Hasil untuk "Fossil man. Human paleontology"

E. G. Nisbet, R. Fisher, D. Lowry et al.

The atmospheric methane burden is increasing rapidly, contrary to pathways compatible with the goals of the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement. Urgent action is required to bring methane back to a pathway more in line with the Paris goals. Emission reduction from “tractable” (easier to mitigate) anthropogenic sources such as the fossil fuel industries and landfills is being much facilitated by technical advances in the past decade, which have radically improved our ability to locate, identify, quantify, and reduce emissions. Measures to reduce emissions from “intractable” (harder to mitigate) anthropogenic sources such as agriculture and biomass burning have received less attention and are also becoming more feasible, including removal from elevated‐methane ambient air near to sources. The wider effort to use microbiological and dietary intervention to reduce emissions from cattle (and humans) is not addressed in detail in this essentially geophysical review. Though they cannot replace the need to reach “net‐zero” emissions of CO2, significant reductions in the methane burden will ease the timescales needed to reach required CO2 reduction targets for any particular future temperature limit. There is no single magic bullet, but implementation of a wide array of mitigation and emission reduction strategies could substantially cut the global methane burden, at a cost that is relatively low compared to the parallel and necessary measures to reduce CO2, and thereby reduce the atmospheric methane burden back toward pathways consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Arnaud Begat, Eduardo Villalobos-Segura, Manuel Amadori et al.

The majority of the fossil records of elasmobranch fishes (sharks, rays, skates) consists of isolated teeth and dermal denticles. Over their long and complex evolutionary history, dental remains are particularly indicative of the group’s plasticity and adaptability, which has hampered the classification of fossil species with highly specialised dental morphologies that deviate from those of extant species. One of such cases is †Synechodus prorogatus recovered from Middle and Late Jurassic deposits in Poland and Germany. Its original description and diagnosis were based on a single complete and two very incomplete teeth, which showed a very peculiar morphology with some features resembling several groups. These similarities resulted in its placement within synechodontiforms. However, subsequent findings showing numerous differences with the type species of the genus, †Synechodus dubrisiensis, cast doubt on its assignment within this group and this genus. Here, we describe new material from Upper Jurassic offshore deposits in SW Germany, which provides additional information about this species. We conducted a comprehensive morphological comparison between †S. prorogatus, various Jurassic selachian taxa and the type species of †Synechodus, †S. dubrisiensis (Late Cretaceous, England), confirming the taxonomic distinctiveness of this Jurassic species, which requires the establishment of a new genus, †Curvorudentis, with †C. prorogatus gen. et comb. nov. being type species. The discovery of this taxon in Late Jurassic deposits of Germany represents its stratigraphically youngest occurrence, extending its chronostratigraphic range and geographical distribution. †Curvorudentis prorogatus is considered here a galeomorph shark, rather than being a member of the stem clade †Synechodontiformes, although its precise systematic position within this group remains ambiguous.

Facundo Javier Riguetti, Sebastián Apesteguía, Juan Ignacio Canale et al.

South American Mesozoic vertebrate fossils are key in contrasting the classic North American and European views of clades evolution. During the last decades, several relevant findings of stegosaurian remains from Argentina show a greater diversity than previously thought. These include the early stegosaur Isaberrysaura from Los Molles Formation (Middle Jurassic) and indeterminate stegosaurian remains from the Cañadón Calcáreo (Upper Jurassic) and the La Amarga (Lower Cretaceous) formations, all from the Argentinian Patagonia. In addition to these scarce records, new remains from the Berriasian–Valanginian Bajada Colorada Formation of Neuquén Province (Argentina) are presented here. These consist of sacral vertebrae, dorsal ribs and several osteoderm types, including stegosaurian-like spines. The shape analysis of the sacral vertebrae, anatomic features (e.g., sacral vertebrae and ribs dorsoventrally compressed, and dorsal ribs with T-shaped proximal transversal section), and the morphologic disparity of the osteoderms, support an assignation to Thyreophora with affinities to Stegosauria. The finding of these remains in Bajada Colorada reinforces the presence of stegosaurs in Argentinian Patagonia during the Lower Cretaceous. Our explorations and research in Bajada Colorada also support that the historical absence of stegosaurian remains in Southern continents was an effect of searching and/or preservational biases, as other authors proposed. These new stegosaurian remains also support the presence of a transitional fauna in Bajada Colorada including both Jurassic and Cretaceous components.

