Reciprocal food-sharing is more prevalent in stable hunter-gatherer camps, shows new UCL research that sheds light on the evolutionary roots of human cooperation.
Agta camp members [Credit: Daniel Smith, UCL Anthropology]
The research explores patterns of food-sharing among the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter-gatherers. It finds that reciprocal food-sharing is more prevalent in stable camps (with fewer changes in membership over time); while in less stable camps individuals acquire resources by taking from others -- known as 'demand sharing'.
Exploring social dynamics in the last remaining groups of present day hunter-gatherers is essential for understanding the factors that shaped the evolution of our widespread cooperation, especially with non-kin.
The study, published in the Royal Society journal >Open Science, is the first to report a real-world association between patterns of cooperation and group stability.
First author of the study, Daniel Smith (UCL Anthropology), said: "Cooperation between unrelated individuals is rare in animals, yet extensive among humans. Reciprocity -- the principle of "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" -- may explain this non-kin cooperation, yet requires stable groups and repeated interactions to evolve.
"Our research shows that hunter-gatherer cooperation is extremely flexible -- reflecting either reciprocity or demand sharing depending on the frequency of repeated interactions between camp members."
Agta camp member participating in study [Credit: Daniel Smith, UCL Anthropology]
The authors looked at two types of food-sharing data. Firstly, details of actual food-sharing from six Agta camps were examined to explore whether differences in camp stability predicted patterns of food-sharing. Secondly, games were also conducted in which individuals were asked to distribute resources between themselves and other camp-mates. These games were conducted with 324 Agta over 18 separate camps.
In one of the games, participants were shown their own picture, along with other randomly selected adults from camp. They were then given a number of small wooden tokens, each representing 125g rice, equal to the number of camp-mates' photos. Not every picture including the subject's could end up with rice on it, introducing a social dilemma regarding whether to share, as it would be impossible for everyone to receive rice. Participants then decided, token by token, whether to keep the rice for themselves, or to give to a camp-mate.
The results showed that, firstly, stable camps were more likely to display reciprocity in the actual food-sharing analyses. Patterns of food-sharing in unstable camps were not reciprocal, consistent with demand sharing, whereby individuals take resources from others rather than being given them. Secondly, individuals from more stable camps were increasingly likely to give resources to others and less likely to take resources in the games.
Despite differences in cooperation, individuals from both stable and unstable camps received resources from others. This distribution of resources among camp-mates is crucial for hunter-gatherers' survival. As foraging success is variable it is likely that, on any given day, an individual may return to camp with no resources. Food-sharing is therefore essential to reduce the likelihood of individuals going without resources for extended lengths of time.
Last author, Professor Ruth Mace (UCL Anthropology), added: "Food sharing and cooperation are at the centre of hunter-gatherers lifestyle. No other Apes share food or cooperate to the extent that humans do. A complex network of sharing and cooperation exists within camps and between camps in different hunter-gatherer groups, regulated by social rules, friendship ties, food taboos, kinship and supernatural beliefs. Sharing is a crucial adaptation to hunter-gatherers' lifestyles, central to their resilience -- and central to the evolution of humankind."
Source: University College London - UCL [July 13, 2016]
Sex equality in residential decision-making explains the unique social structure of hunter-gatherers, a new UCL study reveals.
Agta household [Credit: Mark Dyble]
Previous research has noted the low level of relatedness in hunter-gatherer bands. This is surprising because humans depend on close kin to raise offspring, so generally exhibit a strong preference for living close to parents, siblings and grandparents.
The new study, published today in Science and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is the first to demonstrate the relationship between sex equality in residential decision-making and group composition.
In work conducted over two years, researchers from the Hunter-Gatherer Resilience Project in UCL Anthropology lived among populations of hunter-gatherers in Congo and the Philippines. They collected genealogical data on kinship relations, between-camp mobility and residence patterns by interviewing hundreds of people.
This information allowed the researchers to understand how individuals in each community they visited were related to each other. Despite living in small communities, these hunter-gatherers were found to be living with a large number of individuals with whom they had no kinship ties.
The authors constructed a computer model to simulate the process of camp assortment. In the model, individuals populated an empty camp with their close kin - siblings, parents and children.
When only one sex had influence over this process, as is typically the case in male-dominated pastoral or horticultural societies, camp relatedness was high. However, group relatedness is much lower when both men and women have influence - as is the case among many hunter-gatherer societies, where families tend to alternate between moving to camps where husbands have close kin and camps where wives have close kin.
First author of the study, Mark Dyble (UCL Anthropology), said: "While previous researchers have noted the low relatedness of hunter-gatherer bands, our work offers an explanation as to why this pattern emerges. It is not that individuals are not interested in living with kin. Rather, if all individuals seek to live with as many kin as possible, no-one ends up living with many kin at all."
Many unique human traits such as high cognition, cumulative culture and hyper-cooperation have evolved due to the social organisation patterns unique to humans.
Although hunter-gatherer societies are increasingly under pressure from external forces, they offer the closest extant examples of human lifestyles and social organisation in the past, offering important insights into human evolutionary history.
Senior author, Dr Andrea Migliano (UCL Anthropology), said: "Sex equality suggests a scenario where unique human traits such as cooperation with unrelated individuals could have emerged in our evolutionary past".
A research team led by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology scanned the skulls of Neandertals and found the small middle ear ossicles, which are important for hearing, still preserved within the cavities of the ear. To their surprise, the Neandertal ossicles are morphologically distinct from the ossicles of modern humans. Despite the differences in morphology, the function of the middle ear is largely the same in the two human species.
The authors relate the morphological differences in the ossicles to different evolutionary trajectories in brain size increase and suggest that these findings might be indicative of consistent aspects of vocal communication in modern humans and Neandertals. These findings are also of importance for shedding light on the emergence of human spoken language, which can only be inferred indirectly from the archaeological and fossil record.
The three bones of the middle ear (hammer, anvil, stapes) make up the ossicular chain. This bony chain, which is found in all mammals is dedicated to the transmission of sound waves from the tympanic membrane to the inner ear and helps in amplifying the energy of airborne sound in order to allow the sound wave to travel within the fluid-filled inner ear.
Moreover, the ear ossicles are not only important for correct hearing but are also the smallest bones of our body. Thus, it does not surprise that the ossicles are among the most rarely found bones in the mammalian fossil record including the one of human ancestors. Given their important role in audition this lack of knowledge has ever been frustrating for researchers interested in studying hearing capacities of extinct species.
Tiny bones still present
This also applies to our closest extinct relatives - the Neandertals whose communicative capacities including existence of human spoken language is a major scientific debate ever since the first discovery of Neandertal remains. A research team led by Alexander Stoessel from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig used high-resolution computer tomography scans of Neandertal skulls and systematically checked for ossicles that potentially became trapped within the cavity of the middle ear.
And indeed, the researchers found ear ossicles in 14 Neandertal individuals coming from sites in France, Germany, Croatia and Israel, resulting in the largest sample of ear ossicles of any fossil human species. “We were really astonished how often the ear ossicles are actually present in these fossil remains, particularly when the ear became filled with sediments” says lead researcher Alexander Stoessel.
