Month: February 2025

Astronomy News for February 2025: The latest results from the James Webb Space Telescope. 

It seems as though every time that astronomers build a new instrument, one that’s bigger, or more precise or one that looks at the sky above in a different way the discoveries made by that instrument challenge if not actually break existing theories about the Universe. It all started when Galileo first pointed his primitive telescope skyward and saw the moons of Jupiter, spots on the Sun, the phases of Venus and saw that the Milky Way was actually composed of thousands, millions of stars. As optical telescopes got bigger and bigger they saw more things like nebula and star clusters. Then, when astronomers added spectrographs to their telescopes they were able to discover what elements the stars were made of.

Two Telescope made by Galileo. With these instruments Galileo began the revolution in our understanding of the Universe that continues to this day! (Credit: Britannica)

In the 20th century radio telescopes discovered objects like pulsars and quasars while X-ray telescopes discovered black holes. With each new technological advance in the astronomer’s instruments came a better understanding of the Universe even if that meant tossing aside some older, well established ideas.

Today we build large arrays of radio telescopes in order to get an even clearer view of what lies out there! (Credit: PrimalLuceLab)

Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began to astound astronomers within weeks of its beginning operation in 2022. You see, the JWST was designed primarily to study the early Universe, around a billion years after the Big Bang. If you’re wondering how a telescope can see into the past remember that since the speed of light is a finite 300,000 kilometers per second all you have to do is look at something billions of light years away and you’ll be seeing it as it was billions of years ago.

In operation less than three years the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already shaken up many of our theories about the early Universe. (Credit: European Space Agency)

But you better have a big telescope, and you better put that telescope in space so it can just stare at the object you’re observing for hours or days or longer to gather enough light. Oh, and since the entire Universe is expanding the Doppler effect is going to cause that light from billions of years ago to be shifted to longer wavelengths, you’ll have to build your telescope to see in the infrared. That means you’ll have to get it away from any heat sources like the Sun and Earth, which is why the JWST was placed at the Lagrangian (L1) point in the Earth’s shadow but a million kilometers from our planet.

The five Lagrangian points are the only exact solutions to the ‘Three Body Problem’ in celestial mechanics. Only L4 and L5 are really stable but the JWST is located at Earth’s L1 point where it only requires occasional adjustments to its orbit. (Credit: Australian Space Academy)

So as I said, JWST was primarily designed to study the Universe only a billion or so years after the big bang and those were some of the first images it took. Astronomers were interested in that period because they theorized that was the time that the first stars began to shine, that the first galaxies began to form. (See my post of 6 July 2024.)

Just a few years ago this was our best idea of the evolution of the Universe. After the big bang cooled off there was a period called the dark ages that lasted until about 400 million years after the big bang when the first stars began to shine. The first galaxies formed not long after that. The JWST has already forced us to make some changes to that timetable. (Credit: NASA Science)

One question that it was hoped that the JWST could answer dealt with the supermassive black holes that astronomers are now convinced lie at the heart of every galaxy, at least every big one. Simply put, the question was, which came first? Did galaxies form supermassive black holes in their centers, or do supermassive black holes form galaxies around them? Obviously any theory of how galaxies form needs to know that.

The first ever image of a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87. What you actually see here is not the hole itself but the ring of material that is falling into the hole and heating up so that it shines! (Credit: Wikipedia)

What the JWST did in fact see when it made its first observations were a large number of what astronomers named ‘Little Red Dots’, that is small but rather bright galaxies with a reddish glow to them. By their brightness the red dots appeared to contain millions of bright stars and some of them were found to have existed less than half a billion years after the big bang, a time so early that according to most theories of galaxy formation no such well developed galaxies should exist. That was why there were so many news articles about JWST having ‘Broken Cosmology’.

Some of the ‘Little Red Dots’ observed by the JWST. These ‘proto-galaxies’ appear to have formed much earlier than cosmologists expected. (Credit: Space.com)

That was about two years ago and since then the JWST has both discovered a lot more ‘Little Red Dots’ and made much more detailed and precise measurements of some of them. Now a team of astronomers headed by Dale Kocevski of Colby College has announced results of their survey of the red dots at a conference of the American Astronomical Society that was held in Maryland the second week in January.

