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PLOS—Scythian people of ancient Ukraine led more complex lives than commonly assumed, according to a study published March 10, 2021* in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alicia R. Ventresca Miller of the University of Michigan and colleagues.

The Scythian people, who lived across the Pontic steppe around 700-200 BCE, are often portrayed as a culture of nomadic warriors. But this idea is challenged by archaeological evidence that indicates a more complex and varied culture at this place and time. In this study, researchers employed isotopic analyses to investigate patterns of diet and mobility in Scythian populations.

The authors measured isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and strontium in human teeth and bones from several Scythian-era burial sites in Ukraine. Isotopes that reflect diet, indicate that in some places there was a varied diet including numerous domesticated crops, while isotopes that reflect geologic surroundings indicate that most people did not travel long distances during their lifetimes.

These results support the growing understanding that Scythian populations were not a homogenous culture, but a more diverse group which, in some places, lived more sedentary lives with a dependence on agriculture. The authors suggest that future studies should expand this work to compare multiple generations of people over more varied geographical locations. This work will help archaeologists move toward a more complete idea of what it meant to be Scythian.

The authors add: “Our multi-isotopic study challenges romantic notions of wide-ranging Scythian nomads. We show that while some individuals from classic Scythian contexts traveled long distances, the majority remained local to their settlements, farming millet and raising livestock in mixed economic systems.”

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Bronze mirror found at the site of Mamai-Gora. Svetlana Andrukh (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Ventresca Miller AR, Johnson J, Makhortykh S, Gerling C, Litvinova L, Andrukh S, et al. (2021) Re-evaluating Scythian lifeways: Isotopic analysis of diet and mobility in Iron Age Ukraine. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0245996. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245996

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Neanderthal remains from a Belgian cave may be thousands of years older than previously reported, according to a study. The timing of Neanderthal disappearance remains uncertain, and previous radiocarbon dating of Neanderthal remains from Spy Cave in Belgium has yielded ages as recent as approximately 24,000 years ago, placing the finds among the latest surviving Neanderthals in Europe. However, the reliability of these dates is uncertain due to possible sample contamination. Thibaut Devièse and colleagues re-dated four Spy Cave Neanderthal specimens using compound-specific radiocarbon analysis. In this method, a single amino acid, hydroxyproline, was isolated from bone collagen and dated, thereby minimizing risks of unremoved contamination. Most of the dates obtained using this method were much older than those obtained previously–up to 10,000 years in certain cases. The authors also dated Neanderthal specimens from two additional Belgian sites, Fonds-de-Forêt and Engis, and obtained ages comparable to those from Spy Cave. Based on the newly obtained radiocarbon dates, the authors estimate that Neanderthals disappeared from the region 44,200-40,600 years ago, much earlier than previously published dates suggest. The results support the use of robust pretreatment methods when dating Paleolithic human remains to minimize biases due to contamination, according to the authors.

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Maxilla and mandible assemblage of a late Neanderthal from Spy Cave, Belgium. Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences/Patrick Semal.

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*”Reevaluating the timing of Neanderthal disappearance in Northwest Europe,” by Thibaut Devièse et al.

DUKE UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, N.C.—When you think about what separates humans from chimpanzees and other apes, you might think of our big brains, or the fact that we get around on two legs rather than four. But we have another distinguishing feature: water efficiency.

That’s the take-home of a new study* that, for the first time, measures precisely how much water humans lose and replace each day compared with our closest living animal relatives.

Our bodies are constantly losing water: when we sweat, go to the bathroom, even when we breathe. That water needs to be replenished to keep blood volume and other body fluids within normal ranges.

And yet, research published March 5 in the journal Current Biology shows that the human body uses 30% to 50% less water per day than our closest animal cousins. In other words, among primates, humans evolved to be the low-flow model.

An ancient shift in our body’s ability to conserve water may have enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to venture farther from streams and watering holes in search of food, said lead author Herman Pontzer, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University.

“Even just being able to go a little bit longer without water would have been a big advantage as early humans started making a living in dry, savannah landscapes,” Pontzer said.

The study compared the water turnover of 309 people with a range of lifestyles, from farmers and hunter-gatherers to office workers, with that of 72 apes living in zoos and sanctuaries.

To maintain fluid balance within a healthy range, the body of a human or any other animal is a bit like a bathtub: “water coming in has to equal water coming out,” Pontzer said.

Lose water by sweating, for example, and the body’s thirst signals kick in, telling us to drink. Chug more water than your body needs, and the kidneys get rid of the extra fluid.

For each individual in the study, the researchers calculated water intake via food and drink on the one hand, and water lost via sweat, urine and the GI tract, on the other hand.

When they added up all the inputs and outputs, they found that the average person processes some three liters, or 12 cups, of water each day. A chimpanzee or gorilla living in a zoo goes through twice that much.

Pontzer says the researchers were surprised by the results because, among primates, humans have an amazing ability to sweat. Per square inch of skin, “humans have 10 times as many sweat glands as chimpanzees do,” Pontzer said. That makes it possible for a person to sweat more than half a gallon during an hour-long workout — equivalent to two Big Gulps from a 7-Eleven.

Add to that the fact that the great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans—live lazy lives. “Most apes spend 10 to 12 hours a day resting or feeding, and then they sleep for 10 hours. They really only move a couple hours a day,” Pontzer said.

But the researchers controlled for differences in climate, body size, and factors like activity level and calories burned per day. So they concluded the water-savings for humans were real, and not just a function of where individuals lived or how physically active they were.

The findings suggest that something changed over the course of human evolution that reduced the amount of water our body uses each day to stay healthy.

Then as now, we could likely still only survive a few days without drinking, Pontzer said. “You probably don’t break that ecological leash, but at least you get a longer one if you can go longer without water.”

The next step, Pontzer says, is to pinpoint how this physiological change happened.

One hypothesis, suggested by the data, is that our body’s thirst response was re-tuned so that, overall, we crave less water per calorie compared with our ape relatives. Even as babies, long before our first solid food, the water-to-calories ratio of human breast milk is 25% less than the milks of other great apes.

Another possibility lies in front of our face: Fossil evidence suggests that, about 1.6 million years ago, with the inception of Homo erectus, humans started developing a more prominent nose. Our cousins gorillas and chimpanzees have much flatter noses.

Our nasal passages help conserve water by cooling and condensing the water vapor from exhaled air, turning it back into liquid on the inside of our nose where it can be reabsorbed.

Having a nose that sticks out more may have helped early humans retain more moisture with each breath.

“There’s still a mystery to solve, but clearly humans are saving water,” Pontzer said. “Figuring out exactly how we do that is where we go next, and that’s going to be really fun.”

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As the African environment dried up anciently, early humans adapted by requiring less water intake to survive. Mariamichelle, Pixabay

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Article Source: Duke University news release.

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (BCS-0643122, BCS-1317170, BCS-1440867, BCS-1440841, BCS-1440671), the United States Agency for International Development (APS-497-11-000001), the National Institutes of Health (R01DK080763), the John Templeton Foundation, L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation (Gr. 8670), the University of Arizona, Duke University, and Hunter College.

*”Evolution of Water Conservation in Humans,” Herman Pontzer, Mary H. Brown, Brian M. Wood, David A. Raichlen, Audax. Z.P. Mabulla, Jacob A. Harris, Holly Dunsworth, Brian Hare, Kara Walker, Amy Luke, Lara R. Dugas, Dale Schoeller, Jacob Plange-Rhule, Pascal Bovet, Terrence E. Forrester, Melissa Emery Thompson, Robert W. Shumaker, Jessica M. Rothman, Erin Vogel, Fransiska Sulistyo, Shauhin Alavi, Didik Prasetyo, Samuel S. Urlacher, and Stephen R. Ross. Current Biology, March 5, 2021. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.02.045

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DARTMOUTH COLLEGE—Woolly mammoths may have walked the landscape at the same time as the earliest humans in what is now New England, according to a Dartmouth study published in Boreas. Through the radiocarbon dating of a rib fragment from the Mount Holly mammoth from Mount Holly, Vt., the researchers learned that this mammoth existed approximately 12,800 years ago. This date may overlap with the arrival of the first humans in the Northeast, who are thought to have arrived around the same time.

“It has long been thought that megafauna and humans in New England did not overlap in time and space and that it was probably ultimately environmental change that led to the extinction of these animals in the region but our research provides some of the first evidence that they may have actually co-existed,” explains co-author Nathaniel R. Kitchel, the Robert A. 1925 and Catherine L. McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow in anthropology at Dartmouth.

The Mount Holly mammoth, Vermont’s state terrestrial fossil, was discovered in the summer of 1848 in the Green Mountains during the construction of the Burlington and Rutland railroad lines. One molar, two tusks, and an unknown number of bones were excavated from a hilltop bog near Mount Holly. Over time, the specimens became scattered across several repositories, as they transferred from one collection to the next. A rib fragment from the Mount Holly mammoth became part of the Hood Museum of Art‘s collection and some of the other skeletal materials are now housed at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and the Mount Holly Historical Museum.

Kitchel stumbled across the Mount Holly mammoth rib fragment last December at the Hood Museum’s offsite storage facility, as curators had invited him to take a look at some of their artifacts from New Hampshire and Vermont. He came across a large bone (approximately 30 cm. in length) that was stained brown in color from age. He had a hunch that this was the remains of a mammoth and when he looked down at the tag, it read, “Rib of fossil elephant. Mt. Holly R.R. cut. Presented by Wm. A. Bacon Esq. Ludlow VT.” This was rather serendipitous for Kitchel, as he had recently delivered a talk at Mount Holly’s Historical Museum for which he had read up on the Mount Holly mammoth.

