The Great London:
China

Few Americans may be aware of it, but in 1952 a killer fog that contained pollutants covered London for five days, causing breathing problems and killing thousands of residents. The exact cause and nature of the fog has remained mostly unknown for decades, but an international team of scientists that includes several Texas A&M University-affiliated researchers believes that the mystery has been solved and that the same air chemistry also happens in China and other locales.

Texas A&M researcher Renyi Zhang, University Distinguished Professor and the Harold J. Haynes Chair of Atmospheric Sciences and Professor of Chemistry, along with graduate students Yun Lin, Wilmarie Marrero-Ortiz, Jeremiah Secrest, Yixin Li, Jiaxi Hu and Bowen Pan and researchers from China, Florida, California Israel and the UK have had their work published in the current issue of >Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In December of 1952, the fog enveloped all of London and residents at first gave it little notice because it appeared to be no different from the familiar natural fogs that have swept over Great Britain for thousands of years.

But over the next few days, conditions deteriorated, and the sky literally became dark. Visibility was reduced to only three feet in many parts of the city, all transportation was shut down and tens of thousands of people had trouble breathing. By the time the fog had lifted on Dec. 9, at least 4,000 people had died and more than 150,000 had been hospitalized. Thousands of animals in the area were also killed.

Recent British studies now say that the death count was likely far higher -- more than 12,000 people of all ages died from the killer fog. It has long been known that many of those deaths were likely caused by emissions from coal burning, but the exact chemical processes that led to the deadly mix of fog and pollution have not been fully understood over the past 60 years.

The 1952 killer fog led to the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1956 by the British Parliament and is still considered the worst air pollution event in the European history.

Through laboratory experiments and atmospheric measurements in China, the team has come up with the answers.

"People have known that sulfate was a big contributor to the fog, and sulfuric acid particles were formed from sulfur dioxide released by coal burning for residential use and power plants, and other means," Zhang says.

"But how sulfur dioxide was turned into sulfuric acid was unclear. Our results showed that this process was facilitated by nitrogen dioxide, another co-product of coal burning, and occurred initially on natural fog. Another key aspect in the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfate is that it produces acidic particles, which subsequently inhibits this process. Natural fog contained larger particles of several tens of micrometers in size, and the acid formed was sufficiently diluted. Evaporation of those fog particles then left smaller acidic haze particles that covered the city."

The study shows that similar chemistry occurs frequently in China, which has battled air pollution for decades. Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, China is home to 16 of them, and Beijing often exceeds by many times the acceptable air standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The difference in China is that the haze starts from much smaller nanoparticles, and the sulfate formation process is only possible with ammonia to neutralize the particles," Zhang adds.

"In China, sulfur dioxide is mainly emitted by power plants, nitrogen dioxide is from power plants and automobiles, and ammonia comes from fertilizer use and automobiles. Again, the right chemical processes have to interplay for the deadly haze to occur in China. Interestingly, while the London fog was highly acidic, contemporary Chinese haze is basically neutral."

Zhang says China has been working diligently over the past decade to lessen its air pollution problems, but persistent poor air quality often requires people to wear breathing masks during much of the day. China's explosive industrial and manufacturing growth and urbanization over the past 25 years have contributed to the problem. "A better understanding of the air chemistry holds the key for development of effective regulatory actions in China," he adds.

"The government has pledged to do all it can to reduce emissions going forward, but it will take time," he notes. "We think we have helped solve the 1952 London fog mystery and also have given China some ideas of how to improve its air quality. Reduction in emissions for nitrogen oxides and ammonia is likely effective in disrupting this sulfate formation process."

Source: Texas A&M University [November 15, 2016]

The first Chinese firearm with an imperial reign mark ever to be offered at auction sold for 1.985 million pounds (US$2.5 million), the auction house >Sotheby's London announced in a statement on Wednesday.

