Artist’s depiction of a person carving an osteoderm from a giant sloth in Brazil about 25,000 to 27,000 years ago. “There was this idea that humans arrived and killed everything off very quickly — what’s called ‘Pleistocene overkill,’” said Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. But new discoveries suggest that “humans were existing alongside …
The landscape along the Buffels River in South Africa’s Namaqualand region is dotted with thousands of sandy mounds that occupy about 20% of the surface area. So the termite mounds also offer a mechanism to sequester carbon dioxide through dissolution and leaching of soil carbonate-bicarbonate to groundwater. The results of our radiocarbon dating of both the organic and inorganic carbon …
Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Get our free Climate email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. In just a few decades, the spiralling levels of waste have created vast, spiralling, “gyres” of plastic waste measuring …