To appreciate the significance of the Mount Holly mammoth remains, including the rib fragment, it is helpful to understand the paleontology of the Northeast. During the Last Glacial Maximum around 18,000 – 19,000 years ago when glaciers were at their maximum extent, the ice began to retreat, gradually exposing what is now New England. During that period, it is likely that the glaciers probably sufficiently ripped up whatever soil might have been preserving fossils, reducing the likelihood for fossils to remain intact. These changes combined with the Northeast’s naturally acidic soils have created inhospitable conditions for the preservation of fossils. While Kitchel had discussed the complicated paleontology of the Northeast in the past with colleague and co-author Jeremy DeSilva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, he never thought that he would have much of an opportunity to work on it.

After seeing this mammoth material in the Hood’s collection, he and DeSilva decided to obtain a radiocarbon date of the fragmentary rib bone. They took a 3D scan of the material prior to taking a small (1 gram) sample from the broken end of the rib bone. The sample was then sent out to the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia for radiocarbon dating and a stable istotopic analysis.

Radiocarbon dating enables researchers to determine how long an organism has been dead based on its concentration of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that decays over time. Stable isotopes however, are isotopes that do not decay over time, which provide a snapshot of what was absorbed into the animal’s body when it was alive. Nitrogen isotopes can be used to analyze the protein composition of an animal’s diet. The nitrogen isotopes of the Mount Holly mammoth revealed low values in comparison to that of other recorded mammoths globally while also reflecting the lowest value recorded in the Northeast for a mammoth. The low nitrogen values could have been the result of these mega-herbivores having to consume alder or lichens (nitrogen fixing species) during the last glacial period when the landscape was denser due to climate warming.

“The Mount Holly mammoth was one of the last known occurring mammoths in the Northeast,” says DeSilva. “While our findings show that there was a temporal overlap between mammoths and humans, this doesn’t necessarily mean that people saw these animals or had anything to do with their death but it raises the possibility now that maybe they did.”

The radiocarbon date for the Mount Holly mammoth of 12,800 years old overlaps with the accepted age of when humans may have initially settled in the region, which is thought to have occurred during the start of the Younger Dryas, a final pulse of glacial cold before temperatures warmed dramatically, marking the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age).

While other research on mammoths in the Midwest suggests that humans hunted and buried these animals in lakes and bogs to preserve the meat, there’s little evidence that early humans in New England hunted or scavenged these animals.

The researchers are intrigued by the Mount Holly mammoth. The rest of its rib and other bones could be waiting to be discovered. Or, through time, they could have broken apart, dissolved in the acidic soil, or a scavenger could have run off with the bones. There are still a lot of unknowns; yet, the team has already begun further research using modern and more sophisticated archaeological techniques to explore what may be underground at Mount Holly.

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Replica of a Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) in the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The display is from 1979, and the fur is muskox hair. Flying Puffin (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en).

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Photograph showing the affixed tags and 3D model of the Mount Holly mammoth rib fragment housed at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth. The rib was 3D surface scanned using a Creaform Go!SCAN50 at a resolution of 1.00 mm and has been digitally archived in .stl format at Morphosource.org. Image by Nathaniel R. Kitchel and Jeremy DeSilva.

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Article Source: DARTMOUTH COLLEGE news release

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PLOS—A lone cranium in an Italian cave wound up there after being washed away from its original burial site, according to a study* published March 3, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Maria Giovanna Belcastro of the University of Bologna, Italy and colleagues.

In 2015, archaeologists discovered a single human cranium (a skull without a lower jaw) in a gypsum cave in Northern Italy called Marcel Loubens cave. Caves are known to have been used for funerary practices in ancient Italy, but the fact that there are no other human remains in this cave has raised questions about how this skull came to be there, inspiring the researchers in this study to conduct a detailed analysis on the bone.

The structure of the bone indicates that it belonged to a woman between 24 and 35 years old at death. Carbon dating places the remains between 3630-3380 BC, during the Eneolithic period. Several lesions on the bone appear to be damage caused during the removal of soft tissues after death as part of a funeral ritual, while other damage and encrusted sediment on the bone are evidence that it was moved by natural processes not long afterward.

With this evidence, the researchers reconstructed the journey of the skull. After being treated and laid to rest in a burial place, the skull of this corpse rolled away, most likely moved by water and mud down the slope of a sinkhole and into the cave. Later, continued sinkhole activity created the modern structure of the cave, with this bone still preserved within. Besides revealing this fascinating story, this specimen also likely represents evidence of funerary treatment of a corpse in Italy during this time period.

The authors add: “An intriguing archaeological cold case: an isolated human cranium was found in the natural Marcel Loubens gypsum Cave (Bologna area, northern Italy) at the top of a vertical shaft, reached by an artificial 12-meter technical climb. How and when did it get there? Whose was it?

The cadaver (or head) of an early Eneolithic young woman was likely manipulated and dismembered in a funerary or ritual context and the skull, after a long and bumpy ride, accidentally ended up in the cave in the position in which it was found!”

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MLC on the top of the shaft and Lucia Castagna, the young archaeologist of GSB-USB that secured and recovered the cranium (Archive SABAP-BO/GSB-USB, ph. F. Grazioli). Belcastro et al, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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MLC in frontal (a), superior (b), left (c), posterior (d), inferior (e) and right (f) views. The boxes indicate the Zones (A-M) with the ectocranial lesions. Belcastro et al, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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*Belcastro MG, Nicolosi T, Sorrentino R, Mariotti V, Pietrobelli A, Bettuzzi M, et al. (2021) Unveiling an odd fate after death: The isolated Eneolithic cranium discovered in the Marcel Loubens Cave (Bologna, Northern Italy). PLoS ONE 16(3): e0247306. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247306

Article Source: PLOS news release

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DIAMOND LIGHT SOURCE—In June 2019, an international team brought the complete skull of the 3.67-million-year-old Little Foot Australopithecus skeleton, from South Africa to the UK and achieved unprecedented imaging resolution of its bony structures and dentition in an X-ray synchrotron-based investigation at the UK’s national synchrotron, Diamond Light Source. The X-ray work is highlighted in a new paper in e-Life, published today (2nd March 2021) focusing on the inner craniodental features of Little Foot. The remarkable completeness and great age of the Little Foot skeleton makes it a crucially important specimen in human origins research and a prime candidate for exploring human evolution through high-resolution virtual analysis.

To recover the smallest possible details from a fairly large and very fragile fossil, the team decided to image the skull using synchrotron X-ray micro computed tomography at the I12 beamline at Diamond, revealing new information about human evolution and origins. This paper outlines preliminary results of the X-ray synchrotron-based investigation of the dentition and bones of the skull (i.e., cranial vault and mandible).

Leading author and Principal Investigator, Dr Amelie Beaudet, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge and honorary research at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) explains: “We had the unique opportunity to look at the finest details of the craniodental anatomy of the Little Foot skull. While scanning it, we did not know how well the smallest structures would be preserved in this individual, who lived more than 3.5 million years ago. So, when we were finally able to examine the images, we were all very excited and moved to see such intimate details of the life of Little Foot for the first time. The microstructures observed in the enamel indicate that Little Foot suffered through two clear periods of dietary stress or illness when she was a child.”

The team were also able to observe and describe the vascular canals that are enclosed in the compact bone of the mandible. These structures have the potential to reveal a lot about the biomechanics of eating in this individual and its species, but also more broadly about how bone was remodeled in Little Foot. The branching pattern of these canals indicates some remodeling took place, perhaps in response to changes in diet, and that Little Foot died as an older individual.

The team also observed tiny (i.e., less than 1 mm) channels in the braincase that are possibly involved in brain thermoregulation (i.e., how to cool down the brain). Brain size increased dramatically throughout human evolution (about threefold), and, because the brain is very sensitive to temperature change, understanding how temperature regulation evolves is of prime interest. Dr Amelie Beaudet adds: “Traditionally, none of these observations would have been possible without cutting the fossil into very thin slices, but with the application of synchrotron technology there is an exciting new field of virtual histology being developed to explore the fossils of our distant ancestors.”

Dr Thomas Connolley, Principal Beamline Scientist at Diamond commented: “Important aspects of early hominin biology remain debated, or simply unknown. In that context, synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques like microtomography have the potential to non-destructively reveal crucial details on the development, physiology, biomechanics and taxonomy of fossil specimens. Little Foot’s skull was also scanned using the adjacent IMAT neutron instrument at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, combining X-ray and neutron imaging techniques in one visit to the UK. With such a rich volume of information collected, we’re eager to make more discoveries in the complementary X-ray and neutron tomography scans.”

Applications of X-ray synchrotron-based analytical techniques in evolutionary studies have opened up new avenues in the field of (paleo)anthropology. In particular, X-ray synchrotron microtomography has proved to be enormously useful for observing the smallest anatomical structures in fossils that are traditionally only seen by slicing through the bones and looking at them under a microscope. Through the last decade, there have been more studies in palaeoanthropology using synchrotron radiation to investigate teeth and brain imprints in fossil hominins. However, scanning a complete skull such as the one of Little Foot and aiming to reveal very small details using a very high-resolution was quite challenging, but the team managed to develop a new protocol that made this possible. To recover the smallest possible details from a fairly large and very fragile fossil, the team decided to image the skull using synchrotron X-ray micro computed tomography at the I12 beamline at Diamond.

