QuoteReplyTopic: Anthropology news updates Posted: 17-Jul-2014 at 13:33
Tooth plaque provides unique insights into our prehistoric ancestors' diet
An international team of researchers has found new evidence that our prehistoric ancestors had a detailed understanding of plants long before the development of agriculture.
By extracting chemical compounds and microfossils from dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) from ancient teeth, the researchers were able to provide an entirely new perspective on our ancestors' diets. Their research suggests that purple nut sedge (Cyperus rotundus) -- today regarded as a nuisance weed -- formed an important part of the prehistoric diet.
Crucially, the research, published in PLOS ONE and led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of York, suggests that prehistoric people living in Central Sudan may have understood both the nutritional and medicinal qualities of this and other plants.
The research was carried out at Al Khiday, a pre-historic site on the White Nile in Central Sudan. It demonstrates that for at least 7,000 years, beginning before the development of agriculture and continuing after agricultural plants were also available the people of Al Khiday ate the plant purple nut sedge. The plant is a good source of carbohydrates and has many useful medicinal and aromatic qualities.
Lead author Karen Hardy, a Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) Research Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of York, said: "Purple nut sedge is today considered to be a scourge in tropical and sub-tropical regions and has been called the world's most expensive weed due to the difficulties and high costs of eradication from agricultural areas. By extracting material from samples of ancient dental calculus we have found that rather than being a nuisance in the past, its value as a food, and possibly its abundant medicinal qualities were known. More recently, it was also used by the ancient Egyptians as perfume and as medicine.
"We also discovered that these people ate several other plants and we found traces of smoke, evidence for cooking, and for chewing plant fibres to prepare raw materials. These small biographical details add to the growing evidence that prehistoric people had a detailed understanding of plants long before the development of agriculture."
Al Khiday is a complex of five archaeological sites which lie 25km south of Omdurman; one of the sites is predominantly a burial ground of pre-Mesolithic, Neolithic and Later Meroitic age. As a multi-period cemetery, it gave the researchers a useful long-term perspective on the material recovered.
The researchers found ingestion of the purple nut sedge in both pre-agricultural and agricultural periods. They suggest that the plant's ability to inhibit Streptococcus mutans, a bacterium which contributes to tooth decay, may have contributed to the unexpectedly low level of cavaties found in the agricultural population.
Dr Stephen Buckley, a Research Fellow at the University of York's BioArCh research facility, conducted the chemical analyses. He said: "The evidence for purple nut sedge was very clear in samples from all the time periods we looked at. This plant was evidently important to the people of Al Khiday, even after agricultural plants had been introduced."
Dr Donatella Usai, from the Instituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente in Rome led the excavation and Dr Tina Jakob from Durham University's Department of Archaeology, performed the analysis of the human remains at Al Khiday. Anita Radini, an Archaeobotanist at the University of Leicester Archaeological Service (ULAS) and a PhD candidate at BioArCh, University of York, contributed to the analysis of microfossils found in the dental calculus samples.
Dr Usai said: "Al Khiday is a unique site in the Nile valley, where a large population lived for many thousands of years. This study demonstrates that they made good use of the locally available wild plant as food, as raw materials, and possibly even as medicine."
Dr Hardy added: "The development of studies on chemical compounds and microfossils extracted from dental calculus will help to counterbalance the dominant focus on meat and protein that has been a feature of pre-agricultural dietary interpretation, up until now. The new access to plants ingested, which is provided by dental calculus analysis, will increase, if not revolutionise, the perception of ecological knowledge and use of plants among earlier prehistoric and pre-agrarian populations."
Fieldwork was funded by the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, Centro Studi Sudanesi e Sub-Sahariani, and the Universities of Milano, Padova and Parma. The research was endorsed by the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) of Sudan.
Extinct human cousin gave Tibetans advantage at high elevation
Tibetans were able to adapt to high altitudes thanks to a gene picked up when their ancestors mated with a species of human they helped push to extinction, according to a new report by University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
An unusual variant of a gene involved in regulating the body's production of hemoglobin -- the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood -- became widespread in Tibetans after they moved onto the high-altitude plateau several thousand years ago. This variant allowed them to survive despite low oxygen levels at elevations of 15,000 feet or more, whereas most people develop thick blood at high altitudes, leading to cardiovascular problems.