The recent 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society must have been a fun party!!!! (Credit: Threads)

What the astronomers found was that the better observations of the red dots all showed light signatures indicating that much of their light came from hot gasses spiraling into a growing black hole. So the reason the red dots were so bright wasn’t because they had millions of stars but because they had the beginnings of a Quasar, a feeding black hole in their center. The JWST observations don’t break current theories of cosmology but those theories are certainly going to have to be modified.

Six Quasars as seen in an optical telescope. Today we know that these objects are galaxies with a feeding supermassive black hole at their center that is giving off so much light that it is outshining the entire galaxy around it. (Credit: Britannica)

The case isn’t closed yet however, because about a billion years after the big bang all of the red dots seem to disappear. Dr. Kocevski and the other astronomers in the team think that, as the black hole forms a galaxy around it will start to take on the appearance of a more ‘normal’ active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Quasars are often also referred to as ‘Active Galactic Nuclei’ (AGN). The question for astronomers is how did the ‘Little Red Dots’ evolve into AGN? (Credit: Medium)

So it seems that the JWST has given us the answer to our question about which came first: galaxies or the supermassive black holes inside them. The ‘Little Red Dots’ are black holes that serve as the seeds of galaxy formation. But like every other scientific answer this one breeds another question; where do the black holes that form the ‘Little Red Dots’ come from?

Climate Change Review for the year 2024; The Hottest year ever recorded for the World. 

The year 2024 has been over for more than a month now and although scientists are still evaluating all of the Climate measurements that they obtained during the past year the broad outline of Global Warming’s impact on our planet is clear. The year 2024 was simply the hottest year ever recorded in human history, erasing the record set just the year before in 2023. In fact the ten hottest years ever recorded have all occurred in the last ten years.

And this was BEFORE 2024 was declared the hottest year ever! So really the 11 hottest years ever recorded have been the last 11 years! (Credit: Climate Central)

For the world as a whole the temperature in 2024 was measured as being 1.6ºC above pre-industrial levels, that baseline being as measured from the years 1850 to 1900. The world’s temperature not only exceeded the previous record from 2023 but did so but did so by more than a tenth of a degree, +0.12ºC, an enormous jump. Indeed, over the last two years temperatures worldwide have been so hot that they have surpassed most models of global warming, leading some climate scientists to fear that global warming is actually accelerating. A few statistics that illustrate just how fast the temperatures are climbing worldwide in 2024 are that for every cold temperature record that was set fifty record high temperature we set. At the same time six of the world’s seven continents recorded their hottest years ever, only Asia bucked the trend recording its second hottest year ever.

The World in 2024. Very few areas were colder than average while the vast majority of our globe was hotter, often much hotter than average. (Credit: National Centers for Environmental Information)

That figure of 1.6ºC of course breaks the target figure of limiting global temperature to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels that was set back in the Paris accords of 2015. Now that goal was intended to be an average over a decade or more so we haven’t failed yet. However the last two years have averaged over the 1.5ºC goal and we’re still not really doing anything to control global warming, to reduce if not eliminate the amount of green house gasses that we are dumping into the atmosphere.

In the nine years since the great majority of the world’s nations agreed to the Paris accords virtually nothing has actually been accomplished. (Credit: Yale MacMillian Center, Yale University)

In fact we are actually pumping more greenhouse gasses into the sky. Measurements of CO2 levels at the weather station at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, indicate that in 2024 CO2 in the atmosphere increased by 3.58 parts per million, that’s the largest increase since records began there in 1958. Not all of the increase has come from burning fossil fuels; a lot is coming from all of the wildfires that are increasing in number and intensity. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now 50% higher than it was back in 1900 and most models of climate change agree that another such large increase as happened in 2024 will eliminate all hope of keeping below the Paris agreed 1.5ºC limit.

In fact, we are still actually increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses being emitted into the atmosphere, with no end in sight! (Credit: Carbon Brief)

So much for the temperature measurements for 2024, the effect of all that heat on climate disasters throughout the world is not hard to find. There were the extreme droughts in Italy, southern Africa, the Amazon and the American Southwest as well as the excessive rainfall in Ireland, Spain, Southern India and the Philippines. Add to that the severe storms that ravaged both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans like Hurricanes Helene and Milton along with Typhoon Gaemi in the Pacific. Of course there were heat waves around the planet such as those in the American Southwest, Central Europe and China. In the United States the number of ‘billion dollar’ disasters’ in 2024 was 27, an unprecedented number as was the total dollar figure for the damage 182.7 billion.