After virtually reconstructing the bones, the team - which also included scientist from the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena and the University College in London – compared them to ossicles of anatomically modern humans and also chimpanzees and gorillas which are our closest living relatives.
Since ossicles are not only small but also complex-shaped the researchers compared them by means of three-dimensional analysis that uses a much larger number of measuring points allowing for examination of the three-dimensional shape of a structure. “Despite the close relationship between anatomically modern humans and Neandertals to our surprise the ear ossicles are very differently shaped between the two human species” says Romain David who was involved in the study.
Based on the results of the morphological comparison the research team examined the potential reasons for these different morphologies. In order to see if these differences may affect hearing capacity of Neandertals and modern humans or reflects a tight relationship with the base of the skull they also analyzed the structures surrounding the ear ossicles. The outcome of this analysis was surprising, again since the functional parameters of the Neandertal and modern human middle ear are largely similar despite contrasting morphologies.
Similar communication skills in archaic humans
Instead, the team found the ear ossicles strongly related to the morphology of the surrounding cranial structures which also differ between the two human groups. The reseachers attribute these differences to different evolutionary trajectories that Neandertals and modern humans pursued in order to increase their brain volume which also impacted the structures of the cranial base which the middle ear is a part of.
“For us these results could be indicative for consistent aspects of vocal communication in anatomically modern humans and Neandertals that were already present in their common ancestor” says Jean-Jacques Hublin who is an author of this study and continues “these findings should be a basis for continuing research on the nature of the spoken language in archaic hominins”.
The findings are published in >Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [September 27, 2016]
A new UCL study examines how the baculum (penis bone) evolved in mammals and explores its possible function in primates and carnivores—groups where many species have a baculum, but some do not.
Baculum bones [Credit: WikiCommons]
The baculum has been described as "the most diverse of all bones", varying dramatically in length, width and shape in the male mammals where it is present.
The research, published today in the Royal Society journal >Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that the ancestral mammal, like humans, did not have a baculum - but both ancestral primates and carnivores did. The work uncovers that the baculum first evolved in mammals between 145 and 95 million years ago.
The study found that prolonged intromission - defined as penetration for longer than 3 minutes - was correlated with baculum presence across the course of primate evolution. Prolonged intromission was also found to predict a longer baculum in primates and carnivores.
High levels of postcopulatory sexual competition between males also predicted longer bacula in primates.
First author, Matilda Brindle (UCL Anthropology), said: "Our findings suggest that the baculum plays an important role in supporting male reproductive strategies in species where males face high levels of postcopulatory sexual competition. Prolonging intromission helps a male to guard a female from mating with any competitors, increasing his chances of passing on his genetic material."
The findings of the study may also provide clues as to why humans do not have a baculum.
When any cultural aspects of sex are removed and a male's aim is solely to ejaculate, humans have a short intromission duration.
In species where mating occurs between multiple males and multiple females (known as polygamy), there is acute competition between males to fertilise a female. However, human mating systems are not like this. Instead humans tend to be monogamous or, more rarely, polygynous (where one male mates with multiple females). In these circumstances, only one male has access to a female and postcopulatory competition between males is absent or very low level.
Brindle added: "Interestingly, humans have neither prolonged intromission durations, nor high levels of postcopulatory sexual competition. Given the results of our study, this may help to unravel the mystery of why the baculum was lost in the human lineage."
Chimpanzees and bonobos, humans' closest relatives, have very small bacula (between about 6-8mm) and short intromission durations (around 7 seconds for chimpanzees and 15 seconds for bonobos). However, they are characterised by polygamous mating systems, so they experience high levels of postcopulatory competition between males. The researchers suggest that this may be why these species have retained a baculum - albeit a small one.
Co-author, Dr Kit Opie (UCL Anthropology), commented: "After the human lineage split from chimpanzees and bonobos and our mating system shifted towards monogamy, probably after 2mya, the evolutionary pressures retaining the baculum likely disappeared. This may have been the final nail in the coffin for the already diminished baculum, which was then lost in ancestral humans."
Source: University College London [December 14, 2016]
In a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestor—or close relative—of Neanderthals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans, according to a presentation here yesterday at the fifth annual meeting of the European Society for the study of human evolution.
DNA from these fossilized bones and teeth in a Spanish cave are providing clues about the origins of Neanderthals and modern humans [Credit: J.-J. Hublin; Royal Museum For Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium]
Ever since researchers first discovered thousands of bones and teeth from 28 individuals in the mid-1990s from Sima de los Huesos (“pit of bones”), a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, they had noted that the fossils looked a lot like primitive Neanderthals. The Sima people, who lived before Neanderthals, were thought to have emerged in Europe. Yet their teeth, jaws, and large nasal cavities were among the traits that closely resembled those of Neanderthals, according to a team led by paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid. As a result, his team classified the fossils as members of Homo heidelbergensis, a species that lived about 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many researchers have thought H. heidelbergensis gave rise to Neanderthals and perhaps also to our species, H. sapiens, in the past 400,000 years or so.
But in 2013, the Sima fossils’ identity suddenly became complicated when a study of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the bones revealed that it did not resemble that of a Neanderthal. Instead, it more closely matched the mtDNA of a Denisovan, an elusive type of extinct human discovered when its DNA was sequenced from a finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia. That finding was puzzling, prompting researchers to speculate that perhaps the Sima fossils had interbred with very early Denisovans or that the “Denisovan” mtDNA was the signature of an even more ancient hominin lineage, such as H. erectus. At the time, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who had obtained the mtDNA announced that they would try to sequence the nuclear DNA of the fossils to solve the mystery.
After 2 years of intense effort, paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has finally sequenced enough nuclear DNA from fossils of a tooth and a leg bone from the pit to solve the mystery. The task was especially challenging because the ancient DNA was degraded to short fragments, made up of as few as 25 to 40 single nucleotides. (Nucleotides—also known as base pairs—are the building blocks of DNA.) Although he and his colleagues did not sequence the entire genomes of the fossils, Meyer reported at the meeting that they did get 1 million to 2 million base pairs of ancient nuclear DNA.
Researchers have spent decades studying the remains found in the 'Pit of Bones', reconstructing the skull shown above, which revealed it had suffered a heavy blow to the head before death [Credit: msf]
They scanned this DNA for unique markers found only in Neanderthals or Denisovans or modern humans, and found that the two Sima fossils shared far more alleles—different nucleotides at the same address in the genome—with Neanderthals than Denisovans or modern humans. “Indeed, the Sima de los Huesos specimens are early Neanderthals or related to early Neanderthals,” suggesting that the split of Denisovans and Neanderthals should be moved back in time, Meyer reported at the meeting.
Researchers at the meeting were impressed by this new breakthrough in ancient DNA research. “This has been the next frontier with ancient DNA,” says evolutionary biologist Greger Larson of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
The close affinity with Neanderthals, but not with Denisovans or modern humans, suggests that the lineage leading to Neanderthals was separate from other archaic humans earlier than most researchers have thought. That means that the ancestors of modern humans also had to split earlier than expected from the population that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans, who were more closely related to each other than they were to modern humans. (Although all three groups interbred at low levels after their evolutionary paths diverged—and such interbreeding may have been the source of the Denisovan mtDNA in the first Sima fossil whose DNA was sequenced.) Indeed, Meyer suggested in his talk that the ancestors of H. sapiens may have diverged from the branch leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans as early as 550,000 to 765,000 years ago, although those results depend on different mutation rates in humans and are still unpublished.
