The Great London [Search results for Environment] 

Analysis of the first fossil bee nest from the Plio-Pleistocene of South Africa suggests that the human ancestor Australopithecus africanus lived in a dry savannah environment, according a study published in the >open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jennifer Parker from University College London, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

Little paleoecological information is available for the site in South Africa where the first Au. africanus fossil—the 'Taung Child'—was discovered. However, insect-related fossils, abundant at the discovery site, can yield insights into the paleoenvironment. Bees, for example, tend to build characteristic nests in characteristic conditions. Parker and colleagues analyzed CT scans of a fossil bee nest that was discovered near the Taung Child site to determine its internal structure and thus the kinds of bees that built it.

The fossil nest was exceptionally well preserved, and the structure of its cells and tunnels suggested that it was made by a ground-nesting solitary bee. These bees typically nest on bare, light, dry soil that is exposed to the sun, which bolsters other recent evidence that Au. africanus lived in dry savannahs. Insect-related fossils are common but largely overlooked at sites where human ancestors lived, the researchers said, and their work underscores the contribution such fossils can make to understanding the environments where human ancestors lived.

"When Raymond Dart published his description of the 'Taung Child' in 1925 he profoundly changed our understanding of human evolution," says study co-author Philip Hopley. "In the 90 years following his discovery, attention of anthropologists has moved to other African sites and specimens, and research at Taung has been hampered by the complex geology and uncertain dating. New research at Taung is helping to reconstruct the environment in which this enigmatic little hominin lived and died."

Source: Public Library of Science [September 29, 2016]

Some of the UK's leading nature experts have delivered a clarion call for action to help save many of the nation's native wildlife species from extinction.

A critical new report, called >State of Nature 2016 and published, delivered the clearest picture to date of the status of our native species across land and sea. Crucially, the report attributes much of the imposing threat to changing agricultural land management, climate change and sustained urban development. These threaten many of Britain's best loved species including water voles -- the fastest declining mammal.

The startling report reveals that more than half (56%) of UK species studied have declined since 1970, while more than one in ten (1,199 species) of the nearly 8000 species assessed in the UK are under threat of disappearing altogether.

The report, produced by a coalition of more than 50 leading wildlife and research organisations and specialists including Dr Fiona Mathews from the University of Exeter, demands immediate action to stave off the growing threat to Britain's unique wildlife.

Dr Mathews, an Associate Professor in Mammalian Biology at the University of Exeter and Chair of the Mammal Society, who helped write the report, said many British mammals are under pressure from house building and intensification of agriculture.

She said: "The reality is that our human population is expanding and we need urgently to work out how we can live alongside our wildlife. For example, water voles are one of our fastest declining species, and many thousands of kilometres of their habitat are affected by development every year.

"We are therefore researching ways to ensure their survival, supported by our water vole appeal fund. In the summer, we launched best-practice guidance on looking after water voles during development, and these are now being followed by industry, helping to ensure that "Ratty" survives on ponds, rivers and canals throughout the UK."

As the UK Government and devolved administrations move forward in the light of the EU Referendum result, there is an opportunity to secure world leading protection for our species and restoration of our nature. Now is the time to make ambitious decisions and significant investment in nature to ensure year-on-year improvement to the health and protection of the UK's nature and environment for future generations. The Mammal Society is currently drawing up a 'Red List' of the most threated species, to help ensure that scarce funds are directed to the animals most in need.

Dr Mathews added: "The findings emphasise that whole ecosystems, not just one or two species, are under threat.

"We are a nation of nature-lovers -- just look at the success of "Countryfile" and "Springwatch." Every week thousands of volunteers are out recording wildlife and helping with practical habitat management. We also depend on the natural environment for a huge number of goods and services, not to mention our own health and wellbeing.

"Yet successive governments have cut funding for the environment, and conservation concerns are all too often vilified as a barrier to urban development, infrastructure projects or efficient food production. This is a moment to reflect on what sort of country we want for our children -- a sustainable future for them depends on our decisions now."

The State of Nature 2016 UK report will be launched by Sir David Attenborough and UK conservation and research organisations at the Royal Society in London on Wednesday, September 14, while separate events will be held in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast over the next week.

Sir David Attenborough said: "The natural world is in serious trouble and it needs our help as never before. The rallying call issued after the State of Nature report in 2013 has promoted exciting and innovative conservation projects. Landscapes are being restored, special places defended, struggling species being saved and brought back. But we need to build significantly on this progress if we are to provide a bright future for nature and for people.

"The future of nature is under threat and we must work together -- -Governments, conservationists, businesses and individuals -- -to help it. Millions of people in the UK care very passionately about nature and the environment and I believe that we can work together to turn around the fortunes of wildlife."

In order to reduce the impact we are having on our wildlife, and to help struggling species, we needed to understand what's causing these declines. Using evidence from the last 50 years, experts have identified that significant and ongoing changes in agricultural practices are having the single biggest impact on nature.

The widespread decline of nature in the UK remains a serious problem to this day. For the first time scientists have uncovered how wildlife has fared in recent years. The report reveals that since 2002 more than half (53%) of UK species studied have declined and there is little evidence to suggest that the rate of loss is slowing down.

Mark Eaton, lead author on the report, said:"Never before have we known this much about the state of UK nature and the threats it is facing. Since the 2013, the partnership and many landowners have used this knowledge to underpin some amazing scientific and conservation work. But more is needed to put nature back where it belongs -- we must continue to work to help restore our land and sea for wildlife.

"There is a real opportunity for the UK Government and devolved administrations to build on these efforts and deliver the significant investment and ambitious action needed to bring nature back from the brink.

"Of course, this report wouldn't have been possible without the army of dedicated volunteers who brave all conditions to survey the UK's wildlife. Knowledge is the most essential tool that a conservationist can have, and without their efforts, our knowledge would be significantly poorer."

