The Great London [Search results for LIVE] 

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]

A new and more dangerous phase of impacts on the world's remaining tropical forests is emerging, threatening to simplify the world's most diverse ecosystem including mass species loss, according to new UCL-led research published today in Science.

The impact of humans on these areas has been increasing for millennia and today more than three-quarters of the world's remaining tropical forests have been degraded by human actions.

The scientists identified three prior phases of expanding impacts, the first when hunter-gatherers moved into tropical forests and the second following the emergence of tropical agriculture, some 6,000 years ago. Under both, the overall health of tropical forests was maintained.

Today, we live in the third phase, marked by much greater impacts, with distant decision-makers directing how land is used, including permanent intensive agriculture, often for soybeans or palm oil, frontier industrial logging for timber export, cross-continental species invasions, and early climate change impacts. The scientists term this phase the era of 'Global Integration', affecting even the most remote areas.

Lead author, tropical forest expert Dr Simon Lewis (UCL Geography and University of Leeds) said: "Earth has lost 100 million hectares of tropical forest over the last 30 years, mostly to agricultural developments. Few people think about how intertwined with tropical forests we all are. Many foodstuffs include palm oil which comes from once pristine Asian tropical forest, while remaining intact forests are buffering the rate of climate change by absorbing about a billion tonnes of carbon each year."

Current trends look set to intensify without major policy changes, as global food demand is projected to double, over 25 million kilometres of road are predicted to be built by 2050, and climate change intensifies, ushering in a new phase of human dominance of tropical forests.

Dr Lewis added: "I fear a global simplification of the world's most complex forests. Deforestation, logging and road building all create fragmented patches of forest. However, as the climate rapidly changes the plants and animals living in the rainforest will need to move to continue to live within their ecological tolerances. How will they move? This is a recipe for the mass extinction of tropical forest species this century.

"What is needed are unbroken areas of forest that link today's core tropical regions with forest areas about 4 degrees cooler, so as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change species have a better chance of surviving rapid 21st century climate change. We need to bring conservation in line with the reality of climate change."

The authors note that while deforestation and degradation continue, more optimistically, logged forest retains many environmental benefits, and marginal agricultural lands are being abandoned, which can return back to forest.

Dr David Edwards (University of Sheffield), co-author of the study, said: "Much biodiversity still remains in selectively logged forests, and can recover in secondary forests that grow on abandoned farmland. There is abundant potential to incorporate these forests into global plans to make tropical biodiversity climate change ready.

"Despite their value for biodiversity, logged-over and old secondary forests are frequently threatened by conversion to species-poor agricultural plantations. We urgently need to protect these human-impacted forests, especially in regions such as Southeast Asia where almost nowhere is left undegraded."

A suite of policy measures can help tropical forests survive, including giving forest dwellers formal collective legal rights over their land, which previous studies have shown is one of the best ways of preserving forests. A study of 292 protected areas in Amazonia showed that indigenous reserves were the most effective at avoiding deforestation in high pressure areas.

Most of the financial benefits of logging and plantation agriculture, such as palm oil, flow out of the forests. Ensuring local people have collective long-term rights over their lands would mean that benefits flowing from forest lands accrue to local people. This can provide the beginnings of programs of 'development without destruction', tackling poverty while maintaining forests. This, the authors argue, provides human rights and conservation win-wins.

Dr Lewis added: "With long-term certainty of tenure people can plan, maintaining forests while investing in improving agricultural productivity without expanding into forested lands. Forest dwellers won't be perfect managers of forests, but they won't look for a quick profit and then move on, as big businesses often do.

"This is a pivotal year for the global environment. There are some good signs for the world's tropical forests, with the UN New York Declaration on Forests agreeing to not only halt deforestation, but also restore 150 million hectares of forest. However, there are ominous signs too, with the palm oil industry having driven the world's highest deforestation rates in South East Asia now gearing up to repeat this process across Africa.

"The Paris climate change talks in December are doubly important for forests and forest communities. The levels of emission cuts will be a critical factor in determining how many tropical forest plants and animals go extinct over the coming decades and centuries. The agreements on reducing deforestation, including durable finance, will be pivotal. The final test will be whether some funds for adaptation will include land-use planning to retain forest connectivity as the climate rapidly changes."

Source: University College London [August 24, 2015]

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 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.

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]

Long before the advent of social media, human social networks were built around sharing a much more essential commodity: food. Now, researchers reporting on the food sharing networks of two contemporary groups of hunter-gatherers in the >Cell Press journal Current Biology provide new insight into fundamental nature of human social organization.

The new work reveals surprising similarities between the Agta of the Philippines and Mbendjele of the Republic of Congo. In both places, individuals maintain a three-tiered social network that appears to buffer them against day-to-day shortfalls in foraging returns.

"Previous research has suggested that social networks across human cultures are structured in similar ways," says Mark Dyble of University College London. "Across societies, there appear to be similar limits on the number of social relationships individuals are able to maintain, and many societies are said to have a 'multilevel' structure. Our work on contemporary hunter-gatherer groups sheds light on how this distinctive social structure may have benefited humans in our hunting-and-gathering past."

