Archaeologists found the oldest pottery in Slovakiaintelligent dog breeds have smaller brains relative to their bodies, and crows can be hostile to individuals for up to 17 years. TASR brings a summary of the most interesting from the field of science and technology.
During several years of research in Santovka in the Levick district, Slovak archaeologists succeeded to discover the oldest ceramic fragments in the region north of the Danube. Along with pieces of charred trees, they were found in the profile of the Búr stream flowing just below the archaeological site, says scientist Jozef Bátora on the website of the Archaeological Institute of the Slovak Republic.
Experts from the Institute of Geological Sciences and the Institute of Botany and Zoology of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Masaryk University in Brno also helped the Slovak archaeologists in the analysis of the findings. “The performed radiocarbon analysis showed that ceramics already made by hunters and gatherers at the end of the Mesolithicthat is, the Middle Stone Age, namely 5800 years before our era. It turned out that the discovered pottery is 300 years older than the oldest known Neolithic pottery north of the Danube,” stated Bátora.
According to him, this is an extremely important discovery, because the containers were created by prehistoric hunters who did not yet live as farmers in a settled way of life in one place, but they wandered from place to place. The vessels were used for cooking and were fired at 600 degrees Celsius on an open fire, as pottery kilns did not appear until several centuries later.
A larger brain relative to the body does not automatically mean a smarter dog. In wild mammals, it is usually the case that the larger the brain relative to the body, the more intelligent they are. However, the exact opposite applies to domestic dogs.
In the study, researchers measured the volume of 1,682 skulls of adult dogs of 172 breeds stored in the Natural History Museum in Bern, Switzerland. They then calculated the relative intracranial volume – the ratio of the size of their brain to their body.
In the research, they also included 14 behavioral traits from the C-BARQ questionnaire, the most widely used standardized questionnaire for measuring trainability, demand for attention, aggressiveness and other characteristics of dog breeds. The study showed that larger breeds with smaller relative intracranial volume are more trainable.
Smaller breeds with higher relative intracranial volume show higher levels of timidity, aggression, separation anxiety and attention seeking. The reason is the different internal structure of the brain of large and small breeds. The key to understanding the results of the study is the environment in which dogs live. Dogs do not live in the wild, but in a human-made environment and are the result of deliberate and purposeful development by humans.
Short-billed crows from North America can be hostile to individuals up to 17 years. Birds are more intelligent than many people realize. Professor John Marzluff from the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle claims that crows are actually flying monkeys in terms of intelligence, and their (un)friendliness depends on what a person has done to a given crow or one of its friends.
In 2006, he began a study in which he captured circled and after a short “imprisonment” safely released seven crows. He was wearing a mask covering his entire head. For the next five years, he and other scientists fed crows on campus—sometimes wearing the mask used to trap and ring crows.
The mask elicited exasperated cawing in 47 out of 53 crows, which is significantly more than the seven crows originally captured. According to the scientists, this is evidence of the horizontal spread of information, i.e. its transmission from one crow to another.
Exasperated croaking at masked persons it peaked in 2013 and has been gradually declining since then. It stopped completely only in 2023, i.e. 17 years after the initial capture. Short-billed crows typically live seven to eight years in the wild. Negative reactions to the mask even after such a long time are proof that in crows, information is not only spread horizontally between flock members, but also vertically from parent to young.