The gun -- a brilliantly designed and exquisitely crafted musket, produced in imperial workshops -- was created for the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty, arguably the greatest collector and patron of the arts in Chinese history.

Estimated at 1 million to 1.5 million pounds (1.33 million to 1.99 million dollars), the firearm ignited a 10-minute bidding battle before finally selling to an Asian private collector.

"This gun ranks as one of the most significant Chinese treasures ever to come to auction. Today's result will be remembered alongside landmark sales of other extraordinary objects that epitomize the pinnacle of imperial craftsmanship during the Qing dynasty," said Robert Bradlow, senior director of Chinese Works of Art, Sotheby's London in a statement to Xinhua.

"Over the last 10 years we've seen the market for historical Chinese works of art go from strength to strength, with collectors drawn from across the globe and exceptional prices achieved whether the sale is staged in London, Hong Kong or New York," he added.

The musket bears not only the imperial reign mark on top of its barrel, but in addition, incised on the breech of the barrel are four Chinese characters which denote the gun's peerless ranking -- "Supreme Grade, Number One." This exceptional grading makes it unique amongst the known extant guns from imperial workshops, and asserts its status as one of the most important firearms produced for Emperor Qianlong.

According to Sotheby's London, the advent of Western firearm technology sparked the production of muskets in imperial workshops, and this modern mode of weaponry had unquestionable advantages over the traditional bow and arrow for hunting.

Using only the most luxurious materials, imperial muskets were created in very small numbers for Emperor Qianlong. While the Emperor is unlikely ever to have held a gun in battle, he would regularly hunt with a musket.

The auction house said the Supreme Number One is closely related to six celebrated, named imperial Qianlong muskets in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, which appear to correspond with seven muskets listed in the Qing work, Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty with Illustrations. These guns were probably graded in the same way as the Supreme Number One, but with lower grade and/or number ("Supreme Grade, Number Two", "Top Grade, Number 2").

Revered as one of the most powerful "Sons of Heaven," Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) was the longest-lived and de-facto longest-reigning emperor in Chinese history (1736-1795).

Source: Xinhua [November 13, 2016]

Human teeth discovered in southern China provide evidence that our species left the African continent up to 70,000 years earlier than prevailing theories suggest, a study published on Wednesday said.

Homo sapiens reached present-day China 80,000-120,000 years ago, according to the study, which could redraw the migration map for modern humans.

"The model that is generally accepted is that modern humans left Africa only 50,000 years ago," said Maria Martinon-Torres, a researcher at University College London and a co-author of the study.

"In this case, we are saying the H. sapiens is out of Africa much earlier," she told the peer-reviewed journal Nature, which published the study.

While the route they travelled remains unknown, previous research suggests the most likely path out of East Africa to east Asia was across the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East.

The findings also mean that the first truly modern humans -- thought to have emerged in east Africa some 200,000 years ago -- landed in China well before they went to Europe.

There is no evidence to suggest that H. sapiens entered the European continent earlier than 45,000 years ago, at least 40,000 years after they showed up in present-day China.

The 47 teeth exhumed from a knee-deep layer of grey, sandy clay inside the Fuyan Cave near the town of Daoxian closely resemble the dental gear of "contemporary humans," according to the study.

They could only have come from a population that migrated from Africa, rather than one that evolved from an another species of early man such as the extinct Homo erectus, the authors said.

The scientists also unearthed the remains of some 38 mammals, including specimens of five extinct species, one of them a giant panda larger than those in existence today.

No tools were found.

"Judging by the cave environment, it may not have been a living place for humans," lead author Wu Liu from the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing told AFP.

The study, published in the journal Nature, also rewrites the timeline of early man in China.

Up to now, the earliest proof of H. sapiens east of the Arabian Peninsula came from the Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, and dated from no more than 40,000 years ago.

The new discovery raises questions about why it took so long for H. sapiens to find their way to nearby Europe.

"Why is it that modern humans -- who were already at the gates -- didn't really get into Europe?", Martinon-Torres asked.