While previous studies have identified similarities in social structure across hunter-gatherer populations, the researchers say that the new work is the first to explore how hunter-gatherers' distinctive, "multilevel" social organization structures social life and cooperation in important activities such as foraging and food sharing.

"No other apes share food to the extent that humans do," says Andrea Migliano, principal investigator of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Hunter-Gatherers Resilience Project. "Hunter-gatherers' multi-level social structure exists in different groups, to help regulate these cooperative systems. Furthermore, multi-level social structures regulate social rules, friendship and kinship ties, and the spread of social norms, promoting a more efficient sharing and cooperation. Sharing is a crucial adaptation to hunter-gatherers' lifestyles, central to their resilience -- and central to the evolution of mankind."

The Agta live in northeast Luzon, Philippines. Their primary source of protein is fish, supplemented by inter-tidal foraging, hunting, honey collecting, and gathering of wild foods. The Mbendjele live in an area spanning northern Republic of Congo and southern Central African Republic, where they hunt for meat in the forest. Both groups also trade wild-caught meat or fish for cultivated foods, including rice and manioc.

Dyble, Migliano, and their colleagues collected data on food sharing by living with the two communities for many months, making observations on how often households shared food with each other. From this they constructed social networks of food sharing.

"Although we had an idea of how camps split into food sharing clusters 'on the ground,' we were able to test these using algorithms which are able to identify sub-communities within the nine camps we studied," Dyble explains.

Their analysis showed that food sharing is closely related to social organization. In both communities, individuals maintain a three-tiered social network. First is their immediate household, most often consisting of five or six individuals, second is a cluster of three to four closely related households who share food frequently, and third is the wider camp.

"Despite being from different continents and living in very different ecologies, both groups of hunter-gatherers had a strikingly similar social organization," Dyble says.

"Cooperation and especially food sharing are essential for survival in a hunting-and-gathering economy," Dyble says. "The proverb that 'it takes a village to raise a child' is certainly true for hunter-gatherers, who, without food sharing to mitigate the day-to-day shortfalls in foraging, could simply not survive."

Dyble says that they now intend to explore the structure of other types of social networks in the hunter-gatherer communities, such as cooperation in childcare, and their overlap with food sharing.

Source: Cell Press [July 21, 2016]

For the second year running a project led by University of Leicester archaeologists has been nominated in the Current Archaeology Awards, this year in the category >'Rescue Project of the Year'.

The project, ‘Buried between Road and River: Investigating a Roman cemetery in Leicester’ (reported on in Current Archaeology Issue 319), investigated part of a large Roman cemetery in Leicester’s West End. Between 2010 and 2015, archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) carried out a series of excavations at the former ‘Equity Shoes’ factory on Western Road as part of its ongoing redevelopment.

83 skeletons were discovered, dating from the 2nd century AD through to the 4th century. Many were buried with grave goods or exhibit burial customs not previously seen in Leicester, and tantalisingly, a number possibly have African ancestry, the first evidence ever found for Leicester’s ‘migrant’ population. The project is giving archaeologists a wealth of exciting new insights into life in the Roman town, whose inhabitants were perhaps as diverse and multicultural as those who reside in the modern city.

The research being funded by Jamie Lewis Residential is part of the site’s redevelopment. Excavation and analysis of the skeletal assemblage is being carried out by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), York Osteoarchaeology Ltd., the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) and the British Geological Survey (BGS).

Mathew Morris, project supervisor for ULAS said: “Until recently, burial practices in Leicester’s Roman cemeteries were poorly understood. Now, this excavation is providing a wealth of exciting new insights into the Roman town’s diverse population.

"Five individuals have cranial features that suggest they might have African or mixed ancestry. We are carrying out stable isotopes analysis to see if they were born in Britain or elsewhere in the Roman Empire. So far, two appear to have been born in Britain, one in the Pennines area and one in the Leicester area.

"Analysis is ongoing and the information gained from the study will provide fascinating new insights into the lives of the people living in Roman Leicester. Projects like this can only come about through successful collaboration between developers such as Jamie Lewis and archaeologists, and the notable results of our research highlight how important this process is for British archaeology, as demonstrated by our nomination for this award."

The results of the competition are decided on a public vote which has now opened and can be accessed from the Current Archaeology Awards webpage >www.archaeology.co.uk/vote

Voting will be open until Monday 6 February 2017, and the winners will be announced at Current Archaeology Live! 2017, held at the University of London’s Senate House on 24-25 February.

The nomination is the fourth for the University of Leicester in the past five years. In 2013 the University was awarded ‘Research Project of the Year’ for the Grey Friars Project and the discovery of Richard III. The following year Dr Richard Buckley, Lead Archaeologist on the Greyfriars Project, was awarded ‘Archaeologist of the Year’ and in 2016 the School of Archaeology and Ancient History’s summer fieldschool at Burrough Hill Iron Age Hillfort was nominated for ‘Research Project of the Year’.