Principal Investigator, and Associate Professor, Prof Dominic Stratford, University of Witwatersrand (Wits University), School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies says: “This level of resolution is providing us with remarkably clear evidence of this individual’s life. We think there will also be a hugely significant evolutionary aspect, as studying this fossil in this much detail will help us understand which species she evolved from and how she differs from others found at a similar time in Africa. This is just our first paper so watch this space. Funding permitting, we hope to be able to bring other parts of Little Foot to Diamond,” adding:

“This research was about bringing the best-preserved Australopithecus skull to the best of the best synchrotron facility for our purposes. Traditionally, hominins have been analyzed by measuring and describing by the exterior shapes of their fossilized bones to assess how these differ between species. Synchrotron development and microCT resources means that we are now able to virtually observe structures inside the fossils, which hold a wealth of information. More recently, technology has developed to such an extent that we can now virtually explore minute histological structures in three dimensions, opening new avenues for our research.”

The first bones of the Little Foot fossil were discovered in the Sterkfontein Caves, northwest of Johannesburg, by Professor Ron Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994. In 1997, following their discovery of the location of the skeleton, Professor Clarke and his team spent more than 20 years painstakingly removing the skeleton in stages from the concrete-like cave breccia using a small airscribe (a vibrating needle). Following cleaning and reconstructing, the skeleton was publicly unveiled in 2018. Wits University is the custodian of the StW 573, Little Foot, fossil.

Professor Ron Clarke, the British scientist based in South Africa who discovered and excavated Little Foot and conducted all the early examinations of the fossil, was also part of the research team and concludes: “It has taken us 23 years to get to this point. This is an exciting new chapter in Little Foot’s history, and this is only the first paper resulting from her first trip out of Africa. We are constantly uncovering new information from the wealth of new data that was obtained. We hope this endeavor will lead to more funding to continue our work. Our team and PAST* emphasize that all of humanity has had a long-shared ancestry in harmony with the natural world, and that learning from those earliest ancestors gives us perspective on the necessity to conserve nature and our planet.”

This paper is the first in what is expected to be a series of papers resulting from the wealth of data the Principal Investigators from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa the University of Cambridge in UK, co-investigators from the Natural History Museum and Diamond were able to gain from their collaboration. Little Foot also underwent neutron imaging at STFC’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source at the same time as the work undertaken at Diamond Light Source, providing unprecedented access to complementary advanced imaging techniques. Neutrons are absorbed very differently from X-rays by the fossil’s interior parts thanks to the sensitivity of neutrons to certain chemical elements. Despite having coarser spatial resolution, neutron tomography can sometimes differentiate between different mineralogical constituents for which contrast is very low for X-rays.

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Close-up of Little Foot Skull at Diamond Light Source. Diamond Light Source

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Little Foot Fossil skull in Diamond’s beamline I12. Diamond Light Source Ltd

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*’Preliminary paleohistological observations of the StW 573 Little Foot skull’ – Amelie Beaudet, Robert Atwood, Winfried Kockelmann, Vincent Fernandez, Thomas Connolley, Nghia Trong Vo, Ronald Clarke, Dominic Stratford. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64804

Article Source: DIAMOND LIGHT SOURCE news release

The team: Principal Investigators, Professor Dominic Stratford and Dr Amelie Beaudet from the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cambridge respectively, co-investigators Dr Vincent Fernandez, Natural History Museum, Dr Robert Atwood and Dr Nghia Trong Vo, Diamond Light Source, Dr Thomas Connolley, Principle Beamline Scientist, Diamond Light Source and Dr Winfried Kockelmann, the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Professor Ron Clarke, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

*PAST South Africa (Paleontological Scientific Trust https://www.past.org.za/learn/ ) was set up to fund research into LF and has since funded and facilitated research into literally tons of fossils and excavation project. It has funded numerous research projects on specimens that reveal details of our humanity and our link with nature ‘We are all from Africa’.

For further information please contact Diamond Communications: Lorna Campbell +44 7836 625999 or Isabelle Boscaro-Clarke +44 1235 778130

About Diamond Light Source:

W: http://www.diamond.ac.uk Twitter: @DiamondLightSou

Diamond Light Source provides industrial and academic user communities with access to state-of-the-art analytical tools to enable world-changing science. Shaped like a huge ring, it works like a giant microscope, accelerating electrons to near light speeds, to produce a light 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, which is then directed off into 33 laboratories known as beamlines. In addition to these, Diamond offers access to several integrated laboratories including the world-class Electron Bio-imaging Centre (eBIC) and the Electron Physical Science Imaging Centre (ePSIC).

Diamond serves as an agent of change, addressing 21st century challenges such as disease, clean energy, food security and more. Since operations started, more than 14,000 researchers from both academia and industry have used Diamond to conduct experiments, with the support of approximately 760 world-class staff. More than 10,000 scientific articles have been published by our users and scientists.

Funded by the UK Government through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and by the Wellcome Trust, Diamond is one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world, and its pioneering capabilities are helping to keep the UK at the forefront of scientific research.

About Wits University:

W: http://www.wits.ac.za Twitter: @Wits_News & @WitsUniversity

Wits University is a research-intensive University, one of the leading institutions on the African continent that produces world-class research that is locally relevant and globally competitive. Wits is a global leader in the palaeosciences, one of its key research areas. Wits research output has increased by over 45% in the last four years with more than 85% of its research published in international journals. Wits offers a free space for the exchange of ideas and a vibrant intellectual community that fosters debate and knowledge transfer both within and beyond our lecture halls. Wits latest research available at http://www.wits.ac.za/ research.

About the University of Cambridge

The mission of the University of Cambridge is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. To date, 110 affiliates of the University have won the Nobel Prize.

Founded in 1209, the University comprises 31 autonomous Colleges and 150 departments, faculties and institutions. Cambridge is a global university. Its 19,000 student body includes 3,700 international students from 120 countries. Cambridge researchers collaborate with colleagues worldwide, and the University has established larger-scale partnerships in Asia, Africa and America.

The University sits at the heart of the Cambridge cluster, which employs more than 61,000 people and has in excess of £15 billion in turnover generated annually by the 5,000 knowledge-intensive firms in and around the city. The city publishes 316 patents per 100,000 residents. http://www.cam.ac.uk

Twitter: @Cambridge_Uni @UCamArchaeology

About the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

W: https://stfc.ukri.org T: https://twitter.com/stfc_matters

ISIS Neutron and Muon Source produces beams of neutrons and muons that allow scientists to study materials at the atomic level using a suite of instruments, often described as ‘super-microscopes’. It supports a national and international community of more than 2000 scientists who use neutrons and muons for research in physics, chemistry, materials science, geology, engineering, and biology.

ISIS Neutron and Muon Source is a world-leading centre for research in the physical and life sciences. It is owned and operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council is part of UK Research and Innovation; the UK body which works in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities, and government to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish. STFC funds and supports research in particle and nuclear physics, astronomy, gravitational research and astrophysics, and space science and also operates a network of five national laboratories as well as supporting UK research at a number of international research facilities including CERN, FERMILAB and the ESO telescopes in Chile.

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TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY—A new paper by Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University proposes an original unifying explanation for the physiological, behavioral and cultural evolution of the human species, from its first appearance about two million years ago, to the agricultural revolution (around 10,000 BCE). According to the paper, humans developed as hunters of large animals, causing their ultimate extinction. As they adapted to hunting small, swift prey animals, humans developed higher cognitive abilities, evidenced by the most obvious evolutionary change – the growth of brain volume from 650cc to 1,500cc. To date, no unifying explanation has been proposed for the major phenomena in human prehistory. The novel theory was published in Quaternary Journal.

In recent years more and more evidence has been accumulated to the effect that humans were a major factor in the extinction of large animals, and consequently had to adapt to hunting smaller game, first in Africa and later in all other parts of the world. In Africa, 2.6 million years ago, when humans first emerged, the average size of land mammals was close to 500kg. Just before the advent of agriculture this figure had decreased by over 90% – down to several tens of kg.

According to the researchers, the decrease in the size of game and the need to hunt small, swift animals forced humans to display cunning and boldness – an evolutionary process that demanded increased volume of the human brain and later led to the development of language enabling the exchange of information about where prey could be found. The theory claims that all means served one end: body energy conservation.

The researchers show that, throughout most of their evolution, early humans were apex (top) predators, specializing in hunting large game. Representing most of the biomass available for hunting, these animals provided humans with high fat levels, an essential source of energy, and enabled a higher energy return than small game. In the past, six different species of elephants lived in Africa, comprising more than half of the biomass of all herbivores hunted by humans. Initial evidence from East Africa indicates that homo sapiens only emerged in that area after a significant decline in the number of elephant species in certain regions. Comparing the size of animals found in archaeological cultures, representing different species of humans in east Africa, southern Europe and Israel, the researchers found that in all cases there was a significant decline in the prevalence of animals weighing over 200kg, coupled with an increase in the volume of the human brain.