Minja Axelsson, Henry Shevlin

In this preliminary work, we offer an initial disambiguation of the theoretical concepts anthropomorphism and anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and social robotics. We define anthropomorphism as users perceiving human-like qualities in robots, and anthropomimesis as robot developers designing human-like features into robots. This contribution aims to provide a clarification and exploration of these concepts for future HRI scholarship, particularly regarding the party responsible for human-like qualities - robot perceiver for anthropomorphism, and robot designer for anthropomimesis. We provide this contribution so that researchers can build on these disambiguated theoretical concepts for future robot design and evaluation.

Denis Theda, Darius Nau, René Dederichs et al.

Ornithomimosauria is a group of coelurosaurs primarily known from the Cretaceous of Asia and North America. The European record is comparatively sparse, with Pelecanimimus from the Lower Cretaceous of Spain being the only unequivocal representative. Here, we present a manual ungual and a distal metatarsal III from a Lower Cretaceous (Barremian to Aptian) karstic fissure fill in Balve, northwestern Germany, which we assign to Ornithomimosauria indet. We also review the literature regarding manual unguals of ornithomimosaurs and confirm previous reports of quite consistent positional variation within Ornithomimosauria, with manual ungual I being the most recurved and bearing the largest flexor tubercle, and the unguals of digits II and III being less recurved and possessing smaller tubercles. The manual ungual from Balve is closest in morphology to manual digit III. The metatarsal has a shaft with a strongly triangular cross-section, marking it as a sub- or fully developed arctometatarsal. This type of specialized third metatarsal occurs in a number of different clades of Coelurosauria (Alvarezsauroidea, Ornithomimosauria, Oviraptorosauria, Troodontidae, Tyrannosauridae). Based on its overall morphology and the rarity (Alvarezsauroidea, Troodontidae) or absence (Oviraptorosauria, Tyrannosauridae) of other clades with arctometatarsals from the fossil record of Europe, we regard it as ornithomimosaurian. This is only the second definitive record of European ornithomimosaurs, after the description of Pelecanimimus polyodon from Spain, and represents the first reported occurrence of this clade in Germany.

Yuanning Han, Ziyi Qiu, Jiale Cheng et al.

Studies of Generative AI (GenAI)-assisted creative workflows have focused on individuals overcoming challenges of prompting to produce what they envisioned. When designers work in teams, how do collaboration and prompting influence each other, and how do users perceive generative AI and their collaborators during the co-prompting process? We engaged students with design or performance backgrounds, and little exposure to GenAI, to work in pairs with GenAI to create stage designs based on a creative theme. We found two patterns of collaborative prompting focused on generating story descriptions first, or visual imagery first. GenAI tools helped participants build consensus in the task, and allowed for discussion of the prompting strategies. Participants perceived GenAI as efficient tools rather than true collaborators, suggesting that human partners reduced the reliance on their use. This work highlights the importance of human-human collaboration when working with GenAI tools, suggesting systems that take advantage of shared human expertise in the prompting process.

Andrea Gaggioli, Sabrina Bartolotta, Andrea Ubaldi et al.