That would mean that the ancestors of humans were already wandering down a solitary path apart from the other kinds of archaic humans on the planet 100,000 to 400,000 years earlier than expected. “It resolves one controversy—that they’re in the Neanderthal clade,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “But it’s not all good news: From my point of view, it pushes back the origin of H. sapiens from the Neanderthals and Denisovans.” The possibility that humans were a distinct group so early shakes up the human family tree, promising to lead to new debate about when and where the branches belong.
Author: Ann Gibbons | Source: ScienceMag/AAAS [September 11, 2015]
The Piltdown Man scandal is arguably the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated in the UK, with fake fossils being claimed as evidence of our earliest ancestor.
The faked fossilized remains of Piltdown man (stained to look old), newspaper articles from the 1950s exposing the fraud. Inset: Charles Dawson, who the new article claims is probably the sole fraudster [Credit: Natural History Museum]
Published 100 years on from Dawson's death, new research reveals that the forgeries were created using a limited number of specimens that were all constructed using a consistent method, suggesting the perpetrator acted alone.
It is highly likely that an orang-utan specimen and at least two human skeletons were used to create the fakes, which are still kept at the Natural History Museum.
Between 1912 and 1914 Museum palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and the amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced the discovery of fossils from Piltdown in Sussex. These were supposedly a new evolutionary link between apes and humans. They indicated a species with both an ape-like jaw and a large braincase like a modern human. Before he died in 1916, Dawson claimed to have discovered further evidence at a second site.
The forgeries helped misdirect the study of anthropology for decades. While doubts were raised from the start, it took 40 years for the scientific community to recognise that the remains had been altered to seem ancient and had been planted in the sites.
The new research, published in >Royal Society Open Science, was undertaken by a multi-disciplinary team from institutions in Liverpool, London, Cambridge and Canterbury. They used the latest scientific methods to test the Piltdown specimens to uncover more about how the forgery was done.
Surface modifications of Piltdown I M 1 : (A-B) photo and CT scans showing the material removal of the cusps in an unnatural horizontal plane and enamel reconstruction on the lingual margin (C) Comparison of surface modifications on different areas of the Piltdown I M 1 : Enamel (D), dentine (E), restorative putty (F), stained enamel (G) [Credit: De Groote et al./Natural History Museum]
DNA analyses show that both the canine from the first Piltdown site and the molar from the second site probably came from one orang-utan, related most closely to orang-utans now occupying south-west Sarawak (Borneo). In addition, the shape and form of the molar from the second Piltdown site was almost certainly from the other side of the jawbone planted in the first site.
3D X-ray imaging (Micro-CT scans) show that many of the bones and a tooth were filled with Piltdown gravel and the openings plugged with small pebbles. Holes in the skull bones were filled with dental putty, which was also used to re-set the teeth in the jaw and to reconstruct one of the teeth that fell apart while it was being ground down.
Dr Laura Buck co-author on the paper from the Division of Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge commented on the project's importance. "Even today, over a hundred years after the Piltdown fraud was perpetrated, it remains relevant because of the huge impact it had on the course of Palaeoanthropological research at the beginning of the twentieth century."
"Fossil human remains from Africa, such as the Taung child from South Africa, were largely ignored when first found because they didn't fit with preconceptions of what an early human relative would look like, based on Piltdown Man. This serves as an important reminder to researchers today to study what is there and not what we think should be there," Buck said.
Dr Isabelle De Groote from Liverpool John Moores University and lead author on the paper, thinks the results point to a clear conclusion: "Although multiple individuals have been accused of producing the fake fossils, our analyses to understand the modus operandi show consistency between all the different specimens and on both sites. It is clear from our analysis that this work was likely all carried out by one forger: Charles Dawson."
Industrialized nations that view wildfire as the enemy have much to learn from people in some parts of the world who have learned to live compatibly with wildfire, says a team of fire research scientists.
A locale in the French Western Pyrenees, where communities practice fire management to maintain seasonally flammable grassland, shrub and woodland patches for forage and grazing animals [Credit: Michael Coughlan]
The interdisciplinary team say there is much to be learned from these "fire-adaptive communities" and they are calling on policy makers to tap that knowledge, particularly in the wake of global warming.
Such a move is critical as climate change makes some landscapes where fire isn't the norm even more prone to fire, say the scientists in a new report published in a special issue of the >Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
"We tend to treat modern fire problems as unique, and new to our planet," said fire anthropologist Christopher Roos, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, lead author of the report. "As a result, we have missed the opportunity to recognize the successful properties of communities that have a high capacity to adapt to living in flammable landscapes—in some cases for centuries or millennia."
One such society is the ethnically Basque communities in the French Western Pyrenees, who practice fire management to maintain seasonally flammable grassland, shrub and woodland patches for forage and grazing animals. But the practice is slowly being lost as young people leave farming.
Additionally, Aboriginal people in the grasslands of Western Australia use fire as part of their traditional hunting practices. Children begin burning at a very young age, and the everyday practice is passed down. These fires improve hunting successes but also reduce the impact of drought on the size and ecological severity of lightning fires.
Social institutions support individual benefits, preserve common good
Fire-adaptive communities have social institutions in place that support individual benefits from fire-maintained landscapes while preserving the common good, said Roos, whose fire research includes long-term archaeological and ecological partnerships with the Pueblo of Jemez in New Mexico.
"These institutions have been shaped by long-histories with wildfire, appropriate fire-use, and the development of social mechanisms to adjudicate conflicts of interest," said Roos, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology. "There is a wealth of tried and tested information that should be considered in designing local fire management."
The authors note that globally, a large number of people use fire as a tool to sustain livelihoods in ways that have been handed down across many generations. These include indigenous Australians and North Americans, South Asian forest dwellers, European farmers, and also hunters, farmers and herders in tropical savannahs.
Global Warming will likely bring new fire problems, more flammable landscapes
Global Warming will likely bring new fire problems, such as making some landscapes more flammable, Roos said. More effort will be required to balance conflicting fire management practices between adjacent cultures. Currently most fire-related research tends to be undertaken by physical or biological scientists from Europe, the United States and Australia. Often the research treats fire challenges as exclusively contemporary phenomena for which history is either absent or irrelevant.
"We need national policy that recognizes these dynamic challenges and that will support local solutions and traditional fire knowledge, while providing ways to disseminate scientific information about fire," Roos said.
The authors point out that one of the greatest policy challenges of fire on a warming planet are the international consequences of smoke plumes and potential positive feedbacks on climate through carbon emissions. Most infamously, wildfire smoke plumes have had extraordinary health impacts during Southeast Asian "haze" events, which result in increased hospitalization and mortality in the region.
Not all fire is a disaster; we must learn to live with and manage fire
Carbon emissions from wildfires can be as much as 40 percent of fossil fuel emissions in any given year over the last decade. Although only deforestation fires and land conversion are a net carbon source to the atmosphere, the contribution of wildfires to global carbon emissions is non-trivial and should be a formal component of international climate dialogs.
