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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics at play?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuzzy picture

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

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

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

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

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

Modern humans have been blamed for killing off the Neanderthals by out competing them, breeding with them and even outright murdering them.

But new research suggests it may actually have been infectious diseases carried by our modern ancestors as they migrated out of Africa that finished them off.

Scientists studying the latest genetic, fossil and archaeological evidence claim that Neanderthals suffered from a wide range of diseases that still plague us today.

They have found evidence that suggests our prehistoric cousins would have been infected by diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid, whooping cough, encephalitis and the common cold.

But anthropologists from Cambridge University and Oxford Brookes University say that new diseases carried by modern humans may have led to the downfall of Neanderthals.

They speculate that pathogens like Heliocbacter pylori, the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers, were brought to Europe by modern humans from Africa and may have infected Neanderthals, who would have been unable to fight off these new diseases.

However, Neandethals may have also helped modern humans by passing on slivers of immunity against some diseases to our ancestors when they interbred.

Dr Simon Underdown, a principal lecturer in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University and co-author of the study, said: 'As Neanderthal populations became more isolated they developed very small gene pools and this would have impacted their ability to fight off disease.

'When Homo sapiens came out of Africa they brought diseases with them.

'We know that Neanderthals were actually much more advanced than they have been given credit for and we even interbred with them.

'Perhaps the only difference was that we were able to cope with these diseases but Neanderthals could not.'

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals were not as different from modern humans as was originally thought.

Recent discoveries have suggested that rather than being brutish cavemen, Neanderthals had sophisticated culture, were master tool makers and may even have had their own language.

The new study suggests that Neanderthals also suffered from many of the same afflictions and complaints that modern humans experience.

Indeed, there is some evidence from caves that early humans may have burned their bedding in a bid to rid themselves of infestations of lice or bed bugs.

Dr Underdown and his colleague Dr Charlotte Houldcroft, a researcher in infectious diseases at Cambridge University and University College London, analysed recent genetic studies on Neanderthals and other early humans.

They also examined recent genetic research on common human pathogens that have aimed to trace their origins and combined it with fossil and archaeological evidence.

Most evidence from the fossil record suggest that Neanderthals tended to suffer traumatic injuries as a result of their hunter gatherer lifestyle, but there are also signs of inflammation and infection.

Their study, which is published on the open source database bioRxiv, contradicts the common view that infectious diseases only really became a problem for humans in the Holocene about 11,000 years ago when humans began living in dense settlements and farming livestock.

Instead, they say many of the diseases we see around us today were common during the pleistocene when Neanderthals dominated much of Europe and Asia between 250,000 and 45,000 years ago, when they disappeared.

They say pathogens like TB, typhoid and Crimean fever that were thought to be zoonoses caught from herd animals may have actually originated in humans and were only passed to animals during the rise of farming around 8,000 years ago.

Genetic sequencing of Neanderthal and Denisovan - another early human ancestor - DNA has shown that modern humans have inherited a number of genes from these extinct species.

These include genes that provide immunity to viral infections such as tick-borne encephalitis.

Dr Underdown said this virus would probably have been common in the forested areas of northern Europe that Neanderthals inhabited and so immunity would have been an advantage.

Other genes found in modern Papua New Guineans that are involved in the immune response against viruses like dengue and influenza may have come from Neanderthals.

Analysis of ancient DNA has also shown that Neanderthals carried genes that would have protected them against bacterial blood poisoning, or sepsis.

Dr Underdown said: 'There are genetic signals in the Neanderthal genome that suggest quite clearly that they were exposed to these types of diseases but also developed some resistance to them.

'It had been thought that many of these diseases began infecting humans with the population increases that came with domestication of animals and permanent settlements.

'Be here we have got Neanderthals being infected by these diseases long before those developments.'

Author: Richard Gray | Source: Daily Mail Online [April 03, 2015]

A research team led by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology scanned the skulls of Neandertals and found the small middle ear ossicles, which are important for hearing, still preserved within the cavities of the ear. To their surprise, the Neandertal ossicles are morphologically distinct from the ossicles of modern humans. Despite the differences in morphology, the function of the middle ear is largely the same in the two human species.

The authors relate the morphological differences in the ossicles to different evolutionary trajectories in brain size increase and suggest that these findings might be indicative of consistent aspects of vocal communication in modern humans and Neandertals. These findings are also of importance for shedding light on the emergence of human spoken language, which can only be inferred indirectly from the archaeological and fossil record.

The three bones of the middle ear (hammer, anvil, stapes) make up the ossicular chain. This bony chain, which is found in all mammals is dedicated to the transmission of sound waves from the tympanic membrane to the inner ear and helps in amplifying the energy of airborne sound in order to allow the sound wave to travel within the fluid-filled inner ear.

Moreover, the ear ossicles are not only important for correct hearing but are also the smallest bones of our body. Thus, it does not surprise that the ossicles are among the most rarely found bones in the mammalian fossil record including the one of human ancestors. Given their important role in audition this lack of knowledge has ever been frustrating for researchers interested in studying hearing capacities of extinct species.

Tiny bones still present

This also applies to our closest extinct relatives - the Neandertals whose communicative capacities including existence of human spoken language is a major scientific debate ever since the first discovery of Neandertal remains. A research team led by Alexander Stoessel from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig used high-resolution computer tomography scans of Neandertal skulls and systematically checked for ossicles that potentially became trapped within the cavity of the middle ear.

And indeed, the researchers found ear ossicles in 14 Neandertal individuals coming from sites in France, Germany, Croatia and Israel, resulting in the largest sample of ear ossicles of any fossil human species. “We were really astonished how often the ear ossicles are actually present in these fossil remains, particularly when the ear became filled with sediments” says lead researcher Alexander Stoessel.

After virtually reconstructing the bones, the team - which also included scientist from the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena and the University College in London – compared them to ossicles of anatomically modern humans and also chimpanzees and gorillas which are our closest living relatives.

Since ossicles are not only small but also complex-shaped the researchers compared them by means of three-dimensional analysis that uses a much larger number of measuring points allowing for examination of the three-dimensional shape of a structure. “Despite the close relationship between anatomically modern humans and Neandertals to our surprise the ear ossicles are very differently shaped between the two human species” says Romain David who was involved in the study.