The billion dollar disasters for the US in 2024. The total value came to more than 180 billion dollars along with more than 500 lives. And it’s only going to get worse! (Credit: Climate.gov)

Between the years 1980 and 2010 the yearly number of weather disasters averaged about 8 but over the last five years it has ballooned to more than 20, an exponential growth rate. It’s worth pointing out that if the trend continues, the destruction caused by extreme weather will in a few years generate a considerable stress on the American economy. That possibility is causing a growing fear within the insurance industry, which has to pay their costumers for any damage to property by the weather.

In the last six years two million homes have been refused insurance because of the risk generated by climate change. Of course, most of those homes are in states like California and Florida that experience the worst effects of global warming but even in my home state of Pennsylvania it has begun. (Credit: New York Times)

Because of that many insurance companies are now refusing to accept customers in ‘high risk’ areas of the country such as in wildfire areas in California or hurricane prone parts of Florida. However remember that much of the damage done by hurricane Helene occurred in the western mountains of North Carolina, an area generally considered safe from severe weather. So in just a few years the question will be, is any part of our country, any part of the world safe from severe weather. 

Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida as a Cat 4 causing destruction all the way up even into North Carolina. (Credit: ABC45)

Of course it’s not just property that’s harmed by severe weather, there’s a cost in human lives as well. For example, in those ‘billion dollar’ disasters mentioned above 418 Americans were directly killed, 225 by hurricane Helene alone. Now, I just said directly caused by weather disasters, that figure doesn’t include all of the people whose lives were shortened by extreme heat, such as the 113 consecutive days above 100ºF in Phoenix Arizona which led to a record 645 heat related deaths. Heat waves in other parts of the world, where air conditioning is rare led to many more thousands of deaths. And again, if the trend of exponential growth in temperature continues those death figures will also grow exponentially.

I simply can’t imagine 113 straight days of over 100 degrees F (37.8 degrees C). And look at by how much it broke the old record of 76! Phoenix broke all kinds of heat records in 2024. (Credit: Fox Weather)

I’m going to end here, but the litany of extreme weather events is so large that I could go on and on. There is some good news, since the strong El Nino event that began in 2023 has now turned into a La Nina most climate models suggest that 2025 will not be as hot as either 2024 or 2023. Most experts expect this year to only be the third hottest year ever recorded. Of course that makes you wonder how bad the next El Nino will be when it comes.

Climatologists had hoped that 2025 would be a little bit cooler than 2024, it sure hasn’t started that way!!! (Credit: Facebook)

So long as we continue to burn fossil fuels the world will simply get hotter and hotter, that’s all there is to it.

Space News for February 2025: Unmanned Probes make some News. 

It seems as though my last several space news posts have all been about manned space flight, either to the International Space Station or beyond, back to the Moon. I don’t want to give the impression that our unmanned probes haven’t been making any discoveries or advancing our ability to explore the solar system so in this post I’ll be discussing the latest news about unmanned space exploration and I’ll begin with the big news from the Parker Solar Probe.

Artist’s impression of the Parker Solar Probe making the closest ever approach to the Sun of any man made object. The thermal shield that protected Parker from the Sun’s heat is on the left facing the Sun. (Credit: Science Friday)

Launched in 2018 the Parker Solar Probe is named for Eugene Parker, a NASA astrophysicist who back in the 1950s predicted the existence of the Solar Wind. The solar wind is the never creasing stream of sub-atomic particles that flow outward from the Sun for about 20 billion kilometers creating a bubble around our solar system. See my post of 18 December 2019. During its six-year mission so far the Parker probe has crept ever closer to the Sun using gravity boosts from both the Earth and Venus to alter its orbit.