"It is important to emphasize that not all fire is a disaster and we must learn how to both live with as well as manage fire," said co-author Andrew Scott, earth sciences professor at Royal Holloway University of London.
The report, "Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges," was published May 23, 2016 by The Royal Society, the U.K.'s independent scientific academy.
Authors call for holistic study of fire on Earth
The authors are from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Spain. The synthesis emerged from four days of international meetings sponsored by the Royal Society - the first of its kind for fire sciences.
The authors advocate for greater collaboration among researchers studying all aspects of fire.
Pyrogeography—the holistic study of fire on Earth, "may be one way to provide unity to the varied fire research programs across the globe," the authors write.
"Fire researchers across disciplines from engineering, the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities need to develop a common language to create a holistic wildfire science," said Roos. "The magnitude of the wildfire challenges we face on a warming planet will demand greater collaboration and integration across disciplines, but our job won't be done unless we are also able to translate our research for policymakers, land managers, and the general public."
Source: Southern Methodist University [June 01, 2016]
Archaeologists have created a new database from the teeth of prehistoric humans found at ancient burial sites in Britain and Ireland that tell us a lot about their climate, their diet and even how far they may have travelled. In a paper, led by Dr Maura Pellegrini from the University of Oxford, researchers say that individuals in prehistoric Britain were highly mobile.
Ancient Britons' teeth were analysed for clues as to where they had grown up [Credit: Mandy Jay]
The study is part of the international Beaker People project lead by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, and involves scientists from many institutions, including the universities of Oxford, Durham, Bradford, University College London, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The paper says most of the teeth in the collection date back to Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age periods (from 2500 to 1500 BC) and the analysis, published in the journal >Scientific Reports, suggests not only were people moving around their own country but may also have travelled to and from continental Europe.
Researchers describe how tests on tooth fragments using an oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel provides evidence of where an individual lived when the tooth formed. Oxygen, a naturally occurring element in the environment, is absorbed by plants and animals and fixed in the mineral component of mammalian teeth, with an isotopic composition related to the environment in which that individual spent their childhood. Based on the theory that prehistoric people would have sourced water and food locally, the team were able to geographically map the oxygen isotopic variability in the landscape of Britain and Ireland thereby providing a guide to where individuals sampled had lived as children.
Woodhenge, one of the locations the variability in the isotope values was found to be particularly marked in individuals [Credit: WikiCommons]
An analysis of the teeth of those buried in the Stonehenge region, the Peak District, and the hills of the Yorkshire Wolds (in East Riding and North Yorkshire) show many were not 'local' to their final resting place. They were drawn from far and wide, sometimes to focal points containing sacred monuments. The variability in the isotope values was found to be particularly marked in individuals recovered from Woodhenge, a timber circle situated near Stonehenge; Bee Low, a Bronze Age round cairn in the Peak District, and Garton Slack in Yorkshire where there is a complex range of barrow types and burial practices.
Tooth enamel fragments from 261 individual teeth were tested with researchers focusing on the central part of the tooth crown in each case. The teeth sampled from these individuals mineralise from the age of two years up to 8 years old, providing the clues to the environmental conditions, including the water they drank as a child. The possibility that people were outsiders who came into areas where they eventually died was calculated by comparing their values with the 'isoscape' information gleaned from most of the other samples in each area, as it was assumed the latter represented 'local' individuals. As individuals' signatures in the teeth were matched with areas where the majority, or 'local' people, were found, the researchers identified those who had lived in other areas as children.
The British Museum will open a major exhibition presenting a history of Indigenous Australia, supported by BP. This exhibition will be the first in the UK devoted to the history and culture of Indigenous Australians: both Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders. Drawing on objects from the British Museum’s collection, accompanied by important loans from British and Australian collections, the show will present Indigenous Australia as a living culture, with a continuous history dating back over 60,000 years.
The objects in the exhibition will range from a shield believed to have been collected at Botany Bay in 1770 by Captain Cook or one of his men, a protest placard from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy established in 1972, contemporary paintings and specially commissioned artworks from leading Indigenous artists. Many of the objects in the exhibition have never been on public display before.
The objects displayed in this exhibition are immensely important. The British Museum’s collection contains some of the earliest objects collected from Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders through early naval voyages, colonists, and missionaries dating as far back as 1770. Many were collected at a time before museums were established in Australia and they represent tangible evidence of some of the earliest moments of contact between Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders and the British. Many of these encounters occurred in or near places that are now major Australian cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. As a result of collecting made in the early 1800s, many objects originate from coastal locations rather than the arid inland areas that are often associated with Indigenous Australia in the popular imagination.
The exhibition will not only present Indigenous ways of understanding the land and sea but also the significant challenges faced by Indigenous Australians from the colonial period until to the present day. In 1770 Captain Cook landed on the east coast of Australia, a continent larger than Europe. In this land there were hundreds of different Aboriginal groups, each inhabiting a particular area, and each having its own languages, laws and traditions. This land became a part of the British Empire and remained so until the various colonies joined together in 1901 to become the nation of Australia we know today. In this respect, the social history of 19th century Australia and the place of Indigenous people within this is very much a British story. This history continues into the twenty first century. With changing policies towards Indigenous Australians and their struggle for recognition of civil rights, this exhibition shows why issues about Indigenous Australians are still often so highly debated in Australia today.
The exhibition brings together loans of special works from institutions in the United Kingdom, including the British Library, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. A number of works from the collection of the National Museum of Australia will be shown, including the masterpiece ‘Yumari’ by Uta Uta Tjangala. Tjangala was one of the artists who initiated the translation of traditions of sand sculptures and body painting onto canvas in 1971 at Papunya, a government settlement 240km northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Tjangala was also an inspirational leader who developed a plan for the Pintupi community to return to their homelands after decades of living at Papunya. A design from ‘Yumari’ forms a watermark on current Australian passports.
This exhibition has been developed in consultation with many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, Indigenous art and cultural centres across Australia, and has been organised with the National Museum of Australia. The broader project is a collaboration with the National Museum of Australia. It draws on a joint research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, undertaken by the British Museum, the National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University. Titled ‘Engaging Objects: Indigenous communities, museum collections and the representation of Indigenous histories’, the research project began in 2011 and involved staff from the National Museum of Australia and the British Museum visiting communities to discuss objects from the British Museum’s collections. The research undertaken revealed information about the circumstances of collecting and significance of the objects, many of which previously lacked good documentation. The project also brought contemporary Indigenous artists to London to view and respond to the Australian collections at the British Museum.
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum said, “The history of Australia and its people is an incredible, continuous story that spans over 60,000 years. This story is also an important part of more recent British history and so it is of great significance that audiences in London will see these unique and powerful objects exploring this narrative. Temporary exhibitions of this nature are only possible thanks to external support so I am hugely grateful to BP for their longstanding and on-going commitment to the British Museum. I would also like to express my gratitude to our logistics partner IAG Cargo and the Australian High Commission who are supporting the exhibition’s public programme.”
The hidden secrets of Egyptian mummies up to 3,000 years old have been virtually unwrapped and reconstructed for the first time using cutting-edge scanning technology in a joint British-Australian exhibition.