Based on the results of the morphological comparison the research team examined the potential reasons for these different morphologies. In order to see if these differences may affect hearing capacity of Neandertals and modern humans or reflects a tight relationship with the base of the skull they also analyzed the structures surrounding the ear ossicles. The outcome of this analysis was surprising, again since the functional parameters of the Neandertal and modern human middle ear are largely similar despite contrasting morphologies.

Similar communication skills in archaic humans

Instead, the team found the ear ossicles strongly related to the morphology of the surrounding cranial structures which also differ between the two human groups. The reseachers attribute these differences to different evolutionary trajectories that Neandertals and modern humans pursued in order to increase their brain volume which also impacted the structures of the cranial base which the middle ear is a part of.

“For us these results could be indicative for consistent aspects of vocal communication in anatomically modern humans and Neandertals that were already present in their common ancestor” says Jean-Jacques Hublin who is an author of this study and continues “these findings should be a basis for continuing research on the nature of the spoken language in archaic hominins”.

The findings are published in >Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [September 27, 2016]

A single entry of the plague bacterium into Europe was responsible for the Black Plague of the mid-14th century. This same strain sparked recurrent outbreaks on the continent over the following four centuries before spreading to China, where it triggered the third plague pandemic in the late 19th century. The wave of plague that traveled to Asia later became the source population for modern-day epidemics around the globe. The bacterium's routes over time were revealed by genome analyses published in >Cell Host & Microbe.

"Our study is the first to provide genetic support for plague's travel from Europe into Asia after the Black Death, and it establishes a link between the Black Death in the mid-14th century and modern plague," says first author Maria Spyrou of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, is one of the deadliest pathogens in human history, sparking three major pandemics: the Plague of Justinian, which struck the Roman Empire during the 6th and 8th centuries; the second plague pandemic, which first erupted in Europe in the mid-14th-century Black Death and continued to strike the continent in recurrent outbreaks until the mid-18th century; and the third plague pandemic, which emerged in China during the late 19th century.

Evidence based on ancient DNA samples and historical climate patterns has suggested that the recurrent outbreaks of the second pandemic were caused by multiple reintroductions of Yersinia pestis into Europe, most likely from Asia. Moreover, some scientists have recently suggested that the plague bacterium migrated from Europe to Asia after the Black Death, later giving rise to the third pandemic. But until now, genomic evidence to support this model was missing.

To shed light on the origin and path of the second pandemic, Spyrou and co-senior study authors Alexander Herbig, Kirsten Bos, and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History collected samples from plague-infected individuals buried in mass grave sites in Barcelona, Spain, and Ellwangen, Germany, as well as a single grave in Bolgar City, Russia.

"The mass burials where our samples come from often represent events where hundreds of people died of plague during a single outbreak," Herbig says. "This gives us an impression about how significant the impact of this disease was during medieval times."

The Bolgar City site was dated to the second half of the 14th century using coin artifacts known to have been minted after 1362. Radiocarbon dates from bone fragments and tooth roots were estimated at 1300-1420 for Barcelona, 1298-1388 for Bolgar City, and 1486-1627 for Ellwangen.

After analyzing DNA extracts from the teeth of 178 individuals, the researchers identified Y. pestis DNA in extracts from 32 individuals. Three individuals from Barcelona, Bolgar City, and Ellwangen had sufficient Y. pestis DNA for genome-level analysis. The researchers sequenced the genomes of these three ancient Y. pestis strains and compared them to 148 previously sequenced ancient and modern strains to reconstruct the Y. pestis phylogenetic tree.

The phylogenetic analysis revealed no differences between their Black Death strain from Barcelona and previously genotyped strains from mid-14th-century London. The simultaneous presence of the same strain in both southern and northern Europe suggests that Y. pestis entered the continent in a single wave rather than through multiple pulses during the Black Death.

These Black Death strains from London and Barcelona gave rise to a branch containing the Ellwangen strain and previously sequenced 18th-century strains from the Great Plague of Marseille in France. Moreover, all three newly reconstructed genomes and previously sequenced genomes from the second plague grouped together in the same branch on the phylogenetic tree. Taken together, these findings suggest that a single Y. pestis lineage was responsible for the Black Death and subsequent second pandemic outbreaks throughout Europe.

Meanwhile, the Bolgar City strain shared similarities with the Black Death London strain as well as all modern strains. This finding supports the idea that one Y. pestis lineage traveled from Europe to Asia after the Black Death, later sparking the third pandemic and modern-day epidemics worldwide.

"Our most significant finding revealed a link between the Black Death and modern plague," Krause says. "Though several plague lineages exist in China today, only the lineage that caused the Black Death several centuries earlier left Southeast Asia in the late 19th century pandemic and rapidly achieved a near worldwide distribution."

In future studies, the researchers plan to gain additional insights into the entry and end points of the Black Death in Europe. They hope to expand their sample range and explore these regions further to better understand the route traveled by the disease, the evolutionary changes it acquired at different stages, and the toll it had on the human population.

"We hope that our findings will highlight the importance for more extensive sampling and sequencing of both ancient and modern plague isolates around the world, and open up new research themes regarding the role played by Europe and West Asia in plague's evolution and ecology," Bos says.

Source: Cell Press [June 09, 2016]

From the Old Coal Station to the Modern Housing Complex

In many cities of the world directly in the city center there are the power stations. However, in London are going to transform old power station into quite modern multipurpose complex.

In London practically in city center directly on the bank of Thames there is an old coal power station. Because the such awful smoking monster is absolutely bad for center of London, the old station was been closed. And now, plan to convert this place into a multipurpose complex where will be: luxury apartments, hotels, showrooms, cafe, fitness clubs, fashion boutiques etc.

Modern London Apartments

Architectural company «Rafael Viñoly Architects» has received the grant from «The UK's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment» on creation of the project of reorganization of old coal factory in the center of London in a modern multipurpose complex.
This power station, certainly, will remain, as a history monument. Here there will be the 1st non-polluting energy office-center. Thus, power station will still develop energy, truth, now by means of solar batteries and wind turbines.

Round this building will the whole micro-district of new infrastructure: modern offices, new shops, sports arenas. Besides it, in plan to create the new station of the London underground. An excellent example of the modern utilization of the old infrastructural projects.