“We correlate the increase in human brain volume with the need to become smarter hunters,” explains Dr. Ben-Dor. For example, the need to hunt dozens of gazelles instead of one elephant generated prolonged evolutionary pressure on the brain functions of humans, who were now using up much more energy in both movement and thought processes. Hunting small animals, that are constantly threatened by predators and therefore very quick to take flight, requires a physiology adapted to the chase as well as more sophisticated hunting tools. Cognitive activity also rises as fast tracking requires fast decision-making, based on phenomenal acquaintance with the animals’ behavior – information that needs to be stored in a larger memory.”

The evolutionary adaptation of humans was very successful,” says Dr. Ben-Dor. “As the size of animals continued to decrease, the invention of the bow and arrow and domestication of dogs enabled more efficient hunting of medium-sized and small animals – until these populations also dwindled. Toward the end of the Stone Age, as animals became even smaller, humans had to put more energy into hunting than they were able to get back. Indeed, this is when the Agricultural Revolution occurred, involving the domestication of both animals and plants. As humans moved into permanent settlements and became farmers, their brain size decreased to its current volume of 1300-1400cc. This happened because, with domesticated plants and animals that don’t take flight, there was no more need for the allocation of outstanding cognitive abilities to the task of hunting.”

Prof. Barkai: “While the chimpanzee’s brain, for example, has remained stable for 7 million years, the human brain grew threefold, reaching its greatest size about 300,000 years ago. In addition to brain volume, evolutionary pressure caused humans to use language, fire and sophisticated tools such as bow and arrow, adapt their arms and shoulders to the tasks of throwing and hurling and their bodies to the prolonged chase, improve their stone tools, domesticate dogs and ultimately also domesticate the game itself and turn to agriculture.”

Prof. Barkai adds: “It must be understood that our perspective is not deterministic. Humans brought this trouble upon themselves. By focusing on hunting the largest animals, they caused extinctions. Wherever humans appeared – whether homo erectus or homo sapiens, we see, sooner or later, mass extinction of large animals. Dependence on large animals had its price. Humans undercut their own livelihood. But while other species, like our cousins the Neanderthals, became extinct when their large prey disappeared, homo sapiens decided to start over again, this time relying on agriculture.”

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Elephant hunting illustration. Dana Ackerfeld

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Article Source: TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—By assembling Bahamian records of landscape, vegetation, and anthropogenic burning via charcoal and pollen samples from the Bahamas’ Blackwood Sinkhole, researchers determined that Lucayans–the first humans to inhabit the Bahamas–arrived in the northern Bahamas around 830 CE and expanded rapidly throughout the Bahamian archipelago in less than a century; although the Bahamas’ forest landscape rapidly transitioned from hurricane-resilient hardwoods and palms to modern pine with the arrival of Lucayans, pine forests decreased during heightened regional hurricane activity in the 16th century, suggesting that future increases in hurricane activity may endanger Bahamian pine forests.

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Aerial photo of Blackwood Sinkhole on Abaco, northern Bahamas. Peter J. van Hengstum

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“Human arrival and landscape dynamics in the northern Bahamas,” by Patricia L. Fall et al.

Article Source: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES news release

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BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, BINGHAMTON, NY—Neanderthals—the closest ancestor to modern humans — possessed the ability to perceive and produce human speech, according to a new study published by an international multidisciplinary team of researchers including Binghamton University anthropology professor Rolf Quam and graduate student Alex Velez.

“This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career”, says Quam. “The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology.”

The evolution of language, and the linguistic capacities in Neanderthals in particular, is a long-standing question in human evolution.

“For decades, one of the central questions in human evolutionary studies has been whether the human form of communication, spoken language, was also present in any other species of human ancestor, especially the Neanderthals,” says coauthor Juan Luis Arsuaga, Professor of Paleontology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and co-director of the excavations and research at the Atapuerca sites. The latest study has reconstructed how Neanderthals heard to draw some inferences about how they may have communicated.

The study relied on high resolution CT scans to create virtual 3D models of the ear structures in Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as well as earlier fossils from the site of Atapuerca that represent ancestors of the Neanderthals. Data collected on the 3D models were entered into a software-based model, developed in the field of auditory bioengineering, to estimate the hearing abilities up to 5 kHz, which encompasses most of the frequency range of modern human speech sounds. Compared with the Atapuerca fossils, the Neanderthals showed slightly better hearing between 4-5 kHz, resembling modern humans more closely.

In addition, the researchers were able to calculate the frequency range of maximum sensitivity, technically known as the occupied bandwidth, in each species. The occupied bandwidth is related to the communication system, such that a wider bandwidth allows for a larger number of easily distinguishable acoustic signals to be used in the oral communication of a species. This, in turn, improves the efficiency of communication, the ability to deliver a clear message in the shortest amount of time. The Neanderthals show a wider bandwidth compared with their ancestors from Atapuerca, more closely resembling modern humans in this feature.

“This really is the key,” says Mercedes Conde-Valverde, professor at the Universidad de Alcalá in Spain and lead author of the study. “The presence of similar hearing abilities, particularly the bandwidth, demonstrates that the Neandertals possessed a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech.”

“One of the other interesting results from the study was the suggestion that Neanderthal speech likely included an increased use of consonants,” said Quam. “Most previous studies of Neanderthal speech capacities focused on their ability to produce the main vowels in English spoken language. However, we feel this emphasis is misplaced, since the use of consonants is a way to include more information in the vocal signal and it also separates human speech and language from the communication patterns in nearly all other primates. The fact that our study picked up on this is a really interesting aspect of the research and is a novel suggestion regarding the linguistic capacities in our fossil ancestors.”

Thus, Neanderthals had a similar capacity to us to produce the sounds of human speech, and their ear was “tuned” to perceive these frequencies. This change in the auditory capacities in Neanderthals, compared with their ancestors from Atapuerca, parallels archaeological evidence for increasingly complex behavioral patterns, including changes in stone tool technology, domestication of fire and possible symbolic practices. Thus, the study provides strong evidence in favor of the coevolution of increasingly complex behaviors and increasing efficiency in vocal communication throughout the course of human evolution.

The team behind the new study has been developing this research line for nearly two decades, and has ongoing collaborations to extend the analyses to additional fossil species. For the moment, however, the new results are exciting.

“These results are particularly gratifying,” said Ignacio Martinez from Universidad de Alcalá in Spain. “We believe, after more than a century of research into this question, that we have provided a conclusive answer to the question of Neanderthal speech capacities.”

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3D model and virtual reconstruction of the ear in a modern human (left) and the Amud 1 Neandertal (right). Mercedes Conde-Valverde

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Reconstructed hearing patterns in modern humans, Neanderthals and the Sima de los Huesos based on their ear anatomy. Compared with their ancestors from the Sima de los Huesos, the Neanderthals more closely resemble modern humans in showing a heightened sensitivity between 3.5-5 kHz, a frequency range that contains acoustic information related to consonant production in human spoken language. Mercedes Conde-Valverde

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The study, “Neandertals and modern humans had similar auditory and speech capacities,” was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Article Source: BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY news release

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES—Based on a manual recently discovered in a 3,500-year-old medical papyrus, University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Sofie Schiødt has been able to help reconstruct the embalming process used to prepare ancient Egyptians for the afterlife. It is the oldest surviving manual on mummification yet discovered.

In ancient Egypt, embalming was considered a sacred art, and knowledge of the process was the preserve of very few individuals. Most secrets of the art were probably passed on orally from one embalmer to the other, Egyptologists believe, so written evidence is scarce; until recently, only two texts on mummification had been identified.

Egyptologists were therefore surprised to find a short manual on embalming in a medical text that is primarily concerned with herbal medicine and swellings of the skin. The manual has recently been edited by University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Sofie Schiødt:

– Many descriptions of embalming techniques that we find in this papyrus have been left out of the two later manuals, and the descriptions are extremely detailed. The text reads like a memory aid, so the intended readers must have been specialists who needed to be reminded of these details, such as unguent recipes and uses of various types of bandages. Some of the simpler processes, e.g. the drying of the body with natron, have been omitted from the text, Sofie Schiødt explains. She adds:

– One of the exciting new pieces of information the text provides us with concerns the procedure for embalming the dead person’s face. We get a list of ingredients for a remedy consisting largely of plant-based aromatic substances and binders that are cooked into a liquid, with which the embalmers coat a piece of red linen. The red linen is then applied to the dead person’s face in order to encase it in a protective cocoon of fragrant and anti-bacterial matter. This process was repeated at four-day intervals.

Although this procedure has not been identified before, Egyptologists have previously examined several mummies from the same period as this manual whose faces were covered in cloth and resin. According to Sofie Schiødt, this would fit well with the red linen procedure described in this manuscript.

Four was the key number

The importance of the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg manual in reconstructing the embalming process lies in its specification of the process being divided into intervals of four, with the embalmers actively working on the mummy every four days.

– A ritual procession of the mummy marked these days, celebrating the progress of restoring the deceased’s corporeal integrity, amounting to 17 processions over the course of the embalming period. In between the four-day intervals, the body was covered with cloth and overlaid with straw infused with aromatics to keep away insects and scavengers, Sofie Schiødt says.

The Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg

The manuscript, which Sofie Schiødt has been working on for her PhD thesis, is the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg – so called because one half of the papyrus belongs to the Louvre Museum in Paris and the other half is part of the University of Copenhagen’s Papyrus Carlsberg Collection. The two parts of the papyrus originally belonged to two private collectors, and several sections of it are still missing. Based on the palaeography, that is, the sign forms, the six meter long papyrus is dated to approximately 1450 BC, which means that it predates the only two other examples of embalming texts by more than a thousand years.