A young visitor looks at a 3D image of a CT scan of an Egyptian mummy, during a preview for a joint British-Australian exhibition in Sydney [Credit: AFP/William West]
Three-dimensional images of six mummies aged between 900BC and 140-180AD from ancient Egypt, which have been held at the British Museum but never physically unwrapped, give an insight into what it was like to live along the Nile river thousands of years ago.
"We are revealing details of all their physical remains as well as the embalming material used by the embalmers like never before," the British Museum's physical anthropology curator Daniel Antoine told AFP at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Thursday. "What we are showing to the public is brand-new discoveries of their insides."
Two of the travelling mummies were previously exhibited at the British Museum in 2014, with the other four being revealed to the world for the first time in the Sydney show that opens on Saturday.
A young visitor looks at a 3D image of a CT scan of an Egyptian mummy, during a preview for a joint British-Australian exhibition in Sydney [Credit: AFP/William West]
A dual-energy computed tomography (CT) scanner at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London—of which only a handful are in operation around the world—was used to obtain thousands of slices of images of the mummies, with volumetric software then harnessed to create 3D models, Antoine said.
It effectively allows visitors to virtually peel back the layers of history through interactive 3D visualisations of the CT scans.
"I've been able to image the arteries of the mummies, the ones that have been left, and I'm able to look at whether they are suffering from diseases which many people are suffering from today, (such as) cardiovascular diseases," Antoine added.
A 3D image of a CT scan of an Egyptian mummy is projected next to its sarcophagus [Credit: AFP/William West]
He believes the mummies can be rescanned in a decade's time using the latest technology to find out more about their state of health, what diseases they were suffering from and the nature of their deaths.
"We hope in the future to image the soft tissues at the cellular level to look at whether there's any changes or to find evidence, for example, of cardiovascular diseases but also things like cancer."
The scans found that one of mummies, Tamut, a priest's daughter from about 900BC, had plaque in her arteries. Three-dimensional printing was also used to recreate amulets found during scans of her mummified remains.
The earliest evidence of mummification in Egypt suggests that the practice of wrapping bodies to preserve them after death dates back as far as 4500BC.
Researchers surveying for endangered primates in national parks and forest reserves of Ivory Coast found, to their surprise, that most of these protected areas had been turned into illegal cocoa farms, a new study reports.
Study co-author Gonedele Sere, on left, holds a cocoa plant found at an illegal farm in the Dassioko Forest Reserve in Ivory Coast [Credit: W. Scott McGraw/Ohio State University]
The researchers surveyed 23 protected areas in the West African nation between 2010 and 2013 and found that about three-quarters of the land in them had been transformed into cocoa production.
The Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa beans, providing more than one-third of the world's supply. Cocoa is the main ingredient in chocolate.
"The world's demand for chocolate has been very hard on the endangered primates of Ivory Coast," said W. Scott McGraw, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.
McGraw said the original goal of this research was "just to do a census of the monkeys in these protected areas."
"But when we started walking through these areas we were just stunned by the scale of illegal cocoa production. It is now the major cause of deforestation in these parks," he said.
"There are parks in Ivory Coast with no forests and no primates, but a sea of cocoa plants."
An illegal cocoa farm found in the Dassioko Forest Reserve [Credit: W. Scott McGraw/Ohio State University]
For the study, McGraw and his co-authors, all of whom work for Ivory Coast research institutions, spent a total of 208 days walking transects through nationally protected areas, most in the central and southern regions of the country. In each area, they noted the amount of forest that had been cut down or degraded and how much of this was replaced by cocoa or other types of farms. They also recorded the presence of 16 primate species, including monkeys and chimpanzees.
The results, McGraw said, were "depressing."
Of the 23 protected areas, 16 of them had more than 65 percent of their forests degraded by farms, logging or other human disturbance. While a variety of agricultural products were grown illegally in the parks, cocoa constituted 93 percent of the total crops grown.
Overall, 20 of the areas had illegal cocoa plantations and approximately 74 percent of the total land in these areas was transformed into cocoa production.
Unauthorized villages have sprung up within these parks, with one housing nearly 30,000 people.
"I've been doing survey work in these parks for 20 years, and it wasn't nearly this bad when I started. This is a relatively recent development," McGraw said.
The impact on primates has been dramatic.
Overall, 13 of the protected areas (57 percent) had lost their entire primate populations, while another five had lost half of their species.
One species of monkey -- Miss Waldron's red colobus -- was not seen during this survey and has not officially been sighted since 1978. It is probably extinct.
Two other monkeys -- the Roloway monkey and the White-naped mangabey -- were seen in only two reserves and are critically endangered, at least partially due to the habitat destruction caused by illegal cocoa farms.
Farmers load a truck with cocoa beans inside a protected area [Credit: Anderson Bitty/Ohio State University]
"The Roloway monkey may be the next to go extinct," McGraw said. "It is not able to live in the degraded habitats that are left in many of these protected areas."
A variety of factors have led to these forest reserves being destroyed, he said. One has been the growing worldwide demand for chocolate. Ivory Coast produced a record 1.7 million metric tons of cocoa in the year that ended in September, according to the International Cocoa Organization in London.
Many of the older, legal cocoa plantations in the country have been blighted by disease or otherwise haven't produced at the same levels as previously, which has led some growers to establish new farms in the reserves. Moreover, migrants from outside the country have moved into Ivory Coast and turned to farming to survive.
At the same time, Ivory Coast has been in political turmoil in recent years and the government hasn't been focused on monitoring these forest reserves.
"There is little, if any, real active protection given to these parks and reserves," McGraw said. "People have moved in and settled with essentially no resistance, cut down the forest, and planted cocoa. It is incredibly blatant."
McGraw said that while the results are disappointing, there is still time to halt the disappearance of more primates and other wildlife. First, the land within protected areas needs to be actually protected.
Unauthorized village inside of a protected area [Credit: Anderson Bitty/Ohio State University]
Outside these lands, growers should move toward shade-cocoa farming, which keeps some of the large existing trees, with cocoa plants interspersed among them. This would at least preserve some suitable habitat for monkeys that live in the country, he said.
In addition, there should be efforts to connect the many fragmented forest reserves in the country. "We need to view the protected areas not as individual islands, but as a matrix," he said.
One promising development is the establishment of community-based bio-monitoring programs that involve foot patrols conducted by local villagers. McGraw said his co-authors on this paper established a patrol in the Dassioko Forest Reserve and it has succeeded in reducing illegal activity in the area. Encounter rates with primates has risen in the area as a result.
The study appears in the March 2015 issue of the journal Tropical Conservation Science.
Author: Jeff Grabmeier | Source: Ohio State University [March 30, 2015]
Researchers from the University of Southampton have joined archaeologists from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) to answer the centuries old question ‘why are so many Roman skulls found in the Walbrook valley?’
About 20 Roman skulls were dug up from an old river bed near Liverpool Street station in London [Credit: Crossrail]
Bringing together archaeological evidence and oceanographic testing, the team has shown that erosion from the Walbrook River can be credited with causing this mysterious phenomenon. The findings weree revealed in ‘Mystery of the Crossrail Skulls’ produced by True North, which aired on 24 April on Channel 4, and which explored a range of theories, including long-lost rituals.
