorites contain minerals formed through interactions with liquid water while still on Mars.
NEMES LASZLO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty
Tremblay, who specialises in how chemical processes shape planetary surfaces, said: “Dating these minerals can, therefore, tell us when there was liquid water at or near the surface of Mars in the planet’s geologic past.
“We dated these minerals in the Martian meteorite Lafayette and found they formed 742 million years ago.”
She added: “We do not think there was abundant liquid water on the surface of Mars at this time. Instead, we think the water came from the melting of nearby subsurface ice called permafrost and that the permafrost melting was caused by magmatic activity that still occurs periodically on Mars to the present day.”
Tremblay and her team showed that the water-related changes in the Lafayette Meteorite happened millions of years ago on Mars—and that this timing is accurate.
Despite the impact of being blasted off Mars, spending 11 million years in space and crashing into Earth, none of them affected the age of the water interaction they found.
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Ryan Ickert, a senior research scientist at Purdue and co-author of the study, explained that earlier attempts to figure out when water interacted with rocks on Mars weren’t always reliable.
This new evidence provides a more precise and accurate date for when water was present on Mars, uncovering more about the Red Planet’s history.
The Lafayette Meteorite was likely blasted off Mars’ surface about 11 million years ago during an asteroid impact. While floating in space, it was bombarded by cosmic rays which created certain isotopes within it.
This evidence doesn’t just uncover Mars’ backstory but also the Solar System and how our planet Earth got its water all those years ago.
“We have demonstrated a robust way to date alteration minerals in meteorites that can be applied to other meteorites and planetary bodies to understand when liquid water might have been present,” Tremblay concluded.
Featured Image Credit: NEMES LASZLO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty / Purdue Brand Studio
Scientists discover remains of hidden ‘buried planet’ under Earth surface from 4.5 billion years ago
The planet was long thought to have disappeared during the collision.
Before we start packing our bags to prepare for life on Mars or the Moon, there’s still a lot to uncover about our home planet. As well as discovering what’s missing.
According to new research, parts of the Earth’s crust are missing. Scientists also noted the fascinating remnants from an ancient planet located close to the Earth’s core.
Our understanding of how our moon came to be involved in a collision between Earth and a smaller planet called Theia – a theory planetary scientists have called the ‘giant impact’.
However, no remains of this smaller planet have ever been found, which has puzzled scientists for years, until now.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The new evidence of this event points to two mysterious blobs beneath the surface, hinting that our home planet could have absorbed Theia.
The blobs, known as large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs), were first discovered in the 1980s, under the continent of Africa and the Pacific Ocean.
Their high iron content means that the seismic waves passing through are slowed down, leading to their descriptive name.
Qian Yuan, O.K. Earl Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate and leader of the research noted these as ‘mantle blobs.’
‘Seismic images of Earth’s interior have revealed two continent-sized anomalies with low seismic velocities, known as the large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs), in the lowermost mantle,’ the researchers wrote.
‘The LLVPs are often interpreted as intrinsically dense heterogeneities that are compositionally distinct from the surrounding mantle.’
ThomasVogel/Getty
They added: ‘Here we show that LLVPs may represent buried relics of Theia mantle material (TMM) that was preserved in proto-Earth’s mantle after the Moon-forming giant impact.
‘Our canonical giant-impact simulations show that a fraction of Theia’s mantle could have been delivered to proto-Earth’s solid lower mantle.’
Paul Asimow, the Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geology and Geochemistry, who also worked on the research, said: ‘A logical consequence of the idea that the LLVPs are remnants of Theia is that they are very ancient.’
Looking at the next steps, Asimow added: ‘It makes sense, therefore, to investigate next what consequences they had for Earth’s earliest evolution, such as the onset of subduction before conditions were suitable for modern-style plate tectonics, the formation of the first continents, and the origin of the very oldest surviving terrestrial minerals.’
Featured Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech / ThomasVogel/Getty
Scientists figure out mystery of how man’s brain turned to glass after 2,000 years
The scientific mystery has long puzzled researchers
Nearly 2,000 years ago it’s understood that a man’s brain somehow turned into glass.
This bizarre incident has long troubled scientists looking for an answer, but a recent study might just have figured out how this phenomenal event occurred.
If there’s something that’s generally consistent about the artefacts found in Pompeii and Herculaneum following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is that they’re improbably well preserved.
Recent discoveries have uncovered pristinely maintained private bathhouses alongside ancient jewellery that looks like it was made recently, yet one of the strangest finds is the brain of a man that somehow turned into glass.