The Center of Industrial London

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]

The highly anticipated exhibition From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics, opens at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) on February 12, 2015. With some 50 outstanding ancient objects, and more than 100 related documents, photographs, and drawings, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the fascinating process through which archaeological objects are transformed from artifacts to artworks and, sometimes, to popular icons, as they move from the sites of their discovery, to be publicized by mass media and exhibited by museums.

From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics displays a series of spectacular early Mesopotamian objects alongside rich documentation, opening a window onto the ways in which archaeological finds of the 1920s and 1930s were transformed from artifacts into works of art. This process raises fundamental and critical questions: What biographies were initially given to these objects by their discoverers? How were these objects filtered through the eyes and voice of the press before they were seen by the public? How were the objects’ biographies affected by or reflective of the tastes of the time? How were the items presented in museums and received by artists of the period?

And finally, how do they continue to influence artistic practice today? The goal of Archaeology and Aesthetics is to demonstrate that these biographies do not begin and end in antiquity, or span the period from their discovery to the present, but continue to be written—through scholarly inquiry and reconsideration, through museum displays and the relationships they create between object and viewer, and through the ways in which they inspire artists of our time. The modern unearthing of an object is in fact the starting point for a multiplicity of approaches, each creating a better understanding of both the artifact and the people who produced it.

Archaeology and Aesthetics begins with a gallery devoted to a number of early Mesopotamian archaeological sites. Concentrating on the city of Ur and several sites in the Diyala River Valley, the display comprises many now-iconic objects, including a wide array of Sumerian stone sculptures, spectacular jewelry in a variety of precious and exotic materials, and such luxury items as ostrich-egg vessels and bronzes.

These exceptional artifacts are shown with field notebooks, excavator’s diaries, archival photography, and original newspaper clippings, among other archival items, illustrating the ways in which the finds were carefully described and presented to the press, the general public, and the academic community. Selected objects are followed as they are strategically presented to an international audience, effecting their transformation from archaeological artifact to aesthetic item.

The exhibition continues with a gallery devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic responses to ancient Mesopotamian objects. As these artifacts began to make their way into museums across pre-World War II Europe and North America, artists including Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Willem de Kooning drew inspiration from what they saw as a new kind of energy and vision inherent to the material.

Today, many artists return to the archaeological object to explore its role as a window onto human history and cultures rather than as an aesthetic object. Archaeology and Aesthetics demonstrates this approach with work by Jananne al-Ani, who was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, and lives in London, and by the Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz, who is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage. Both create art expressive of the traumatic loss of human heritage caused by wars and the spreading conflict in the Near and Middle East.

“From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics” runs through June 7 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

Source: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World [February 15, 2015]

In a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestor—or close relative—of Neanderthals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans, according to a presentation here yesterday at the fifth annual meeting of the European Society for the study of human evolution.

Ever since researchers first discovered thousands of bones and teeth from 28 individuals in the mid-1990s from Sima de los Huesos (“pit of bones”), a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, they had noted that the fossils looked a lot like primitive Neanderthals. The Sima people, who lived before Neanderthals, were thought to have emerged in Europe. Yet their teeth, jaws, and large nasal cavities were among the traits that closely resembled those of Neanderthals, according to a team led by paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid. As a result, his team classified the fossils as members of Homo heidelbergensis, a species that lived about 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many researchers have thought H. heidelbergensis gave rise to Neanderthals and perhaps also to our species, H. sapiens, in the past 400,000 years or so.

But in 2013, the Sima fossils’ identity suddenly became complicated when a study of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the bones revealed that it did not resemble that of a Neanderthal. Instead, it more closely matched the mtDNA of a Denisovan, an elusive type of extinct human discovered when its DNA was sequenced from a finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia. That finding was puzzling, prompting researchers to speculate that perhaps the Sima fossils had interbred with very early Denisovans or that the “Denisovan” mtDNA was the signature of an even more ancient hominin lineage, such as H. erectus. At the time, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who had obtained the mtDNA announced that they would try to sequence the nuclear DNA of the fossils to solve the mystery.

After 2 years of intense effort, paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has finally sequenced enough nuclear DNA from fossils of a tooth and a leg bone from the pit to solve the mystery. The task was especially challenging because the ancient DNA was degraded to short fragments, made up of as few as 25 to 40 single nucleotides. (Nucleotides—also known as base pairs—are the building blocks of DNA.) Although he and his colleagues did not sequence the entire genomes of the fossils, Meyer reported at the meeting that they did get 1 million to 2 million base pairs of ancient nuclear DNA.

They scanned this DNA for unique markers found only in Neanderthals or Denisovans or modern humans, and found that the two Sima fossils shared far more alleles—different nucleotides at the same address in the genome—with Neanderthals than Denisovans or modern humans. “Indeed, the Sima de los Huesos specimens are early Neanderthals or related to early Neanderthals,” suggesting that the split of Denisovans and Neanderthals should be moved back in time, Meyer reported at the meeting.

Researchers at the meeting were impressed by this new breakthrough in ancient DNA research. “This has been the next frontier with ancient DNA,” says evolutionary biologist Greger Larson of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

The close affinity with Neanderthals, but not with Denisovans or modern humans, suggests that the lineage leading to Neanderthals was separate from other archaic humans earlier than most researchers have thought. That means that the ancestors of modern humans also had to split earlier than expected from the population that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans, who were more closely related to each other than they were to modern humans. (Although all three groups interbred at low levels after their evolutionary paths diverged—and such interbreeding may have been the source of the Denisovan mtDNA in the first Sima fossil whose DNA was sequenced.) Indeed, Meyer suggested in his talk that the ancestors of H. sapiens may have diverged from the branch leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans as early as 550,000 to 765,000 years ago, although those results depend on different mutation rates in humans and are still unpublished.

That would mean that the ancestors of humans were already wandering down a solitary path apart from the other kinds of archaic humans on the planet 100,000 to 400,000 years earlier than expected. “It resolves one controversy—that they’re in the Neanderthal clade,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “But it’s not all good news: From my point of view, it pushes back the origin of H. sapiens from the Neanderthals and Denisovans.” The possibility that humans were a distinct group so early shakes up the human family tree, promising to lead to new debate about when and where the branches belong.

