The Red Lady was ‘even older’

 

The Red Lady of Paviland has always been a little coy about her age – but it appears she may be 4,000 years older than previously thought. Scientists say more accurate tests date the earliest human burial found in the UK to just over 29,000 years ago. When discovered in a cave on Gower in the 1820s the bones were thought to be around 18,000 years old, but were later redated to between 25,000 and 26,000. Researchers said it casts a new light on human presence in western Europe.

The skeleton of the Red Lady – actually a young male – was discovered at Goat’s Hole Cave at Paviland on Gower in 1823 by William Buckland, then a geology professor at Oxford University. It owes its name to the red ochre covering the bones.

Dr Thomas Higham of Oxford University said he and his colleague Dr Roger Jacobi of the British Museum had now done further tests and were “confident” of the new results. The remains were found along with a number of artefacts including ivory wands, bracelets and periwinkle shells. “The remains and artefacts were previously difficult to date accurately,” said Dr Higham. “Many of the bones were treated with preservations in the 19th Century and some of this contamination is often difficult to remove.”

He said their analysis was the bones were “just over” 29,000 years old. It would mean The Red Lady lived in an age when the climate was much warmer than it would have been 4,000 years later. Dr Higham added: “The data that we have got now is making a lot more sense.”

He said it was important for “our understanding of the presence and behaviour of humans in this part of the world at this time”. He also said it “might” suggest that the custom of burying people with artefacts originated in western Europe rather than eastern Europe as had previously been thought. “This raises new questions about the way in which these people spread and lived on the continent,” he added.

The remains of the Red Lady are to form part of a new exhibition opening at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff in December. The full findings of the new research are due to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution early next year.

Source: BBC News Online

Fossilized cashew nuts reveal Europe was important route between Africa and South America

 

Cashew nut fossils have been identified in 47-million year old lake sediment in Germany, revealing that the cashew genus Anacardium was once distributed in Europe, remote from its modern “native” distribution in Central and South America. It was previously proposed that Anacardium and its African sister genus, Fegimanra, diverged from their common ancestor when the landmasses of Africa and South America separated. However, groundbreaking new data in the October issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences indicate that Europe may be an important biogeographic link between Africa and the New World.

“The occurrence of cashews in both Europe and tropical America suggests that they were distributed in both North America and Europe during the Tertiary and spread across the North Atlantic landbridge that linked North America and Europe by way of Greenland before the rifting and divergence of these landmasses,” explain Steven R. Manchester (University of Florida), Volker Wilde (Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Sektion Palaeobotanik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), and Margaret E. Collinson (Royal Holloway University of London, UK). “They apparently became extinct in northern latitudes with climatic cooling near the end of the Tertiary and Quaternary but were able to survive at more southerly latitudes.”

The cashew family (Anacardiaceae) includes trees, shrubs, and climbers prominent in tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates around the world. A key feature is an enlarged hypocarp, or fleshy enlargement of the fruit stalk, which is a specialized structure known only in the cashew family.

The researchers examined possible fossil remains found in the Messel oil shales, near Darmstadt, Germany, which are dated to about 47 million years before the present and reveal the presence of a “conspicuously thickened” stalk. In four out of five specimens, this hypocarp was still firmly attached to the nut, indicating that the two were dispersed as a unit. According to the researchers, the size and shape of the hypocarp – like a teardrop and two or three times longer than it is wide – support its assignation to the Anacardium genus, common to South America, rather than the African Fegimanra genus, though the fossils have features common to both.

“The occurrence of Anacardium in the early Middle Eocene of Germany suggests . . . that the two genera [Anacardium and Fegimanra] diverged after dispersal between Europe and Africa,” the researchers write. “Presumably, Anacardium traversed the North American landbridge during the Early or Middle Eocene, at a time of maximal climatic warmth, when higher latitudes were habitable by frost-sensitive plants.”

The astoundingly close similarity between the fossil and modern day Anacardium also indicates little evolutionary change to the cashew since the mid-Eocene period: “Although cashews have been cultivated for human consumption for centuries, it is clear that they were in existence millions of years before humans. The cashew had already evolved more than 45 million years ago, apparently in association with biotic dispersers,” they write.

Reference: Steven R. Manchester, Volker Wilde, and Margaret E. Collinson, “Fossil Cashew Nuts from the Eocene of Europe: Biogeographic Links Between Africa and South America.” International Journal of Plant Sciences 68 (8): 1199-1206.

Source: EurekAlert!