Derek Crawley, Atlas Office for the Mammal Society, said "New technology now enables volunteers to share information more easily than ever before. Our MammalTracker app is freely available from the App Store, or sightings of mammals can be recorded via our website. We will also be sharing information on how to make the most of volunteer programmes at a special meeting in the autumn.

Source: University of Exeter [September 23, 2016]

The diversity of mammals on Earth exploded straight after the dinosaur extinction event, according to UCL researchers. New analysis of the fossil record shows that placental mammals, the group that today includes nearly 5000 species including humans, became more varied in anatomy during the Paleocene epoch - the 10 million years immediately following the event.

Senior author, Dr Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), said: "When dinosaurs went extinct, a lot of competitors and predators of mammals disappeared, meaning that a great deal of the pressure limiting what mammals could do ecologically was removed. They clearly took advantage of that opportunity, as we can see by their rapid increases in body size and ecological diversity. Mammals evolved a greater variety of forms in the first few million years after the dinosaurs went extinct than in the previous 160 million years of mammal evolution under the rule of dinosaurs."

The Natural Environment Research Council-funded research, published today in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, studied the early evolution of placental mammals, the group including elephants, sloths, cats, dolphins and humans. The scientists gained a deeper understanding of how the diversity of the mammals that roamed the Earth before and after the dinosaur extinction changed as a result of that event.

Placental mammal fossils from this period have been previously overlooked as they were hard to place in the mammal tree of life because they lack many features that help to classify the living groups of placental mammals. Through recent work by the same team at UCL, this issue was resolved by creating a new tree of life for placental mammals, including these early forms, which was described in a study published in Biological Reviews yesterday.

First author of both papers, Dr Thomas Halliday (UCL Earth Sciences and Genetics, Evolution & Environment), said: "The mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is traditionally acknowledged as the start of the 'Age of Mammals' because several types of mammal appear for the first time immediately afterwards.

"Many recent studies suggest that little changed in mammal evolution during the Paleocene but these analyses don't include fossils from that time. When we look at the mammals that were present, we find a burst of evolution into new forms, followed by specialisation that finally resulted in the groups of mammals we see today. The earliest placental mammal fossils appear only a few hundred thousand years after the mass extinction, suggesting the event played a key role in diversification of the mammal group to which we belong."

The team studied the bones and teeth of 904 placental fossils to measure the anatomical differences between species. This information was used to build an updated tree of life containing 177 species within Eutheria (the group of mammals including all species more closely related to us than to kangaroos) including 94 from the Paleocene - making it the tree with the largest representation from Paleocene mammals to date. The new tree was analysed in time sections from 140 million years ago to present day, revealing the change in the variety of species.

Three different methods were used by the team to investigate the range and variation of the mammals present and all showed an explosion in mammal diversity after the dinosaur extinction. This is consistent with theories that mammals flourished when dinosaurs were no longer hunting them or competing with them for resources.

Dr Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), added: "Extinctions are obviously terrible for the groups that go extinct, non-avian dinosaurs in this case, but they can create great opportunities for the species that survive, such as placental mammals, and the descendants of dinosaurs: birds."

Professor Paul Upchurch (UCL Earth Sciences), co-author of the Biological Reviews study, added: "Several previous methodological studies have shown that it is important to include as many species in an evolutionary tree as possible: this generally improves the accuracy of the tree. By producing such a large data set, we hope that our evolutionary tree for Paleocene mammals is more robust and reliable than any of the previous ones. Moreover, such large trees are very useful for future studies of large-scale evolutionary patterns, such as how early placental mammals dispersed across the continents via land bridges that no longer exist today."

The team are now investigating rates of evolution in these mammals, as well as looking at body size more specifically. Further work will involve building data from DNA into these analyses, to extend these studies to modern mammals.

Source: University College London [December 21, 2015]

Using a technique that can tell if a species has passed by from just a sample of water, scientists are developing new ways to assess ecosystems.

All animals shed fragments of DNA as they go about their lives – in faeces, mucous, sperm and eggs, shed skin, hair and, eventually, their carcasses.

These traces of genetic material can persist in the environment for some time – a matter of weeks in water and up to a few centuries in soil. With new, more sensitive DNA amplification and sequencing techniques, scientists can collect and analyse these fragments in water and soil samples and identify individual species that have passed by.

One area where environmental DNA, or eDNA, is finding practical use is in environmental assessments, for example to check whether any protected species are present before construction works are carried out. Already, Defra in the UK have approved the use of eDNA sampling to assess the presence of protected great crested newts in ponds.

Now, in a new partnership between Imperial College London and environmental ecology consultancy Thomson Ecology, scientists are hoping to expand the use of eDNA. They want to create protocols to assess whether different areas are home to key protected species, including crayfish, water voles, otters and reptiles.

As well as looking at key protected species for conservation, the team want to use eDNA for biosecurity, by identifying invasive species. For example, as well as native crayfish, some UK waters have been occupied by invasive American Signal Crayfish, which outcompete the native species and damage the local environment. Early detection of invasive crayfish could mean they are dealt with sooner, and cause less damage.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to be able to use eDNA to profile entire ecosystems, analysing water samples to get a snapshot of all the organisms present in the local environment that have shed some DNA.

Victoria Priestley, who is taking on this task for her PhD thesis in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: "I think eDNA surveys represent a sea change in how we approach survey and monitoring of species.

"There is a lot of effort going into eDNA research globally and once it becomes more established, we should be able to assess what species are present in an area much more quickly. Ultimately we should be able to use it to create a clearer and more detailed picture of global biodiversity."

Efficient Environmental Assessments

Currently, species are assessed based on intensive field surveys, requiring taxonomic expertise and often involving tagging animals and repeat visits to a site. However, Professor Vincent Savolainen, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, is developing new protocols for various species.

This is paving the way for much simpler and more cost-effective surveying for environmental assessments. Professor Savolainen said: "This research will contribute to developing new indices to meet goals of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the body that assesses the state of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services it provides to society, in response to requests from decision makers."

