During the past year, some major scientific discoveries were made which left experts and ordinary people scratching their heads, as the field of exploration and scientific research advanced even further.
This article will provide a brief overview of some of the scientific discoveries that have been made to date, but have yet to be proven. Could they be true, however? Would it make a difference if they were?
In this article, we are going to take a close look at several scientific claims that will shake up their fields if they prove to be true, according to Science News.
Life may have been boosted by lightning
According to a new study published in this year’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, giant volcanic eruptions millions of years ago may have boosted the odds of early life on Earth, since the debris that was left behind contained a significant amount of nitrate, which formed in the atmosphere during those eruptions.
In the midst of the eruptions, there may have been fierce lightning strikes that empowered molecular nitrogen to bond with other elements, allowing it to form molecules useful for living organisms.
To confirm this claim, however, scientists will need to take into account the different chemical makeup of the atmosphere of primordial Earth in order to support their claim.
Early humans were known to engage in cannibalism
There is evidence that a 1.45-million-year-old fossilised leg that bears tool marks could be used as the earliest evidence of human cannibalism among the ancestors of modern humans, researchers claim.
It is possible that the imprints on the bone, found in Kenya, were created by an unnamed species of hominid using a stone tool to snip a muscle from the shin of another species of hominid. Paleoanthropologists, on the other hand, contend that it is not necessary to take the few bone nicks to be construed as cannibal table crumbs.
A healthy thymus gland plays a crucial role in the body
Even so, it is possible that the thymus may not be of no importance to the health of adults.
There is a common misconception that this organ of the immune system, which sits between the lungs, is expendable in adulthood, since it shows the greatest activity during childhood and diminishes with time.
An analysis of almost 2,000 adults who underwent chest surgery without the removal of the thymus gland, however, found that the removal of the gland was associated with increased chances of cancer and death over the following few years.
The reason for the possible disadvantage of removing the thymus is currently unknown.
Humans buried their dead before big brains
A scientific study has shown that hominids such as Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may not have been the only ones to honour the dead.
According to current research, Homo naledi, which lived around the same time as early Homosapiens, but had a brain that was about the size of an orange, deliberately buried bodies in an underground cave in South Africa around the time of its death.
As for the supposedly buried bodies, both experts and archeologists remain unconvinced. This could be due to the fact that the bodies may have fallen through cave shafts or been washed away by the water into natural depressions in the cave floor. By over 160,000 years, this predates the earliest known burials of humans and Neanderthals by a considerable amount of time.
That news provided by timenews.
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