The bulk of the papyrus, which is the second-longest medical papyrus surviving from ancient Egypt, deals with herbal medicine and skin illnesses. Specifically, it contains the earliest-known herbal treatise, which provides descriptions of the appearance, habitat, uses, and religious significance of a divine plant and its seed as well as a lengthy treatise on swellings of the skin, which are seen as illnesses sent forth by the lunar god Khonsu.

The papyrus is planned for publication in 2022 as a collaboration between the Louvre Museum and the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection. If you are interested in a copy of Sofie Schiødt’s PhD thesis “Medical Science in Ancient Egypt: A translation and interpretation of Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg (PLouvre E 32847 + PCarlsberg 917)”, which she defended 8 February 2021, please contact her at zcq348@hum.ku.dk.

The embalming process

The embalming, which was performed in a purpose-built workshop erected near the grave, took place over 70 days that were divided into two main periods – a 35-day drying period and a 35-day wrapping period.

During the drying period, the body was treated with dry natron both inside and outside. The natron treatment began on the fourth day of embalming after the purification of the body, the removal of the organs and the brain, and the collapsing of the eyes.

The second 35-day period was dedicated to the encasing of the deceased in bandages and aromatic substances. The embalming of the face described in the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg belonged to this period.

The entire 70-day embalming process was divided into intervals of 4 days, with the mummy being finished on day 68 and then placed in the coffin, after which the final days were spent on ritual activities allowing the deceased to live on in the afterlife.

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The papyrus contains new evidence of the procedure for embalming the deceased’s face, where the face is covered with a piece of red linen and aromatic substances. Ida Christensen, University of Copenhagen

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Section of the papyrus that deals with swellings of the skin. The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, University of Copenhagen

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES news release

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TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY—Evolutionary expert Charles Darwin and others recognized a close evolutionary relationship between humans, chimps and gorillas based on their shared anatomies, raising some big questions: how are humans related to other primates, and exactly how did early humans move around? Research by a Texas A&M University professor may provide some answers.

Thomas Cody Prang, assistant professor of anthropology, and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”), dated to 4.4 million years old and found in Ethiopia. One of Ardi’s hands was exceptionally well-preserved.

The researchers compared the shape of Ardi’s hand to hundreds of other hand specimens representing recent humans, apes and monkeys (measured from bones in museum collections around the world) to make comparisons about the kind of locomotor behavior used by the earliest hominins (fossil human relatives).

The results provide clues about how early humans began to walk upright and make similar movements that all humans perform today.

This discovery is described in a study published in the current issue of Science Advances.

“Bone shape reflects adaptation to particular habits or lifestyles – for example the movement of primates – and by drawing connections between bone shape and behavior among living forms, we can make inferences about the behavior of extinct species, such as Ardi, that we can’t directly observe, Prang said.

“Additionally, we found evidence for a big evolutionary ‘jump’ between the kind of hand represented by Ardi and all later hominin hands, including that of Lucy’s species (a famous 3.2 million-year-old well-preserved skeleton found in the same area in the 1970s). This ‘evolutionary jump’ happens at a critical time when hominins are evolving adaptations to a more human-like form of upright walking, and the earliest evidence for hominin stone-tool manufacture and stone-tool use, such as cut-marks on animal fossils, are discovered.”

Prang said the fact that Ardi represents an earlier phase of human evolutionary history is important because it potentially shines light on the kind of ancestor from which humans and chimpanzees evolved.

“Our study supports a classic idea first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1871, when he had no fossils or understanding of genetics, that the use of the hands and upper limbs for manipulation appeared in early human relatives in connection with upright walking,” he said. “The evolution of human hands and feet probably happened in a correlated fashion.”

Since Ardi is such an ancient species, it might retain skeletal features that were present in the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. If this is true, it could help researchers place the origin of the human lineage – in addition to upright walking – into a clearer light.

“It potentially brings us one step closer to an explanation for how and why humans evolved our form of upright walking,” Prang said.

He added that the big change in hand anatomy between Ardi and all later hominins occurs at a time, roughly between 4.4 and 3.3 million years ago, coinciding with the earliest evidence of the loss of a grasping big toe in human evolution. This also coincides with the earliest known stone tools and stone cut-marked animal fossils.

He said it appears to mark a major change in the lifestyle and behavior of human relatives within this timeframe.

“We propose that it involves the evolution of more advanced upright walking, which enabled human hands to be modified by the evolutionary process for enhanced manual manipulation, possibly involving stone tools,” Prang said.

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Fossil reconstruction of Ardipithecus ramidus hand. Bjoertvedt, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, Wikimedia Commons

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Ardipithecus ramidus skull as displayed in the National Museum of Natural Sciences of Spain. Tiia Monto, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY news release

This research was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation.

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UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, BUFFALO, N.Y.—The history of dogs has been intertwined, since ancient times, with that of the humans who domesticated them.

But how far back does that history go in the Americas, and which route did dogs use to enter this part of the world?

A new study led by the University at Buffalo provides insight into these questions. The research reports that a bone fragment found in Southeast Alaska belongs to a dog that lived in the region about 10,150 years ago. Scientists say the remains — a piece of a femur — represent the oldest confirmed remains of a domestic dog in the Americas.

DNA from the bone fragment holds clues about early canine history in this part of the world.

Researchers analyzed the dog’s mitochondrial genome, and concluded that the animal belonged to a lineage of dogs whose evolutionary history diverged from that of Siberian dogs as early as 16,700 years ago. The timing of that split coincides with a period when humans may have been migrating into North America along a coastal route that included Southeast Alaska.

The research will be published on Feb. 24 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist from UB, was senior author of the study, which included scientists from UB and the University of South Dakota. The findings add to a growing body of knowledge about the migration of dogs into the Americas.

“We now have genetic evidence from an ancient dog found along the Alaskan coast. Because dogs are a proxy for human occupation, our data help provide not only a timing but also a location for the entry of dogs and people into the Americas. Our study supports the theory that this migration occurred just as coastal glaciers retreated during the last Ice Age,” says Lindqvist, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “There have been multiple waves of dogs migrating into the Americas, but one question has been, when did the first dogs arrive? And did they follow an interior ice-free corridor between the massive ice sheets that covered the North American continent, or was their first migration along the coast?”

“The fossil record of ancient dogs in the Americas is incomplete, so any new remains that are found provide important clues,” says Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a UB PhD student in biological sciences, and one of the paper’s first authors. “Before our study, the earliest ancient American dog bones that had their DNA sequenced were found in the U.S. Midwest.”

A surprise finding from a large collection of bones

Lindqvist’s team did not set out to study dogs. The scientists came across the femur fragment while sequencing DNA from a collection of hundreds of bones excavated years before in Southeast Alaska by researchers including Timothy Heaton, PhD, professor of earth sciences at the University of South Dakota.

“This all started out with our interest in how Ice Age climatic changes impacted animals’ survival and movements in this region,” Lindqvist says. “Southeast Alaska might have served as an ice-free stopping point of sorts, and now — with our dog — we think that early human migration through the region might be much more important than some previously suspected.”

The bone fragment, originally thought to come from a bear, was quite small, but when the DNA was studied, the team realized it was from a dog, Lindqvist says.

After this surprise discovery, the scientists compared the bone’s mitochondrial genome to those of other ancient and modern dogs. This analysis showed that the Southeast Alaskan dog shared a common ancestor about 16,000 years ago with American canines that lived before the arrival of European colonizers, Lindqvist says. (Mitochondrial DNA, inherited from the mother, represents a small fraction of an organism’s complete DNA, so sequencing a complete nuclear genome could provide further details if that material can be extracted.)

Of interest, carbon isotope analysis on the bone fragment indicates that the ancient Southeast Alaskan dog likely had a marine diet, which may have consisted of foods such as fish and scraps from seals and whales.

The research adds depth to the layered history of how dogs came to populate the Americas. As Lindqvist notes, canines did not arrive all at once. For example, some Arctic dogs arrived later from East Asia with the Thule culture, while Siberian huskies were imported to Alaska during the Gold Rush. Other dogs were brought to the Americas by European colonizers.

The new study sharpens the debate on dog and human migration into the Americas.

“Our early dog from Southeast Alaska supports the hypothesis that the first dog and human migration occurred through the Northwest Pacific coastal route instead of the central continental corridor, which is thought to have become viable only about 13,000 years ago,” Coelho notes.

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This bone fragment, found in Southeast Alaska, belongs to a dog that lived about 10,150 years ago, a study concludes. Scientists say the remains, a piece of a femur, provide insight into the question of when dogs and humans first entered the Americas, and what route they took to get there. Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo

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A map showing the study area. Bob Wilder / University at Buffalo

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Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a University at Buffalo PhD student in biological sciences, holds the ancient dog bone fragment that was found in Southeast Alaska. Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO news release

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to Lindqvist, Coelho and Heaton, authors of the new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B included Stephanie Gill and Crystal Tomlin.

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UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE—A two-meter-long painting of a kangaroo in Western Australia’s Kimberley region has been identified as Australia’s oldest intact rock painting.

Using the radiocarbon dating of 27 mud wasp nests, collected from over and under 16 similar paintings, a University of Melbourne collaboration has put the painting at 17,500 and 17,100 years old.

“This makes the painting Australia’s oldest known in-situ painting,” said Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Damien Finch who pioneered the exciting new radiocarbon technique.