"We have very clear evidence that this version of the gene came from Denisovans," a mysterious human relative that went extinct 40,000-50,000 years ago, around the same time as the more well-known Neanderthals, under pressure from modern humans, said principal author Rasmus Nielsen, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. "This shows very clearly and directly that humans evolved and adapted to new environments by getting their genes from another species."
This is the first time a gene from another species of human has been shown unequivocally to have helped modern humans adapt to their environment, he said.
Nielsen and his colleagues at BGI-Shenzhen in China will report their findings online July 2 in advance of publication in the journal Nature.
The gene, called EPAS1, is activated when oxygen levels in the blood drop, triggering production of more hemoglobin. The gene has been referred to as the superathlete gene because at low elevations, some variants of it help athletes quickly boost hemoglobin and thus the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood, upping endurance. At high altitude, however, the common variants of the gene boost hemoglobin and its carrier, red blood cells, too much, increasing the thickness of the blood and leading to hypertension and heart attacks as well as low-birth-weight babies and increased infant mortality. The variant or allele found in Tibetans raises hemoglobin and red blood cell levels only slightly at high elevation, avoiding the side-effects seen in most people who relocate to elevations above 13,000 feet.
"We found part of the EPAS1 gene in Tibetans is almost identical to the gene in Denisovans and very different from all other humans," Nielsen said. "We can do a statistical analysis to show that this must have come from Denisovans. There is no other way of explaining the data."
Harsh conditions on Tibetan plateau
The researchers first reported the prevalence of a high-altitude version of EPAS1 in Tibetans in 2010, based on sequencing of the genomes of numerous Han Chinese and Tibetans. Nielsen and his colleagues argued that this was the result of natural selection to adapt to about 40 percent lower oxygen levels on the Tibetan plateau. That is, people without the variant died before reproducing at a much higher rate than those with it. About 87 percent of Tibetans now have the high-altitude version, compared to only 9 percent of Han Chinese, who have the same common ancestor as Tibetans.
Nielsen and his colleagues subsequently sequenced the EPAS1 gene in an additional 40 Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese. The data revealed that the high-altitude variant of EPAS1 is so unusual that it could only have come from Denisovans. Aside from its low frequency in Han Chinese, it occurs in no other known humans, not even Melanesians, whose genomes are nearly 5 percent Denisovan. A high quality sequence of the Denisovan genome was published in 2012.
Nielsen sketched out a possible scenario leading to this result: modern humans coming out of Africa interbred with Denisovan populations in Eurasia as they passed through that area into China, and their descendants still retain a small percentage -- perhaps 0.1 percent -- Denisovan DNA. The group that invaded China eventually split, with one population moving into Tibet and the other, now known as Han Chinese, dominating the lower elevations.
He and his colleagues are analyzing other genomes to pin down the time of Denisovan interbreeding, which probably happened over a rather short period of time.
"There might be many other species from which we also got DNA, but we don't know because we don't have the genomes," Nielsen said. "The only reason we can say that this bit of DNA is Denisovan is because of this lucky accident of sequencing DNA from a little bone found in a cave in Siberia. We found the Denisovan species at the DNA level, but how many other species are out there that we haven't sequenced?"
Fossil Human Skulls Unearthed in Spanish Cave Shed Light on Neandertal Evolution
The recent recovery and analysis of 17 early human fossil skulls from the Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") cave pit site in the Sierra de Atapuerca cave system of northern Spain have illuminated our understanding of how Neandertals, a more ancient, extinct sister species ofHomo sapiens(modern humans), actually evolved, according to a study report published this week inScience.
Currently led by Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, archaeological teams have been excavating at the site for four decades, and have recovered the largest assemblage of early human fossils ever discovered at any one site in the world.