Although sequencing techniques have improved dramatically in the last few decades, challenges remain in analysing eDNA. The fragments degrade over time, a process enhanced by temperature, microbes, enzymes and salinity.

The rate that eDNA is 'shed' from species to species and individual to individual also requires more research, as does the role of predators in moving eDNA between sites, and especially how eDNA is distributed in aquatic environments.

However, Priestley is positive that eDNA surveys have a bright future: "There is still some way to go before whole-ecosystem eDNA monitoring is standard practice, but I believe that at least in the near future, eDNA will increasingly be one of the options in the survey toolkit, working alongside traditional methods to obtain the best ecological survey data in the most efficient way."

Positive Partnership

Professor Tom Welton, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, said partnerships like this one help translate research into real-world applications: "This exciting collaboration demonstrates that research across the whole breadth of natural sciences at Imperial, even on newts, has practical applications to real world problems.

"Our partnership with Thomson Ecology will allow our research to have a positive impact on environmental protection and conservation."

Author: Hayley Dunning | Source: Imperial College London [November 25, 2016]

Mammals immortalise their genes through eggs and sperm to ensure future generations inherit good quality mitochondria to power the body's cells, according to new UCL research.

Before now, it was not known why mammals rely on dedicated sex cells that are formed early in development (a germline) to make offspring whereas plants and other simple animals, such as corals and sponges, use sex cells produced later in life from normal body tissues.

In a new study, published today in >PLOS Biology and funded by Natural Environment Research Council, Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, UCL scientists developed an evolutionary model to investigate how these differences evolved over time and discovered that the germline in mammals developed in response to selection on mitochondria (the powerhouses of cells).

First author and UCL PhD student, Arunas Radzvilavicius, said: "There have been many theories about why mammals have a specialised germline when plants and other ancient animals don't. Some suggest it was due to complexity of tissues or a selfish conflict between cells. The distinction between sex cells and normal body tissues seems to be necessary for the evolution of very complex specialised tissues like brain.

"Surprisingly, we found that these aren't the reason. Rather, it's about the number of genetic mutations in mitochondrial DNA over time, which differs between organisms, and the variation between cells caused by the mitochondria being randomly partitioned into daughter cells at each division."

In plants, mitochondrial mutations creep in slowly, so a germline isn't needed as mutations are corrected by natural selection. Mitochondrial variation is maximised by forming the next generation from the same cells used to make normal tissue cells. When the cells divide to form new daughter cells, some receive more mutant mitochondria than others and these cells are then removed through natural selection, preserving the reproductive cells containing higher quality mitochondria.

In mammals, genetic errors in mitochondria accumulate more quickly due to our higher metabolic rate so using cells that have undergone lots of division cycles would be a liability. Mitochondria are therefore only passed along to the next generation through a dedicated female germline in the form of large eggs. This protects against errors being introduced as eggs undergo many fewer replication cycles than cells in other tissues such as the gut, skin and blood.

The germline ensures that the best quality mitochondria are transferred but restricts the genetic variation in the next generation of cells in the developing embryo. This is corrected for by mammals generating far too many egg cells which are removed during development. For example, humans are born with over 6 million egg-precursor cells, 90% of which are culled by the start of puberty in a mysterious process called atresia.

Senior author, Dr Nick Lane (UCL CoMPLEX and Genetics, Evolution & Environment) added: "We think the rise in mitochondrial mutation rate likely occurred in the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago when oxygen levels rose. This was the first appearance of motile animals in the fossil record, things like trilobites that had eyes and armour plating - predators and prey. By moving around they used their mitochondria more and that increased the mutation rate. So to avoid these mutations accumulating they needed to have fewer rounds of cell division, and that meant sequestering a specialized germline."

Co-author, Professor Andrew Pomiankowski (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), concluded: "Without a germline, animals with complex development and brains could not exist. Scientists have long tried to explain the evolution of the germline in terms of complexity. Who would have thought it arose from selection on mitochondrial genes? We hope our discovery will transform the way researchers understand animal development, reproduction and aging."

Source: University College London [December 20, 2016]

Our ancestors evolved three times faster in the 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs than in the previous 80 million years, according to UCL researchers.

The team found the speed of evolution of placental mammals -- a group that today includes nearly 5000 species including humans -- was constant before the extinction event but exploded after, resulting in the varied groups of mammals we see today.

Lead researcher, Dr Thomas Halliday (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), said: "Our ancestors -- the early placental mammals - benefitted from the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and dwindling numbers of competing groups of mammals. Once the pressure was off, placental mammals suddenly evolved rapidly into new forms.

"In particular, we found a group called Laurasiatheria quickly increased their body size and ecological diversity, setting them on a path that would result in a modern group containing mammals as diverse as bats, cats, rhinos, whales, cows, pangolins, shrews and hedgehogs."

The team found that the last common ancestor for all placental mammals lived in the late Cretaceous period, about three million years before the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. This date is 20 million years younger than suggestions from previous studies which used molecular data from living mammals and assumed a near-constant rate of evolution.

In this study, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and published in >Proceedings B of the Royal Society, the researchers analysed fossils from the Cretaceous to the present day, and used the dates of their occurrence in the fossil record to estimate the timing of divergences based on an updated tree of life. The new tree was released by the same team in 2015 and has the largest representation of Paleocene mammals to date.

The scientists measured all the small changes in the bones and teeth of 904 placental fossils and mapped the anatomical differences between species on the tree of life. From measuring the number of character changes over time for each branch, they found the average rate of evolution for early placental mammals both before and after the dinosaur extinction event. They compared the average rate of evolution over the geological stages before the extinction and the geological stages after to see what impact it had.

Senior author, Professor Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment and UCL Earth Sciences), said: "Our findings refute those of other studies which overlooked the fossils of placental mammals present around the last mass extinction. Using rigorous methods, we've successfully tracked the evolution of early placental mammals and reconstructed how it changed over time. While the rate differed between species, we see a clear and massive spike in the rates of evolution straight after the dinosaurs become extinct, suggesting our ancestors greatly benefitted from the demise of the dinosaurs. The huge impact of the dinosaur extinction on the evolution of our ancestors really shows how important this event was in shaping the modern world."