Wu and colleagues propose two explanations.

The first is the intimidating presence of Neanderthal man. While this species of early human eventually died out, they were spread across the European continent up until at least some 50,000 years ago.

"The classic idea is that H. sapiens... took over the Neanderthal empire, but maybe Neanderthals were a kind of ecological barrier, and Europe was too small a place" for both, Martinon-Torres said.

Another impediment might have been the cold.

Up until the Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago, ice sheets stretched across a good part of the European continent, a forbidding environment for a new species emerging from the relative warmth of East Africa.

"H. sapiens originated in or near the tropics, so it makes sense that the species' initial dispersal was eastwards rather than northwards, where winter temperatures rapidly fell below freezing," Robin Dennell of the University of Exeter said in a commentary, also in Nature.

Martinon-Torres laid out some of the questions to be addressed in future research, using both genetics and fossil records.

"What are the origins of these populations, and what was their fate? Did they vanish? Could they be the ancestors of later and current populations that entered Europe?"

She also suggested there might have been "different movements and migrations" out of Africa, not just one.

Besides the prehistoric panda, called Ailuropoda baconi, the scientists found an extinct species of a giant spotted hyaena.

An elephant-like creature called Stegodon orientalis and a giant tapir, also present, were species that may have survived into the era when the Chinese had developed writing, some 3500 years ago.

The cache of teeth nearly went unnoticed, Wu told AFP.

He and his Chinese colleagues discovered the cave -- and its menagerie of long-deceased animals -- in the 1980s, but had no inkling that it also contained human remains.

But 25 years later, while revisiting the site, Wu had a hunch.

"By thinking about the cave environment, we realised that human fossils might be found there," he told AFP by email. "So we started a five-year excavation."

Author: Marlowe Hood | Source: AFP [October 14, 2015]

Science has long dictated that brains don't fossilize, so when Nicholas Strausfeld co-authored the first ever report of a fossilized brain in a 2012 edition of Nature, it was met with "a lot of flack."

"It was questioned by many paleontologists, who thought - and in fact some claimed in print - that maybe it was just an artifact or a one-off, implausible fossilization event," said Strausfeld, a Regents' professor in UA's Department of Neuroscience.

His latest paper in Current Biology addresses these doubts head-on, with definitive evidence that, indeed, brains do fossilize.

In the paper, Strausfeld and his collaborators, including Xiaoya Ma of Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology at China's Yunnan University and Gregory Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum in London, analyze seven newly discovered fossils of the same species to find, in each, traces of what was undoubtedly a brain.

The species, Fuxianhuia protensa, is an extinct arthropod that roamed the seafloor about 520 million years ago. It would have looked something like a very simple shrimp. And each of the fossils - from the Chengjiang Shales, fossil-rich sites in Southwest China - revealed F. protensa's ancient brain looked a lot like a modern crustacean's, too.

Using scanning electron microscopy, the researchers found that the brains were preserved as flattened carbon films, which, in some fossils, were partially overlaid by tiny iron pyrite crystals. This led the research team to a convincing explanation as to how and why neural tissue fossilizes.

In another recent paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Strausfeld's experiments uncovered what it likely was about ancient environmental conditions that allowed a brain to fossilize in the first place.

The only way to become fossilized is, first, to get rapidly buried. Hungry scavengers can't eat a carcass if it's buried, and as long as the water is anoxic enough - that is, lacking in oxygen - a buried creature's tissues evade consumption by bacteria as well. Strausfeld and his collaborators suspect F. protensa was buried by rapid, underwater mudslides, a scenario they experimentally recreated by burying sandworms and cockroaches in mud.

This is only step one. Step two, explained Strausfeld, is where most brains would fail: Withstanding the pressure from being rapidly buried under thick, heavy mud.