"After thirty years, we have recovered nearly 7,000 human fossils corresponding to all skeletal regions of at least 28 individuals," says study co-author Ignacio Martinez, Professor of Paleontology at the University of Alcalá. "This extraordinary collection includes 17 fragmentary skulls, many of which are very complete."
The 17 skulls, according to the researchers, represent a single population of a hominin (early human) species. Although some of have been studied before, seven are presented anew here, and six are more complete than ever before, after many hours of painstaking assemblage in the lab. Now, with the mostly intact samples for study, the researchers have been able to more clearly define the common features of what they believe to be a single population.
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The Sima de los Huesos site. Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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The fossils exhibited a mosaic of physical characteristics that could not be wholly attributed to any single, recognized human species to date. The skull samples showed clear Neandertal features in the face and teeth. The researchers suggest these 'Neandertal-derived' features were functionally related to mastication, or chewing. "It seems these modifications had to do with an intensive use of the frontal teeth," Arsuaga said. "The incisors show a great wear as if they had been used as a 'third hand," typical of Neanderthals." But elsewhere, the skulls showed characteristics that diverted from the Neandertal model. The braincase itself, for example, still showed features associated with more primitive hominins.
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Skull 17 from the Sima de los Huesos site in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain. Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Skull 15. Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Skull 9. Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Observations like these led the researchers to suggest support for the 'accretion model' of Neandertal evolution, or something similar to cladogenesis, wherein evolution takes place through a splitting of species into branches or "clades", leading to the development of a greater variety of sisterspecies.
However, according to Arsuaga,"we think based on the morphology that the Sima people were part of the Neanderthal clade, although not necessarily direct ancestors to the classic Neanderthals."
"One thing that surprised me about the skulls we analyzed," Arsuaga continued, "is how similar the different individuals were. The other fossils of the same geological period are different and don't fit in the Sima pattern. This means that there was a lot of diversity among different populations in the Middle Pleistocene."
In other words, because other European Middle Pleistocene fossil specimens found in Europe do not exhibit the suite of features seen in this fossil group, the researchers suggest that more than one evolutionary lineage appears to have coexisted during the European Middle Pleistocene, with that represented by the Sima sample being closer to the Neandertals. The work of Arsuaga et al. suggests that facial modification was the first step in Neandertal evolution, a mosaic pattern fitting the prediction of the accretion model.
Key to the study findings was the homogeneity of the Sima samples. "All of the individuals recovered at the site represent the same biological population which makes it possible for anthropologists to study individual variation as well as sexual differences in the skeleton and patterns of growth and development, among other aspects," report Arsuaga, et al. in a press release of the Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humano. "While considerable differences in size are apparent within the collection, with some larger skulls and some smaller ones, the anatomical features that anthropologists study to examine evolutionary relationships do not vary much within the Sima population. This combination of mosaic evolution and anatomical homogeneity led the authors to favor a branching pattern of evolution, known as cladogenesis in evolutionary studies, in the European Middle Pleistocene."
So what species do these Sima fossils represent? The study authors do not assign the fossils to any specific species. But mitochondrial DNA was recently extracted and analyzed from one of the Sima fossils. The results suggest that this population was not a group of "early Neandertals". Nor, as has been previously suggested, were they representatives of another early human species called Homo heidelbergensis, thought to be ancestral to the Neandertals. The Sima jawbones (mandibles) were observed to be anatomically distinct from that of heidelbergensis.
But there is much more to come from the Pit of Bones.
"With excavations continuing and new fossils being discovered each field season," report Arsuaga, et al., "there is certainly reason to believe that the Sima de los Huesos will yield more surprising findings in the future."
Prehistoric tipples revealed: Ancient Eurasians drank wines brewed from pine resin and fruit beers 9,000 years ago
We might think of quirky fruit beers made in small, independent breweries as a modern trend.
But in fact the practice goes back 9,000 years when high-ranking cavemen drank brews which included fruit and strange ingredients such as pine resin.
Unlike in modern times, alcohol was considered to be sacred and was used in ritual ceremonies, new research suggests.
Fossils and skeletons revealed evidence that elite people drank fruit wines and beer.
