"Before the introduction of the domestic horse in Mesopotamia, valuable equids were being harnessed to ceremonial or military four wheeled wagons and used as royal gifts, but their true nature remained unknown. According to a palaeogenetic study, these prestigious animals were the result of a cross between a domestic donkey and a wild ass from Syria, now extinct. This makes them the oldest example of an animal hybrid produced by humans." Source: Science Daily.
"Palaeobiologists have unearthed the earliest evidence yet of hippos in the UK. Excavations at Westbury Cave in Somerset have uncovered a million-year-old hippo tooth which shows the animal roamed Britain much earlier than previously thought." (Science Daily, Oct. 2021)
"...Research demonstrates that the fossil is over one million years old, eclipsing the previous record of hippo in the UK by at least 300,000 years and filling an important gap in the British fossil record."
These hippos -- hippopotamus antiquus -- were gigantic, weighing around three tons, and the first human species to arrive in Britain may have run into these monsters as well as other animals like lions, hyenas, mammoths and the bizarre woolly rhinoceros.
"Millions of modern humans ask themselves the same question every morning while looking in the mirror: Why am I so hairy? As a society, we spend millions of dollars per year on lip waxing, eyebrow threading, laser hair removal, and face and leg shaving, not to mention the cash we hand over to Supercuts or the neighborhood salon. But it turns out we are asking the wrong question—at least according to scientists who study human genetics and evolution. For them, the big mystery is why we are so hairless." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Nobody has the slightest idea why humans lost their fur. Of course this question is only a mystery if you assume that humans were actually covered with fur in the first place. Nevertheless, if we did evolve (like the modern apes) from some "fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon," then presumably at one time Homo Sapiens or one of its hominin ancestors was just as furry as the gibbons of today.
I don't buy any of the explanations given in the top video. According to the new research described in the Smithsonian article, we may have lost our fur because of a genetic mutation which could also be responsible for baldness:
"A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth."
According to this still speculative theory, something happened early in human evolution which led to an increase in Dkk2, which in turn inhibited the growth of hair. It's still unclear, at least to me, why a genetic mutation like this could effect an entire species, but some of these mutations can apparently spread very quickly.
"Archaeologists surveying the Guattari Cave, near Rome, have discovered the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals. One of the early humans lived 90,000 to 100,000 years ago, while the others lived between 50,000 and 68,000 years ago." Source: Smithsonian Magazine (May 10, 2021).
"Researchers had previously found a Neanderthal skull in the cave in 1939. The new find makes the location 'one of the most significant places in the world for the history of Neanderthals,' says the Italian Ministry of Culture in a statement, per a translation by the Associated Press (AP)."
"As Lorenzo Tondo reports for the Guardian, Stone Age hyenas used the cave as a den and likely targeted the Neanderthals as prey.
"'Hyenas hunted them, especially the most vulnerable, like sick or elderly individuals,' Mario Rolfo, an archaeologist at Tor Vergata University, tells the Guardian."
Note: The hyenas probably killed the Neanderthals outside and then dragged them into the cave.
"A winding lava-tube cavern in northern Saudi Arabia was home to hyenas for millennia, and they left behind plenty of gruesome evidence of past meals. The floor of the cave system was covered in deep piles of gnawed bones — some of which belonged to people. " Source: Live Science.
"Hyenas often scavenge their meals, so they probably didn't kill their human prey, but rather, dug up cadavers from nearby burials and devoured them in this underground den, scientists recently reported."
"Other researchers described the western part of the lava tube site in 2009 as the 'Wolf Den,' because they suspected that wolves were responsible for the vast collection of bones. However, new analysis of the bone piles, coprolites (preserved feces) and individual bones told a different story. Scientists now suspect that the den belonged to striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena), which fed on a variety of animals — including humans — in that location from at least 4,500 years ago until as recently as 150 years ago."
"Rome has been invaded by Gauls, Visigoths and vandals over the centuries, but the Eternal City is now grappling with a rampaging force of an entirely different sort: rubbish-seeking wild boars." Source: NPR.
"Entire families of wild boars have become a daily sight in Rome, as groups of 10-30 beasts young and old emerge from the vast parks surrounding the city to trot down traffic-clogged streets in search of food in Rome's notoriously overflowing rubbish bins."
Comment: Wild animals invading city spaces is usually a sign of urban decay. Detroit is a good example. In the case of Rome, the city has apparently been falling apart for years. Back in 2019, for example, the Guardian ran an article headlined "Romans Revolt as Tourists Turn Their Noses Up At City's Decay" and locals have been complaining for a long time that Rome has become a "garbage dump:"
"Overflowing rubbish bins in Rome are increasingly becoming a common sight, with residents complaining that with high summer temperatures, it's only getting worse." Source: EuroNews (July 2021).