Author: Ann Gibbons | Source: ScienceMag/AAAS [September 11, 2015]

In the summer of 430 B.C., a mass outbreak of disease hit the city of Athens, ravaging the city’s population over the next five years. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the historian Thucydides, who witnessed the epidemic, described victims’ “violent heats in the head,” “redness and inflammation in the eyes,” and tongues and throats “becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath.” Patients would experience hot flashes so extreme, he wrote, that they “could not bear to have on [them] clothing or linen even of the very lightest description.” In the later stages of infection, the disease would end with “violent ulceration” and diarrhea that left most too weak to survive.

More than 2,000 years later, the Plague of Athens remains a scientific mystery. Thucydides’ account—the only surviving description of the epidemic—has been the basis for dozens of modern-day theories about its cause, including bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid fever, influenza, and measles. And in June, an article in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease suggested another answer: Ebola.

The article, written by the infectious-disease specialist Powel Kazanjian, is the latest in a string of papers arguing that Athens was once the site of an Ebola outbreak. The surgeon Gayle Scarrow first raised the suggestion in The Ancient History Bulletin in 1988. Eight years later, the epidemiologist Patrick Olson published a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comparing the symptoms of the Athens plague to those of Ebola, which had broken out in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) and Sudan in 1976. “The profile of the ancient disease,” he concluded, “is remarkably similar.”

But not everyone was on board with Olson’s theory. In a 1996 interview with the The New York Times, the epidemiologist David Morens argued that Thucydides wasn’t the most reliable source: Unlike his contemporary, Hippocrates, he wasn’t a physician, and many of the terms he used to describe the disease’s symptoms were ambiguous. For example, the ancient Greek phlyktainai could refer to either blisters or callouses. Noting Thucydides’ claim that the epidemic had originated “in the parts of Ethiopia above Egypt” (today’s sub-Saharan Africa), Morens also questioned how people with Ebola, a highly contagious and deadly disease, could make it all the way to Greece without dying along the way.

The duration of the Athens epidemic also presented another problem: At five years, it was much longer than any known Ebola outbreaks, the majority of which lasted less than a year. And finally, Morens asked, if Ebola had made it out of Africa millennia ago, why were there no other accounts of the disease re-appearing anywhere on Earth until 1976?

Unfortunately for both Olson and Morens, however, neither had a more concrete way to back up their arguments. Their efforts to identify the Plague of Athens, like all the other efforts before them, could only rely on the written record left by Thucydides, which made confirmation more or less impossible.

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge of ancient pathology: With DNA testing, it’s often possible to identify the cause of an epidemic that took place centuries or even millennia ago. Finding remains of those victims to test, though, is another story.

Sometimes, scientists get lucky. In 2001, for example, a mass grave was uncovered at a construction site in Vilnus, Lithuania. Based on uniform fragments found in the grave, the bodies were identified as belonging to soldiers in Napoleon’s army—somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 of them, hurriedly buried during the retreat from Moscow. When a team of anthropologists examined dental pulp taken from the bodies, they found that around one-third of them had died of typhus, a finding confirmed by tests of dead lice found at the site (the disease is transmitted through lice). Researchers had long suspected that typhus had contributed to Napoleon’s eventual defeat, but because knowledge of the disease was scant during his lifetime, historical accounts alone had never been enough to confirm it.

For the Plague of Athens, it seemed like a similar turning point had arrived in 1994, when during excavations for a planned Athens metro station at Kerameikos, an ancient graveyard used from the early Bronze age through Roman times. The excavators uncovered thousands of previously undiscovered tombs—including a set of seemingly hurried, unceremonious mass burials dating to 430 B.C., the year of the Plague of Athens.

Control of the site was turned over from the construction company to the Greek Ministry of Culture, which handles the discoveries of ancient ruins. In 2000, archaeologists turned over three teeth found at the site to a University of Athens team led by Manolis Papagrigorakis, an orthodontist and professor of dentistry, for DNA testing. Examining the dental pulp found in the teeth, Papagrigorakis’ team ran tests for seven diseases that had previously been suggested by other scholars: plague, typhus, anthrax, tuberculosis, cowpox, cat-scratch disease, and typhoid fever. The only match they identified on all three teeth was with the pathogen for typhoid fever. The researchers published the findings from their analysis in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2006.

Far from solving the mystery, though, Papagrigorakis’s team only muddled it further. In a letter to the editor in the same journal, zoologists from Oxford University and the University of Copenhagen argued that Papagrigorakis’s methodology was flawed because he failed to do a phylogenetic analysis (a way of examining evolutionary relationships) on the teeth. Using the DNA data published in Papagrigorakis’s study, they conducted their own phylogenetic analysis, concluding that the DNA of the tooth bacteria was related to, but not the same as, that of the pathogen for typhoid fever. “The Athens [DNA] sequence and typhoid would have shared a common ancestor in the order of millions of years ago,” they wrote.

The authors also suggested another possibility: that the DNA found in the teeth wasn’t from the Plague of Athens pathogen at all. “While we cannot exclude the possibility that the Athens sequence is a previously unidentified infectious agent,” they concluded, “it is quite reasonable to assume that the sequence is actually that of a modern, free-living soil bacterium, a possibility that could have been explored by extracting DNA from surrounding soil samples as additional negative controls.”

Papagrigorakis currently has a new study underway, using more modern techniques and a greater number of tooth samples, that he hopes will help to settle the debate. In the decade since he published his Athens study, advancements in DNA-sequencing technology have enabled scientists to answer a number of lingering questions about ancient epidemics, making new discoveries from very old tooth samples. In 2011, for example, scientists used teeth taken from bodies in one of London’s so-called “plague pits” to sequence the genome of the bacterium y. pestis, the source of the Black Death epidemic that had swept Europe in the 14th century. By comparing the old genome to modern-day strains, the researchers were able to reconstruct the bacterium’s evolutionary path over the centuries, finding support for the idea that the 14th-century pathogen was likely the root of the evolutionary tree leading to more recent outbreaks.

And in a 2014 study published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists were able to prove for the first time that the Plague of Justinian—which killed about 50 million people in Europe and the Byzantine Empire between 600 and 800 A.D.—was actually a strain of y. pestis, making it the first known outbreak. The team made its discovery by sequencing DNA from teeth taken from human remains that had been found in a German graveyard and dated to the time of the epidemic.

