Study Suggests Weather and Not Hunting Killed Off Wooly Mammoths 150
Big Hairy Ian writes, quoting the BBC: "A DNA analysis shows that the number of creatures began to decrease much earlier than previously thought as the world's climate changed. It also shows that there was a distinct population of mammoth in Europe that died out around 30,000 years ago. ... Dr Dalen worked with researchers in London to analyse DNA samples from 300 specimens from woolly mammoths collected by themselves and other groups in earlier studies ... [The researchers] speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."
Re:How history changes (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.
Maybe we should be like you, where we know that there's no human-induced climate change because we ignore the unprecedented rate of change in temperature over the past 2 centuries, and keep all our understanding exactly the same as when we were born.
Re:Mammoth burgers (Score:4, Interesting)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: ... The meat of this animal is the easiest of digestion, and a quantity of it, exceeding that of any other food, can be eaten without experiencing the slightest of inconvenience."[81] Darwin was less enthusiastic about the meat, writing "the breast-plate roasted (as the Gauchos do "carne con cuero"), with the flesh on it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent."
Captain James Colnett of the British Navy wrote of "the land tortoise which in whatever way it was dressed, was considered by all of us as the most delicious food we had ever tasted."[108] US Navy captain David Porter declared that, "after once tasting the Gallipagos tortoises, every other animal food fell off greatly in our estimation
Re:It's a conspiracy! (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely false, laws are not "facts", they are uesful generalizations and most scientific laws have many exceptions.
You want examples? Ohm's Law, Hooke's Law, Charles Law, Boyle's law are all linear approximations that many materials obey but real world materials have higher order terms and some materials have *opposite* behaviour.
Second law of thermodynamics, one of the most useful laws, applies to closed systems, but there are no truly closed systems.
Coulomb's law, applies to electrostatic system but there are no pure electrostatic systems in the universe, it is approximation and so there is "the electrostatic approximation"