“This is a significant find as through these initial estimates, we can understand something of the world these ancient artists lived in. We can never know what was in the mind of the artist when he/she painted this piece of work more than 600 generations ago, but we do know that the Naturalistic period extended back into the Last Ice Age, so the environment was cooler and dryer than today.”

The Kimberley-based research is part of Australia’s largest rock art dating project, led by Professor Andy Gleadow from the University of Melbourne. It involves the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Universities of Western Australia, Wollongong, and Manchester, the Australian National Science and Technology Organization, and partners Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral.

Published today in Nature Human Behaviour, Dr Finch and his colleagues detail how rock shelters have preserved the Kimberley galleries of rock paintings, many of them painted over by younger artists, for millennia – and how they managed to date the kangaroo rock painting as Australia’s oldest known in-situ painting.

The kangaroo is painted on the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter on the Unghango clan estate in Balanggarra country, above the Drysdale River in the north-eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Earlier researchers looked at the stylistic features of the paintings and the order in which they were painted when they overlapped, and were able to work out from there that the oldest style of painting is what’s known as the Irregular Infill Animal or the Naturalistic period, which often features life-size animals. This kangaroo is a typical example of paintings in this style.

Dr Finch said it was rare to find mud wasp nests both overlying and underlying a single painting. For this painting they were able to sample both types to establish the minimum and maximum age for the artwork.

“We radiocarbon dated three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built over it to determine, confidently, that the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; most likely 17,300 years old.”

Dr Sven Ouzman, from University Western Australia’s School of Social Sciences and one of the project’s chief investigators, said the rock painting would unlock further understanding of Indigenous cultural history.

“This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to rock paintings from islands in South East Asia dated to more than 40,000 years ago, suggesting a cultural link – and hinting at still older rock art in Australia,” Dr Ouzman said.

Cissy Gore-Birch, Chair of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, said partnerships were important to integrate traditional knowledge with western science, to preserve Australia’s history and cultural identity.

“It’s important that Indigenous knowledge and stories are not lost and continue to be shared for generations to come,” Ms Gore-Birch said. “The dating of this oldest known painting in an Australian rock shelter holds a great deal of significance for Aboriginal people and Australians and is an important part of Australia’s history.”

The next step for the researchers, who are aiming to develop a time scale for Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley, is to date further wasp nests in contact with this and other styles of Kimberley rock art to establish, more accurately, when each art period began and ended.

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Traditional Owner Ian Waina inspecting a Naturalistic painting of a kangaroo, determined to be more than 12,700 years old based on the age of overlying mud wasp nests. The inset is an illustration of the painting above it. Peter Veth and the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, Illustration: Pauline Heaney

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE news release

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FRONTIERS—Modern medical technology is helping scholars tell a more nuanced story about the fate of an ancient king whose violent death indirectly led to the reunification of Egypt in the 16th century BC. The research was published in Frontiers in Medicine.

Pharaoh Seqenenre-Taa-II, the Brave, briefly ruled over Southern Egypt during the country’s occupation by the Hyksos, a foreign dynasty that held power across the kingdom for about a century (c. 1650-1550 BCE). In his attempt to oust the Hyskos, Seqenenre-Taa-II was killed. Scholars have debated the exact nature of the pharaoh’s death since his mummy was first discovered and studied in the 1880s.

These and subsequent examinations — including an X-ray study in the 1960s — noted the dead king had suffered several severe head injuries but no other wounds to his body. The prevailing theory, based on the evidence, was that the king had been captured in battle and then executed afterward, possibly by the Hyksos king himself. Others have suggested he was murdered in his sleep by a palace conspiracy.

In addition, the poor condition of the mummy suggested the embalming had been done hastily, away from the royal mummification workshop.

But computed tomography (CT) scans of the mummified remains of Seqenenre revealed new details about his head injuries, including previously undetected lesions that embalmers had skillfully concealed.

The authors of the new paper offer a novel interpretation of the events before and after the king’s death based on the computer-processed X-ray images: Seqenenre had indeed been captured on the battlefield, but his hands had been tied behind his back, preventing him from defending against the attack.

“This suggests that Seqenenre was really on the front line with his soldiers risking his life to liberate Egypt,” said lead author Dr. Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University who specializes in paleoradiology. This investigative technique employs medical imaging technologies to non-invasively study a cross section of archaeological remains, including bodies. It can help determine age at death, sex and even how the person died.

For example, the CT scans, combined with other evidence, suggest the execution had been carried out by multiple attackers, which the scientists confirmed by studying five different Hyksos weapons that matched the king’s wounds.

“In a normal execution on a bound prisoner, it could be assumed that only one assailant strikes, possibly from different angles but not with different weapons,” Saleem explained. “Seqenenre’s death was rather a ceremonial execution.”

The CT study also determined that Seqenenre was about 40 when he died, based on the detailed morphology revealed in the images, providing the most precise estimate to date.

Saleem and co-author Zahi Hawass, an archaeologist and former Egyptian minister of antiquities, have pioneered the use of CT scans to study the New Kingdom pharaohs and warriors, including well-known names such as Hatshepsut, Tutankhamun, Ramesses III, Thutmose III and Rameses II. Yet Seqenenre, based on the available evidence, appears to be the only one among this illustrious group to have been on the frontline of the battlefield.

In addition, the CT study revealed important details about the mummification of Seqenenre’s body. For instance, the embalmers used a sophisticated method to hide the king’s head wounds under a layer of embalming material that functioned similarly to the fillers used in modern plastic surgery. This would imply that mummification took place in a real mummification laboratory rather than in a poorly equipped place, as previously interpreted.

Saleem said the CT scan study provides important new details about a pivotal point in Egypt’s long history. “Seqenenre’s death motivated his successors to continue the fight to unify Egypt and start the New Kingdom,” she said.

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Dr Sahar Saleem placing the mummy in the CT scanner. Sahar Saleem

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X ray of pharaoh Seqenenre-Taa-II’s torso. Sahar Saleem

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3D Virtual Reality image of the pharaoh’s skull. Sahar Saleem

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Article Source: FRONTIERS news release

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OKINAWA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (OIST) GRADUATE UNIVERSITY:

• New research has found that a group of genes that reduces the risk of developing severe COVID-19 by around 20% is inherited from Neanderthals
• These genes, located on chromosome 12, code for enzymes that play a vital role in helping cells destroy the genomes of invading viruses
• The study suggests that enzymes produced by the Neanderthal variant of these genes are more efficient which helps protect against severe COVID-19
• This genetic variant was passed to humans around 60,000 years ago via interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals
• The genetic variant has increased in frequency over the last millennium and is now found in around half of people living outside Africa

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, impacts people in different ways after infection. Some experience only mild or no symptoms at all while others become sick enough to require hospitalization and may develop respiratory failure and die.

Now, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany have found that a group of genes that reduces the risk of a person becoming seriously ill with COVID-19 by around 20% is inherited from Neanderthals.

“Of course, other factors such as advanced age or underlying conditions such as diabetes have a significant impact on how ill an infected individual may become,” said Professor Svante Pääbo, who leads the Human Evolutionary Genomics Unit at OIST. “But genetic factors also play an important role and some of these have been contributed to present-day people by Neanderthals.”

Last year, Professor Svante Pääbo and his colleague Professor Hugo Zeberg reported in Nature that the greatest genetic risk factor so far identified, doubling the risk to develop severe COVID-19 when infected by the virus, had been inherited from Neanderthals.

Their latest research builds on a new study, published in December last year from the Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care (GenOMICC) consortium in the UK, which collected genome sequences of 2,244 people who developed severe COVID-19. This UK study pinpointed additional genetic regions on four chromosomes that impact how individuals respond to the virus.

Now, in a study published today in PNAS, Professor Pääbo and Professor Zeberg show that one of the newly identified regions carries a variant that is almost identical to those found in three Neanderthals – a ~50,000-year-old Neanderthal from Croatia, and two Neanderthals, one around 70,000 years old and the other around 120,000 years old, from Southern Siberia.

Surprisingly, this second genetic factor influences COVID-19 outcomes in the opposite direction to the first genetic factor, providing protection rather than increasing the risk to develop severe COVID-19. The variant is located on chromosome 12 and reduces the risk that an individual will require intensive care after infection by about 22%.

“It’s quite amazing that despite Neanderthals becoming extinct around 40,000 years ago, their immune system still influences us in both positive and negative ways today,” said Professor Pääbo.

To try to understand how this variant affects COVID-19 outcomes, the research team took a closer look at the genes located in this region. They found that three genes in this region, called OAS, code for enzymes that are produced upon viral infection and in turn activate other enzymes that degrade viral genomes in infected cells.

“It seems that the enzymes encoded by the Neanderthal variant are more efficient, reducing the chance of severe consequences to SARS-CoV-2 infections,” Professor Pääbo explained.

The researchers also studied how the newly discovered Neanderthal-like genetic variants changed in frequency after ending up in modern humans some 60,000 years ago.

To do this, they used genomic information retrieved by different research groups from thousands of human skeletons of varying ages.

They found that the variant increased in frequency after the last Ice Age and then increased in frequency again during the past millennium. As a result, today it occurs in about half of people living outside Africa and in around 30% of people in Japan. In contrast, the researchers previously found that the major risk variant inherited from Neanderthals is almost absent in Japan.