To have been able to do this, the F. protensa nervous system must have been remarkably dense. In fact, tissues of nervous systems, including brains, are densest in living arthropods. As a small, tightly packed cellular network of fats and proteins, the brain and central nervous system could pass step two, just as did the sandworm and cockroach brains in Strausfeld's lab.

"Dewatering is different from dehydration, and it happens more gradually," said Strausfeld, referring to the process by which pressure from the overlying mud squeezes water out of tissues. "During this process, the brain maintains its overall integrity leading to its gradual flattening and preservation. F. protensa's tissue density appears to have made all the difference."

Now that he and his collaborators have produced unassailable evidence that fossilized arthropod brains are more than just a one-off phenomenon, Strausfeld is working to elucidate the origin and evolution of brains over half a billion years in the past.

"People, especially scientists, make assumptions. The fun thing about science, actually, is to demolish them," said Strausfeld.

Source: University of Arizona [November 06, 2015]

On the outskirts of Beijing, a small limestone mountain named Dragon Bone Hill rises above the surrounding sprawl. Along the northern side, a path leads up to some fenced-off caves that draw 150,000 visitors each year, from schoolchildren to grey-haired pensioners. It was here, in 1929, that researchers discovered a nearly complete ancient skull that they determined was roughly half a million years old. Dubbed Peking Man, it was among the earliest human remains ever uncovered, and it helped to convince many researchers that humanity first evolved in Asia.

Since then, the central importance of Peking Man has faded. Although modern dating methods put the fossil even earlier—at up to 780,000 years old—the specimen has been eclipsed by discoveries in Africa that have yielded much older remains of ancient human relatives. Such finds have cemented Africa's status as the cradle of humanity—the place from which modern humans and their predecessors spread around the globe—and relegated Asia to a kind of evolutionary cul-de-sac.

But the tale of Peking Man has haunted generations of Chinese researchers, who have struggled to understand its relationship to modern humans. "It's a story without an ending," says Wu Xinzhi, a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing. They wonder whether the descendants of Peking Man and fellow members of the species Homo erectus died out or evolved into a more modern species, and whether they contributed to the gene pool of China today.

Keen to get to the bottom of its people's ancestry, China has in the past decade stepped up its efforts to uncover evidence of early humans across the country. It is reanalysing old fossil finds and pouring tens of millions of dollars a year into excavations. And the government is setting up a US$1.1-million laboratory at the IVPP to extract and sequence ancient DNA.

The investment comes at a time when palaeoanthropologists across the globe are starting to pay more attention to Asian fossils and how they relate to other early hominins—creatures that are more closely related to humans than to chimps. Finds in China and other parts of Asia have made it clear that a dazzling variety of Homo species once roamed the continent. And they are challenging conventional ideas about the evolutionary history of humanity.

"Many Western scientists tend to see Asian fossils and artefacts through the prism of what was happening in Africa and Europe," says Wu. Those other continents have historically drawn more attention in studies of human evolution because of the antiquity of fossil finds there, and because they are closer to major palaeoanthropology research institutions, he says. "But it's increasingly clear that many Asian materials cannot fit into the traditional narrative of human evolution."

Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees. "Asia has been a forgotten continent," he says. "Its role in human evolution may have been largely under-appreciated."

Evolving story

In its typical form, the story of Homo sapiens starts in Africa. The exact details vary from one telling to another, but the key characters and events generally remain the same. And the title is always 'Out of Africa'.

In this standard view of human evolution, H. erectus first evolved there more than 2 million years ago. Then, some time before 600,000 years ago, it gave rise to a new species: Homo heidelbergensis, the oldest remains of which have been found in Ethiopia. About 400,000 years ago, some members of H. heidelbergensis left Africa and split into two branches: one ventured into the Middle East and Europe, where it evolved into Neanderthals; the other went east, where members became Denisovans—a group first discovered in Siberia in 2010. The remaining population of H. heidelbergensis in Africa eventually evolved into our own species, H. sapiens, about 200,000 years ago. Then these early humans expanded their range to Eurasia 60,000 years ago, where they replaced local hominins with a minuscule amount of interbreeding.