Artificial Intelligence holds significant potential to enhance human creativity. However, achieving this vision requires a clearer understanding of how such enhancement can be effectively realized. Drawing on a relational and distributed cognition perspective, we identify three fundamental modes by which AI can support and shape creative processes: Support, where AI acts as a tool; Synergy, where AI and humans collaborate in complementary ways; and Symbiosis, where human and AI cognition become so integrated that they form a unified creative system. These modes are defined along two key dimensions: the level of technical autonomy exhibited by the AI system (i.e., its ability to operate independently and make decisions without human intervention), and the degree of perceived agency attributed to it (i.e., the extent to which the AI is experienced as an intentional or creative partner). We examine how each configuration influences different levels of creativity from everyday problem solving to paradigm shifting innovation and discuss the implications for ethics, research, and the design of future human AI creative systems.

Tim Schreiter, Jens V. Rüppel, Rishi Hazra et al.

To achieve natural and intuitive interaction with people, HRI frameworks combine a wide array of methods for human perception, intention communication, human-aware navigation and collaborative action. In practice, when encountering unpredictable behavior of people or unexpected states of the environment, these frameworks may lack the ability to dynamically recognize such states, adapt and recover to resume the interaction. Large Language Models (LLMs), owing to their advanced reasoning capabilities and context retention, present a promising solution for enhancing robot adaptability. This potential, however, may not directly translate to improved interaction metrics. This paper considers a representative interaction with an industrial robot involving approach, instruction, and object manipulation, implemented in two conditions: (1) fully scripted and (2) including LLM-enhanced responses. We use gaze tracking and questionnaires to measure the participants' task efficiency, engagement, and robot perception. The results indicate higher subjective ratings for the LLM condition, but objective metrics show that the scripted condition performs comparably, particularly in efficiency and focus during simple tasks. We also note that the scripted condition may have an edge over LLM-enhanced responses in terms of response latency and energy consumption, especially for trivial and repetitive interactions.

Rikuo Sasaki, Michimasa Inaba

Recent advancements in AI have highlighted its application in captology, the field of using computers as persuasive technologies. We hypothesized that the "conformity effect," where individuals align with others' actions, also occurs with AI agents. This study verifies this hypothesis by introducing a "Persuadee Agent" that is persuaded alongside a human participant in a three-party persuasive dialogue with a Persuader Agent. We conducted a text-based dialogue experiment with human participants. We compared four conditions manipulating the Persuadee Agent's behavior (persuasion acceptance vs. non-acceptance) and the presence of an icebreaker session. Results showed that when the Persuadee Agent accepted persuasion, both perceived persuasiveness and actual attitude change significantly improved. Attitude change was greatest when an icebreaker was also used, whereas an unpersuaded AI agent suppressed attitude change. Additionally, it was confirmed that the persuasion acceptance of participants increased at the moment the Persuadee Agent was persuaded. These results suggest that appropriately designing a Persuadee Agent can improve persuasion through the conformity effect.

Alessio Iannucci, Piroska Pazonyi, Krisztina Sebe

Abstract Sus arvernensis is a Pliocene species that occupies a key position in the evolution of suids (Suidae, Artiodactyla, Mammalia) in Eurasia, and besides, it is considered important for biochronological correlations and paleoecological inferences. However, our knowledge on S. arvernensis is largely based on fossil remains from southwestern Europe. Here, we present a revision of the Hungarian fossil record of S. arvernensis. Up to now, the species was known from only two localities of Hungary, Gödöllő (central Hungary) and Süttő (northwest Hungary), and the latter occurrence has even been questioned. After the comparison with other relevant samples of S. arvernensis, of the Early Pleistocene S. strozzii, and of the extant wild boar S. scrofa (motivated by previous attributions and the chronology of the localities), the presence of S. arvernensis from Gödöllő and Süttő is confirmed, and more material of the species is described from Beremend (southern Hungary) and Kisláng (western Hungary). Collectively, the results of the revision carried out herein reveal a relatively widespread distribution of S. arvernensis in Hungary, hence providing an important link from the eastern to western European fossil record of the species. The specimens from Gödöllő and Süttő are slightly larger than the other material of S. arvernensis from France and Italy included in the biometric comparison, although the paucity of the material precludes to evaluate whether these differences are significant and to relate them to a chronological and/or geographical context. The occurrence of S. arvernensis in the Hungarian localities considered in this work is a biochronological indication of an age older than at least 2.6 Ma, since the species is not recorded after the Pliocene–Pleistocene transition. This in agreement with the age estimates available so far for some of the localities or provides new insights. At Süttő, in particular, the identification of S. arvernensis reinforces the view that travertine deposition started already in the Pliocene.