"An association representing 4,000 restaurants in Rome, FIEPET, said their revenues have dropped due to waste being abandoned outside their premises."
Video from Jan. 2019. All this garbage has been attracting the wild boars.
Virginia Raggi, the current mayor, is facing an election which I think is happening as I write this. A so-called "populist," she's been in office since 2016. I don't know enough about the situation in Rome to say that she's responsible for Rome's sorry condition, but the city's decay seems to have accelerated under her leadership:
"Under her tenure both public transport and waste management have been subject of criticism due to poor quality of passenger service and waste collection; as for the former to date (July 2018) more than 30 buses caught fire since January 2017 because of poor or absent maintenance. The event has become so common that the press reports that every time a bus explodes in Rome the first thing people think of by now is a lack of service of Atac - Rome's public transport company - rather than a terrorist attack." (Wikipedia)
Garbage piling up. Buses catching on fire. Wild boars wandering through the streets. Call me a misogynist, but these aren't exactly signs that Rome's first female mayor knows what she's doing. That may not be completely fair, however. After all, this is Italy. The mafia has probably been screwing things up, not to mention the EU. The different regions are constantly squabbling. There's corruption everywhere and the country's still recovering from a recent financial crisis. Raggi's had her chance, though. If the situation in Rome just got worse while she was in office, maybe it's time for somebody else to take over.
Report from Oct. 3, 2021.
Update (10/4/21): It looks like Raggi lost the election, coming in third behind "a far-right candidate and a center-left one," according to the Guardian. There may be a runoff to see who ends up trying to deal with the garbage and burning buses and the boars in the streets.
"More than a dozen young elephants — newborns, toddlers and teens — gamboled through mud in an ice age elephant "nursery" in southwestern Spain more than 100,000 years ago, according to new analysis of tracks that the youngsters left behind." Source: Live Science.
"Scientists examined 34 sets of tracks belonging to straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) — extinct relatives of modern elephants — at a site known as the Matalascañas Trampled Surface in Huelva, on the Iberian Peninsula. As the name implies, this was a high-traffic area for a short period of time during the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to about 11,700 years ago), when diverse animals, including Neanderthals, crisscrossed the surface.
"The presence of Neanderthal footprints — adult and juvenile — hint that they may have visited the nursery to hunt vulnerable elephants, preying on calves, targeting females in labor "or opportunistically scavenging stillbirths and females dead from birth," according to a new study."
The evidence is clear that prehistoric humans hunted mammoths in what is now Siberia. This 2016 video, for instance, describes one find that dated back to almost 45,000 years ago. Butchering these huge animals must have been a difficult and time-consuming job for hunters using stone tools.
"Experts have confirmed that ancient hunters resided on Kotelny, off the coast of Yakutia, at 75°20'N 141°00'E, a remarkable 990 kilometres (615 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. Their butchering tools have been found alongside multiple bones of extinct woolly mammoths." Source: Archaeology news Network (2021).
Note: This is a very harsh and remote region, to say the least, but it must have been teeming with wildlife back in the Stone Age:
"Ymyakhtakh culture (c. 2200–1300 BC) was a Late Neolithic culture of Siberia, with a very large archaeological horizon. Its origins were in Sakha, in the Lena river basin. From there it spread both to the east and to the west."
"The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean; they died out 4,000 years ago within a very short time. An international research team ... has now reconstructed the scenario that could have led to the mammoths' extinction. The researchers believe a combination of isolated habitat and extreme weather events, and even the spread of prehistoric man may have sealed the ancient giants' fate." Source: Science Daily (2019).
Note: According to this scenario, the mammoths' habitat shrank during the warming that followed the end of the last ice age and a group of the animals ended up isolated on Wrangel Island by rising sea levels. According to Wikipedia, they survived on the island "until 2500–2000 BC, the most recent survival of all known mammoth populations. Isolated from the mainland for 6000 years, about 500 to 1000 mammoths lived on the island at the time."
"Archaeologists in Russia have found a large circle made out of the stuff of horror movies: the bones of mammoths and other ice age creatures that lived more than 20,000 years ago, a new study finds." Source: Live Science (2020).
"Among the remains are the bones of more than five dozen mammoths, as well as bones from reindeer, horses, bears, wolves, red foxes and Arctic foxes, the study researchers said."
Note: Building structures from mammoth and other animal bones wasn't that unusual in the Stone Age, apparently. The 2011 video below, for instance, describes four mammoth-bone huts discovered near a Ukranian village called Mezhyrich:
"In 1965, a farmer dug up the lower jawbone of a mammoth while in the process of expanding his cellar. Further excavations revealed the presence of 4 huts, made up of a total of 149 mammoth bones. These dwellings, dating back some 15,000 years, were determined to have been some of the oldest shelters known to have been constructed by pre-historic man, usually attributed to Cro-Magnon." (Wikipedia)