Environmental setting of human migrations in the circum-Pacific Region

A new study by Kevin Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research and John Terrell of The Field Museum adds insight into the migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and into Asia less than 100,000 years before present (BP). The comprehensive review of human genetic, environmental, and archaeological data from the circum-Pacific region supports the hypothesis, originally based largely on genetic evidence, that modern humans migrated into eastern Asia via a southern coastal route. The expansion of modern human populations into the circum-Pacific region occurred in at least four pulses, in part controlled by climate and sea level changes in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. The initial “out of Africa” migration was thwarted by dramatic changes in both sea level and climate and extreme drought in the coastal zone. A period of stable climate and sea level 45,000-40,000 years BP gave rise to the first major pulse of migration, when modern humans spread from India, throughout much of coastal southeast Asia, Australia, and Melanesia, extending northward to eastern Russia and Japan by 37,000 years BP.

The northward push of modern humans along the eastern coast of Asia stalled north of 43° N latitude, probably due to the inability of the populations to adjust to cold waters and tundra/steppe vegetation. The ensuing cold and dry Last Glacial period, ~33,000-16,000 year BP, once again brought dramatic changes in sea level and climate, which caused abandonment of many coastal sites. After 16,000 years BP, climates began to warm, but sea level was still 100 m below modern levels, creating conditions amenable for a second pulse of human migration into North America across an ice-free coastal plain now covered by the Bering Sea.

The stabilization of climate and sea level in the early Holocene (8,000-6,000 years BP) supported the expansion of coastal wetlands, lagoons, and coral reefs, which in turn gave rise to a third pulse of coastal settlement, filling in most of the circum-Pacific region. A slight drop in sea level in the western Pacific in the mid-Holocene (~6,000-4,000 year BP), caused a reduction in productive coastal habitats, leading to a brief disruption in human subsistence along the then densely settled coast. This disruption may have helped initiate the last major pulse of human migration in the circum-Pacific region, that of the migration to Oceania, which began about 3,500 years BP and culminated in the settlement of Hawaii and Easter Island by 2000-1000 years BP.

Source: EurekAlert!

Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

This blog meme was created by Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My parent is The Primate Diaries

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:

Ilium by Dan Simmons

The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is:

Children of Men

The best cult novel in beat fiction is:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I am propagating this meme on to:

Remote Central
A Very Remote Period Indeed
Clioaudio

It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment ends up. Don’t let it go extinct!

Blog Carnival – Tangled Bank

The second blog carnival of the day is hosted by The Other 95%, a blog devoted to our spineless animal brethren. The 90th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival brings us everything from physiology to ecology, and from palaeobiology and archaeology to science and politics. There are some great posts to read, but I’d particularly highlight: ‘Evo-devo of mammalian molars‘ by PZ Myers and ‘Which Came First; Social Behavior or Elaborate Ornamentation?‘ by Grrlscientist.

Inca children’s countdown to sacrifice

Hair samples from naturally preserved child mummies discovered at the world’s highest archaeological site in the Andes have provided a startling insight into the lives of the children chosen for sacrifice. A team of scientists led by Dr Andrew Wilson at the University of Bradford analysed hair samples taken from the heads and from small accompanying bags of four mummies found in the Andes. These included the 15-year old “Llullaillaco Maiden” and the 7-year old “Llullaillaco Boy” whose frozen remains were found in 1999 at a shrine 25m from the summit of Mount Llullaillaco, a 6,739m volcano on the border of Argentina and Chile. The Maiden, described as a “perfect mummy” went on display for the first time last month in Salta, northwest Argentina.

Dr Wilson and colleagues studied DNA and stable light isotopes from the hair samples to offer insight into the lives of these children. Unlike samples of bone collagen and dental enamel, which give an average reading over time, hair growth allows scientists to capture a unique snapshot at different intervals over time, helping build up a picture of how the children were prepared for sacrifice over a period of months. The results are published  in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

“By examining hair samples from these unfortunate children, a chilling story has started to emerge of how the children were ‘fattened up’ for sacrifice,” says Dr Wilson, a Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeology Fellow.

It is believed that sons and daughters of local rulers and local communities were chosen for sacrifice, possibly as a way for the ruling Incas to use fear to govern their people. Some girls, know as acllas, were selected from around the age of four and placed under the guardianship of priestesses; some would later be offered as wives to local nobles, others consecrated as priestesses and others offered as human sacrifices.

By analysing stable isotopes found in the hair samples, Dr Wilson and colleagues were able to see that for much of the time prior to sacrifice, the children were fed a diet of vegetables such as potato, suggesting that they came from a peasant background. Stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen from an individual’s diet are deposited in their hair where they can remain unchanged over thousands of years.

However, in the twelve months prior to sacrifice, the isotopic evidence shows that the Maiden’s diet changed markedly to one that was enriched with plants such as maize, considered an “elite” food, and protein, likely to have come from charki (dried llama meat).