Dying all the way back in 79 A.D., scientists found a black glass-like material in the skull of a man who perished following Vesuvius’ devastation, leading all to remain puzzled as to how exactly this happened.
The man’s body was found in Herculaneum with a glass shard inside his skull (Marco Cantile/LightRocket via Getty Images)
However, as reported by Live Science, a breakthrough has seemingly now been made as researchers appear to have pinpointed the chain of events that transformed the brain in question into the bizarre substance.
Published in the Scientific Reports academic journal, it’s indicated that the process required to turn the man’s brain into glass is “the only such occurrence on Earth” of its kind, indicating quite how rare and unique the circumstances were to achieve it.
It was a mystery for so long because the typical pyroclastic flow from the volcano wouldn’t have been hot enough or cooled down quick enough to turn muscle tissue into glass, as the study explains:
“Organic tissues are commonly preserved as glass by the processes of vitrification at very low temperatures, known as cryopreservation, and can return to their original soft state when heated back to ambient temperature.
“It would therefore be impossible to find organic glass embedded in volcanic deposits that have reached several hundred of Celsius degrees.”
However, this new research proposes that a unique form of vitrification occurred at very high temperatures of around 510°C, indicating that “the body was exposed to the passage and vanishing of a short-lived, dilute and much hotter pyroclastic flow, explaining its early fast heating and the following very fast cooling.”
Extremely hot temperatures caused by an ash cloud allowed the vitrification of the man’s brain to occur (Pier Paolo Petrone)
Expanding upon this, the study theorizes that the high temperatures were caused by a “very hot ash cloud” that was the first deadly event following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the dissipation of this cloud within “minutes” allowed for such a dramatic shift in temperature compared to the cooler pyroclastic flow.
Previous studies published in 2020 pointed towards a similar hypothesis, but this is the first of its kind that have also proved that the glass-like material is indeed brain tissue, as pointed out through evidence of brain cells.
“This is the only way by which such a glass type can be preserved in the geological or archaeological record and explains why this is a unique occurrence and preserves the ultra-find neural structure of the brain,” the study concludes.
Featured Image Credit: Pier Paolo Petrone
Scientists discover truth behind mysterious radio signal in deep space that repeats every two hours
The discovery has challenged previous expectations
In space nobody can hear you scream, but they can instead hear a radio signal that blares out every two hours with no hesitation. Thankfully scientists have finally uncovered the origins of this mysterious sound, and its source has proven to be incredibly unexpected.
Sounds can be some of the eeriest things you’ll find in space, as researchers have released audio of what both the Sun and black holes ‘sound’ like, and it’s hard not to get creeped out.
These noises are even more terrifying if you don’t know where they’re coming from, as shown in the strange sounds that stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams heard from their own spacecraft.
If there’s one thing that has really puzzled scientists though it’s the bizarre (and rather creepy) radio signal from space that transmits every two hours without fail, but they’ve finally discovered its origins.
As reported by Space, a team of international astronomers have located the source of this mysterious radio signal after a lengthy search, and it was unveiled that it’s actually caused by a binary system with a dead star.
A dead star, otherwise known as a white dwarf, is a key part of why these mysterious radio signals are happening (Getty Stock)
These pulses of sound were first discovered by Iris de Ruiter in archives from the largest radio telescope on Earth, known as the Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR for short.
She found that the radio signals date all the way back to 2015, and they can last from anywhere between a few seconds to several minutes, although they remain consistent in their occurrence every two hours with no breaks from the regimented routine.
Strange events have caused a red dwarf and a white dwarf (otherwise known as a dead star) to orbit each other so closely that their magnetic fields interact, and this is what causes the radio blast to sound for us.
The orbiting red and white dwarfs produce the regular radio blasts when they bash into each other (Daniëlle Futselaar/artsource.nl)
Every two hours they bump together endlessly, creating the radio signal that was previously understood to only be capable of neutron stars. However, it’s now recognized that binary systems can similarly produce such loud waves of sound, and this changes how astronomers view radio signals.
As per EurekAlert!, Charles Kilpatrick, who co-authored the study, explains that “some astrophysicists also have argued that sources might emit pulses at regular time intervals because they are spinning, so we only see the radio emission when source is rotated towards us.
“Now, we know at least some long-period radio transients come from binaries. We hope this motivates radio astronomers to localize new classes of sources that might arise from neutron star of magnetar binaries.”