One of the highlights of the recent excavations was a simple grave which had been dug into mudstone on the west bank of the River Soar. Buried in the grave were the remains of a middle-aged man wearing an elaborately decorated belt in a style that would have been worn by a late Roman soldier or civil servant during the second half of the 4th century or the early 5th century AD. Belts like this are rare and this is the first occurrence of such a find in Roman Leicester.

Source: University of Leicester [December 01, 2016]

The stories of Roman lives are written their bones: diet, disease, childbirth and trauma all leave their mark. Individual skeletons can tell rich tales, but the fullest information comes from large groups, when we can look at populations. So what can we learn about about a Roman community from their skeletons?

Whether they were a slave

Slavery was ubiquitous in the Roman world, and some of its agonies are preserved on skeletons: those working in and living near Roman mines in Jordan were exposed to lead and copper at levels that would have been toxic, and caused a range of illnesses. The remains of people who were likely to have been slaves have also been found still wearing iron shackles, for instance in a subterranean room of a villa in Pompeii, and near the silver mines of Laurion in Roman-era Greece.

Whether they played sports

Among the human remains from ancient Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius at the same time as Pompeii, were a possible boxer, with typical fractures to his hands and nose, and a javelin-thrower whose bones reveal the same elbow problems experienced by modern athletes.

How they died, who they loved

At Dura-Europos in Syria, remains of Roman and Sasanian troops trapped in a siege mine beneath the walls of the ancient city reveal the brutal and violent reality of ancient conflict, including gas warfare. In the nearby cemetery, families were buried together in underground tombs, with women and children placed together.

Where people came from

Even places like Roman Britain were diverse. Scientific methods (such as isotope analysis), as well as the study of graves and grave goods (the objects buried with a body) can tell us where a person was likely to have come from, or where they had links to. For instance, work on the cemeteries of Roman York has shown that people buried there came from other places in Britain, and much further afield in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The extent of childhood illnesses

In the Roman world, children often didn’t make it to adulthood. Roman cemeteries such as Poundbury in Dorset include many children with rickets, scurvy and anaemia – survival rates were staggeringly low by modern Western standards. Infant and early childhood mortality was high in the Roman period, with 45% of children unlikely to survive past five years of age.

So we can learn a lot about how a Roman may have lived from her or his remains, but, while skeletons are biological, bodies are cultured and contextual; they can be modified to fit ideals of beauty, status, or gender. Ultimately, Roman skeletons tell us that culture is a significant factor in determining difference: underneath it all, we’re pretty much the same collection of 206 interlocking parts.

Dr Jen Baird and Dr Tim Reynolds from the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London, will be talking in depth about Roman skeletons at a Guardian Live/Birkbeck event on 21 November.

Authors: Dr Jen Baird and Dr Tim Reynolds | Source: The Guardian [November 14, 2015]

The world's fastest land animal, the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), is sprinting towards the edge of extinction and could soon be lost forever unless urgent, landscape-wide conservation action is taken, according to a study published today in the journal >Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Led by Zoological Society of London (ZSL), Panthera and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the study reveals that just 7,100 cheetahs remain globally, representing the best available estimate for the species to date. Furthermore, the cheetah has been driven out of 91% of its historic range. Asiatic cheetah populations have been hit hardest, with fewer than 50 individuals remaining in one isolated pocket of Iran.

Due to the species' dramatic decline, the study's authors are calling for the cheetah to be up-listed from 'Vulnerable' to 'Endangered' on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Typically, greater international conservation support, prioritization and attention are granted to wildlife classified as 'Endangered', in efforts to stave off impending extinction.

Dr. Sarah Durant, ZSL/WCS lead author and Project Leader for the Rangewide Conservation Program for Cheetah and African Wild Dog, said: "This study represents the most comprehensive analysis of cheetah status to date. Given the secretive nature of this elusive cat, it has been difficult to gather hard information on the species, leading to its plight being overlooked. Our findings show that the large space requirements for cheetah, coupled with the complex range of threats faced by the species in the wild, mean that it is likely to be much more vulnerable to extinction than was previously thought."

Durant continued, "We have worked with range state governments and the cheetah conservation community to put in place comprehensive frameworks for action to save the species, but funds and resources are needed to implement them. The recent decisions made at the CITES CoP17 meeting in Johannesburg represent a significant breakthrough particularly in terms of stemming the illegal flow of live cats trafficked out of the Horn of Africa region. However, concerted action is needed to reverse ongoing declines in the face of accelerating land use changes across the continent."

While renowned for its speed and spots, the degree of persecution cheetahs face both inside and outside of protected areas is largely unrecognized. Even within guarded parks and reserves, cheetahs rarely escape the pervasive threats of human-wildlife conflict, prey loss due to overhunting by people, habitat loss and the illegal trafficking of cheetah parts and trade as exotic pets.