Professor Paul Upchurch (UCL Earth Sciences), co-author of the study, added: "Our large and refined data set allows us to build a clearer picture of evolutionary history. We plan on using it to study other large-scale evolutionary patterns such as how early placental mammals dispersed across the continents via land bridges that no longer exist today."

Source: University College London [June 28, 2016]

Global populations of vertebrates -- mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish -- have declined by 58 percent between 1970 and 2012, states a new report from World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Animals living in the world's lakes, rivers, and freshwater systems have experienced the most dramatic population declines, at 81 percent. Because of human activity, the report states that without immediate intervention global wildlife populations could drop two-thirds by 2020.

"This research delivers a wake-up call that for decades we've treated our planet as if it's disposable," said Carter Roberts, WWF president and CEO. "We created this problem. The good news is that we can fix it. It requires updating our approach to food, energy, transportation, and how we live our lives. We share the same planet. We rely on it for our survival. So we are all responsible for its protection."

The top threat to wildlife is habitat loss and degradation, driven primarily by increasing demand for food and energy. According to the report, global food production is the leading cause for destruction of habitats and overexploitation of wildlife. Agriculture currently occupies approximately one-third of Earth's total land area and accounts for 70 percent of all freshwater use.

Wild animals are not the only ones at risk; the report states that increased pressure threatens the natural resources that all life -- including humanity -- depend on.

The report demonstrates the need to rethink how we produce, consume, measure success and value the natural environment, and calls for an urgent system change by individuals, businesses and governments. The report also illustrates the positive momentum that is building by highlighting recent global agreements on climate change and sustainable development. In particular, the report recognizes the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as an essential guide to decision-making that can ensure that the environment is valued alongside economic and social interests.

"A strong natural environment is the key to defeating poverty, improving health and developing a just and prosperous future," said Marco Lambertini, WWF director general. "We have proven that we know what it takes to build a resilient planet for future generations, we just need to act on that knowledge."

>Living Planet Report 2016: Risk and resilience in a new era is the eleventh edition of WWF's biennial flagship publication. The report tracks over 14,000 vertebrate populations of over 3,700 species from 1970 to 2012 and includes research from the Global Footprint Network and the Zoological Society of London.

Source: World Wildlife Fund [October 27, 2016]

Ancient Britons may have intentionally mummified some of their dead during the Bronze Age, according to archaeologists at the University of Sheffield.

The study, published in the Antiquity Journal, is the first to provide indications that mummification may have been a wide-spread funerary practise in Britain.

Working with colleagues from the University of Manchester and University College London, Dr Tom Booth analysed skeletons at several Bronze Age burial sites across the UK. The team from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology found that the remains of some ancient Britons are consistent with a prehistoric mummy from northern Yemen and a partially mummified body recovered from a sphagnum peat bog in County Roscommon, Ireland.

Building on a previous study conducted at a single Bronze Age burial site in the Outer Hebrides, Dr Booth used microscopic analysis to compare the bacterial bioerosion of skeletons from various sites across the UK with the bones of the mummified bodies from Yemen and Ireland.

Archaeologists widely agree that the damp British climate is not favourable to organic materials and all prehistoric mummified bodies that may be located in the UK will have lost their preserved tissue if buried outside of a preservative environment such as a bog.

Dr Booth, who is now based at the Department of Earth Sciences at London’s Natural History Museum, said: “The problem archaeologists face is finding a consistent method of identifying skeletons that were mummified in the past – especially when they discover a skeleton that is buried outside of a protective environment.

“To help address this, our team has found that by using microscopic bone analysis archaeologists can determine whether a skeleton has been previously mummified even when it is buried in an environment that isn’t favourable to mummified remains.

“We know from previous research that bones from bodies that have decomposed naturally are usually severely degraded by putrefactive bacteria, whereas mummified bones demonstrate immaculate levels of histological preservation and are not affected by putrefactive bioerosion.”

Earlier investigations have shown that mummified bones found in the Outer Hebrides were not entirely consistent with mummified remains found elsewhere because there wasn’t a complete absence of bacterial bioerosion.

However, armed with a new technique, the team were able to re-visit the remains from the Outer Hebrides and use microscopic analysis to test the relationship between bone bioerosion and the extent of soft tissue preservation in bone samples from the Yemeni and Irish mummies.

Their examinations revealed that both the Yemeni and Irish mummies showed limited levels of bacterial bioerosion within the bone and therefore established that the skeletons found in the Outer Hebrides as well as other sites across Britain display levels of preservation that are consistent with mummification.

The research team also found that the preservation of Bronze Age skeletons at various sites throughout the UK is different to the preservation of bones dating to all other prehistoric and historic periods, which are generally consistent with natural decomposition. Furthermore, the Sheffield-led researchers also found that Bronze Age Britons may have used a variety of techniques to mummify their dead.

Dr Booth added, “Our research shows that smoking over a fire and purposeful burial within a peat bog are among some of the techniques ancient Britons may have used to mummify their dead. Other techniques could have included evisceration, in which organs were removed shortly after death.

“The idea that British and potentially European Bronze Age communities invested resources in mummifying and curating a proportion of their dead fundamentally alters our perceptions of funerary ritual and belief in this period.”

The research also demonstrates that funerary rituals that we may now regard as exotic, novel and even bizarre were practised commonly for hundreds of years by our predecessors.

Also, this method of using microscopic bone analysis to identify formerly-mummified skeletons means that archaeologists can continue searching for Bronze Age mummies throughout Europe.

“It’s possible that our method may allow us to identify further ancient civilisations that mummified their dead,” Dr Booth concluded.

Source: University of Sheffield [September 30, 2015]

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]

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.

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.

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.