YOSHINO ISHIZAKI, YUTA SHIINO

The discinid brachiopod from the Lower Triassic Osawa Formation in the Southern Kitakami Terrane, Japan, exhibited a unique morphological combination of a narrow pedicle track (listrium) and a V-shaped large depressed area, thereby suggesting an intermediate form between the Palaeozoic Orbiculoidea and the extant Discinisca. Based on these characteristics, we propose Bronzoria recta gen. et sp. nov., a genus that appeared in the late Permian and was widely distributed during the Triassic period. Morphological analysis of extant discinids revealed that the pedicle area showed an arrowhead-shaped median plate and a pair of semilunar plates, equivalent to the inner and outer listrial plates of Palaeozoic-type discinids, respectively. Consequently, there are great differences in the development of the pedicle area, i.e., the large pedicle area of extant discinids is suitable for robust pedicle attachment, whereas the narrow pedicle area of Bronzoria gen. nov. suggests a free-lying mode of life. Given the relationship between pedicle-related structures and the mode of life, we hypothesised that the evolution of the large depressed area preceded the development of the pedicle area. Subsequently, the large depressed area accommodated a larger pedicle, facilitating an autecological innovation for pedicle attachment, as observed in extant species.

João Paulo da Costa, L. H. M. S. Trifilio, H. I. de Araújo‐Júnior et al.

Abstract Northeastern Brazilian natural tank deposits stand out among the sedimentary deposits bearing megafauna remains in South America. João Cativo Paleontological Site (JCPS, Itapipoca, Ceará State, Brazil) is included in the Megafauna Valley and is one of the main sources of paleoecological data in that area. This study reveals trace fossils detected on Quaternary megafauna remains recovered from JCPS, allowing interpretation of paleosynecological interactions among the Quaternary megafauna taxa of the Brazilian Intertropical Region (RIB) and associated taxa. Only four of the 951 fossil specimens (cranial, post-cranial, osteoderms, and teeth) collected in the 1960s had biogenic signatures related to predation/scavenging and pre-historic human handling. Scratches on two rib fragments and a metapodial of Eremotherium laurillardi are attributed to the ichnospecies Machichnus fatimae and suggest a feeding interaction between a canid (probably Protocyon troglodytes) and the carcass of E. laurillardi. The anthropic mark corresponds to incisions made by a lithic weapon in the femur of a Palaeolama major, likely with the intent of slicing and sawing the carcass into smaller pieces.

Felipe Busker, Luciana María Giachetti, Gastón Martínez

En esta contribución se reporta por primera vez restos fósiles de mamíferos y trazas continentales hallados en la Formación Sarmiento (Eoceno medio a Mioceno Temprano), aflorante en la localidad de Cabo Raso (Chubut, Argentina). Entre los mamíferos se destaca la presencia del roedor Soriamys gaimanensis (primer registro fuera de la localidad de Bryn Gwyn), además de los chinchilloideos Eoviscaccia australis y Perimys sp. En el mismo nivel se hallaron dientes aislados de notoungulados (Hegetotheriidae indet. y Pachyrukhinae cf. Pachyrukhos sp.). Por otra parte, se reporta el icnotaxón Chubutolithes gaimanenesis (hallado en el nivel subyacente al portador de mamíferos), siendo ésta la tercera localidad de la provincia del Chubut en la que se lo registra. Estos materiales permitieron proponer edades relativas para ambos niveles de la Formación Sarmiento en dicha localidad, uno de ellos referible a las Edades Mamífero Continentales de América del Sur (SALMA su sigla en inglés) Casamayorense (Eoceno medio) y el otro a la SALMA Colhuehuapense (Mioceno Temprano). Desde un punto de vista faunístico, el hallazgo de la nueva asociación Colhuehuapense para Argentina resulta relevante dada la restricción geográfica de los yacimientos de esta edad comparado con otras SALMAs (e.g., Deseadense o PanSantacrucense). Desde un punto de vista geográfico, Cabo Raso es la única localidad actualmente costera de Chubut con fósiles del Mioceno Temprano descriptos hasta ahora.