Elisa Guerra-Doce, a prehistory expert at the University of Valladolid in Spain told Live Science that the archaeological record of prehistoric Europe shows that people used mind-altering substances.
As well as historical accounts by ancient Greek writers, archaeologists have found macrofossil remains with mind-altering properties and some designs in tombs could have been inspired by altered states of consciousness.
Dr Guerra-Doce looked at macrofossil remains of psychoactive plants, residue from fermented alcoholic drinks, chemical compounds left on skeletons and artwork showing drinking scenes in a bid to piece together how alcohol and drugs were used in Eurasian prehistory.
Alcoholic residues suggest that ancient Eurasians drank fruity wines, beer made from barley and wheat and mead.
They also consumed fermented drinks made from dairy products.
While the making of alcohol seems to originate in China in around 7,000BC, 2,000 years later, people living in the Zagros Mountains of north-western Iran were drinking wine made with pine resin.
And scientists have discovered a professional winery in south-eastern Armenia dating from 4,000BC.
Experts think that the wine was made for mortuary practices as there were 20 graves and a number of cups unearthed nearby.
Some pottery fragments contained residues of beer and wine from burial sites and settlements.
Dr Guerra-Doce said: ‘Many tombs have provided traces of alcoholic drinks and drugs. I think these substances were used to aid in communication with the spirit world.’
Some artworks, such as a figurine known as the ‘Poppy Goddess’ show that drugs were also used ceremonially.
The figurine was found in a chamber in Crete thought to have been used by cult members. She has three moveable hairpins shaped like poppy capsules, which hint at how opium might have been extracted by people.
Her serene expression suggests the trance-like state ancient people may have entered into by inhaling opium fumes.
Dr Guerra-Doce thinks that alcohol and drugs were only used by people of high social standing in the vast region.
‘The main evidence to support that idea is the archaeological contexts where they have been found: tombs of high-status individuals and restricted ceremonial places,’ she said.
‘I think that prior to a large-scale production, alcoholic drinks were reserved for special events and they played a similar role as drug plants.’
But as larger scale wineries and breweries became more common, alcohol found its way into the hands of average people, who largely used it for hedonistic rather than ritualistic purposes.
Rock-Shelter in Spain Evidences Early Human Use of Fire
In a report co-authored by Michael Walker and colleagues of Spain's Murcia University, scientists suggest that early humans who lived in the Cueva Negra (Black Cave) rock-shelter of southeastern Spain about 800,000 years ago used fire, and that they exhibited behaviors that indicated a cognitively sophisticated late early Pleistocene use of resources and tools in their environment. The detailed report is published in the upcoming Volume 15 of Popular Archaeology Magazine.
The rock-shelter, located in the face of a cliff overlooking the Quipar river and the small village of La Encarnación, became the subject of initial exploration by archaeologists in 1981. But full systematic excavations didn't begin until 1990, when an archaeological team led by Walker and colleagues with the Murcia University Experimental Sciences Research Group undertook detailed investigation that continued for another 25 field seasons. What they uncovered were 5 meters of sediment containing late Pleistocene (somewhat before 780,000 years ago) finds, including hominin (early human, possiblyH. heidelbergensis) teeth, a rich artifact assemblage, and an array of ancient flora and fauna remains that bespoke an ancient climate of warm, moist environmental conditions. Their analysis and interpretation of the finds may have, they maintain, important implications for early human behavior.
"The most important findings at Cueva Negra concern human activity," write Walker and colleagues in their report. "Undoubted evidence of fire has been uncovered."* They point to the evidence of sediment combustion, thermally altered chert and burnt animal bone found in a layer measured at 4.5 meters in depth.
But they qualify their interpretation.
"A fire-place is not a hearth," the authors continue. "The Cueva Negra could have brought glowing brands left by a forest fire into the cave to establish and tend a fire where rain and wind would not put it out. They may well have been less afraid of fire outside than other animals they saw fleeing from it (which could have led them to play with fire in order to drive animals towards natural death traps, such as swamps, enabling dismemberment and roasting). This does not mean they could reproduce or control fire: there is a dearth of archaeological evidence for hearths or fire-pits before 0.5 Ma."