Even when ancient specimens are available, though, they may not be enough to identify a disease. Bacteria, like typhoid and plague, can be identified through DNA sampling, but this isn’t always the case with viruses. Many of them, including the viruses for Ebola, influenza, and measles, require an RNA sample for positive identification—and thus far, the oldest preserved RNA viral genome belongs to a 700-year-old specimen of caribou feces, much more recent than the Athens samples from in the 5th century B.C. The structure of RNA makes it much more unstable—and therefore more prone to degradation—than DNA, meaning that if the Plague of Athens was viral rather than bacterial, its source may remain a mystery.

“If Ebola virus was there, we will never know,” said Vinent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University professor and the host of the podcast This Week in Virology. “For that, we’ll need a time machine to bring us back to get samples.”

Partially due to these limitations, Kazanjian’s recent study doesn’t delve into dental-pulp analysis data. His argument is based on the similarity between the symptoms of the Plague of Athens and those of Ebola, an argument that he believes is strengthened by observations from the latest Ebola outbreak. The paper ends with a chart of the symptoms described by Thucydides, listed side-by-side against the symptoms of eight modern diseases that had previously been floated as possible explanations; of all of them, the symptoms for Ebola have the most overlap.

Even so, Kazanjian cautioned against referring to Ebola as a “probable” or even a “likely” cause. “The most accurate statement is that the cause remains unknown, and there are several possibilities,” he said, including that the Plague of Athens may have been a now-extinct disease with Ebola-like symptoms.

He also acknowledges the difficulty of making rigorous comparisons between Thucydides’s descriptions and modern-day medical knowledge: “I try not to get into the trap of saying what the most likely thing is,” he said.

But for Kazanjian—also a historian—solving the puzzle of the Plague of Athens is less compelling than exploring all the possibilities. The inquiry is “clearly fun to do,” he said, “no matter what your background is.”

Author: Simon Davis | Source: The Atlantic [September 16, 2015]

A genetic mutation in extinct European apes that enabled them to convert fruit sugar into fat could be a cause of the modern obesity epidemic and diabetes, according to scientists. Fossil evidence reveals that apes living around 16 million years ago, in what was then subtropical Europe, began to suffer as global cooling subsequently changed the forest, making the fruit they ate scarce.

Experts suggest that a mutation in the uricase gene which helps to convert fruit sugar (fructose) occurred around 15 million years ago. This aided apes in adding on fat layers so they could survive famines and harsh winters.

Persistence of the same mutation in all modern great apes and all modern humans, along with the fossil evidence, suggests that the now extinct European apes evolved into today's great apes and the earliest hominids.

Scientists have spent decades researching the genetic causes of obesity which is rarely found in other animals – apart from domesticated pets. The latest research focuses on fructose: a sugar which breaks down to form uric acid in the blood, according to a Sunday Times report.

The Western diet contains so much uric acid that it cannot be removed quickly enough, but triggers liver cells to turn fructose into fat, with the effect of humans adding on extra weight. The uricase mutation predisposes humans to obesity and diabetes in modern times. The results suggest a need to eat and drink much less fructose to fight obesity and prevent its dangerous complications.

"The gene enables uric acid levels to spike in response to two types of food," wrote Peter Andrews, professor of anthropology at University College London in Scientific American, co-authored with Richard Johnson, a professor of medicine in the US. "Those like beer that produce a lot of uric acid [directly] and those that contain a lot of fructose. These include honey and processed food that are high in table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When uric acid spikes we become susceptible to obesity and diabetes."

Obesity is considered as one of the biggest public health challenges of the century. Statistics show that it is affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. In the US alone, obesity costs at least $200 billion each year.

This medical condition also contributes to potentially fatal disorders such as cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Author: Fiona Keating | Source: International Business Times [November 20, 2015]

The 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]

For the earliest Egyptologists, a trip to the Egyptian Museum in Turin was considered indispensable. The museum's new director is seeking to return the almost 200-year-old museum to its one-time prominence, boosted by an overhaul of the collection and exhibit space of near-pharaonic proportions.

Museum director Christian Greco, who arrived in Turin 10 months ago, well into an ambitious five-year reinstallation of the museum's considerable treasures, aims to make the Egyptian Museum the second-most important in the world, after Cairo.

"Our museum needs to be back on the international scene," Greco said in an interview in front of the ancient Temple of Ellesjia on Tuesday, as the museum showed off its five-year, 50-million-euro ($53.6-million) reinstallation. `'For too many years we have been absent. For too many years, the focus has been on building and renovating the museum."

The museum, founded in 1824, is filled with treasures found in digs commissioned by Savoy kings and completed with the finds of Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli. The vast holdings include a captivating statue of Ramses II, one of the world's most important papyrus collections and nearly the entire contents of an architect's tomb dating back well over 3,000 years.

The large-scale renovations nearly doubled the space, allowing many artifacts to be taken out of storage and a more complete and modern exposition of those already on display. The museum remained open during the years of work, rotating closures of wings.

"It is a very important improvement from an archaeological and Egyptological point of view," said Guillemette Andreu, former director of Egyptology at the Louvre in Paris and member of the Turin Egyptian Museum board who toured the museum on Tuesday. She praised the chronological organization of the reinstallation from the 4th century B.C. to the Coptic period, new lighting and modern showcases.

Andreu said the Turin collection is unique because alongside masterpieces, it includes many objects that describe daily lives, funerary customs, religion as well as architecture and philosophy. "Even if you are not a scholar of Egypt, you can see how great this civilization was," she said.

The revamp puts the 6,500 objects on display in their archaeological context, transforming it from what Greco called `'an encyclopedia of Egyptology from A to Z," and includes 3-D films using historical photos that depict the moment of discovery.

"Turin has a fantastic collection and an incredible history, and to have it redisplayed in a modern museological way is fantastic," said Neal Spencer of the British Museum, who attended the Turin museum's opening and is on the advisory board. `'It is a very immersive experience. The collection really can tell the story of Egypt across several millennia."

The museum already belongs on the European itinerary of any Egyptologist, amateur or otherwise, along with the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin. But Greco's ambition is to make it a more integral part of the scientific community, restoring its standing to the one it enjoyed when one of Egyptology's founding figures, Jean-Francois Champollion, famously declared: `'The road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin."

Greco, a 39-year-old Italian who was previously at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, announced on Tuesday that the Turin museum in May will join an ongoing, 40-year-old dig in Saqqara, Egypt, that was founded by his former employer and the University of Leiden. Greco is also working on a coffin project with the Vatican and trying to organize a joint exposition of artifacts from the craftsmen's village of Medina with the Louvre.