The Walbrook skulls have been known since the 1200s and numerous findings of disarticulated Roman skulls were recorded in the 19th century, including those found in a sewer in 1839 on Blomfield Street. In 2013, engineers digging for Crossrail discovered dozens of skulls under London’s Liverpool Street station.
The theories as to their origin are various and include: decapitated victims of Boudica’s sacking of London, trophy heads collected by Roman soldiers and a continuation of the Iron Age ‘cult of the head’. The systematic excavation of a series of sites in the Walbrook valley, including most recently at Liverpool Street, has given archaeologists an opportunity to methodically study these remains in the context of the Roman landscape.
The Walbrook Valley was a watery landscape in the Roman period and the river had a network of streams that flooded seasonally. The Romans tried to manage the water and archaeological excavation revealed a number of attempts to reclaim land. Today, the Walbrook River runs entirely underground and leads into the Thames by Cannon Street.
Roman pottery helped identify the period the skulls were from [Credit: Crossrail]
Whilst studying the cemeteries set up by the Romans outside the city walls, MOLA archaeologists found burials close to the banks of the streams that were partially washed away by overflowing water. Working with researchers Charlie Hope and Samuel Griffiths from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton, archaeologists have been able to test how this fluvial (river) erosion carried the human remains downstream.
Using a flume filled with gravel, mirroring the conditions of the Walbrook River, Charlie and Samuel simulated what effects the impact of the gravel had on animal remains, chipping away at the bone to create a pocked marked surface.
Placing a replica skull and long bone in a long flume that replicates the flow of the Walbrook River, it was established that the shape and buoyancy of the skulls meant that they bobbed or rolled over long distances, whereas long bones, such as leg bones, sunk with little movement.
Analysing the skulls, osteologists from MOLA have identified a number of characteristics that corroborate this model, these include: shiny polished skulls where they sat in running water, pitted skulls where the gravels of the water bed chipped at the bone, and discolouration, staining and tide marks where the remains were waterlogged. Osteologists also recorded a lack of jaw bones, which indicates that the skulls came to rest when they were already disarticulated from the rest of the body.
Samuel Griffith said: “Adopting an experimental approach allowed us to reconstruct past processes, which may have led Roman skulls to accumulate in the Walbrook River. Using this experimental analysis, in conjunction with evidence recovered by archaeologists, we have been able to gain exciting new insight into history of the Walbrook skulls.”
MOLA Senior Human Osteologist, Don Walker, said: “Meticulously studying these human remains, and the landscape in which they were found, has given us the chance to finally solve the mystery of the Walbrook skulls. Sometimes we have to look outside of our immediate field of expertise and look at the problem with fresh eyes. By combining the archaeological evidence with forensic anthropology and geoarchaeology (the study of past landscapes) we have shed new light on this phenomenon.”
Source: University of Southampton [April 25, 2016]
Biological anthropologist Sharon DeWitte studies ancient skeletons that can open a window onto the human history she hopes to illuminate. But as she and graduate student Samantha Yaussy show in a recently published study, some of the markers on the skeletons that scientists use to decipher the past might need to be looked at in a new light.
Horizontal grooves in skeletal teeth (linear enamel hypoplasia) are an indication of physiological stress on an individual in early childhood, between six months and six years of age [Credit: Sharon DeWitte]
DeWitte, one of the world's foremost experts on the Black Death, which killed one-third to one-half of Europe's inhabitants over just seven years in a mid-1300s pandemic, is also interested in the periods before and after the Black Death, both in times of famine and, for the medieval era, relative plenty.
"This was a time when you had all of these other stressors existing, like multiple infectious diseases, people living in really crowded conditions, lack of hygiene," DeWitte says. "I'm interested in looking at how famine might have affected subsequent patterns of health and risks of mortality."
In research recently published in the >American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Yaussy and DeWitte worked with skeletal remains excavated from London's St. Mary Spital cemetery, which was in use from about 1120 to 1540 A.D. The cemetery was organized well enough over those years that modern-day researchers can assign burial groupings according to location to a number of shorter time periods within that larger 420-year time frame. Because they were focused on the effects of famine, the scientists specifically excluded burials from the Black Death era in the study.
The way that people were buried in plots also provided important data. Large group burials within a single grave were taken to be the result of catastrophic famine losses over short periods of time, whereas single interments were categorized as "attritional" deaths, that is, deaths in "normal" times.
Using a total of more than 1,500 individual adult remains that were almost evenly divided between famine deaths and normal deaths, DeWitte and Yaussy carefully examined the skeletons for markers that are indicative of stress during the individual's lifetime.
One stress marker they looked for is called "linear enamel hypoplasia" (LEH), which is a horizontal groove on a tooth that results from childhood physiological stress or trauma sometime between 6 months and 6 years of age, when the tooth is forming in the jaw.
"It could be the result of an infection, lack of nutrition, or even breaking a leg," says Yaussy. "Your enamel just stops creating itself for a day or a little longer. It starts back up again, but during that time when it was shut off, there's no enamel on that portion of the teeth, and it leaves a groove."
They found that that stress marker, LEH, was significantly correlated with famine. "It was a pretty sensitive indicator of famine burials," Yaussy says. "Having that early life insult seems to instigate this pattern of lifelong frailty, so when a famine event occurs, it causes mortality in those individuals."
Another indicator of life stress, though, turned out to be a horse of a different color. Using shin bones (tibia), the researchers looked for what's called periosteal lesions. It's a place on the bone where new growth on the surface has occurred in response to physical or physiological stress.
"When it's put under stress, and it can be from something like an infection, or a break, or even just stress from carrying heavy buckets all day, bone can grow onto itself and strengthen itself," Yaussy says. "These are nonspecific -- we're not necessarily saying that it was an infection that caused it, or that it was from someone hitting their shin repeatedly. I just see that there was bone growth there, so there's some stressor that's causing the bone to generate more bone."
In contrast to people with the LEH indicator, individuals with areas of bone regrowth were correlated with periods of normal, or attritional, death. That result came as a something of a surprise to colleagues in the field.
"This project was a bit of a shock to some of the people at the paleopathology meetings where we presented it," Yaussy says. "A lot of people have been thinking that things like periosteal lesions are bad, that people who had them weren't especially healthy. But this study in part might be saying that those people were actually pretty healthy. It takes time, a couple of weeks, to build up this bone, so it could be that if there was some stress event that was substantial enough to kill a person before they could even register a response, we wouldn't be seeing it on the bone now."
The unexpected result helps inform DeWitte in the larger goal of looking at what happens to populations after crises, such as the Black Death or famines, pass, and particularly how cultural norms might influence the outcomes.
"What I'm interested in going forward is looking at access to resources before the Black Death, during normal conditions during famine conditions, and then after the Black Death, again during normal and famine conditions," Dewitte says. "Seeing if there were social factors that affected people's access to resources when there was little available and then when they became abundant again."
"I think this might have implications for living populations, understanding how social, economic and political factors affect access to resources beyond the actual amount of resources that are available."
Author: Steven Powell | Source: University of South Carolina [May 02, 2016]
The forests of Central Africa could be home to up to 920,000 Pygmies, according to researchers from UCL, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Malaga, who have conducted the first measured estimate of the population and distribution of these indigenous groups.