Source: University of Oxford [October 08, 2016]

Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest winter point since satellite observations began in the late 1970s, raising concerns about faster ice melt and rising seas due to global warming, US officials said Thursday.

The maximum extent of sea ice observed was 5.6 million square miles (14.5 million square kilometers) on February 25, earlier than scientists had expected, said the report by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"It is also the lowest in the satellite record," the NSIDC said.

Below-average ice conditions were observed everywhere except in the Labrador Sea and Davis Strait.

The sea ice was about 425,000 square miles below the average from 1981 to 2010, a loss equal to more than twice the size of Sweden.

It was also 50,200 square miles below the previous lowest maximum that occurred in 2011.

Environmentalists said the report offered more evidence of worsening global warming, and urged action to curb the burning of fossil fuels that send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"This is further evidence that global warming and its impacts have not stopped despite the inaccurate and misleading claims of climate change 'skeptics,'" said Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

"The gradual disappearance of ice is having profound consequences for people, animals and plants in the polar regions, as well as around the world, through sea level rise."

The World Wildlife Fund said the loss of sea ice means trouble for a vast web of life that depends on it, from polar bears to marine creatures.

"Today's chilling news from the Arctic should be a wakeup call for all of us," said Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF Global Climate and Energy Initiative.

"Climate change won't stop at the Arctic Circle. Unless we make dramatic cuts in polluting gases, we will end up with a climate that is unrecognizable, unpredictable and damaging for natural systems and people."

The NSIDC said much of the ice loss could be attributed to an unusually warm February in parts of Russia and Alaska, and that it was still possible that a late-season surge of ice growth could occur.

A detailed analysis of the winter sea ice from 2014 to 2015 is due to be released in early April.

Source: AFP [March 19, 2015]

Species across the world are rapidly going extinct due to human activities, but humans are also causing rapid evolution and the emergence of new species. A new study published today summarises the causes of humanmade speciation, and discusses why newly evolved species cannot simply replace extinct wild species. The study was led by the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen.

A growing number of examples show that humans not only contribute to the extinction of species but also drive evolution, and in some cases the emergence of entirely new species. This can take place through mechanisms such as accidental introductions, domestication of animals and crops, unnatural selection due to hunting, or the emergence of novel ecosystems such as the urban environment.

Although tempting to conclude that human activities thus benefit as well as deplete global biodiversity, the authors stress that extinct wild species cannot simply be replaced with newly evolved ones, and that nature conservation remains just as urgent.

"The prospect of 'artificially' gaining novel species through human activities is unlikely to elicit the feeling that it can offset losses of 'natural' species. Indeed, many people might find the prospect of an artificially biodiverse world just as daunting as an artificially impoverished one" says lead author and Postdoc Joseph Bull from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen.

The study which was carried out in collaboration with the University of Queensland was published in >Proceedings of Royal Society B. It highlights numerous examples of how human activities influence species' evolution. For instance: as the common house mosquito adapted to the environment of the underground railway system in London, it established a subterranean population. Now named the 'London Underground mosquito', it can no longer interbreed with its above ground counterpart and is effectively thought to be a new species.

"We also see examples of domestication resulting in new species. According to a recent study, at least six of the world's 40 most important agricultural crops are considered entirely new" explains Joseph Bull.

Furthermore, unnatural selection due to hunting can lead to new traits emerging in animals, which can eventually lead to new species, and deliberate or accidental relocation of species can lead to hybridization with other species. Due to the latter, more new plant species in Europe have appeared than are documented to have gone extinct over the last three centuries.

Although it is not possible to quantify exactly how many speciation events have been caused through human activities, the impact is potentially considerable, the study states.

"In this context, 'number of species' becomes a deeply unsatisfactory measure of conservation trends, because it does not reflect many important aspects of biodiversity. Achieving a neutral net outcome for species numbers cannot be considered acceptable if weighing wild fauna against relatively homogenous domesticated species. However, considering speciation alongside extinction may well prove important in developing a better understanding of our impact upon global biodiversity. We call for a discussion about what we, as a society, actually want to conserve about nature" says Associate Professor Martine Maron from the University of Queensland.

Researchers do agree that current extinction rates may soon lead to a 6th period of mass extinction. Since the last Ice Age, 11.500 years ago, it is estimated that 255 mammals and 523 bird species has gone extinct, often due to human activity. In the same period, humans have relocated almost 900 known species and domesticated more than 470 animals and close to 270 plant species.

Source: Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen [June 28, 2016]

Fossil fuel emissions could soon make it impossible for radiocarbon dating to distinguish new materials from artefacts that are hundreds of years old.

Carbon released by burning fossil fuels is diluting radioactive carbon-14 and artificially raising the radiocarbon 'age' of the atmosphere, according to a paper published in the journal PNAS.

Radiocarbon measurements have a range of uses, from analysing archaeological finds, to detecting fraudulent works of art, to identifying illegal ivory trading, to assessing the regeneration of brain cells in neurological patients.

The new study suggests that some of these current uses will be affected over this century, depending on how much fossil fuel emissions increase or decrease.

"If we reduced fossil fuel emissions, it would be good news for radiocarbon dating," said the study's author, Dr Heather Graven from the Department of Physics and the Grantham Institute -- Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College London.

Carbon-14 is a rare, but naturally occurring, radioactive type of carbon that decays over thousands of years.

Radiocarbon dating works by measuring how much the fraction of carbon-14 versus non-radioactive carbon in an object has changed and therefore how long the object has been around.

Fossil fuels like coal and oil are so old that they contain no carbon-14. When their emissions mix with the modern atmosphere, they flood it with non-radioactive carbon.

In radiocarbon dating terms this makes the atmosphere appear older, which is reflected in the tissues of plants taking in CO2 during photosynthesis, and their products such as cottons.

At the rate fossil fuel emissions are currently increasing, by 2050 a new T-shirt would have the same radiocarbon date as a robe worn by William the Conqueror a thousand years earlier.

If fossil fuel emissions were rapidly curbed, the new t-shirt would only have the same radiocarbon age as something 100 years old, according to the study.