Eugene Parker discussing the solar wind whose existence he predicted. (Credit: ScienceAlert)

In its last close flyby in 2023 Parker set records for both proximity to the Sun, at a distance of 6.2 million kilometers as well as fastest speed ever attained by a human built object, 635, 266 kilometers per hour. Remember the Sun’s gravitational field is so much stronger than Earth’s that a space probe traveling close to it has to travel at an enormous speed in order to not get sucked in!

The velocity of an object orbiting a planet or star increases as the object gets closer to the planet or star. (Credit: YouTube)

But on the 24th of December 2024 Parker was scheduled to break both of those records with an even closer approach to the Sun at a distance of only 6.1 million kilometers and reaching a speed of 692,000 kilometers per hour. Getting so close to the Sun is obviously a dangerous maneuver not only because of the enormous heat, estimated at 980º C, but also because of the energy of the particles in the solar wind which can easily destroy sensitive electronics.

Sometimes the Sun erupts in massive solar flares but even when the Sun is quiet it is still constantly emitting super-heated plasma of enormous energy that could prove deadly to the electronics on a space probe. (Credit: The Wonder of Science)

To protect the spacecraft’s instruments from the worst of Sun’s energy Parker has an 11.5 cm thick carbon composite shield that is kept facing the Sun. Nevertheless as the probe makes its closest approach to the Sun the Space Agency knew that they would lose all radio contact with it, NASA did not know that Parker had survived until two days later on December 26th.

With radio antennas like this one in Madrid, Spain NASA’s deep space network maintains communication with its interplanetary probes like Parker. (Credit: Jet Propulsion Labouratory)

Even after receiving the signal that Parker was in good shape NASA still had to wait until New Year’s Day before the spacecraft could begin transmitting back the data it had collected at its closest approach to the Sun. Meanwhile Parker is scheduled to make two more flybys of our Sun, on March 22nd and June 19th of 2025 although neither will be quite as close as the one on December 24th.

Parker isn’t finished with the Sun just yet. The probe will make two more close approaches to our star this year! (Credit: NASA Science)

Meanwhile, not too far away the European Space Agency’s (ESA) BepiColombo probe made its fifth flyby of the planet Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun on the first of December 2024. Like Parker, BepiColombo is using the gravity of Mercury in order to change its trajectory so that in 2026 the spacecraft can go into a permanent orbit around the solar system’s smallest planet. Even though the encounter on the first was only a flyby the scientists at the ESA still used the occasion to check out their instruments by making detailed observations of Mercury, particularly the probe’s infrared spectrograph. 

Actually two space probes in one BepiColombo consists of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (l) and the Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (r). (Credit: Space.com)

Surprisingly, BepiColombo is actually two spacecraft in one. Once in orbit around Mercury BepiColombo will split into two distinct probes. One is the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the other is the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). Both probes will conduct different observations of the planet. Like the Parker Solar Probe, BepiColombo promises to reward us with many new discoveries in the near future.

The planet Mercury is much closer to Earth than Jupiter but because it is so close to the Sun it is more difficult to get to, so we actually know less about it. BepiColombo will hopefully teach us a great deal more. (Credit: Phys.org)

Finally I have some sad news to report, the Ingenuity helicopter, which was carried to the planet Mars aboard the Perseverance rover and which became the first human built craft to fly on another planet, see my post of 1 May 2021, crashed on its 72nd flight. Now bear in mind that Ingenuity was really just a test vehicle, intended only to see if flight of any kind was even possible in Mar’s thin atmosphere. The original NASA plan was for Ingenuity to only take five flights, tests that would be observed by Perseverance. That the little helicopter would succeed in making 72 flights over a three-year period and cover over 16 kilometers was beyond the wildest hopes of the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory who designed and built the aircraft.

The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first ever man made aircraft to take flight on another planet. Originally planned to take five experimental flights the little helicopter that could made rose above the Martian surface 72 times before finally crashing. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Now NASA has released a report detailing what they think happened to Ingenuity, although since the accident happened over 100 million kilometers from Earth no one can visit the crash site to do a proper investigation to be certain. The trouble seemed to begin on Ingenuity’s 70th flight when the helicopter was flying over an area of flat terrain with few features. Because the ground below had so few landmarks it caused Ingenuity’s visual navigation system to become confused. The same problem occurred on the next flight, in fact the navigation system ordered an emergency landing, one that turned out to be a hard landing, a landing that NASA thinks damaged at least one of the helicopter’s blades. Ingenuity’s 72nd and final flight was intended to be just a short test to see whether any damage had been sustained but the helicopter quickly crashed, breaking off both of its rotors about midway.