To make matters worse, as one of the world's most wide-ranging carnivores, 77% of the cheetah's habitat falls outside of protected areas. Unrestricted by boundaries, the species' wide-ranging movements weaken law enforcement protection and greatly amplify its vulnerability to human pressures. Indeed, largely due to pressures on wildlife and their habitat outside of protected areas, Zimbabwe's cheetah population has plummeted from 1,200 to a maximum of 170 animals in just 16 years -- representing an astonishing loss of 85% of the country's cheetahs.

Scientists are now calling for an urgent paradigm shift in cheetah conservation, towards landscape-level efforts that transcend national borders and are coordinated by existing regional conservation strategies for the species. A holistic conservation approach, which incentivises protection of cheetahs by local communities and trans-national governments, alongside sustainable human-wildlife coexistence is paramount to the survival of the species.

Panthera's Cheetah Program Director, Dr. Kim Young-Overton, shared, "We've just hit the reset button in our understanding of how close cheetahs are to extinction. The take-away from this pinnacle study is that securing protected areas alone is not enough. We must think bigger, conserving across the mosaic of protected and unprotected landscapes that these far-ranging cats inhabit, if we are to avert the otherwise certain loss of the cheetah forever."

The methodology used for this study will also be relevant to other species, such as African wild dogs, which also require large areas of land to prosper and are therefore similarly vulnerable to increasing threats outside designated protected areas.

Source: Panthera [December 26, 2016]

The British Museum is to stage a major exhibition on two lost Egyptian cities and their recent rediscovery by archaeologists beneath the Mediterranean seabed. Opening in May 2016 for an extended run of six months, The BP exhibition Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds will be the Museum’s first large-scale exhibition of underwater discoveries. It will show how the exploration of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus – submerged at the mouth of the River Nile for over a thousand years – is transforming our understanding of the relationship between ancient Egypt and the Greek world and the great importance of these ancient cities.

300 outstanding objects will be brought together for the exhibition including more than 200 spectacular finds excavated off the coast of Egypt near Alexandria between 1996 and 2012. Important loans from Egyptian museums rarely seen before outside Egypt (and the first such loans since the Egyptian revolution) will be supplemented with objects from various sites across the Delta drawn from the British Museum’s collection; most notably from Naukratis – a sister harbour town to Thonis-Heracleion and the first Greek settlement in Egypt.

Likely founded during the 7th century BC, Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus were busy, cosmopolitan cities that once sat on adjacent islands at the edge of the fertile lands of the Egyptian Delta, intersected by canals. After Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332BC, centuries of Greek (Ptolemaic) rule followed. The exhibition will reveal how cross-cultural exchange and religion flourished, particularly the worship of the Egyptian god of the afterlife, Osiris.

By the 8th century AD, the sea had reclaimed the cities and they lay hidden several metres beneath the seabed, their location and condition unclear. Although well-known from Egyptian decrees and Greek mythology and historians, past attempts to locate them were either fruitless or very partial. The exhibition will show how a pioneering European team led by Franck Goddio in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities made use of the most up-to-date technologies to find them.

Thanks to the underwater setting, a vast number of objects of great archaeological significance have been astonishingly well preserved. Pristine monumental statues, fine metalware and gold jewellery will reveal how Greece and Egypt interacted in the late first millennium BC. These artefacts offer a new insight into the quality and unique character of the art of this period and show how the Greek kings and queens who ruled Egypt for 300 years adopted and adapted Egyptian beliefs and rituals to legitimise their reign.

The exhibition will feature a number of extraordinary, monumental sculptures. A 5.4m granite statue of Hapy, a divine personification of the Nile’s flood, will greet visitors as they enter the space. Masterpieces from Egyptian museums such as the Apis bull from the Serapeum in Alexandria will be shown alongside magnificent recent finds from the sea. One such piece is the stunning sculpture from Canopus representing Arsinoe II (the eldest daughter of Ptolemy I, founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty). The Graeco-Macedonian queen became a goddess beloved to both Egyptians and Greeks after her death and is depicted here as the perfect embodiment of Aphrodite, a goddess of beauty ‘who grants fortunate sailing’.

The exhibition will also cover the arrival of Greeks in Egypt, when they were hosts and not rulers; privileged but controlled by the pharaohs. A complete stela from Thonis-Heracleion advertises a 380BC royal decree of the Egyptian pharaoh Nectanebo I. It states that 10% of the taxes collected on all goods imported from the ‘Sea of the Greeks’ into Thonis-Heracleion and on all trade operations at Naukratis were to be donated to an Egyptian temple.

A wide range of objects, from modest to grand and costly, bears witness to the piety of both inhabitants and visitors at these major religious centres. Lead models of barges uncovered in the sacred waterway linking Thonis-Heracleion to Canopus are unique and moving finds. They are associated with the Mysteries of Osiris, the most popular festival celebrated annually across Egypt during the month of Khoiak (mid-October to mid-November). Ranging in size from 6 to 67cm, these reproduce in metal a flotilla of 34 papyrus barges that would have been displayed on a waterway to celebrate the first sacred navigation of the festival. According to religious texts, each barge was to measure 67.5 cm and to bear the figure of an Egyptian god, and would have been illuminated by 365 lamps. The lead barges are lasting testimonies possibly left by people who, long ago, celebrated this festival in the Canopic region.