The fraction of carbon-14 in the atmosphere decreased after the Industrial Revolution with the rise of fossil fuel combustion. But in the 1950s and 60s, nuclear weapons testing caused a sharp increase. Since then atmospheric observations show the levels have been dropping, and are now close to the pre-industrial proportions.

The new study indicates that by 2020, the fraction of carbon-14 could drop to such an extent that radiocarbon dating will start to be affected.

"We can see from atmospheric observations that radiocarbon levels are steadily decreasing. How low they go depends on changes in our fossil fuel emissions," said Dr Graven.

Author: Simon Levey | Source: Imperial College London [July 20, 2015]

Genes that drive the shape of human noses have been identified by a UCL-led study. The four genes mainly affect the width and 'pointiness' of noses which vary greatly between different populations. The new information adds to our understanding of how the human face evolved and may help contribute to forensic DNA technologies that build visual profiles based on an individual's genetic makeup.

The study, published today in >Nature Communications, analysed a population of over 6,000 people with varied ancestry across Latin America to study the differences in normal facial features and identify the genes which control the shape of the nose and chin.

The researchers identified five genes which play a role in controlling the shape of specific facial features. DCHS2, RUNX2, GLI3 and PAX1 affect the width and pointiness of the nose and another gene -- EDAR -- affects chin protrusion.

"Few studies have looked at how normal facial features develop and those that have only looked at European populations, which show less diversity than the group we studied. What we've found are specific genes which influence the shape and size of individual features, which hasn't been seen before.

"Finding out the role each gene plays helps us to piece together the evolutionary path from Neanderthal to modern humans. It brings us closer to understanding how genes influence the way we look, which is important for forensics applications," said the first author of the report, Dr Kaustubh Adhikari, UCL Cell & Developmental Biology.

People have different shaped facial features based on their genetic heritage and this is partly due to how the environment influenced the evolution of the human genome. The nose, for example, is important for regulating the temperature and humidity of the air we breathe in so developed different shapes in warmer and cooler climates.

"It has long been speculated that the shape of the nose reflects the environment in which humans evolved. For example, the comparatively narrower nose of Europeans has been proposed to represent an adaptation to a cold, dry climate. Identifying genes affecting nose shape provides us with new tools to examine this question, as well as the evolution of the face in other species. It may also help us understand what goes wrong in genetic disorders involving facial abnormalities," explained Professor Andrés Ruiz-Linares UCL Biosciences, who led the study.

The team collected and analysed DNA samples from 6,630 volunteers from the CANDELA cohort recruited in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru. After an initial screen, a sample size of 5,958 was used. This group included individuals of mixed European (50%), Native American (45%) and African (5%) ancestry, resulting in a large variation in facial features.

Both men and women were assessed for 14 different facial features and whole genome analysis identified the genes driving differences in appearance.

A subgroup of 3,000 individuals had their features assessed using a 3D reconstruction of the face in order to obtain exact measurements of facial features and the results identified the same genes.

The study identified genes that are involved in bone and cartilage growth and the development of the face. GLI3, DCHS2 and PAX1 are all genes known to drive cartilage growth -- GLI3 gave the strongest signal for controlling the breadth of nostrils, DCHS2 was found to control nose 'pointiness' and PAX1 also influences nostril breadth. RUNX2 which drives bone growth was seen to control nose bridge width.

The genes GLI3, DCHS2 and RUNX2 are known to show strong signals of recent selection in modern humans compared to archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans; GLI3 in particular undergoing rapid evolution.

Source: University College London [May 19, 2016]

Current rates of climate change could trigger instability in a major Antarctic glacier, ultimately leading to more than 2m of sea-level rise.

This is the conclusion of a new study looking at the future of Totten Glacier, a significant glacier in Antarctica. Totten Glacier drains one of the world's largest areas of ice, on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS).

By studying the history of Totten's advances and retreats, researchers have discovered that if climate change continues unabated, the glacier could cross a critical threshold within the next century, entering an irreversible period of very rapid retreat.

This would cause it to withdraw up to 300 kilometres inland in the following centuries and release vast quantities of water, contributing up to 2.9 metres to global sea-level rise.

The EAIS is currently thought to be relatively stable in the face of global warming compared with the much smaller ice sheet in West Antarctica, but Totten Glacier is bucking the trend by losing substantial amounts of ice. The new research reveals that Totten Glacier may be even more vulnerable than previously thought.

The study, by scientists from Imperial College London and institutions in Australia, the US, and New Zealand is >published in Nature. Last year, the team discovered that there is currently warm water circulating underneath a floating portion of the glacier that is causing more melting than might have been expected.

Their new research looks at the underlying geology of the glacier and reveals that if it retreats another 100-150 km, its front will be sitting on an unstable bed and this could trigger a period of rapid retreat for the glacier. This would cause it to withdraw nearly 300 km inland from its current front at the coast.

Retreating the full 300 km inland may take several hundred years, according to co-author Professor Martin Siegert, Co-Director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. However, once the glacier crosses the threshold into the unstable region, the melting will be unstoppable -- at least until it has retreated to the point where the geology becomes more stable again.

"The evidence coming together is painting a picture of East Antarctica being much more vulnerable to a warming environment than we thought," he said. "This is something we should worry about. Totten Glacier is losing ice now, and the warm ocean water that is causing this loss has the potential to also push the glacier back to an unstable place."

"Totten Glacier is only one outlet for the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, but it could have a huge impact. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is by far the largest mass of ice on Earth, so any small changes have a big influence globally."

To uncover the history of Totten Glacier's movements, the team looked at the sedimentary rocks below the glacier using airborne geophysical surveys. From the geological record, influenced by the erosion by ice above, they were able to understand the history of the glacier stretching back millions of years.

They found that the glacier has retreated more quickly over certain 'unstable' regions in the past. Based on this evidence, the scientists believe that when the glacier hits these regions again we will see the same pattern of rapid retreat.

