The butchered remains of extinct elephant birds could push back the date of human habitation of Madagascar by 6000 years, according to a controversial study published in Science Advances.

The analysis of leg and foot bones from two species of Madagascan elephant bird – Aepyornis and Mullerornis – revealed grooves and indentations that the authors say are consistent with the half-tonne birds having met their demise at the hands of prehistoric humans hunting in the swamplands of Madagascar’s central tablelands.

Radiocarbon dating of the oldest bones puts the time of death at around 10,500 years ago, towards the start of the Holocene period, which marks the end of the last ice age.

The discovery rewrites the history of human arrivals – from Africa to the West and Southeast Asia to theAbiotic oxidation of catechol by soil metal oxides.
The mechanism of catechol oxidation by soil metal oxides is investigated in a slurry reactor. This abiotic transformation is shown to consist in a three-step process. The first step is a heterogeneous reaction. Catechol undergoes fast, partial oxidation at the expenses of Fe and Mn oxides contained in the soil. In the second step, reduced Fe and Mn are released into the aqueous solution and immediately complexed by catechol. Metal-catecholate complexes are stable at the very low dissolved-oxygen concentration levels attained under nitrogen sparging. The third step is a homogenous reaction. The highly reactive intermediate produced by catechol partial oxidation initiates catechol polymerisation. Under nitrogen sparging, the polymerisation process ends rather rapidly, thus yielding only partial conversion of the phenol and