Only a tiny proportion of these sites have revealed their secrets. The on-going underwater archaeological mission continues to bring to light new masterpieces and further research every year as the most recent finds from 2012 will show.

Sir Richard Lambert, Chairman of the British Museum, said, “It’s hugely exciting to be announcing the British Museum’s first large-scale exhibition of underwater discoveries and to be welcoming these important loans to London. We are grateful to BP for their ongoing support without which ambitious exhibitions such as these would simply not be possible. We’re also delighted to be working with Franck Goddio, his expert team at IEASM, the Hilti Foundation and of course our Egyptian colleagues to bring the extraordinary story of these lost cities to life.”

His Excellency Nasser Kamel, Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt to the United Kingdom, said, "As well as looking for partners to invest in the Egyptian economy, Egypt is always searching for partners to help in exploring its heritage and treasures which are still hidden under its lands, and waters. This exhibition shows that despite what we know of its tremendous history and culture, Egypt still has a lot more to offer to?the world and we thank our partners in the UK, such as BP, for working with us in utilising our resources to develop our economy and through such an exhibition unraveling our history as well. I invite the people of Britain to visit this exhibition to get a glimpse of what Egypt has to offer, and come to Egypt to live that experience."

Bob Dudley, Group Chief Executive, BP, said, “BP is proud to support this fascinating exhibition which showcases the power of science and the pioneering spirit to discover what lies beneath the surface of the Nile Delta. By sharing these underwater treasures the British Museum is opening a whole new frontier for visitors to explore, and we are pleased to be a part of it.”

Franck Goddio, President of Institut Europeen d’Archeologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) and exhibition co-curator said “My team and I, as well as the Hilti Foundation, are delighted that the exhibition with discoveries from our underwater archaeological expeditions off the coast of Egypt will be on display at the British Museum. It enables us to share with the public the results of years of work at the sunken cities and our fascination for ancient worlds and civilisations. Placing our discoveries alongside selected masterpieces from the collections of Egyptian museums, complemented by important objects from the British Museum, the exhibition presents unique insights into a fascinating period in history during which Egyptians and Greeks encountered each other on the shores of the Mediterranean.”

Aurelia Masson-Berghoff, exhibition curator at the British Museum said “People sometimes assume that when two cultures mix, the essence of each is diluted and, as a result, weakened; this exhibition demonstrates the opposite. It is a rare opportunity to reveal the beauty and strength of Late Pharaonic art and culture, alongside the latest research on the momentous intermingling between Egyptian and Greek communities in Egypt at this time. We are illustrating this vibrant cosmopolitan world through Egyptian, Greek and ‘hybrid’ artworks, rarely ever displayed side by side. It shows ancient Egypt not as an isolated civilisation, but as the outward looking, influential and inclusive society that it was.”

Source: British Museum [February 14, 2016]

An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has discovered a new species of fossil in England -- and identified it as an ancient parasitic intruder.

The fossil species found in 425-million year old rocks in Herefordshire, in the Welsh borderland, is described as 'exceptionally well preserved.' The specimens range from about 1 to 4 millimeters long.

The fossil species -- a 'tongue worm', which has a worm-like body and a head and two pairs of limbs -- is actually a parasite whose representatives today live internally in the respiratory system of a host, which it enters when it is eaten.

The new fossil, which was originally entirely soft-bodied, is the first fossil tongue worm species to be found associated with its host, which in this case is a species of ostracod -- a group of micro-arthropods (crabs, spiders and insects are also arthropods) with two shells that are joined at a hinge.

Professor David Siveter, of the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester made the discovery working alongside researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Imperial College London and Yale, USA. Their research is published in the journal Current Biology and was supported by The Natural Environmental Research Council, together with the Leverhulme Trust, the John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Professor Siveter said: "This discovery is important not only because examples of parasites are exceptionally rare in the fossil record, but also because the possible host of fossil tongue worms -- and the origin of the lifestyle of tongue worms -- has been the subject of much debate.

"This discovery affirms that tongue worms were 'external' parasites on marine invertebrate animals at least 425 million years ago; it also suggests that tongue worms likely found their way into land-based environments and associated hosts in parallel with the movement of vertebrates onto the land by some 125 million years later."

Professor Siveter said tongue worms -- technically termed pentastomids -- are in fact not worms at all; they are an unusual group of tiny and widespread parasitic arthropods. Their fossils are exceptionally rare and until now are known only from a handful of isolated juvenile specimens.

Today they are known from about 140 species, nearly all of which are parasitic on vertebrate animals, particularly reptiles and including humans. Some of the fossil tongue worm specimens occur inside the shell, near the eggs of the ostracod; others are attached to the external surface of its shell, a unique position for any fossil or living tongue worm.