“Given the surprising change in their diets and the symbolic cutting of their hair, it appears that various events were staged in which the status of the children was raised” says Dr Wilson. “In effect, their countdown to sacrifice had begun some considerable time prior to death.”

Changes in the isotopes in the hair sample in the final 3-4 months suggest that the children then began their pilgrimage to the mountains, likely from Cuzco, the Inca capital. Whilst scientists cannot be certain how the children died, it is believed that they were first given maize beer (chicha) and coca leaves, possibly to alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness and also to inure them to their fate. This theory is supported by evidence of coca metabolites that the researchers found in the victims’ hair, and in particularly high concentrations in the Maiden’s.

“It looks to us as though the children were led up to the summit shrine in the culmination of a year-long rite, drugged and then left to succumb to exposure,” says co-author Dr Timothy Taylor, also of the University of Bradford. “Although some may wish to view these grim deaths within the context of indigenous belief systems, we should not forget that the Inca were imperialists too, and the treatment of such peasant children may have served to instil fear and facilitate social control over remote mountain areas.”

Previous research has shown that Llullaillaco Boy appears to have met a particularly horrific end. His clothes were covered in vomit and diarrhoea, features indicative of a state of terror. The vomit was stained red by the hallucinogenic drug achiote, traces of which were also found in his stomach and faeces. However, his death was likely caused by suffocation, his body apparently having been crushed by his textile wrapping having been drawn so tight that his ribs were crushed and his pelvis dislocated.

Source: EurekAlert!

Fish Diet Linked To Evolution

Chipped teeth from 10 million years ago have revealed new insights into fish diets and their influence on fish evolution, according to new research featured in the journal Science. The chips were found, along with scratches, on the teeth of fossil stickleback fish and reveal for the first time how changes in the way an animal feeds control its evolution over thousands of years.

This kind of study has previously not been possible because although fossils preserve direct evidence of evolutionary change over thousands and millions of years, working out exactly what a long-dead fossil animal was eating when it was alive, and establishing a link between feeding and evolution, is very difficult.

The stickleback tooth chips and scratches were formed 10 million years ago as part of the normal process of tooth wear while the fish were alive and feeding in a large lake in what is now Nevada. “Like footprints in sand, the wear on teeth preserves a trail of evidence of how a fish feeds and what it feeds on,” says Dr Mark Purnell from the University of Leicester, lead author on the report. “The difficult bit was learning how to read that trail.”

The research team, based at the universities of Leicester, UK, and Stony Brook, USA, captured living stickleback (of the common or garden pond variety), fed them different kinds of food in different conditions and then examined their teeth using a powerful electron microscope. The team also looked at the teeth of wild stickleback, which had been feeding naturally, from Alaskan lakes.

Professor Paul Hart, also from the University of Leicester, explains: “The teeth might be tiny, but we discovered a very clear picture. Stickleback that feed from lake bottoms have very different tooth wear from those that eat water fleas and the like which swim around in open water”. The fossil teeth have almost exactly the same wear patterns as living stickleback but they have changed through time.

Dr. Mike Bell, from Stony Brook University adds, “Stickleback are spiky little characters, with armour and spines on their sides and along their backs. We found that evolutionary changes in these characteristic features were closely linked to shifts in feeding away from the lake bottom. As feeding changed over thousands of years, the stickleback in the fossil sequence evolved to have fewer spines.”

Scientifically, this is highly significant. That feeding and diet is an important control on evolution is exactly what would be expected from evolution by natural selection, but this is the first time that this aspect of Darwin’s theory has been directly testable using fossils that record real evolutionary change over many thousands of years. “We now know that by looking at microscopic chips and scratches on fish teeth we can investigate important evolutionary questions that were previously in the realm of the unknowable” concludes Purnell.

The paper, ‘Correlated Evolution and Dietary Change in Fossil Stickleback’ by Mark Purnell, Michael Bell, David Baines, Paul Hart and Matthew Travis is published in the September 28 issue of Science.

Source: Science Daily

DNA Extracted From Woolly Mammoth Hair

Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller of Penn State, working with Thomas Gilbert from Copenhagen and a large international consortium, discovered that hair shafts provide an ideal source of ancient DNA — a better source than bones and muscle for studying the genome sequences of extinct animals. Their research achievement, described in a paper to be published in the journal Science on Sept. 28, includes the sequencing of entire mitochondrial genomes from 10 individual woolly mammoths.