Author: Hayley Dunning. | Source: Imperial College London [May 18, 2016]

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world's seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut.

The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird's stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010.

The researchers predict that plastic ingestion will affect 99 per cent of the world's seabird species by 2050, based on current trends.

The scientists estimate that 90 per cent of all seabirds alive today have eaten plastic of some kind.

This includes bags, bottle caps, and plastic fibres from synthetic clothes, which have washed out into the ocean from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.

Birds mistake the brightly coloured items for food, or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes even death.

"For the first time, we have a global prediction of how wide-reaching plastic impacts may be on marine species -- and the results are striking," senior research scientist at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Dr Wilcox said.

"We predict, using historical observations, that 90 per cent of individual seabirds have eaten plastic. This is a huge amount and really points to the ubiquity of plastic pollution."

Dr Denise Hardesty from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere said seabirds were excellent indicators of ecosystem health.

"Finding such widespread estimates of plastic in seabirds is borne out by some of the fieldwork we've carried out where I've found nearly 200 pieces of plastic in a single seabird," Dr Hardesty said.

The researchers found plastics will have the greatest impact on wildlife where they gather in the Southern Ocean, in a band around the southern edges of Australia, South Africa and South America.

Dr van Sebille, from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said the plastics had the most devastating impact in the areas where there was the greatest diversity of species.

"We are very concerned about species such as penguins and giant albatrosses, which live in these areas," Erik van Sebille said.

"While the infamous garbage patches in the middle of the oceans have strikingly high densities of plastic, very few animals live here."

Dr Hardesty said there was still the opportunity to change the impact plastic had on seabirds.

"Improving waste management can reduce the threat plastic is posing to marine wildlife," she said.

"Even simple measures can make a difference. Efforts to reduce plastics losses into the environment in Europe resulted in measureable changes in plastic in seabird stomachs with less than a decade, which suggests that improvements in basic waste management can reduce plastic in the environment in a really short time."

Chief Scientist at the US-based Ocean Conservancy Dr George H. Leonard said the study was highly important and demonstrated how pervasive plastics were in oceans.

"Hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world come face-to-face with this problem during annual Coastal Cleanup events," Dr Leonard said.

"Scientists, the private sector and global citizens working together against the growing onslaught of plastic pollution can reduce plastic inputs to help protect marine biodiversity."

Source: CSIRO Australia [September 01, 2015]

The new temporary exhibition “A dream among splendid ruins... Strolling through the Athens of travelers, 17th-19th century” was designed to provide an imaginary stroll through monumental Athens between the 17th and 19th centuries. Our companions on this stroll are the European travelers who undertook the “Grand Tour” to the capital city of Hellenism and who, inspired by the movement of Classicism, recorded the “splendid ruins” of its historical past.

Twenty-two illustrated travel publications and twenty-four original works of art — oil paintings, watercolors, and engravings from the Library collections of the Hellenic Parliament — offer landscapes, images, monuments, and specific moments from the Athens of travelers, feeding our imagination and setting starting-points for our own, personal readings. Thirty-five marble sculptures from the National Archaeological Museum, many of them presented here for the first time, converse with the travelers’ works, complementing their charming narrative of the city’s monumental topography. The museum experience is supplemented by music from the travelers’ homelands as well as by Greek music such as that recorded by the French composer and music theorist L.A. Bourgault-Ducoudray during his visit to Athens in 1874-1875.

The cultural environment in which European traveling flourished was directly linked to the intensification of the study of classical antiquity and systematization of archaeological research. Integrated into the same context is the formation of the first private archaeological collections and archaeological museums in Europe, as well as the dark side of traveling — the “mania” for antiquities and their plundering —, both of which increased the awareness of the newly-formed Greek state and led to the establishment of a national policy for the protection of antiquities and creation of archaeological museums.

The exhibition was organised with the cooperation of the Hellenic Parliament Library. Into the total of 76 exhibits are included works of sculpture and archive records from the National Archaeological Museum, along with etchings, paintings and illustrated editions from the Collection of Artworks and the Library of the Hellenic Parliament. Works of art on loan from the Museum of the City of Athens and the General State Archives of Greece also feature among the exhibits.

The exhibition is enriched with digital applications that enhance visitors’ sense of direction around the monumental landscape of the city, enable them to leaf through pictures of illustrated books on display, offer them the opportunity to glimpse into the everyday life of the city, as this comes alive with the aid of technology, and to reflect back, by way of images, photos and selected extracts from travelers’ texts as well as those of institutional representatives of the new Greek state, on the relationship people who lived then in Athens, permanently or temporarily, had with antiquities. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue in Greek and in English published by the Archaeological Receipts Fund.

Finally, this temporary exhibition can be seen as the precursor of an important approaching anniversary. In 2016, the National Archaeological Museum will celebrate 150 years since its foundation. The new exhibition of the National Archaeological Museum brings out the incipient cultural environment to which the Museum owes its foundation, while the long chronicle of the museum’s founding, character, history, and activities, so closely bound with the modern history of Greece, will be unravelled in a series of upcoming events.

The first one is now presented in a separate hall adjacent to the exhibition of the Travelers. It is a special visual installation the artistic curation of which was undertaken by Andonis Theocharis Kioukas. Enriched with music and film projections, the installation makes use of old showcases from the first years of the Museum’s operation, subtly making an effort to elucidate the secret thread that connects all those that the National Archaeological Museum carries in its entrails and transports through time functioning as an ark of concepts and universal values.

The exhibition will run until 8th October, 2016.

Source: National Archaeological Museum [September 12, 2015]

An unidentified fossilised bone in a museum has revealed the size of a fearsome abelisaur and may have solved a hundred-year old puzzle.

Alessandro Chiarenza, a PhD student from Imperial College London, last year stumbled across a fossilised femur bone, left forgotten in a drawer, during his visit to the Museum of Geology and Palaeontology in Palermo Italy. He and a colleague Andrea Cau, a researcher from the University of Bologna, got permission from the museum to analyse the femur. They discovered that the bone was from a dinosaur called abelisaur, which roamed the Earth around 95 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.