Professor Siveter added: "The tongue worm and its host lived in a sea that 425 million years ago -- during the Silurian period of geological time -- covered much of southern Britain, which was positioned then in warm southerly subtropical latitudes. The animals died and were preserved when a volcanic ash rained down upon them. The new species has been named Invavita piratica, which means an 'ancient intruder' and 'piracy', referring to its parasitic lifestyle in the sea."

The fossils have been reconstructed as virtual fossils by 3D computer modelling.

Source: University of Leicester [May 21, 2015]

Sex equality in residential decision-making explains the unique social structure of hunter-gatherers, a new UCL study reveals.

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".

Source: University College London [May 15, 2015]

A relationship that has lasted for 100 million years is at serious risk of ending, due to the effects of environmental and climate change. A species of spiny crayfish native to Australia and the tiny flatworms that depend on them are both at risk of extinction, according to researchers from the UK and Australia.

Look closely into one of the cool, freshwater streams of eastern Australia and you might find a colourful mountain spiny crayfish, from the genus Euastacus. Look even closer and you could see small tentacled flatworms, called temnocephalans, each only a few millimetres long. Temnocephalans live as specialised symbionts on the surface of the crayfish, where they catch tiny food items, or inside the crayfish's gill chamber where they can remove parasites. This is an ancient partnership, but the temnocephalans are now at risk of coextinction with their endangered hosts. Coextinction is the loss of one species, when another that it depends upon goes extinct.

In a new study, researchers from the UK and Australia reconstructed the evolutionary and ecological history of the mountain spiny crayfish and their temnocephalan symbionts to assess their coextinction risk. This study was based on DNA sequences from crayfish and temnocephalans across eastern Australia, sampled by researchers at James Cook University, sequenced at the Natural History Museum, London and Queensland Museum, and analysed at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge. The results are published in the >Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"We've now got a picture of how these two species have evolved together through time," said Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, the paper's lead author. "The extinction risk to the crayfish has been measured, but this is the first time we've quantified the risk to the temnocephalans as well -- and it looks like this ancient partnership could end with the extinction of both species."

Mountain spiny crayfish species diversified across eastern Australia over at least 80 million years, with 37 living species included in this study. Reconstructing the ages of the temnocephalans using a 'molecular clock' analysis showed that the tiny worms are as ancient as their crayfish hosts and have evolved alongside them since the Cretaceous Period.

>A symbiotic relationship that has existed since the time of the dinosaurs is at risk of ending,> as habitat loss and environmental change mean that a species of Australian crayfish >and the tiny worms that depend on them are both at serious risk of extinction >[Credit: David Blair/James Cook University]
Today, many species of mountain spiny crayfish have small geographic ranges. This is especially true in Queensland, where mountain spiny crayfish are restricted to cool, high-altitude streams in small pockets of rainforest. This habitat was reduced and fragmented by long-term climate warming and drying, as the continent of Australia drifted northwards over the last 165 million years. As a consequence, mountain spiny crayfish are severely threatened by ongoing climate change and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed 75% of these species as endangered or critically endangered.

"In Australia, freshwater crayfish are large, diverse and active 'managers', recycling all sorts of organic material and working the sediments," said Professor David Blair of James Cook University in Australia, the paper's senior author. "The temnocephalan worms associated only with these crayfish are also diverse, reflecting a long, shared history and offering a unique window on ancient symbioses. We now risk extinction of many of these partnerships, which will lead to degradation of their previous habitats and leave science the poorer."

The crayfish tend to have the smallest ranges in the north of Australia, where the climate is the hottest and all of the northern species are endangered or critically endangered. By studying the phylogenies (evolutionary trees) of the species, the researchers found that northern crayfish also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. This also applies to the temnocephalans of genus Temnosewellia, which are symbionts of spiny mountain crayfish across their geographic range. "This means that the most evolutionarily distinctive lineages are also those most at risk of extinction," said Hoyal Cuthill.

The researchers then used computer simulations to predict the extent of coextinction. This showed that if all the mountain spiny crayfish that are currently endangered were to go extinct, 60% of their temnocephalan symbionts would also be lost to coextinction. The temnocephalan lineages that were predicted to be at the greatest risk of coextinction also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. These lineages represent a long history of symbiosis and coevolution of up to 100 million years. However they are the most likely to suffer coextinction if these species and their habitats are not protected from ongoing environmental and climate change.

"The intimate relationship between hosts and their symbionts and parasites is often unique and long lived, not just during the lifespan of the individual organisms themselves but during the evolutionary history of the species involved in the association," said study co-author Dr Tim Littlewood of the Natural History Museum. "This study exemplifies how understanding and untangling such an intimate relationship across space and time can yield deep insights into past climates and environments, as well as highlighting current threats to biodiversity."

Source: University of Cambridge [May 24, 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]

Levels of global biodiversity loss may negatively impact on ecosystem function and the sustainability of human societies, according to UCL-led research.