Schuster and Miller, working at Penn State’s Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, and Gilbert, from the Center for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, led a team of collaborators that includes a large group of researchers and museum curators from the United States, Russia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The research team obtained hair from 10 woolly mammoths collected from a wide swathe of northern Siberia and with dates of death spanning approximately 38,000 years — from 50,000 years to 12,000 years ago. Before this study, only seven mitochondrial genomes from extinct animals had been published: four from ancient birds, two from mammoths and one from a mastodon.

“DNA in bones and muscle usually degrades and becomes contaminated with genetic material from other sources such as bacteria, limiting its usefulness in scientific studies,” Schuster explained. Because only a tiny proportion of ancient bones and muscle are preserved in such a way that uncontaminated DNA can be recovered, research with such materials has involved laborious efforts, sometimes spanning as long as six years for a single study. In contrast, Miller said, “Once I get the data from the genome sequencer, it takes only five minutes to assemble the entire mitochondrial genome.”

The discovery demonstrates that hair clippings can give researchers enormous power and efficiency for divining the genetic makeup of ancient species.

The methods the team members developed for efficiently generating and analyzing large amounts of ancient mitochondrial-genome sequences now position them to generate such data for other extinct species, as well as to sequence the huge nuclear genome of an extinct species. “The data already generated from this study set the stage for the sequencing of a complete mammoth genome,” said Schuster.

“We realized that the keratin in hair could protect the DNA it contains from outside influences and hence from the sorts of degradation that affect DNA in other parts of the body, such as bone,” Gilbert said. Hair also can more easily be cleaned of environmental contaminants, such as bacteria. The researchers discovered that, even if the hair is washed in a solution that kills and washes off external DNA, the genetic material within the hair is unaffected.

“When people thought of sequencing DNA from hair, the usual assumption was that the material must come from the hair root, which contains recognizable cells, because the hair shaft appears to be dead,” Miller explained; “however, we now know that a hair shaft consists essentially of DNA encased in a kind of biological plastic.” Protected in this way, the DNA resists damage and readily can be separated from any bacteria that may contaminate the sample. “We discovered, moreover, that the DNA in hair shafts is remarkably enriched for mitochondrial DNA, the special type of DNA frequently used to measure the genetic diversity of a population,” Gilbert added.

Several of the hair samples investigated were up to 50,000 years old. One of the samples came from the first specimen ever recorded: the so-called Adams mammoth, found in 1799 and dug out of the permafrost between1804 and 1806 by the botanist Michael Adams and members of the Tungus tribe. This mammoth died around 36,000 years ago. “Hair samples from this find were stored in a Russian museum for 200 years at room temperature, but still allowed for a complete analysis of its mitochondrial genome using only 0.2 grams of hair,” Schuster said. As a result, he uses the term “museumomics” for his dream of deriving molecular-genomic-analysis data from the specimens stored in the collections of Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl von Linne.

The new route to the genetic material of extinct animals also will enable researchers to study the relatedness of individual animals from different populations at a much higher resolution than previously thought possible. “We plan to use hair and other keratin-containing body parts, such as nail and horn, to untangle the secrets of populations that lived long ago, so these populations can send a message from the past about what it might have taken for them to survive,” Schuster said. “This discovery is good news for anyone interested in learning more about how species of large mammals can go extinct.”

Source: Science Daily

Whale and dolphin sonar evolution

U.S. biologists have determined that, as bats developed sonar to chase flying insects, whales and dolphins developed sonar to chase squid at night. And because squid migrate to deeper, darker waters during the day, toothed whales eventually perfected an exquisite echolocation system that allows them to follow the squid down to that “refrigerator in the deep, where food is available day or night, 24/7,” said evolutionary biologist Professor David Lindberg of the University of California-Berkeley and coauthor of a new paper on the evolution of echolocation in toothed whales.

“When the early toothed whales began to cross the open ocean, they found this incredibly rich source of food surfacing around them every night, bumping into them,” said Lindberg, a curator at University of California-Berkeley’s Museum of Palaeontology. “This set the stage for the evolution of the more sophisticated biosonar system that their descendants use today to hunt squids at depth.”

Lindberg and graduate student Nick Pyenson reported their research in the July 23 online edition of the journal Lethaia in advance of its print publication.

Source: Science Daily

Blog Carnival – Tangled Bank

Today’s second blog carnival comes courtesy of Dr Martin Rundkvist at Aaradvarchaeology. The 89th edition of the Tangled Bank has submissions on everything from beasties to doctorin’, and from neurology to climate change. Particularly interesting to me was the clear review of the weird world of virus taxonomy in ‘What’s in a Name?‘ at A Mad Tea-Party, as well as Grrlscientist’s explanation of how ‘Salmon + Salmon = Trout‘.

Confused?

It’s all the result of a little embryo manipulation, apparently.