"I suspect Greco has a lot of irons in the fire that are going to be very exciting that will be of real benefit to Egyptology and to world culture," said Kara Cooney at the University of California, Los Angeles, who will be traveling to Turin in June to look at the museum's coffins.

The museum is among the top 10 visited in Italy, with a record 567,000 visitors last year. Greco could like to increase that to more than 700,000. The opening of the expanded museum a month before the Expo 2015 world's fair in Milan, just a 40-minute train ride away, is expected to bring a boon in visitors, along with the rare exposition of the Shroud of Turin from April 19-June 24.

More information: 

EGYPTIAN MUSEUM: Turin, Italy. Tuesday-Sunday, 8:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; Sundays, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Full admission, 13 euros.

Author: Colleen Barry | Source: The Associated Press [March 31, 2015]

Apartment in London, United Kingdom

A modern townhouse located in the northern part of London was completely renovated by TG-STUDIO. Dark and soulless space has the new life. Architect Thomas Griem has introduced a central staircase that connects the six levels of single-parent together. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, kitchen and dining room smoothly follow each other without visible boundaries. All the rooms are made in a minimalist style with a Scandinavian accent, where a bright finish of natural materials is a reflection of the Norwegian roots of the owner.

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]

Scientific analysis of skeletons excavated as part of the Crossrail Programme has identified the DNA of the bacteria responsible for the 1665 Great Plague.

The discovery comes following a year-long study of skeletons found in a mass grave within the New Churchyard, the burial ground excavated by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) during construction of the new Elizabeth line station at Liverpool Street in 2015.

The mass grave has been dated between 1650 and 1670 using fragments of pottery, glass and coffin handles found within the pit. Local burial records confirm there was a dramatic rise in burial rates in the New Churchyard when the epidemic peaked in the summer of 1665. Historic accounts, such as Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ and the Court of Aldermen records, paint a vivid picture of the graveyard’s struggle to cope with a crisis of capacity at that time.

Samples from 20 individuals were tested for traces of the plague pathogen Yersinia pestis, and five were found to have been exposed to it before they died. Due to the disease’s virulence it is likely that this exposure was the cause of death. This is the first identification of plague DNA from 17th Century Britain. The bacteria itself perished days after the individuals died 351 years ago and is no longer active.

The Great Plague of 1665 was the last major bubonic plague epidemic in Britain and killed an estimated 100,000 people in London, almost a quarter of the population. Despite its scale, the pathogen responsible has eluded detection as the fast-acting disease left no traces on skeletons and the DNA has a low-survival rate when buried in the ground for hundreds of years.

Modern scientific techniques have allowed scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, to isolate this DNA from teeth extracted from the skeletons. The enamel on the teeth acted as protective capsules, preserving the DNA of bacteria that was in the person’s bloodstream at the time of death.

Molecular palaeopathologists are now attempting to sequence the pathogen’s full DNA genome. In doing so they hope to be able to compare the 1665 Great Plague to the 1348 Black Death epidemic as well as recent modern outbreaks. This will allow scientists to further understand the evolution and spread of the disease.

Jay Carver, Crossrail Lead Archaeologist, said: “The Crossrail project has given archaeologists a rare opportunity to study previously inaccessible areas of London. The discovery of the ancient DNA, which has eluded scientists for so long, is yet another piece of the jigsaw that we are piecing together to learn more about the lives and deaths of 16th to 18th Century Londoners.”

Don Walker, Senior Osteologist at MOLA, said: “This is a hugely significant discovery as it is the first identification of ancient DNA from the 1665 Great Plague in Britain. This discovery has the potential to greatly enhance scientist’s understanding of the disease and coupled with detailed research of the skeletons reveal more about this devastating epidemic and the lives of its victims.”

Vanessa Harding, Professor of London History, Birkbeck, University of London, said: “This is a very exciting finding, for the history of London, the history of disease, and the history of burial. It confirms thatYersinia pestis was present in early modern London plague epidemics, and links them epidemiologically with the 14th-Century Black Death and the 1720 Marseille plague. We still need, however, to understand why the disease manifested itself in so many different ways, and whether other pathogens made a significant contribution to these epidemics.

“The excavation also underlines the strength of custom and order in time of crisis, showing that plague burial, even in mass graves, could be controlled and orderly, with bodies in coffins laid neatly on each other – not quite the shambolic ‘plague pit’ of popular discourse.”

In total 42 individuals were excavated from the mass grave but archaeologists estimate that it may have contained as many as 100 people. The predominantly coffined burials were tightly packed in orderly rows that, over the centuries, collapsed in on each other as the coffins decayed. Although contemporary Plague Orders dictated that burials sit a minimum of 6ft from the surface, the top of the mass burial was only about 2ft from the surface. This was perhaps a matter of practicality for the gravediggers but ‘noisome stenches’ were reported, eventually leading to burial restrictions being placed on the New Churchyard.

Further scientific analysis of the skeletons will continue over the coming months. Isotopic analysis may reveal where these people grew up and if they moved in their lifetimes, and examination of the material trapped within the plaque on the teeth may show what they ate, and what diseases and pollutants they were exposed to.

In 2014, skeletons excavated during the construction of the Elizabeth line station at Farringdon were found to contain traces of the DNA of the Yersinia pestis bacteria from the first major plague epidemic in Europe, the 1348 Black Death.

Crossrail’s extensive archaeology programme is the largest in the UK. To date it has found more than 10,000 artefacts and fossils spanning 55 million years of London’s past at over 40 construction sites. Full findings from the archaeological excavation at Liverpool Street will be published in early 2017.

Author: Andrew Dempsey | Source: Crossrail [September 10, 2016]

Researchers have identified the first known example of fossilised brain tissue in a dinosaur from Sussex. The tissues resemble those seen in modern crocodiles and birds.

An unassuming brown pebble, found more than a decade ago by a fossil hunter in Sussex, has been confirmed as the first example of fossilised brain tissue from a dinosaur.

The fossil, most likely from a species closely related to Iguanodon, displays distinct similarities to the brains of modern-day crocodiles and birds. Meninges -- the tough tissues surrounding the actual brain -- as well as tiny capillaries and portions of adjacent cortical tissues have been preserved as mineralised 'ghosts'.