Cueva Negra is not the only site that has evidenced early use of fire by early humans. For example, the site of Bnot Ya'akov Bridge in Israel has been claimed to show human control of fire some time between 790,000 and 690,000 years ago, and evidence has emerged at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa for the use of fire by around 1 million years ago. There are also other sites showing this possibility in Africa and China. But Cueva Negra could be the earliest, if not one of the earliest, sites in Europe demonstrating this development.
Other findings suggested a clear mastery of material resources for survival. The assemblage of stone tool artifacts recovered (classified by the authors as "Acheulo-Levalloiso-Mousteroid") showed evidence of the use of three different core reduction methodologies or sequences, and that natural stone resources were exploited as much as 40 km downstream from the site and 30 km upstream.
Concludes Walker, et al., "Research at Cueva Negra throws new light, including fire-light, on the cognitive versatility, manual dexterity, and technical aptitude of early humans ca. 0.8 Ma in S.E. Spain. They exploited their surroundings in a competent fashion that implies precise knowledge and accurate awareness of what was available for survival."
Dating and DNA show Paleoamerican-Native American connection
Eastern Asia, Western Asia, Japan, Beringia and even Europe have all been suggested origination points for the earliest humans to enter the Americas because of apparent differences in cranial form between today's Native Americans and the earliest known Paleoamerican skeletons. Now an international team of researchers has identified a nearly complete Paleoamerican skeleton with Native American DNA that dates close to the time that people first entered the New World.
"Individuals from 9,000 or more years ago have morphological attributes -- physical form and structure -- distinctive from later Native American peoples," said Douglas Kennett, professor of environmental archaeology, Penn State. "What we have here is the unique combination of an adolescent Paleoamerican skeleton with a Native American DNA haplotype."
The skeleton of a teenage girl was found in Hoyo Negro, a deeply submerged chamber in the Sac Actun cave system in the eastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Alberto Nava Blank and a team of science divers discovered the skeleton along with many extinct animal remains deep inside this inundated cave in 2007. The divers named the girl Naia. The Hoyo Negro project is led by Pilar Luna and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico, Nava and James Chatters, owner of Applied Paleoscience, with funding from the National Geographic Society.
This collaborative interdisciplinary research effort is reported in today's (May 16) issue of Science.
Kennett and Brendan J. Culleton, postdoctoral fellow in anthropology, Penn State, were originally asked to directly date the skeleton. After traditional and well accepted direct-dating methods failed because the bones were mineralized from long emersion in warm salty water within this limestone cave system, they worked closely with colleagues to build a geochronological framework for Naia using a unique combination of techniques to constrain the age of the skeleton to the end of the ice age.
To build the case for a late Pleistocene age they collaborated with Yemane Asmerom and Victor Polyak from the University of New Mexico using global sea level rise data to determine when the cave system, which at the time Naia and the extinct animals entered was dry, filled with water. The site where Naia lies is now 130 feet below sea level and sea level rise would have raised the groundwater level in the cave system and submerged everything between 9,700 and 10,200 years ago. So initial estimates of the latest that animals and humans could have walked into the cave system was 9,700 years ago.
At the same time, the researchers experimented with uranium thorium dating the skeleton directly. Asmerom and Polyak tried to directly date Naia's teeth using this method, but that also did not work well.
The bones were found deep below today's ground surface in a collapsed chamber connected to the surface via a web of now flooded tunnels that Naia once walked along to fall to her untimely death. Because the caves are limestone, mineral deposits continued to form while the cave was largely dry. Working with Patricia Beddows, Northwestern University, Chatters noticed accumulations of calcium carbonate -- tiny rosettes of calcite deposited by water dripping off the cave roof -- which could be accurately dated using the uranium thorium method. Because these drip water deposits formed on top of Naia's bones, their date must occur after she fell in the cave. The oldest one dated so far is 12,000 years old.
Naia's tooth enamel was also radiocarbon dated to 12,900 years ago by Kennett's lab.