A hallmark of H. heidelbergensis—the potential common ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans—is that individuals have a mixture of primitive and modern features. Like more archaic lineages, H. heidelbergensis has a massive brow ridge and no chin. But it also resembles H. sapiens, with its smaller teeth and bigger braincase. Most researchers have viewed H. heidelbergensis—or something similar—as a transitional form between H. erectus and H. sapiens.

Unfortunately, fossil evidence from this period, the dawn of the human race, is scarce and often ambiguous. It is the least understood episode in human evolution, says Russell Ciochon, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. "But it's central to our understanding of humanity's ultimate origin."

The tale is further muddled by Chinese fossils analysed over the past four decades, which cast doubt over the linear progression from African H. erectus to modern humans. They show that, between roughly 900,000 and 125,000 years ago, east Asia was teeming with hominins endowed with features that would place them somewhere between H. erectus and H. sapiens, says Wu.

"Those fossils are a big mystery," says Ciochon. "They clearly represent more advanced species than H. erectus, but nobody knows what they are because they don't seem to fit into any categories we know."

The fossils' transitional characteristics have prompted researchers such as Stringer to lump them with H. heidelbergensis. Because the oldest of these forms, two skulls uncovered in Yunxian in Hubei province, date back 900,000 years >^{1, 2}>, Stringer even suggests that H. heidelbergensis might have originated in Asia and then spread to other continents.

But many researchers, including most Chinese palaeontologists, contend that the materials from China are different from European and African H. heidelbergensis fossils, despite some apparent similarities. One nearly complete skull unearthed at Dali in Shaanxi province and dated to 250,000 years ago, has a bigger braincase, a shorter face and a lower cheekbone than most H. heidelbergensis specimens>3, suggesting that the species was more advanced.

Such transitional forms persisted for hundreds of thousands of years in China, until species appeared with such modern traits that some researchers have classified them as H. sapiens. One of the most recent of these is represented by two teeth and a lower jawbone, dating to about 100,000 years ago, unearthed in 2007 by IVPP palaeoanthropologist Liu Wu and his colleagues>4. Discovered in Zhirendong, a cave in Guangxi province, the jaw has a classic modern-human appearance, but retains some archaic features of Peking Man, such as a more robust build and a less-protruding chin.

Most Chinese palaeontologists—and a few ardent supporters from the West—think that the transitional fossils are evidence that Peking Man was an ancestor of modern Asian people. In this model, known as multiregionalism or continuity with hybridization, hominins descended from H. erectus in Asia interbred with incoming groups from Africa and other parts of Eurasia, and their progeny gave rise to the ancestors of modern east Asians, says Wu.

Support for this idea also comes from artefacts in China. In Europe and Africa, stone tools changed markedly over time, but hominins in China used the same type of simple stone instruments from about 1.7 million years ago to 10,000 years ago. According to Gao Xing, an archaeologist at the IVPP, this suggests that local hominins evolved continuously, with little influence from outside populations.

Politics at play?

Some Western researchers suggest that there is a hint of nationalism in Chinese palaeontologists' support for continuity. "The Chinese—they do not accept the idea that H. sapiens evolved in Africa," says one researcher. "They want everything to come from China."

Chinese researchers reject such allegations. "This has nothing to do with nationalism," says Wu. It's all about the evidence—the transitional fossils and archaeological artefacts, he says. "Everything points to continuous evolution in China from H. erectus to modern human."

But the continuity-with-hybridization model is countered by overwhelming genetic data that point to Africa as the wellspring of modern humans. Studies of Chinese populations show that 97.4% of their genetic make-up is from ancestral modern humans from Africa, with the rest coming from extinct forms such as Neanderthals and Denisovans>5. "If there had been significant contributions from Chinese H. erectus, they would show up in the genetic data," says Li Hui, a population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai. Wu counters that the genetic contribution from archaic hominins in China could have been missed because no DNA has yet been recovered from them.