The results are reported in a >Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, published in tribute to Professor Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford, who died in 2014. Brasier and Dr David Norman from the University of Cambridge co-ordinated the research into this particular fossil during the years prior to Brasier's untimely death in a road traffic accident.

The fossilised brain, found by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks near Bexhill in Sussex in 2004, is most likely from a species similar to Iguanodon: a large herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous Period, about 133 million years ago.

Finding fossilised soft tissue, especially brain tissue, is very rare, which makes understanding the evolutionary history of such tissue difficult. "The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing," said co-author Dr Alex Liu of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, who was one of Brasier's PhD students in Oxford at the time that studies of the fossil began.

According to the researchers, the reason this particular piece of brain tissue has been so well-preserved is that the dinosaur's brain was essentially 'pickled' in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water -- similar to a bog or swamp -- shortly after its death. This allowed the soft tissues to become mineralised before they decayed away completely, so that they could be preserved.

"What we think happened is that this particular dinosaur died in or near a body of water, and its head ended up partially buried in the sediment at the bottom," said Norman. "Since the water had little oxygen and was very acidic, the soft tissues of the brain were likely preserved and cast before the rest of its body was buried in the sediment."

Working with colleagues from the University of Western Australia, the researchers used scanning electron microscope (SEM) techniques in order to identify the tough membranes, or meninges, that surrounded the brain itself, as well as strands of collagen and blood vessels. Structures that could represent tissues from the brain cortex (its outer layer of neural tissue), interwoven with delicate capillaries, also appear to be present. The structure of the fossilised brain, and in particular that of the meninges, shows similarities with the brains of modern-day descendants of dinosaurs, namely birds and crocodiles.

In typical reptiles, the brain has the shape of a sausage, surrounded by a dense region of blood vessels and thin-walled vascular chambers (sinuses) that serve as a blood drainage system. The brain itself only takes up about half of the space within the cranial cavity.

In contrast, the tissue in the fossilised brain appears to have been pressed directly against the skull, raising the possibility that some dinosaurs had large brains which filled much more of the cranial cavity. However, the researchers caution against drawing any conclusions about the intelligence of dinosaurs from this particular fossil, and say that it is most likely that during death and burial the head of this dinosaur became overturned, so that as the brain decayed, gravity caused it to collapse and become pressed against the bony roof of the cavity.

"As we can't see the lobes of the brain itself, we can't say for sure how big this dinosaur's brain was," said Norman. "Of course, it's entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for, but we can't tell from this specimen alone. What's truly remarkable is that conditions were just right in order to allow preservation of the brain tissue -- hopefully this is the first of many such discoveries."

"I have always believed I had something special. I noticed there was something odd about the preservation, and soft tissue preservation did go through my mind. Martin realised its potential significance right at the beginning, but it wasn't until years later that its true significance came to be realised," said paper co-author Jamie Hiscocks, the man who discovered the specimen. "In his initial email to me, Martin asked if I'd ever heard of dinosaur brain cells being preserved in the fossil record. I knew exactly what he was getting at. I was amazed to hear this coming from a world renowned expert like him."

Source: University of Cambridge [October 27, 2016]

Marine turtles experienced an evolutionary windfall thanks to a mass extinction of crocodyliforms around 145 million years ago, say researchers.

Crocodyliforms comprise modern crocodiles and alligators and their ancient ancestors, which were major predators that thrived on Earth millions of years ago. They evolved into a variety of species including smaller ones that lived on land through to mega-sized sea-swimming species that were up to 12 metres long. However, around 145 million years ago crocodyliforms, along with many other species, experienced a severe decline - an extinction event during a period between two epochs known as the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary.

Now a PhD student and his colleagues from Imperial College London and University College London have carried out an extensive analysis of 200 species of crocodyliforms from a fossil database. One of the findings of the study is that the timing of the extinction coincided with the origin of modern marine turtles. The team suggest that the ecological pressure may have been lifted from early marine turtle ancestors due to the extinction of many marine crocodyliforms, which were one of their primary predators.

Jon Tennant, lead author of the study from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: "This major extinction of crocodyliforms was literally a case of out with the old and in with the new for many species. Marine turtles, the gentle, graceful creatures of the sea, may have been one of the major winners from this changing of the old guard. They began to thrive in oceans around the world when their ferocious arch-predators went into terminal decline."

In the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers point to evidence in the records of a dramatic extinction of crocodyliforms during the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary. Up to 80 per cent of species on land and in marine environments were wiped out. This decline was primarily due to a drop in sea levels, which led to a closing off of shallow marine environments such as lagoons and coastal swamps. These were the homes and primary hunting grounds for many crocodyliforms.

The decimation of many marine crocodyliforms may also have laid the way for their ecological replacement by other large predatory groups such as modern shark species and new types of plesiosaurs. Plesiosaurs were long-necked, fat-bodied and small-headed ocean-going creatures with fins, which later went extinct around 66 million years ago.

Other factors that contributed to the decline of marine crocodyliforms included a change in the chemistry of ocean water with increased sulphur toxicity and a depletion of oxygen.

While primitive crocodyliform species on land also suffered major declines, the remaining species diversified into new groups such as the now extinct notosuchians, which were much smaller in size at around 1.5 metres in length. Eusuchians also came to prominence after the extinction, which led to today's crocodiles.

To carry out the study on crocodyliforms the team used the Paleobiology Database, which is a professionally curated digital archive of all known fossil records. The team analysed almost 1,200 crocodyliform fossil records.

Scientists have known since the early 1970s about the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary extinction from fossil records. However, researchers have focussed on other extinction events and as a consequence less has been done to understand in detail the effects of Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary extinction on species like crocodyliforms.

The next steps will see the analysis extended to other groups including dinosaurs, amphibians and mammals to learn more about the effects of the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary on their biodiversity

Source: Imperial College London [March 09, 2016]

Cutting-edge genome technology in Trinity College Dublin has cast more light on a mystery that has perplexed archaeologists for more than a decade. The origins of a set of Roman-age decapitated bodies, found by York Archaeological Trust at Driffield Terrace in the city, have been explored, revealing a Middle Eastern body alongside native British.

Archaeologists have speculated that the skeletons belonged to gladiators, although they could also have been soldiers or criminals. Several suffered perimortem decapitation and were all of a similar age – under 45 years old. Their skulls were buried with the body, although not positioned consistently – some were on the chest, some within the legs, and others at the feet.

