Another bunch of readings for you :
1) Perseverance Can Continue To Operate On Mars Until At Least 2031- The gallant rover continues its exploration. How do NASA engineers plan a route and how do team geologists decide what to sample? Terrain consideration and rock outcrops are key and so far Perseverance has aced the challenges of topography and geology. Some beautiful maps too in this article.
2) Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi- How do you date rock art? The material used, mineral pigments mostly, cannot be dated directly. Often, ancient cave walls are covered with layers of calcite precipitated from water seeping along the walls. This calcite can be dated as it contains radiogenic Uranium, giving us a minimum age for the underlying art.
Rock art from Sulawesi, Indonesia, have yielded minimum dates of around 67 thousand years ago. This makes it among the earliest rock art known anywhere. Also, the location of Sulawesi, separated from Bornea by wide deep water channels, suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul around 65k involved maritime journey from Borneo to Papua. Modern Homo sapiens first reached this region sometime after 60,000 years ago.
Who then made this art? Denisovans, or some other branch of humans? The Indonesia- Papua region with an improving fossil and material record of being populated by a variety of humans is proving to be a very important area to understand human migrations and evolution.
3) Sediments reveal 2,600-year-old story of human persistence in central India- Desilting of lakes is going on in many parts of India. I say, before the JCB’s move in , send in the climate scientists. Sahana Ghosh writes about some fascinating work from the wetlands of Bandhavgarh forests in Central India. Scientists have reconstructed a climate and ecologic history going back 2600 years from lake sediment and then matched that with human cultural and political changes. Even as climate changed, humans adapted and modified landscapes. This is one of the few paleoclimate archives from Central India.