Many researchers say that there are ways to explain the existing Asian fossils without resorting to continuity with hybridization. The Zhirendong hominins, for instance, could represent an exodus of early modern humans from Africa between 120,000 and 80,000 years ago. Instead of remaining in the Levant in the Middle East, as was thought previously, these people could have expanded into east Asia, says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Other evidence backs up this hypothesis: excavations at a cave in Daoxian in China's Hunan province have yielded 47 fossil teeth so modern-looking that they could have come from the mouths of people today. But the fossils are at least 80,000 years old, and perhaps 120,000 years old, Liu and his colleagues reported last year>6. "Those early migrants may have interbred with archaic populations along the way or in Asia, which could explain Zhirendong people's primitive traits," says Petraglia.

Another possibility is that some of the Chinese fossils, including the Dali skull, represent the mysterious Denisovans, a species identified from Siberian fossils that are more than 40,000 years old. Palaeontologists don't know what the Denisovans looked like, but studies of DNA recovered from their teeth and bones indicate that this ancient population contributed to the genomes of modern humans, especially Australian Aborigines, Papua New Guineans and Polynesians—suggesting that Denisovans might have roamed Asia.

Maria Martinon-Torres, a palaeoanthropologist at University College London, is among those who proposed that some of the Chinese hominins were Denisovans. She worked with IVPP researchers on an analysis>7, published last year, of a fossil assemblage uncovered at Xujiayao in Hebei province—including partial jaws and nine teeth dated to 125,000–100,000 years ago. The molar teeth are massive, with very robust roots and complex grooves, reminiscent of those from Denisovans, she says.

A third idea is even more radical. It emerged when Martinon-Torres and her colleagues compared more than 5,000 fossil teeth from around the world: the team found that Eurasian specimens are more similar to each other than to African ones>8. That work and more recent interpretations of fossil skulls suggest that Eurasian hominins evolved separately from African ones for a long stretch of time. The researchers propose that the first hominins that left Africa 1.8 million years ago were the eventual source of modern humans. Their descendants mostly settled in the Middle East, where the climate was favourable, and then produced waves of transitional hominins that spread elsewhere. One Eurasian group went to Indonesia, another gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and a third ventured back into Africa and evolved into H. sapiens, which later spread throughout the world. In this model, modern humans evolved in Africa, but their immediate ancestor originated in the Middle East.

Not everybody is convinced. "Fossil interpretations are notoriously problematic," says Svante Paabo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. But DNA from Eurasian fossils dating to the start of the human race could help to reveal which story—or combination—is correct. China is now making a push in that direction. Qiaomei Fu, a palaeogeneticist who did her PhD with Paabo, returned home last year to establish a lab to extract and sequence ancient DNA at the IVPP. One of her immediate goals is to see whether some of the Chinese fossils belong to the mysterious Denisovan group. The prominent molar teeth from Xujiayao will be an early target. "I think we have a prime suspect here," she says.

Fuzzy picture

Despite the different interpretations of the Chinese fossil record, everybody agrees that the evolutionary tale in Asia is much more interesting than people appreciated before. But the details remain fuzzy, because so few researchers have excavated in Asia.

When they have, the results have been startling. In 2003, a dig on Flores island in Indonesia turned up a diminutive hominin>9, which researchers named Homo floresiensis and dubbed the hobbit. With its odd assortment of features, the creature still provokes debate about whether it is a dwarfed form of H. erectus or some more primitive lineage that made it all the way from Africa to southeast Asia and lived until as recently as 60,000 years ago. Last month, more surprises emerged from Flores, where researchers found the remains of a hobbit-like hominin in rocks about 700,000 years old>10.

