So...I guess in the past I haven't made a science topic, because pop-science is trash (pro tip, you can ignore news headlines that say stuff like "a new study shows asparagus causes cancer!!1!1") and the kind of science I studied in university is...old; I figure people can look that stuff up in textbooks or encyclopedias if they want.
But recently I've actually been outright reading blogs by scientists, summaries of research papers, or even outright research papers. From 2018 (*gasp*).
So...let's give this a try.
Two results that jumped out to me recently.
Mitochondrial DNA has traditionally been thought to only be inherited from the mother, but a case was found recently where it was inherited from both parents:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/dads-mitochondrial-dna/This second one...I genuinely found hard to believe so I ended up reading the whole paper; I'm still a little skeptical because these are some extraordinary claims:
https://www.athensjournals.gr/history/2018-1-X-Y-Sweatman.pdf
Basically the result they found is that cave paintings and statues in Europe up to 40,000 years ago had astrological signs represented (OK sure) that there's thousands of years of continuity in these zodiac signs--some of them lasting till the present day, but most lasting at least until Göbekli Tepe (surprising, but alright) and that people at the time knew about the procession of the equinoxes that happens roughly once every 2000 years, and used this as a method for marking dates. (Um, wait really?) But they manage to show this with...at least they claim relatively high precision (Four animal pictures in cave paintings they will generally interpret as the zociac signs for the four equinoxes, and then they can use this to predict the date of the site, which...apparently in all but one case matched perfectly with the carbon dated date). They also claim to understand the significance of Göbekli Tepe--one of the earliest religious sites and a large stone monument, which has confused scientists for a while since people living at the time were nomadic hunter gatherers so why build a huge stone monument? (They claim it's a monument to the Younger Dryas event, which was a return to ice age weather a thousand years after the end of the previous ice age).EDIT: Alright, sounds like I was right to be skeptical about this one; my followup with AskAnthropology points out some stuff like the authors of this study are an associate professor of engineering, and a postdoc, neither of them in anthropology or archeology:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/a7nyrt/so_i_read_this_paper_by_sweatman_and_coombs_and/