"This is the first time we've quantified the effect of habitat loss on biodiversity globally in such detail and we've found that across most of the world biodiversity loss is no longer within the safe limit suggested by ecologists" explained lead researcher, Dr Tim Newbold from UCL and previously at UNEP-WCMC.

"We know biodiversity loss affects ecosystem function but how it does this is not entirely clear. What we do know is that in many parts of the world, we are approaching a situation where human intervention might be needed to sustain ecosystem function."

The team found that grasslands, savannas and shrublands were most affected by biodiversity loss, followed closely by many of the world's forests and woodlands. They say the ability of biodiversity in these areas to support key ecosystem functions such as growth of living organisms and nutrient cycling has become increasingly uncertain.

The study, published in >Science, led by researchers from UCL, the Natural History Museum and UNEP-WCMC, found that levels of biodiversity loss are so high that if left unchecked, they could undermine efforts towards long-term sustainable development.

For 58.1% of the world's land surface, which is home to 71.4% of the global population, the level of biodiversity loss is substantial enough to question the ability of ecosystems to support human societies. The loss is due to changes in land use and puts levels of biodiversity beyond the 'safe limit' recently proposed by the planetary boundaries -- an international framework that defines a safe operating space for humanity.

"It's worrying that land use has already pushed biodiversity below the level proposed as a safe limit," said Professor Andy Purvis of the Natural History Museum, London, who also worked on the study. "Decision-makers worry a lot about economic recessions, but an ecological recession could have even worse consequences -- and the biodiversity damage we've had means we're at risk of that happening. Until and unless we can bring biodiversity back up, we're playing ecological roulette."

The team used data from hundreds of scientists across the globe to analyse 2.38 million records for 39,123 species at 18,659 sites where are captured in the database of the PREDICTS project. The analyses were then applied to estimate how biodiversity in every square kilometre land has changed since before humans modified the habitat.

They found that biodiversity hotspots -- those that have seen habitat loss in the past but have a lot of species only found in that area -- are threatened, showing high levels of biodiversity decline. Other high biodiversity areas, such as Amazonia, which have seen no land use change have higher levels of biodiversity and more scope for proactive conservation.

"The greatest changes have happened in those places where most people live, which might affect physical and psychological wellbeing. To address this, we would have to preserve the remaining areas of natural vegetation and restore human-used lands," added Dr Newbold.

The team hope the results will be used to inform conservation policy, nationally and internationally, and to facilitate this, have made the maps from this paper and all of the underlying data publicly available.

Source: University College London - UCL [July 14, 2016]

A project for the deciphering of ancient papyri found in Graeco-Roman Egypt has recruited armchair archaeologists from around the world with amazing results.

The Ancient Lives project is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the Egypt Exploration Society, the Citizen Science Alliance and others asking for anyone who can identify Greek letters to work on-line and decipher the writing on digital scans of papyri from Oxyrhynchus in Upper Egypt. Then, scholars, with the use of special online tools, carry out the translation. The latest finds were presented yesterday by Dirk Obbink, associate professor in Papyrology and Greek Literature from the University of Oxford.

The papyri, dating mainly from the 1st Century BC to the 7th Century AD, when Egypt was occupied by the Greeks and Romans, were discovered by Victorian archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in January 1897, at what turned out to be a rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, an ancient city about 160m south-west of Cairo. The excavations yielded 700 boxes of documents which were shipped to Oxford for study, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society in London.

Transcribing them, however, was really time-consuming, allowing experts to transcribe over 5,000 out of the 500,000 documents between 1898 and 2012. That’s when the Ancient Lives project was piloted, asking citizen scientists from all over the world to help scientists decipher the writing on the papyri online. The project went fully live in 2014 and with the use of algorithms to help experts assess the accuracy of the work by volunteers, it has allowed a variety of individuals across the globe to participate.

The Oxyrhynchus fragments have revealed personal documents of various use, from tax assessments, grocery lists and mariage certificates, ancient remedies, to court records and pieces of literature by Sappho Euripides and Homer. Fragments of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, Andromeda, have also been found.

The results were announced by Dirk Obbink at a talk in London, held at the Royal Geographical Society and organised by the World Monuments Fund Britain.

For more on this story see:

• The Art Newspaper, http://theartnewspaper.com/news/news/armchair-archaeologists-reveal-details-of-life-in-ancient-egypt/ (29/02/2016) 

• The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ancient-egypt-citizen-scientists-reveal-tales-of-tragedy-unearthed-from-centuries-old-rubbish-dump-a6905541.html (01/03/2016)

Planetary scientists have discovered pieces of opal in a meteorite found in Antarctica, a result that demonstrates that meteorites delivered water ice to asteroids early in the history of the solar system. Led by Professor Hilary Downes of Birkbeck College London, the team announce their results at the National Astronomy Meeting in Nottingham on Monday 27 June.

Opal, familiar on Earth as a precious stone used in jewellery, is made up of silica (the major component of sand) with up to 30% water in its structure, and has not yet been identified on the surface of any asteroid. Before the new work, opal had only once been found in a meteorite, as a handful of tiny crystals in a meteorite from Mars.