Pygmy musicians in the Congo Basin, Bottom: Mbendjele girls sharing out harvest [Credit: Jerome Lewis]
Up until now it has not been possible to determine the numbers and actual geographic ranges of Pygmy communities, because of their location in remote forest areas, mobility, lack of census data, and imprecise and partial sources of information. Pygmy communities live in rainforests across nine countries in Central Africa—an area of some 178 million hectares—where they make up a very small minority of the total population.
Despite the Pygmies' significance to humanity's cultural diversity as the largest group of active hunter-gatherers in the world, the new study, published in >PLOS ONE, is the first to predict how many Pygmies are likely to be found in the vast expanse of tropical forests in Central Africa. The study maps their distribution and identifies which areas are of ecological importance.
Dr Jerome Lewis (Hunter-Gatherer Resilience Project, UCL Anthropology), co-author of the paper, said: "This is a very underprivileged and neglected group of people many of whom have already lost their forest land, livelihoods and whose rich cultural traditions are seriously threatened in many regions.
"Information on their locations and population numbers are crucial for developing appropriate human rights, cultural and land security safeguards for them, as for other indigenous peoples."
Using a compilation of evidence collected by an unprecedented number of researchers, the authors generated the largest database of Pygmy camp locations throughout their known range.
As there are no known accurate censuses of Pygmy population the researchers used a statistical method, developed by paper co-author Dr Jesus Olivero (University of Malaga), to forecast the distribution of Pygmies in Central Africa. Based on species distribution models that investigate the relationship between environmental conditions and the distribution of organisms, the study is the first to apply this method to human societies and their cultural diversity.
Dr Olivero said: "By using tried and tested animal and plant distribution models we hope to promote a greater awareness of the importance of these too often ignored and marginalized groups in this region."
Professor John Fa (Manchester Metropolitan University), co-author, explained that understanding where and how Pygmy communities live is an important first step in supporting them and safeguarding their rights.
"It's important for all of the countries involved to come together to help support Pygmies' cultures and human rights to make sure they are respected and understood.
"At the end of the day, 900,000 people living in small groups in such a vast area can very easily be ignored, leading to their cultural extinction, and given the extraordinary role they have played in the human story since well before antiquity, we don't want that."
Source: University College London [January 15, 2016]
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.
The reconstructed skull of Peking Man, the fossil that launched discussions of human origins in China [Credit: DeAgostini/Getty]
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."
Modern humans have been blamed for killing off the Neanderthals by out competing them, breeding with them and even outright murdering them.
Neanderthals may have succumbed to infectious diseases carried to Europe by modern humans as they migrated out of Africa [Credit: George Gillard]
But new research suggests it may actually have been infectious diseases carried by our modern ancestors as they migrated out of Africa that finished them off.
Scientists studying the latest genetic, fossil and archaeological evidence claim that Neanderthals suffered from a wide range of diseases that still plague us today.
They have found evidence that suggests our prehistoric cousins would have been infected by diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid, whooping cough, encephalitis and the common cold.
But anthropologists from Cambridge University and Oxford Brookes University say that new diseases carried by modern humans may have led to the downfall of Neanderthals.
They speculate that pathogens like Heliocbacter pylori, the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers, were brought to Europe by modern humans from Africa and may have infected Neanderthals, who would have been unable to fight off these new diseases.
However, Neandethals may have also helped modern humans by passing on slivers of immunity against some diseases to our ancestors when they interbred.
Dr Simon Underdown, a principal lecturer in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University and co-author of the study, said: 'As Neanderthal populations became more isolated they developed very small gene pools and this would have impacted their ability to fight off disease.
'When Homo sapiens came out of Africa they brought diseases with them.
'We know that Neanderthals were actually much more advanced than they have been given credit for and we even interbred with them.
'Perhaps the only difference was that we were able to cope with these diseases but Neanderthals could not.'
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals were not as different from modern humans as was originally thought.
Recent discoveries have suggested that rather than being brutish cavemen, Neanderthals had sophisticated culture, were master tool makers and may even have had their own language.
The new study suggests that Neanderthals also suffered from many of the same afflictions and complaints that modern humans experience.
Indeed, there is some evidence from caves that early humans may have burned their bedding in a bid to rid themselves of infestations of lice or bed bugs.
Dr Underdown and his colleague Dr Charlotte Houldcroft, a researcher in infectious diseases at Cambridge University and University College London, analysed recent genetic studies on Neanderthals and other early humans.
They also examined recent genetic research on common human pathogens that have aimed to trace their origins and combined it with fossil and archaeological evidence.
Most evidence from the fossil record suggest that Neanderthals tended to suffer traumatic injuries as a result of their hunter gatherer lifestyle, but there are also signs of inflammation and infection.
Their study, which is published on the open source database bioRxiv, contradicts the common view that infectious diseases only really became a problem for humans in the Holocene about 11,000 years ago when humans began living in dense settlements and farming livestock.
Instead, they say many of the diseases we see around us today were common during the pleistocene when Neanderthals dominated much of Europe and Asia between 250,000 and 45,000 years ago, when they disappeared.
They say pathogens like TB, typhoid and Crimean fever that were thought to be zoonoses caught from herd animals may have actually originated in humans and were only passed to animals during the rise of farming around 8,000 years ago.
Genetic sequencing of Neanderthal and Denisovan - another early human ancestor - DNA has shown that modern humans have inherited a number of genes from these extinct species.
These include genes that provide immunity to viral infections such as tick-borne encephalitis.
Dr Underdown said this virus would probably have been common in the forested areas of northern Europe that Neanderthals inhabited and so immunity would have been an advantage.
Other genes found in modern Papua New Guineans that are involved in the immune response against viruses like dengue and influenza may have come from Neanderthals.
Analysis of ancient DNA has also shown that Neanderthals carried genes that would have protected them against bacterial blood poisoning, or sepsis.
Dr Underdown said: 'There are genetic signals in the Neanderthal genome that suggest quite clearly that they were exposed to these types of diseases but also developed some resistance to them.
'It had been thought that many of these diseases began infecting humans with the population increases that came with domestication of animals and permanent settlements.
'Be here we have got Neanderthals being infected by these diseases long before those developments.'
Author: Richard Gray | Source: Daily Mail Online [April 03, 2015]
A genetic mutation in extinct European apes that enabled them to convert fruit sugar into fat could be a cause of the modern obesity epidemic and diabetes, according to scientists. Fossil evidence reveals that apes living around 16 million years ago, in what was then subtropical Europe, began to suffer as global cooling subsequently changed the forest, making the fruit they ate scarce.
Extinct European apes evolved into today's great apes and the earliest hominids [Credit: Nathan Thompson, Lucille Betti-Nash, and Deming Yang]
Experts suggest that a mutation in the uricase gene which helps to convert fruit sugar (fructose) occurred around 15 million years ago. This aided apes in adding on fat layers so they could survive famines and harsh winters.
Persistence of the same mutation in all modern great apes and all modern humans, along with the fossil evidence, suggests that the now extinct European apes evolved into today's great apes and the earliest hominids.
Scientists have spent decades researching the genetic causes of obesity which is rarely found in other animals – apart from domesticated pets. The latest research focuses on fructose: a sugar which breaks down to form uric acid in the blood, according to a Sunday Times report.