Although examining the skeletons revealed much about the life they lived – including childhood deprivation and injuries consistent with battle trauma – it was not until genomic analysis by a team from Trinity College Dublin, led by Professor of Population Genetics, Dan Bradley, that archaeologists could start to piece together the origins of the men.

The Trinity College team recently published the first prehistoric Irish genomes and this analysis by Trinity PhD Researcher, Rui Martiniano, also breaks new ground as it represents the first genome analysis of ancient Britons.

From the skeletons of more than 80 individuals, Dr Gundula Muldner of the University of Reading, Dr Janet Montgomery of the University of Durham and Malin Holst and Anwen Caffel of York Osteoarchaeology selected seven for whole genome analyses. Despite variation in isotope levels which suggested some of the 80 individuals lived their early lives outside Britain, most of those sampled had genomes similar to an earlier Iron Age woman from Melton, East Yorkshire. The poor childhood health of these men suggests that they were locals who endured childhood stress, but their robust skeletons and healed trauma, suggest that they were used to wielding weapons.

The nearest modern descendants of the Roman British men sampled live not in Yorkshire, but in Wales. A man from a Christian Anglo-Saxon cemetery in the village of Norton, Teesside, has genes more closely aligned to modern East Anglia and Dutch individuals and highlights the impact of later migrations upon the genetic makeup of the earlier Roman British inhabitants.

However, one of the decapitated Romans had a very different story, of Middle Eastern origin he grew up in the region of modern day Palestine, Jordan or Syria before migrating to this region and meeting his death in York.

"Archaeology and osteoarchaeology can tell us a certain amount about the skeletons, but this new genomic and isotopic research can not only tell us about the body we see, but about its origins, and that is a huge step forward in understanding populations, migration patterns and how people moved around the ancient world," says Christine McDonnell, Head of Curatorial and Archive Services for York Archaeological Trust.

"This hugely exciting, pioneering work will become the new standard for understanding the origins of skeletons in the future, and as the field grows, and costs of undertaking this kind of investigation fall, we may be able to refine our knowledge of exactly where the bodies were born to a much smaller region. That is a remarkable advance."

As well as Trinity College Dublin, the multi-disciplinary scientific analysis involved scientists from the University of York and The York Archaeological Trust, as well as the universities of Durham, Reading and Sheffield, University College London and the University Medical Centre in Utrecht. The research also included experts from York Osteoarchaeology Ltd, City of York Council and the Natural History Museum.

The Roman skeletons sampled were all male, under 45 years old and most had evidence of decapitation. They were taller than average for Roman Britain and displayed evidence of significant trauma potentially related to interpersonal violence. All but one would have had brown eyes and black or brown hair but one had distinctive blue eyes and blond hair similar to the single Anglo-Saxon individual.

The demographic profile of the York skeletons resembles the population structure in a Roman burial ground believed to be for gladiators at Ephesus. But the evidence could also fit with a military context—the Roman army had a minimum recruitment height and fallen soldiers would match the age profile of the York cemetery.

Professor Dan Bradley, Trinity, said: "Whichever the identity of the enigmatic headless Romans from York, our sample of the genomes of seven of them, when combined with isotopic evidence, indicate six to be of British origin and one to have origins in the Middle East. It confirms the cosmopolitan character of the Roman Empire even at its most northerly extent."

PhD Researcher and lead author, Rui Martiniano, Trinity, said: "This is the first refined genomic evidence for far-reaching ancient mobility and also the first snapshot of British genomes in the early centuries AD, indicating continuity with an Iron Age sample before the migrations of the Anglo-Saxon period."

Professor Matthew Collins, of the BioArCh research facility in the Department of Archaeology at York, who co-ordinated the report on the research, "These genomes give the first snapshot of British genomes in the early centuries AD, showing continuity with the earlier Iron Age and evidence of migrations in the Anglo-Saxon period."

The paper is published in >Nature Communications.

Source: Trinity College Dublin [January 20, 2016]

Queen's Apartments

The London architectural studio «Two Create» has created a colorful interior for a new modern hospital of Queen Elizabeth in Birmingham.
The hospital interior looks rather cheerful and gives only positive emotions. Green apartments give more healthy happy life.

Queen Elizabeth's Hospital

The Museum of London today announced a ground-breaking research project to explore the effects of industrialisation on Londoners. The research hopes to uncover new clues about the very nature of disease and how it has affected people as Britain has moved into the age of industrialisation.

The research has been made possible by a City of London Archaeological Trust grant from a bequest made by the late Rosemary Green.

John Schofield, Secretary of the City of London Archaeological Trust, said: “The City of London Archaeological Trust is very happy that the Rosemary Green bequest is used to gather this cutting-edge data on the signs of industrialisation in the skeletal collections on the Museum of London.”

Leading the project is Jelena Bekvalac, based at the Museum of London’s Centre for Human Bioarcheology, along with her research team, Gaynor Western and Mark Farmer.

Jelena Bekvalac, said: “The most tangible evidence we have for the long-term consequences of the industrialisation process upon us is, quite simply, written in our bones. Using the very latest digital technology, we will examine the skeletal remains of over 1,000 adult men and women from industrial-era London in addition to a further 500 skeletons from the medieval metropolis.

“Modern health trends have seen a shift towards increasing life expectancy but we want to look again at what are often thought of as ‘man-made’ conditions like obesity and cancer. Given today’s more sedentary lifestyles, far removed from the physically active and natural existence of most of our forebears, there are some big questions about the origins of these diseases and how they relate to the modern environment.”

The research aims to address some of these questions by analysing diseases affecting the human skeleton. The museum will use the latest clinical techniques, including direct digital radiography, CT scanning and 3D modelling, to get a better understanding of what the bones tell us and to assess their change over time. The research aims to examine the influence of the industrial revolution, a pivotal catalyst in the formation of the modern age, on the changing nature of disease – from the medieval and post-medieval periods through to the present day.

The project offers an exciting opportunity to digitise some of London’s most important skeletal collections, while simultaneously telling a new story about the health of Londoners over time.

This work will culminate in the creation of an extensive new interactive digital resource that can be explored online. Jelena Bekvalac plans to make an immediate start on the digital scanning. She aims to publish her team’s findings as soon as possible and deliver a series of lectures about the work.

Source: Museum of London [April 24, 2015]