Scientific breakthroughs

Herbie Gomez .

THE find consisted of an adult finger, toe bones, teeth, and a child’s thighbone. The fossils, dated between some 50 thousand and 67 thousand years ago, were found in one of the limestone caves called Callao in Peñablanca town, Cagayan province in 2007.

The remains just put the Philippines in the map of evolutionary science in that these belonged to small-bodied human species that until recently were unknown to scientists. The Homo luzonensis (named after Luzon where the fossils were unearthed) shows that the Philippines has had a key role or a story to tell about hominin evolutionary history, particularly in Southeast Asia.

In an April 11, 2019 report, the Strategic Communications and Public Affairs group of The Australian National University (ANU) quotes Prof. Philip Piper as saying that the hand and feet bones are like those of Australopithecines, human-like primates with relatively small brains from one million to four million years ago. Australopithecines, ancestors of the Homo group, were thought to have last walked in Africa some two million years ago.

Piper also noted that “the teeth are really small.”

What does this mean for us? National Geographic quotes University of the Philippines-Diliman archaeologist Armand Mijares as saying that Philippines has been left out in the hominin evolutionary history for a long time, and the discovery somehow changes that.

The Journal Nature published the research of the international team that had Mijares as project leader.

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On a personal note, it looks like the heavens merely “watched” with indifference while the Homo luzonensis and the like, and some 99 percent of the species that ever crawled and walked this planet have become extinct? Many of them died in pain without science providing them some relief — not even a pain reliever.

And so, we homo sapiens, are merely “newcomers” who, like those before us, are headed for extinction. If we don’t nuke ourselves to extinction or if we’re unlucky to see a cosmic disaster, the changing climate probably will. It is just a matter of time — maybe not in our generation, maybe in a few thousands or a million years.

Relax, enjoy, and be grateful for our humanity. Welcome to the human race.

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Another scientific breakthrough was the success of astronomers to capture with a network of eight telescopes the very first image of a “monster” black hole beyond our Milky Way, some 500 million trillion kilometers away from Earth.

It’s three million times the size of our planet or some 40 billion kilometers across with a mass that’s 6.5 billion times compared to the sun in our solar system. The details were published in Astrophysical Journal Letters this week.

The amazing photograph is evidence of a black hole. But what amazes me more is the genuis of Albert Einstein whose comprehensive explanation of gravity, the general theory of relativity, has been subsequently confirmed by major astrophysics discoveries. Einstein got it right in 1915 long before the first computer was invented, and when telescopes were very much weaker.

The image from that distant galaxy called M87, made public this week, is another homage to Einstein who figured out the shape and glow of black holes.

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Now, back to Earth.

Out of the blue, the President has just theorized, without showing any basis, that he has a big D.

And the other day, a former presidential caregiver running for a Senate seat has shown evidence of ringworm-like spots on his back that don’t look like Dragon tattoos at all. Pastilan.