The Western diet contains so much uric acid that it cannot be removed quickly enough, but triggers liver cells to turn fructose into fat, with the effect of humans adding on extra weight. The uricase mutation predisposes humans to obesity and diabetes in modern times. The results suggest a need to eat and drink much less fructose to fight obesity and prevent its dangerous complications.
"The gene enables uric acid levels to spike in response to two types of food," wrote Peter Andrews, professor of anthropology at University College London in Scientific American, co-authored with Richard Johnson, a professor of medicine in the US. "Those like beer that produce a lot of uric acid [directly] and those that contain a lot of fructose. These include honey and processed food that are high in table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When uric acid spikes we become susceptible to obesity and diabetes."
Obesity is considered as one of the biggest public health challenges of the century. Statistics show that it is affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. In the US alone, obesity costs at least $200 billion each year.
This medical condition also contributes to potentially fatal disorders such as cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Author: Fiona Keating | Source: International Business Times [November 20, 2015]
The copper used to make Ötzi’s axe blade did not come from the Alpine region as had previously been supposed, but from ore mined in southern Tuscany. Ötzi was probably not involved in working the metal himself, as the high levels of arsenic and copper found in his hair had, until now, led us to assume.
Scientists present the latest findings on Ötzi’s death at the International Mummy Congress [Credit: PBS]
His murder over 5,000 years ago seems to have been brought about due to a personal conflict a few days before his demise, and the Iceman, despite his normal weight and active life-style, suffered from extensive vascular calcification.
Scientists from all over the world presented these and other new insights, at the 3rd Bolzano Mummy Congress. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ötzi’s discovery, the three days of the Congress, from 19th to 21st September, are all dedicated to the Iceman.
Since the Iceman came on the scene on 19th September 1991, he has not ceased to fascinate scientists from all over the world. No corpse has been more thoroughly investigated. “In terms of his significance for science, Ötzi is not simply an isolated mummy discovery. He could be seen as a typical European from earlier times and is precious for this reason alone,” explained the anthropologist Albert Zink from EURAC Research, the scientific leader of the congress.
“Ötzi is so well preserved as a glacier mummy and through this alone, he serves us researchers as a model for developing scientific methods which can then be used on other mummies,” said Zink.
“What concerns us most these days is to know who the Iceman was, what role he played in society and what happened to him in the last days of his life. Sophisticated procedures, now available to scientists, are continually supplying us with new evidence,” said Angelika Fleckinger, Director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology which co-organised the Congress.
Links to Central Italy
One surprising new fact has been unearthed which concerns the most extraordinary item amongst Ötzi’s equipment – the valuable copper axe. In contrast to what had previously been presumed, the copper used in the blade does not derive from the Alpine region (researchers had suggested East or North Tyrol as the most likely provenance) but from Central Italy. Professor Gilberto Artioli‘s archaeometallurgy research group at the University of Padua has discovered that the metal had been obtained from ore mined in South Tuscany.
In order to determine its origin, Italian scientists took a tiny sample from the blade and compared the proportion of lead isotope – a kind of “finger print” of the ore deposits which remains unchanged in any objects subsequently made from the ore – with the corresponding data from numerous mineral deposits in Europe and the entire Mediterranean region. The result pointed unequivocally to South Tuscany.
“No one was prepared for this finding. We will commission further analyses in order to double-check these first results” stressed Angelika Fleckinger. If the original results are confirmed, this new evidence will give researchers some interesting food for thought.
Was Ötzi as a trader travelling possibly as far as the area around today’s Florence? What was the nature of the trading and cultural links with the south in those days? Did the exchange of goods also involve movements of the population? That is to say, did people from the south venture into the Alpine region and vice versa?
“This is a particularly exciting insight especially with respect to questions about population development”, explained Albert Zink.
Was he or was he not involved in smelting copper?
Another question long debated amongst the scientific community, is whether Ötzi was perhaps involved himself in the process of copper smelting. Scientists have advocated this thesis because raised arsenic and copper levels have been measured in the mummy’s hair, a fact which might possibly be explained, for example, by breathing in the smoke which is released when melting and pouring metal.
Geochemist Wolfgang Müller of Royal Holloway, University of London, who had already used isotope analysis to establish Ötzi’s South Tyrol origins, has now turned to this question once more. Using highly developed methods of analysis such as laser mass spectrometry and speciation analysis, Müller’s team examined not just hairs but also samples from Ötzi’s nails, skin and organs for possible heavy metal contamination.
His, so far still provisional, findings suggest that the hypothesis that Ötzi was involved in processing metal was premature. Müller did indeed find slightly raised arsenic values in the nail sample, but not in other tissue samples. Raised copper levels were only present at the extremities and this correlates with other change indicators, and thus it is doubtful if one can establish a heavy metal contamination for Ötzi’s actual life time: raised values might also be due to environmental influences over the 5,000 years since his death.
Radiological investigations with the latest CT equipment
A new computer tomography (CT) scan of the Iceman was undertaken by radiologists Paul Gostner and Patrizia Pernter in January 2013 in the Department of Radiology of Bozen-Bolzano Hospital. To do this they used a CT-scanner of the latest generation which, thanks to its large opening, allowed the doctors to run Ötzi rapidly through the machine from head to toe despite the way his arm is angled. In addition to the vascular calcification in the arteries of his stomach and legs which had already been known about, the superior image allowed doctors to spot three small areas of calcification near to the outflow tracts of the heart which had hitherto escaped their notice. This substantiates the earlier finding made by molecular biologists in EURAC that Ötzi had a strong genetic predisposition to cardiovascular diseases and that this was probably also the main reason for his general arteriosclerosis.
Investigations of a “profiler”
Ötzi was murdered. The arrow head discovered in 2001 in his left shoulder suggests this. But what were the circumstances surrounding the crime? In 2014 the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology commissioned Chief Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Criminal Investigation Department to investigate the “Ötzi Murder Case” using the latest criminological methods.
Horn interrogated various “acquaintances” of the murder victim such as archaeologists from the museum who had been looking after Ötzi for years, or experts from forensic medicine, radiology and anthropology. Members of the project team also took part in an on-site inspection of the location in Schnals Valley in South Tyrol Italy where the body was found.
The results of this investigation were that Ötzi probably did not feel threatened shortly before his murder, because the situation at the Tisenjoch location where he was found indicates that he had been resting while enjoying a hearty meal. In the days prior to the murder he had incurred an injury to his right hand, probably as a result of defensive action during the course of a physical altercation. No further injuries could be found, and this might serve to indicate that he had not been defeated in this particular conflict.
The arrow shot, which was probably fatal, seems to have been launched from a great distance and took the victim by surprise, from which we may infer that it was an act of treachery. Further medical findings suggest that the victim fell and that the perpetrator used no further violence. The perpetrator probably did not wish to risk a physical altercation, but instead chose a long distance attack to kill the Iceman. As valuable objects such as the copper axe remained at the crime scene, theft can be excluded as the motive.
The reason for the offence is more likely to be found in some sort of personal conflict situation, in a previous hostile encounter – “a behavioural pattern which is prevalent even today in the bulk of murder crimes”, as Alexander Horn explained.