Tommy Nilsson, Flavie Rometsch, Leonie Becker et al.

Revived interest in lunar exploration is heralding a new generation of design solutions in support of human operations on the Moon. While space system design has traditionally been guided by prototype deployments in analogue studies, the resource-intensive nature of this approach has largely precluded application of proficient user-centered design (UCD) methods from human-computer interaction (HCI). This paper explores possible use of Virtual Reality (VR) to simulate analogue studies in lab settings and thereby bring to bear UCD in this otherwise engineering-dominated field. Drawing on the ongoing development of the European Large Logistics Lander, we have recreated a prospective lunar operational scenario in VR and evaluated it with a group of astronauts and space experts (n=20). Our qualitative findings demonstrate the efficacy of VR in facilitating UCD, enabling efficient contextual inquiries and improving project team coordination. We conclude by proposing future directions to further exploit VR in lunar systems design.

Russell Mendonca, Shikhar Bahl, Deepak Pathak

We tackle the problem of learning complex, general behaviors directly in the real world. We propose an approach for robots to efficiently learn manipulation skills using only a handful of real-world interaction trajectories from many different settings. Inspired by the success of learning from large-scale datasets in the fields of computer vision and natural language, our belief is that in order to efficiently learn, a robot must be able to leverage internet-scale, human video data. Humans interact with the world in many interesting ways, which can allow a robot to not only build an understanding of useful actions and affordances but also how these actions affect the world for manipulation. Our approach builds a structured, human-centric action space grounded in visual affordances learned from human videos. Further, we train a world model on human videos and fine-tune on a small amount of robot interaction data without any task supervision. We show that this approach of affordance-space world models enables different robots to learn various manipulation skills in complex settings, in under 30 minutes of interaction. Videos can be found at https://human-world-model.github.io

S. Zarattini, J. A. L. Aguerri, P. Tarrio et al.

In this work we study the large-scale structure around a sample of non-fossil systems and compare the results with earlier findings for a sample of genuine fossil systems selected using their magnitude gap. We compute the distance from each system to the closest filament and intersection as obtained from a catalogue of galaxies in the redshift range $0.05 \le z \le 0.7$. We then estimate the average distances and distributions of cumulative distances to filaments and intersections for different bins of magnitude gap. We find that the average distance to filaments is $(3.0\pm 0.8)$ $R_{200}$ for fossil systems, whereas it is $(1.1\pm 0.1)\,R_{200}$ for non-fossil systems. Similarly, the average distance to intersections is larger in fossil than in non-fossil systems, with values of $(16.3\pm 3.2)$ and $(8.9\pm 1.1) \,R_{200}$, respectively. Moreover, the cumulative distributions of distances to intersections are statistically different between fossil and non-fossil systems. Fossil systems selected using the magnitude gap appear to be, on average, more isolated from the cosmic web than non-fossil systems. No dependence is found on the magnitude gap (i.e. non-fossil systems behave in a similar manner independently of their magnitude gap and only fossils are found at larger average distances from the cosmic web). This result supports a formation scenario for fossil systems in which the lack of infalling galaxies from the cosmic web, due to their peculiar position, favours the building of the magnitude gap via the merging of all the massive satellites with the central galaxy. Comparison with numerical simulations suggests that fossil systems selected using the magnitude gap are not old fossils of the ancient Universe, but systems located in regions of the cosmic web not influenced by the presence of intersections.

Bohao Fan, Siqi Wang, Wenxuan Guo et al.