When a Lear Jet recently crashed in NE Philadelphia member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were quickly on site investigating what had happened. When Ingenuity crashed on Mars it obviously wasn’t possible for investigators to visit the site so the engineers at NASA had to figure out what happened based on the data the little aircraft had sent back to Earth. (Credit: YouTube)

Ingenuity may no longer be flying but the tiny probe is still working, acting now as a weather station on the Martial surface. And because Ingenuity was so successful NASA is now planning on a new helicopter to explore Mars. The proposed aircraft has been given the name Mars Chopper and it is a six-engine drone like helicopter that will be about the size of an SUV. Mars Chopper will carry an array of instruments to enable it to explore the Red Planet but whether it will operate in cooperation with a rover or autonomously is still to be decided.

Concept design for a possible Mars Chopper aircraft to continue Ingenuity’s mission of exploring of the red planet. (Credit: ScienceAlert)

In either case Mars Chopper will join the Parker Solar Probe and BepiColombo and all of the unmanned spacecraft that humans beings have sent into outer space to explore our solar system.

Archaeology News for February 2025:  Two Ancient Sites that tell us a great deal about how People lived Thousands of Years Ago.

Starting about ten thousand years ago we humans first began to both cultivate crops and domesticate herd animals. These twin achievements allowed our ancestors to end their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settle down into more permanent sites, villages, towns and eventually cities.

The Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle wasn’t quite as exciting, or as dangerous as this but life was hard for our ancestors more than 10,000 years ago. (Credit: Students of History)

This change from temporary housing in caves or portable huts to long-term structures obviously is a great boon to present day archaeologists. Think about it, a cave where an extended family lived for a few months out of the year certainly won’t contain as much archaeological evidence for an excavator to find as would a cluster of dwellings where many families lived for decades or longer. Nevertheless the details of exactly when and how that change from wanderers to homesteaders took place are still fuzzy, which is why a great deal of the efforts of archaeologists today are geared towards the study of how humans built those first urban areas.

The first villages appeared in Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago and probably looked something like this. Mud brick homes of a single room each with the work of farming and domestic animals happening right where the people lived. (Credit: Q-files)

As I mentioned above one of the advancements that enabled the first villages and towns to be built was domesticating animals that could be herded like sheep or goats or even reindeer in the north. Now the raising and handling of such large groups of animals requires not only pastures for grazing but also corrals for confining them when it becomes time for sheering, branding, slaughtering or even just counting how many of them you have.

Today we still use corrals whenever we want to keep animals in one place. (Credit: Carri-Lite Corrals)

A recent study by archaeologists at Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has upended long held ideas about a late Stone-Age, early Bronz Age, 4-5 thousand year old mysterious site in the Golan Heights known as the ‘Gilgal Refaim’, which is Hebrew for the ‘Wheel of Giants’. For decades now the 100-meter in diameter site had been interpreted as an astronomical observatory like the famous Stonehenge in England. Indeed the site is often referred to as the ‘Wheel Stonehenge’.

The Wheel of Giants, Gilgal Refaim in Hebrew as it appears in the Golan Heights. Until recently it was thought that the neolithic people who built this site used it as a calendar but new studies have shown that 4-5,000 year ago the site had no alignment to the solstices or equinoxes. Instead it appears to have been used as a corral for rounding up domestic, or possibly wild animals. (Credit: Israel Bardugo Photography)

The new study however took into account the way that Plate Tectonics, working at a slow rate of 8-15 mm per year has over the last 4-5 thousand years moved and even rotated the wheel. So looking at the way that the wheel was orientated back in the Neolithic the archaeologists found that there were no alignments to any celestial objects or events like solstices or equinoxes that would be important to a newly agricultural society. Instead the researchers maintain that Gilgal Refaim was a corral, a place that shepherds or goatherds could bring their flocks. The researchers also surveyed the surrounding area within 30km of the site and found other, smaller examples of such stone wheels averaging 20m in diameter. So perhaps Gilgal Refaim is simply the largest of a whole class of structures in the area used to concentrate livestock. 