Abelisauridae were a group of predatory, carnivorous dinosaurs, characterised by extremely small forelimbs, a short deep face, small razor sharp teeth, and powerful muscular hind limbs. Scientists suspect they were also covered in fluffy feathers. The abelisaur in today's study would have lived in North Africa, which at that time was a lush savannah criss-crossed by rivers and mangrove swamps. This ancient tropical world would have provided the abelisaur with an ideal habitat for hunting aquatic animals like turtles, crocodiles, large fish and other dinosaurs.

By studying the bone, the team deduced that this abelisaur may have been nine metres long and weighed between one and two tonnes, making it potentially one of the largest abelisaurs ever found. This is helping researchers to determine the maximum sizes that these dinosaurs may have reached during their peak.

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, co-author of the study from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: "Smaller abelisaur fossils have been previously found by palaeontologists, but this find shows how truly huge these flesh eating predators had become. Their appearance may have looked a bit odd as they were probably covered in feathers with tiny, useless forelimbs, but make no mistake they were fearsome killers in their time."

The fossil originated from a sedimentary outcrop in Morocco called the Kem Kem Beds, which are well known for the unusual abundance of giant predatory dinosaur fossils. This phenomenon is called Stromer's Riddle, in honour the German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer, who first identified this abundance in 1912. Since then scientists have been asking how abelisaurs and five other groupings of predatory dinosaurs could have co-existed in this region at the same time, without hunting each other into extinction.

Now the researchers in today's study suggest that these predatory dinosaur groups may not have co-existed so closely together. They believe that the harsh and changing geology of the region mixed the fossil fragment records together, destroying its chronological ordering in the Kem Kem beds, and giving the illusion that the abelisaurs and their predatory cousins shared the same terrain at the same time. Similar studies of fossil beds in nearby Tunisia, for example, show that creatures like abelisaurs were inland hunters, while other predators like the fish eating spinosaurs probably lived near mangroves and rivers.

Chiarenza added: "This fossil find, along with the accumulated wealth of previous studies, is helping to solve the question of whether abelisaurs may have co-existed with a range of other predators in the same region. Rather than sharing the same environment, which the jumbled up fossil records may be leading us to believe, we think these creatures probably lived far away from one another in different types of environments."

Fossilised femora are useful for palaeontologists to study because they can determine the overall size of the dinosaur. This is because femora are attached to the thigh and tail muscles and have scars, or bumps, which tell palaeontologists where the ligaments and muscles were attached to the bone and how big those muscles and ligaments would have been.

Andrea Cau, co-author from the University of Bologna, said: "While palaeontologists usually venture to remote and inaccessible locations, like the deserts of Mongolia or the Badlands of Montana, our study shows how museums still play an important role in preserving specimens of primary scientific value, in which sometimes the most unexpected surprises can be discovered. As Stephen Gould, an influential palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, once said, sometimes the greatest discoveries are made in museum drawers."

The study is published in the journal Peer J. Chiarenza did the underpinning analysis with Cau while at the University of Bologna.

The next step will see the team looking for more complete remains from these predatory dinosaurs trying to better understand their environment and evolutionary history.

Author: Colin Smith | Source: Imperial College London [February 29, 2016]

The transition from hunter-gatherer to sedentary farming 10,000 years ago occurred in multiple neighbouring but genetically distinct populations according to research by an international team including UCL.

“It had been widely assumed that these first farmers were from a single, genetically homogeneous population. However, we’ve found that there were deep genetic differences in these early farming populations, indicating very distinct ancestries,” said corresponding author Dr Garrett Hellenthal, UCL Genetics.

The study, published today in >Science and funded by Wellcome and Royal Society, examined ancient DNA from some of the world’s first farmers from the Zagros region of Iran and found it to be very different from the genomes of early farmers from the Aegean and Europe. The team identified similarities between the Neolithic farmer’s DNA and that of living people from southern Asia, including from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Iranian Zoroastrians in particular.

“We know that farming technologies, including various domestic plants and animals, arose across the Fertile Crescent, with no particular centre” added co-author Professor Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment.

“But to find that this region was made up of highly genetically distinct farming populations was something of a surprise. We estimated that they separated some 46 to 77,000 years ago, so they would almost certainly have looked different, and spoken different languages. It seems like we should be talking of a federal origin of farming.”

The switch from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary farming first occurred around 10,000 years ago in south-western Asia and was one of the most important behavioural transitions since humans first evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago. It led to profound changes in society, including greater population densities, new diseases, poorer health, social inequality, urban living, and ultimately, the rise of ancient civilizations.

Animals and plants were first domesticated across a region stretching north from modern-day Israel, Palestine and Lebanon to Syria and eastern Turkey, then east into, northern Iraq and north-western Iran, and south into Mesopotamia; a region known as the Fertile Crescent.

“Such was the impact of farming on our species that archaeologists have debated for more than 100 years how it originated and how it was spread into neighbouring regions such as Europe, North Africa and southern Asia,” said co-author Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL Institute of Archaeology.

“We’ve shown for the first time that different populations in different parts of the Fertile Crescent were coming up with similar solutions to finding a successful way of life in the new conditions created by the end of the last Ice Age.”

By looking at how ancient and living people share long sections of DNA, the team showed that early farming populations were highly genetically structured, and that some of that structure was preserved as farming, and farmers, spread into neighbouring regions; Europe to the west and southern Asia to the east.

“Early farmers from across Europe, and to some extent modern-day Europeans, can trace their DNA to early farmers living in the Aegean, whereas people living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India share considerably more long chunks of DNA with early farmers in Iran. This genetic legacy of early farmers persists, although of course our genetic make-up subsequently has been reshaped by many millennia of other population movements and intermixing of various groups,” concluded Dr Hellenthal.

Source: University College London [July 14, 2016]

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.

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]