3D human pose estimation in outdoor environments has garnered increasing attention recently. However, prevalent 3D human pose datasets pertaining to outdoor scenes lack diversity, as they predominantly utilize only one type of modality (RGB image or pointcloud), and often feature only one individual within each scene. This limited scope of dataset infrastructure considerably hinders the variability of available data. In this article, we propose Human-M3, an outdoor multi-modal multi-view multi-person human pose database which includes not only multi-view RGB videos of outdoor scenes but also corresponding pointclouds. In order to obtain accurate human poses, we propose an algorithm based on multi-modal data input to generate ground truth annotation. This benefits from robust pointcloud detection and tracking, which solves the problem of inaccurate human localization and matching ambiguity that may exist in previous multi-view RGB videos in outdoor multi-person scenes, and generates reliable ground truth annotations. Evaluation of multiple different modalities algorithms has shown that this database is challenging and suitable for future research. Furthermore, we propose a 3D human pose estimation algorithm based on multi-modal data input, which demonstrates the advantages of multi-modal data input for 3D human pose estimation. Code and data will be released on https://github.com/soullessrobot/Human-M3-Dataset.

Chengbin Hou, Xinyu Lin, Hanhui Huang et al.

Identification of fossil species is crucial to evolutionary studies. Recent advances from deep learning have shown promising prospects in fossil image identification. However, the quantity and quality of labeled fossil images are often limited due to fossil preservation, conditioned sampling, and expensive and inconsistent label annotation by domain experts, which pose great challenges to training deep learning based image classification models. To address these challenges, we follow the idea of the wisdom of crowds and propose a multiview ensemble framework, which collects Original (O), Gray (G), and Skeleton (S) views of each fossil image reflecting its different characteristics to train multiple base models, and then makes the final decision via soft voting. Experiments on the largest fusulinid dataset with 2400 images show that the proposed OGS consistently outperforms baselines (using a single model for each view), and obtains superior or comparable performance compared to OOO (using three base models for three the same Original views). Besides, as the training data decreases, the proposed framework achieves more gains. While considering the identification consistency estimation with respect to human experts, OGS receives the highest agreement with the original labels of dataset and with the re-identifications of two human experts. The validation performance provides a quantitative estimation of consistency across different experts and genera. We conclude that the proposed framework can present state-of-the-art performance in the fusulinid fossil identification case study. This framework is designed for general fossil identification and it is expected to see applications to other fossil datasets in future work. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/houchengbin/Fossil-Image-Identification to benefit future research in fossil image identification.

Carl Peters, K. Richter, Jens‐Christian Svenning et al.

Summary Archaeological and paleontological records offer tremendous yet often untapped potential for examining long-term biodiversity trends and the impact of climate change and human activity on ecosystems. Yet, zooarchaeological and fossil remains suffer various limitations, including that they are often highly fragmented and morphologically unidentifiable, preventing them from being optimally leveraged for addressing fundamental research questions in archaeology, paleontology, and conservation paleobiology. Here, we explore the potential of palaeoproteomics—the study of ancient proteins—to serve as a critical tool for creating richer, more informative datasets about biodiversity change that can be leveraged to generate more realistic, constructive, and effective conservation and restoration strategies into the future.

DE-GUANG JIAO, KUN-SHENG DU

A new small euarthropod Astutuscaris bispinifer gen. et sp. nov. is described from the early Cambrian Stage 4 Guanshan Biota in Yunnan, China. This new euarthropod possesses a wide head shield, a pair of possible eyes, paired frontalmost appendages located antero-medially, 11 imbricated tergites most of which have backward-directed tergopleura ending in almost posteriorly oriented spines, and two well-marked wide spines. The affinity of Astutuscaris among euarthropods is uncertain because of the undefined nature of its frontalmost appendages, the incomplete head shield, the anterior trunk tergites, and the limbs. There are about 24 species of non-trilobite euarthropods reported from the Guanshan Biota to date, the documentation of this new taxon expands the biological diversity of euarthropods from this important biota in Yunnan, China.