Downes and her team studied the meteorite, named EET 83309, an object made up of thousands and broken pieces of rock and minerals, meaning that it originally came from the broken up surface, or regolith, of an asteroid. Results from other teams show that while the meteorite was still part of the asteroid, it was exposed to radiation from the Sun, the so-called solar wind, and from other cosmic sources. Asteroids lack the protection of an atmosphere, so radiation hits their surfaces all the time.

EET 83309 has fragments of many other kinds of meteorite embedded in it, showing that there were many impacts on the surface of the parent asteroid, bringing pieces of rock from elsewhere in the solar system. Downes believes one of these impacts brought water ice to the surface of the asteroid, allowing the opal to form.

She comments: "The pieces of opal we have found are either broken fragments or they are replacing other minerals. Our evidence shows that the opal formed before the meteorite was blasted off from the surface of the parent asteroid and sent into space, eventually to land on Earth in Antarctica."

"This is more evidence that meteorites and asteroids can carry large amounts of water ice. Although we rightly worry about the consequences of the impact of large asteroid, billions of years ago they may have brought the water to the Earth and helped it become the world teeming with life that we live in today."

The team used different techniques to analyse the opal and check its composition. They see convincing evidence that it is extra-terrestrial in origin, and did not form while the meteorite was sitting in the Antarctic ice. For example, using the NanoSims instrument at the Open University, they can see that although the opal has interacted to some extent with water in the Antarctic, the isotopes (different forms of the same element) match the other minerals in the original meteorite.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society [June 28, 2016]

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.

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 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.

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.

The mummies are due to travel to Asia next year.

Source: AFP [December 08, 2016]

Various specimens of Africa’s earliest coelacanth have been found in a 360 million year-old fossil estuary near Grahamstown, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

More than 30 complete specimens of the new fossil species, Serenichthys kowiensis, were collected from the famous Late Devonian aged Waterloo Farm locality, by palaeontologist Dr Robert Gess and described by him in collaboration with Professor Michael Coates of the University of Chicago.

Gess did the research whilst he was completing his PhD at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. An article describing the new species will be published in the in the prestigious Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London on Monday, 21 August.

“Remarkably, all of the delicate whole fish impressions represent juveniles. This suggests that Serenichthys was using a shallow, waterweed-filled embayment of the estuary as a nursery, as many fish do today,” says Gess.

The fossils come from black shales originally disturbed by road works at Waterloo Farm. These shales are the petrified compacted remains of mud, which was deposited in the quiet reaches of an estuary not unlike some of those along the Eastern Cape coast today.

“This earliest known record of a coelacanth nursery foreshadows a much younger counterpart, known from the 300 million year old Mazon Creek beds of Illinois in the United States,” says Gess.

“This glimpse into the early life history of ancient coelacanths raises further questions about the life history of the modern coelacanth, Latimeria, which is known to bear live young, but whether they, too, are clustered in nurseries remains unknown,” explains Coates.

360 million years ago, Africa was part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, made up of Africa, India, Australia, Antarctica and South America. At that time, the rocks of Waterloo Farm were forming along the shores of the semi-enclosed Agulhas Sea, not far from the South Pole.

Gess originally identified coelacanth remains from the locality whilst carrying out excavations at Waterloo Farm in the mid-1990s under the supervision of Dr Norton Hiller, of the Rhodes University Geology Department. These fossils were not, however, well enough preserved to be reconstructed and described. His painstaking excavation of tons of shale salvaged during subsequent roadworks has now shed light on dozens more specimens, a few of which are preserved in exquisite detail.

These were prepared under a microscope and have allowed the species to be reconstructed in minute detail. They prove to be a new genus and species.

Coelacanths are believed to have arisen during the Devonian Period (about 419.2 ± 3.2 million years ago), however only five species of reconstructable Devonian coelacanths have previously been described, in addition to a number of very fragmentary remains. None of these came from Africa, but rather from North America, Europe, China and Australia. The new species gives important additional information on the early evolution of coelacanths.

“According to our evolutionary analysis (conducted by Gess and Coates), it is the Devonian species that most closely resembles the line leading to modern coelacanths,” says Gess.

The new species was discovered a mere 100km from the mouth of the Chalumna River, off which the type specimen of Latimeria chalumnae (the first discovered modern coelacanth) was caught in 1938.

Furthermore, the Geology Department at Rhodes, where Gess was based when he found his first fossil coelacanth, is on the site of the former Chemistry Department where Latimeria was first described. In keeping with the naming of its living relative (after an Eastern Cape river), the species name of the new fossil form, kowiensis, is after the Kowie River which rises among the hills where it was found, and the genus name, Serenichthys, honours Serena Gess, who provided land for the storage of more than 70 tons of black shale rescued from roadworks for ongoing research – in which all the new material was found.

All specimens have been deposited in the palaeontological collection of the Albany Natural History Museum, in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.

Source: University of the Witwatersrand [September 21, 2015]

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.

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."

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.

"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.

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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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