Recovering more fossils from all parts of Asia will clearly help to fill in the gaps. Many palaeoanthropologists also call for better access to existing materials. Most Chinese fossils—including some of the finest specimens, such as the Yunxian and Dali skulls—are accessible only to a handful of Chinese palaeontologists and their collaborators. "To make them available for general studies, with replicas or CT scans, would be fantastic," says Stringer. Moreover, fossil sites should be dated much more rigorously, preferably by multiple methods, researchers say.

But all agree that Asia—the largest continent on Earth—has a lot more to offer in terms of unravelling the human story. "The centre of gravity," says Petraglia, "is shifting eastward."

Author: Jane Qiu | Source: Nature 535, 22–25 (14 July 2016) doi:10.1038/535218a [July 15, 2016]

The world's rarest ape has an increased chance of survival after a team led by international conservation charity the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) found a new family group of Hainan gibbons (Nomascus hainanus).

Until last month, it was thought that there were just 25 Hainan gibbons living in three social groups on an island off the Chinese mainland.

The discovery of a new fourth group, a mating pair with a young baby, sighted within Bawangling National Nature Reserve, Hainan Province, increases the known population by almost 12%.

The discovery of this fourth breeding group increases reproductive potential of the population, which could be vital for the long term survival of the Critically Endangered gibbons.

ZSL researcher Dr Jessica Bryant, who led the expedition that made the discovery, said: "Finding a new Hainan gibbon group is a fantastic boost for the population. We had hoped to locate at least one or two solitary gibbons, but discovering a whole new family group complete with a baby is beyond our wildest dreams."

The new social group brings the estimate of the total population of Hainan gibbons to around 28 individuals.

The ZSL-led project team, including international gibbon experts along with staff from Bawangling National Nature Reserve Management Office, set out to try and find any surviving lone gibbons in the reserve to gain a greater understanding of the total number of Hainan gibbons that remain.

Gibbons are typically located by the sound of their daily song. Due to the low population density of the Hainan gibbon, they are less likely to sing as there are few other gibbons to advertise their territory to, making detection of solitary individuals or groups extremely challenging. By utilising new acoustic techniques that prompt gibbons to investigate and call, the team were able to locate this new group.

Dr Bryant added: "The success of our discovery is really encouraging. We now want to learn more about this new group, and also hope to extend the investigation to perhaps even find additional solitary gibbons or other groups. Today is a great day for Hainan gibbon conservation."

Source: Zoological Society of London [July 13, 2015]

Scientists at the international conservation charity Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have used historical records from China stretching back over 400 years to track changes in the distribution of gibbons, which today are some of China's most threatened species. This is one of the first instances of using ancient historical records to reconstruct the course of extinctions across several centuries.

Using local government records dating from as early as 1600 AD, across the Ming and Qing Dynasties and through China's Republican and Communist periods, researchers were able to infer the former presence of gibbons in different Chinese prefectures, and track their gradual disappearance through time.

Researchers found that only a few hundred years ago, gibbons were distributed across almost half of China. However, gibbon populations collapsed during the twentieth century, and today they survive in only a few remote forest patches in the far southwest of the country. One of China's gibbon species, the Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus), is now probably the rarest mammal species in the world, with a total population of only 26-28 individuals.

Dr Samuel Turvey, lead author and Senior Research Fellow at ZSL, said: "Gibbons were of great cultural importance in pre-modern China, because they were thought to be able to channel mystical "qi energy" and live for several hundred years, and their haunting dawn calls came to symbolise the melancholy of travellers in classical poetry. Their former presence over large regions of China was widely recorded in local documents, and reconstructing when -- and why -- different gibbon populations disappeared across much of China can teach us important lessons that can help save the country's last few gibbons.

"China has a fantastically rich historical record, which includes a wealth of environmental data that has rarely been used for conservation management. Because of the current environmental crisis facing eastern and southeast Asia, we have to explore new ways to better understand the kinds of factors that can make species more or less vulnerable to extinction."

The study appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Source: Zoological Society of London [August 05, 2015]