“The rise in the frequency of this protective Neanderthal variant suggests that it may have been beneficial also in the past, maybe during other disease outbreaks caused by RNA viruses,” said Professor Pääbo.

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New research has found that a group of genes that reduces the risk of developing severe COVID-19 by around 20% is inherited from Neanderthals. Bjorn Oberg, Karolinska Institutet.

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Article Source: OKINAWA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (OIST) GRADUATE UNIVERSITY news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR CHEMICAL ECOLOGY—A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that the extinction of North America’s largest mammals was not driven by overhunting by rapidly expanding human populations following their entrance into the Americas. Instead, the findings, based on a new statistical modeling approach, suggest that populations of large mammals fluctuated in response to climate change, with drastic decreases of temperatures around 13,000 years ago initiating the decline and extinction of these massive creatures. Still, humans may have been involved in more complex and indirect ways than simple models of overhunting suggest.

Before around 10,000 years ago, North America was home to many large and exotic creatures, such as mammoths, gigantic ground-dwelling sloths, larger-than-life beavers, and huge armadillo-like creatures known as glyptodons. But by around 10,000 years ago, most of North America’s animals weighing over 44 kg, also known as megafauna, had disappeared. Researchers from the Max Planck Extreme Events Research Group in Jena, Germany, wanted to find out what led to these extinctions. The topic has been intensely debated for decades, with most researchers arguing that human overhunting, climate change, or some combination of the two was responsible. With a new statistical approach, the researchers found strong evidence that climate change was the main driver of extinction.

Overhunting vs. climate change

Since the 1960’s, it has been hypothesized that, as human populations grew and expanded across the continents, the arrival of specialized “big-game” hunters in the Americas some 14,000 year ago rapidly drove many giant mammals to extinction. The large animals did not possess the appropriate anti-predator behaviors to deal with a novel, highly social, tool-wielding predator, which made them particularly easy to hunt. According to proponents of this “overkill hypothesis”, humans took full advantage of the easy-to-hunt prey, devastating the animal populations and carelessly driving the giant creatures to extinction.

Not everyone agrees with this idea, however. Many scientists have argued that there is too little archaeological evidence to support the idea that megafauna hunting was persistent or widespread enough to cause extinctions. Instead, significant climatic and ecological changes may have been to blame.

Around the time of the extinctions (between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago), there were two major climatic changes. The first was a period of abrupt warming that began around 14,700 years ago, and the second was a cold snap around 12,900 years ago during which the Northern Hemisphere returned to near-glacial conditions. One or both of these important temperature swings, and their ecological ramifications, have been implicated in the megafauna extinctions.

“A common approach has been to try to determine the timing of megafauna extinctions and to see how they align with human arrival in the Americas or some climatic event,” says Mathew Stewart, co-lead author of the study. “However, extinction is a process–meaning that it unfolds over some span of time–and so to understand what caused the demise of North America’s megafauna, it’s crucial that we understand how their populations fluctuated in the lead up to extinction. Without those long-term patterns, all we can see are rough coincidences.”

‘Dates as data’

To test these conflicting hypotheses, the authors used a new statistical approach developed by W. Christopher Carleton, the study’s other co-lead author, and published last year in the Journal of Quaternary Science. Estimating population sizes of prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups and long-extinct animals cannot be done by counting heads or hooves. Instead, archaeologists and palaeontologists use the radiocarbon record as a proxy for past population sizes. The rationale being that the more animals and humans present in a landscape, the more datable carbon is left behind after they are gone, which is then reflected in the archaeological and fossil records. Unlike established approaches, the new method better accounts for uncertainty in fossil dates.

The major problem with the previous approach is that it blends the uncertainty associated with radiocarbon dates with the process scientists are trying to identify.

“As a result, you can end up seeing trends in the data that don’t really exist, making this method rather unsuitable for capturing changes in past population levels. Using simulation studies where we know what the real patterns in the data are, we have been able to show that the new method does not have the same problems. As a result, our method is able to do a much better job capturing through-time changes in population levels using the radiocarbon record,” explains Carleton.

North American megafauna extinctions

The authors applied this new approach to the question of the Late Quaternary North American megafauna extinctions. In contrast to previous studies, the new findings show that megafauna populations fluctuated in response to climate change.

“Megafauna populations appear to have been increasing as North American began to warm around 14,700 years ago,” states Stewart. “But we then see a shift in this trend around 12,900 years ago as North America began to drastically cool, and shortly after this we begin to see the extinctions of megafauna occur.”

And while these findings suggest that the return to near glacial conditions around 12,900 years ago was the proximate cause for the extinctions, the story is likely to be more complicated than this.

“We must consider the ecological changes associated with these climate changes at both a continental and regional scale if we want to have a proper understanding of what drove these extinctions,” explains group leader Huw Groucutt, senior author of the study. “Humans also aren’t completely off the hook, as it remains possible that they played a more nuanced role in the megafauna extinctions than simple overkill models suggest.”

Many researchers have argued that it is an impossible coincidence that megafauna extinctions around the world often happened around the time of human arrival. However, it is important to scientifically demonstrate that there was a relationship, and even if there was, the causes may have been much more indirect (such as through habitat modification) than a killing frenzy as humans arrived in a region.

The authors end their article with a call to arms, urging researchers to develop bigger, more reliable records and robust methods for interpreting them. Only then will we develop a comprehensive understanding of the Late Quaternary megafauna extinction event.

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The study’s findings suggest that decreasing hemispheric temperatures and associated ecological changes were the primary drivers of the Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in North America. Hans Sell

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A simplified radiocarbon-dated event (REC) model showing that decreases in megafauna numbers coincided with the return to near-glacial conditions at the start of the Younger-Dryas. Hans Sell & Christopher W. Carlton

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR CHEMICAL ECOLOGY news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Long held in a private collection, the newly analyzed tooth of an approximately 9-year-old Neanderthal child marks the hominin’s southernmost known range. Analysis of the associated archaeological assemblage suggests Neanderthals used Nubian Levallois technology, previously thought to be restricted to Homo sapiens.

With a high concentration of cave sites harboring evidence of past populations and their behavior, the Levant is a major center for human origins research. For over a century, archaeological excavations in the Levant have produced human fossils and stone tool assemblages that reveal landscapes inhabited by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, making this region a potential mixing ground between populations. Distinguishing these populations by stone tool assemblages alone is difficult, but one technology, the distinct Nubian Levallois method, is argued to have been produced only by Homo sapiens.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History teamed up with international partners to re-examine the fossil and archaeological record of Shukbah Cave (located near the town of Shuqba in the western Judaean Mountains in the West Bank). Their findings extend the southernmost known range of Neanderthals and suggest that our now-extinct relatives made use of a technology previously argued to be a trademark of modern humans. This study marks the first time the lone human tooth from the site has been studied in detail, in combination with a major comparative study examining the stone tool assemblage.

“Sites where hominin fossils are directly associated with stone tool assemblages remain a rarity – but the study of both fossils and tools is critical for understanding hominin occupations of Shukbah Cave and the larger region,” says lead author Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn, formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London and now with the Pan-African Evolution Research Group (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History).

Shukbah Cave was first excavated in the spring of 1928 by Dorothy Garrod, who reported a rich assemblage of animal bones and Mousterian-style stone tools cemented in breccia deposits, often concentrated in well-marked hearths. She also identified a large, unique human molar. However, the specimen was kept in a private collection for most of the 20th century, prohibiting comparative studies using modern methods. The recent re-identification of the tooth at the Natural History Museum in London has led to new detailed work on the Shukbah collections.

“Professor Garrod immediately saw how distinctive this tooth was. We’ve examined the size, shape and both the external and internal 3D structure of the tooth, and compared that to Holocene and Pleistocene Homo sapiens and Neanderthal specimens. This has enabled us to clearly characterize the tooth as belonging to an approximately 9 year old Neanderthal child,” says Dr. Clément Zanolli, from Université de Bordeaux. “Shukbah marks the southernmost extent of the Neanderthal range known to date,” adds Zanolli.

Although Homo sapiens and Neanderthals shared the use of a wide suite of stone tool technologies, Nubian Levallois technology has recently been argued to have been exclusively used by Homo sapiens. The argument has been made particularly in southwest Asia, where Nubian Levallois tools have been used to track human dispersals in the absence of fossils.

“Illustrations of the stone tool collections from Shukbah hinted at the presence of Nubian Levallois technology so we revisited the collections to investigate further. In the end, we identified many more artifacts produced using the Nubian Levallois methods than we had anticipated,” says Blinkhorn. “This is the first time they’ve been found in direct association with Neanderthal fossils, which suggests we can’t make a simple link between this technology and Homo sapiens.”

“Southwest Asia is a dynamic region in terms of hominin demography, behavior and environmental change, and may be particularly important to examine interactions between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” adds Prof Simon Blockley, of Royal Holloway, University of London. “This study highlights the geographic range of Neanderthal populations and their behavioral flexibility, but also issues a timely note of caution that there are no straightforward links between particular hominins and specific stone tool technologies.”

“Up to now we have no direct evidence of a Neanderthal presence in Africa,” said Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum. “But the southerly location of Shukbah, only about 400 km from Cairo, should remind us that they may have even dispersed into Africa at times.”