A 4,000 year old megalithic tomb not far from Gilgal Refaim. The Golan Heights is an area rich in neolithic sites which is a shame since it is also so militarily significant that it has been constantly fought over by Israel and Syria. (Credit: Ancient Origins)

At the same time the archaeologists also recognize that structures like corrals can often serve as locations where people gather and interact. Remember the first rodeos were just people having fun at corrals while working with their livestock. So there is every possibility that Gilgal Refaim could have been used as a gathering place for nearby clans, either for religious of social events.

If you think about it the first Rodeos were just people having fun while working with domestic animals at a corral! Certainly people back in the Neolithic did much the same. (Credit: Canadian Horse Journal)

Another way in which the lives of human beings changed as they began to live in settled communities is the spread of communicable diseases. Think about it, a small group of nomads, say 12-15 people, who wander from one place to another with the seasons as different resources become available will probably only encounter other such groups three, maybe four times a year. Those are hardly the conditions that would allow an infectious disease to spread rapidly.

We have ample evidence that hunter gatherer groups were quite small, rarely more than a dozen people in all and those groups came in contact with other such groups only occasionally. (Credit: Wikipedia)

When humans started living in larger communities of hundreds or thousands of people however infectious organisms could multiply more easily, allowing the evolution of more diseases that could inflict our species. Indeed there is considerable DNA evidence that illnesses like salmonella, tuberculosis and even the bubonic plague all began to infect humans during the Neolithic period, the time of the first villages.

Cities, with big crowds of people are the perfect environment for diseases to spread. (Credit: South China Morning Post)

Now there is also evidence that humans began to adapt to these new, potential epidemic conditions by adopting a policy of ‘social distancing’ familiar to all of us thanks to Covid-19. A team of researchers from the University of Tennessee, Cambridge University, Durham University and Texas A&M have studied the patterns of settlement during the Neolithic ‘Trypillia’ culture of eastern Ukraine. Their results have been published in the ‘Journal of the Royal Society Interface’. During the late Stone Age this area contained a number of proto-towns or even proto-cities that have been well studied by archaeologists.

The known distribution of Neolithic sites in Ukraine designated as ‘Trypillia’ by archaeologists. (Credit: Cambridge University Press)

The researchers focused on one settlement known today as Nebelivka, which possessed thousands of wooden dwellings that were identified as being arranged in concentric patterns and clustered in pie shaped neighborhoods. Using computer programs designed to both study the spread of diseases as well as model urban planning to minimize that spread the team discovered that the inhabitants of Nebelivka were well aware of the hygienic benefits of ‘social distancing’. “This clustered layout is known by epidemiologists to be a good configuration to contain disease outbreaks.” According to Lead Author Alex Bentley of the University of Tennessee. “This suggests and helps explain the curious layout of the world’s first urban areas. It would have protected residents from emerging diseases of the time.”

A reconstruction of a Trypillia megasite like Nebelivka. That’s a pretty fair sized town but notice how it’s also rather spread out with open spaces between clusters of homes. Was this in order to help reduce the spread of disease? (Credit: History Enhanced)

The team also conducted a more detailed simulation of what would occur in Nebelivka if a food borne illness such as salmonella was to break out there. Carrying out millions of computer simulations what they discovered was that the pie shaped clustering of houses in Nebelivka helped to reduce the spread of such diseases.

Even today the food borne illness Salmonella causes a huge number of people to get sick. Part of the reason for this is the concentration of people living in cities. (Credit: Harvard Health)

The study’s result may also help to explain why the residents of Nebelivka are known to have burned down their dwellings on a regular basis and replaced them with new wooden houses. Fire has long been used as a means of fighting infectious disease.

There is much evidence throughout Eastern Europe of Neolithic People burning their homes on a regular basis. Archaeologists aren’t certain but it seems likely they did this in order to prevent the spread of diseases. (Credit: Daybreaks Devotions)

What both of these two studies show is that the people of the Neolithic period were every bit as smart as we are. That they used what technology they had to solve the problems that they faced and occasionally they developed new technology that they passed on. We are the inheritors of their knowledge and wisdom, we should be a little more grateful.