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The view from Shukbah Cave. Amos Frumkin

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Photos of Nubian Levallois cores associated with Neanderthal fossils. Copyright: UCL, Institute of Archaeology & courtesy of the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. Blinkhorn, et al., 2021 / CC BY 4.0

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Photo and 3D reconstruction of a tooth of a 9-year-old Neanderthal child. Copyright: Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Blinkhorn, et al., 2021 / CC BY 4.0

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news release

Partnerships

Researchers involved in this study include scholars from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Royal Holloway, University of London, the Université de Bordeaux, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, the University of Malta, and the Natural History Museum, London. This work was supported by the Leverhulme trust (RPH-2017-087).

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—Building modern human brain organoids with the Neanderthal variant of a gene has provided a glimpse into the way substitutions in this gene impacted our species’ evolution. The ability to grow brain organoids with specific archaic genes provides a way to identify and evaluate the functional differences between the closely related genomes of hominin lineages and explore the evolutionary changes that underly the unique traits that set us as modern humans apart from our extinct relatives. While the genomes of modern humans and their archaic Neanderthal and Denisovan relatives are, in many respects, similar, the genetic differences between them are of particular interest, as they could inform on important traits for recent human evolution. For example, each contains NOVA1, an evolutionarily conserved gene known to play key roles in neurodevelopment and function. However, there are protein-coding differences between modern and archaic human variants. To evaluate the functional importance of NOVA1 variants, Cleber Trujillo and colleagues isolated the archaic NOVA1 gene from the Neanderthal genome and used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to introduce the variant into human pluripotent stem cells. This allowed Trujillo et al. to generate modern human cortical organoids expressing the archaic variant. According to the results, the addition induced slower development and higher surface complexity in cortical organoids, as well as differences in the brain’s electrophysical properties. The authors suggest that this genetic divergence may have had functional consequences for the evolutionary development of modern humans.

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A facial reconstruction from the Le Moustier Neanderthal skull in the Neues Museum, Berlin. Gary Todd, Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

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Article Source: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Experts from the Natural History Museum, The Francis Crick Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena have joined together to untangle the different meanings of ancestry in the evolution of our species Homo sapiens.

Most of us are fascinated by our ancestry, and by extension the ancestry of the human species. We regularly see headlines like ‘New human ancestor discovered’ or ‘New fossil changes everything we thought about our ancestry’, and yet the meanings of words like ancestor and ancestry are rarely discussed in detail. In the new paper, published in Nature, experts review our current understanding of how modern human ancestry around the globe can be traced into the distant past, and which ancestors it passes through during our journey back in time.

Co-author researcher at the Natural History Museum Prof Chris Stringer said: “Some of our ancestors will have lived in groups or populations that can be identified in the fossil record, whereas very little will be known about others. Over the next decade, growing recognition of our complex origins should expand the geographic focus of paleoanthropological fieldwork to regions previously considered peripheral to our evolution, such as Central and West Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.”

The study identified three key phases in our ancestry that are surrounded by major questions, and which will be frontiers in coming research. From the worldwide expansion of modern humans about 40-60 thousand years ago and the last known contacts with archaic groups such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, to an African origin of modern human diversity about 60-300,000 years ago, and finally the complex separation of modern human ancestors from archaic human groups about 300,000 to 1 million years ago.

The scientists argue that no specific point in time can currently be identified when modern human ancestry was confined to a limited birthplace, and that the known patterns of the first appearance of anatomical or behavioral traits that are often used to define Homo sapiens fit a range of evolutionary histories.

Co-author Pontus Skoglund from The Francis Crick Institute said: “Contrary to what many believe, neither the genetic or fossil record have so far revealed a defined time and place for the origin of our species. Such a point in time, when the majority of our ancestry was found in a small geographic region and the traits we associate with our species appeared, may not have existed. For now, it would be useful to move away from the idea of a single time and place of origin.”

“Following from this, major emerging questions concern which mechanisms drove and sustained this human patchwork, with all its diverse ancestral threads, over time and space,” said co-author Eleanor Scerri from the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “Understanding the relationship between fractured habitats and shifting human niches will undoubtedly play a key role in unravelling these questions, clarifying which demographic patterns provide a best fit with the genetic and palaeoanthropological record.”

The success of direct genetic analyses so far highlights the importance of a wider, ancient genetic record. This will require continued technological improvements in ancient DNA (aDNA) retrieval, biomolecular screening of fragmentary fossils to find unrecognized human material, wider searches for sedimentary aDNA, and improvements in the evolutionary information provided by ancient proteins. Interdisciplinary analysis of the growing genetic, fossil and archaeological records will undoubtedly reveal many new surprises about the roots of modern human ancestry.

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This cranium from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco is often called a modern human ancestor. The meaning of that ancestry is discussed and disentangled in a new study by Bergstrom and colleagues. Chris Stringer

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news release.

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About the Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is both a world-leading science research centre and the most-visited natural history museum in Europe. With a vision of a future in which both people and the planet thrive, it is uniquely positioned to be a powerful champion for balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world.

It is custodian of one of the world’s most important scientific collections comprising over 80 million specimens. The scale of this collection enables researchers from all over the world to document how species have and continue to respond to environmental changes – which is vital in helping predict what might happen in the future and informing future policies and plans to help the planet.

The Museum’s 300 scientists continue to represent one of the largest groups in the world studying and enabling research into every aspect of the natural world. Their science is contributing critical data to help the global fight to save the future of the planet from the major threats of climate change and biodiversity loss through to finding solutions such as the sustainable extraction of natural resources.

The Museum uses its enormous global reach and influence to meet its mission to create advocates for the planet – to inform, inspire and empower everyone to make a difference for nature. We welcome over five million visitors each year; our digital output reaches hundreds of thousands of people in over 200 countries each month and our touring exhibitions have been seen by around 30 million people in the last 10 years.

About the Francis Crick Institute

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical discovery institute dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. Its work is helping to understand why disease develops and to translate discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases.

An independent organisation, its founding partners are the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King’s College London.

The Crick was formed in 2015, and in 2016 it moved into a brand new state-of-the-art building in central London which brings together 1500 scientists and support staff working collaboratively across disciplines, making it the biggest biomedical research facility under a single roof in Europe.
http://crick.ac.uk/

About the Pan-African Evolution Research Group

The Pan-African Evolution Research Group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History is an independent research group dedicated to investigating the origins of our species and the parallel transformation of environments and ecosystems. The group’s work is unravelling the human story from the perspective of poorly researched regions and environments, coalescing new data and developing novel methods to understand patterns of population movement, cultural change, ecological adaptations, disease, and interactions with now extinct hominins. This research feeds into solutions of current global challenges by contributing lessons from the past to find sustainable solutions to the dual biodiversity and climate crises.

The Pan African Research Group was formed in early 2019 within the framework of the Max Planck Society’s flagship Lise Meitner Excellence Programme.

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CNRS—Almost 80 years after its discovery, a large shell from the ornate Marsoulas Cave in the Pyrenees has been studied by a multidisciplinary team from the CNRS, the Muséum de Toulouse, the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès and the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques-Chirac (1): it is believed to be the oldest wind instrument of its type. Scientists reveal how it sounds in a study published in the journal Science Advances on 10th February 2021.

The Marsoulas Cave, between Haute-Garonne and Ariège, was the first decorated cave to be found in the Pyrenees. Discovered in 1897, the cave bears witness to the beginning of the Magdalenian (2) culture in this region, at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. During an inventory of the material from the archaeological excavations, most of which is kept in the Muséum de Toulouse, scientists examined a large Charonia lampas (sea snail) shell, which had been largely overlooked when discovered in 1931.

The tip of the shell is broken, forming a 3.5 cm diameter opening. As this is the hardest part of the shell, the break is clearly not accidental. At the opposite end, the shell opening shows traces of retouching (cutting) and a tomography scan has revealed that one of the first coils is perforated. Finally, the shell has been decorated with a red pigment (hematite), characteristic of the Marsoulas Cave, which indicates its status as a symbolic object.

To confirm the hypothesis that this conch was used to produce sounds, scientists enlisted the help of a horn player, who managed to produce three sounds close to the notes C, C-sharp and D. As the opening was irregular and covered with an organic coating (3), the researchers assume that a mouthpiece was also attached, as is the case for more recent conches in collection of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. 3D impressions of the conch will enable this lead to be explored and verify whether it can be used to produce other notes.

The first carbon-14 dating of the cave, carried out on a piece of charcoal and a fragment of bear bone from the same archaeological level as the shell, provided a date of around 18,000 years. This makes the Marsoulas conch the oldest wind instrument of its type: to date, only flutes have been discovered in earlier European Upper Palaeolithic contexts; the conches found outside Europe are much more recent.

In addition to immersing us in the sounds produced by our Magdalenian ancestors, this shell reinforces the idea of exchanges between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast, more than 200 kilometers away.

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At 31 cm in height, 18 cm in diameter (at the widest point) and up to 0.8 cm thick, this conch, which bears witness to a colder sea, is thus larger and thicker than more recent ones. © Carole Fritz et al. 2021.

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Reconstruction of the instrument being played. In the background, a red dotted buffalo decorates the walls of the Marsoulas Cave; similar motifs decorate the instrument. © Carole Fritz et al. 2021 / drawing: Gilles Tosello

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– Listen to the sound of the Marsoulas conch: https://soundcloud.com/cnrs_officiel/marsoulas-shell-conch-sound/s-234KE5bFZO1

– See the 3D model: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/triton-700k-0bddff3405144c7b8f91f902e28bcc9b

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Article Source: CNRS news release

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