"Unfortunately, we can't rule out that the tooth enamel is contaminated with secondary carbonates from the cave system, but we removed potential contaminates using standard techniques and Tom Stafford, Stafford Research Laboratories, produced a comparable age," said Kennett. "We consider this a maximum age and when combined with the uranium thorium dates from the adhering speleothems, we argue that the skeleton dates between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago. Well placed as a Paleoamerican."
Morphologically, Naia does not look like a contemporary Native American, but mitochondrial DNA testing -- maternally inherited DNA -- carried out by Brian Kemp, Washington State University, and his collaborators shows that she has a D1 haplotype. This is consistent with the hypothesis that her ancestors' origins were in Beringia, a now partially submerged landmass including parts of Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon. Early humans moved into this area from elsewhere in Asia and remained there for quite some time. During that time they developed a unique haplotype that persists today in Native Americans. Genetically, Paleoamericans have similar attributes as modern Native Americans even if their morphology appears different.
"More work is needed," said Kennett. " There are still carbonate deposits on the bones of Naia and other animal bones in the cave. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the scientific diving community have nicely preserved the site so the next step will be to date additional samples to constrain the age of Naia and associated extinct animals further." Also working on this project were Eduard Reinhardt, McMaster University, Ontario; Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales, INAH; Deborah A. Bolnick, University of Texas at Austin; Ripan S. Malhi, University of Illinois; Dominique Rissolo, Waitt Institute; and Shanti Morell-Hart, Stanford University.
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The National Geographic Society, Archaeological Institute of America, Waitt Institute, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the National Science Foundation supported this work. Penn State, the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas at Austin and DirectAMS also supported this project.
Ground-breaking technique traces DNA direct to your ancestor's home 1,000 years ago
Visualization: World map with human genetic signatures overlaid.
Tracing where your DNA was formed over 1,000 years ago is now possible, thanks to a revolutionary technique developed by a team of international scientists led by experts from the University of Sheffield.
The ground-breaking Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool, created by Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences and Dr Tatiana Tatarinova from the University of Southern California, works similarly to a satellite navigation system as it helps you to find your way home, but not the one you currently live in -- but rather your actual ancestor's home from 1,000 years ago.
Previously, scientists have only been able to locate where your DNA was formed to within 700kms, which in Europe could be two countries away; however this pioneering technique has been 98 per cent successful in locating worldwide populations to their right geographic regions, and down to their village and island of origin.
The breakthrough of knowing where the gene pools that created your DNA were last mixed has massive implications for life-saving personalised medicine, advancing forensic science and for the study of populations whose ancestral origins are under debate, such as African Americans, Roma gypsies and European Jews.
Genetic admixture occurs when individuals from two or more previously separated populations begin interbreeding. This results in the creation of new gene pools representing a mixture of the founder gene pool.
Such processes are extremely common in history during migrations and invasions, for example, when the Vikings invaded Britain and Europe in the 11th Century and settled with locals some of them formed a new Viking-Anglo-Saxon gene pool, but some married other Vikings and maintained their original gene pool, allowing GPS to trace their Scandinavian origins.
Dr Eran Elhaik said: "If we think of our world as being made up of different colours of soup -- representing different populations -- it is easy to visualise how genetic admixture occurs. If a population from the blue soup region mixes with a population from the red soup region their off-springs would appear as a purple soup.
"The more genetic admixture that takes place, the more different colours of soup are introduced which makes it increasingly difficult to locate your DNA's ancestry using traditional tools like Spatial Ancestry analysis (SPA) which has an accuracy level of less than two per cent."
He added: "What we have discovered here at the University of Sheffield is a way to find not where you were born -- as you have that information on your passport -- but where your DNA was formed up to 1,000 years ago by modelling these admixture processes.
"What is remarkable is that, we can do this so accurately that we can locate the village where your ancestors lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago -- until now this has never been possible."
To demonstrate how accurate GPS predictions are, Dr Elhaik and his colleagues analysed data from 10 villages in Sardinia and over 20 islands in Oceania. The research published today in the journal Nature Communications shows that Dr Elhaik and his team were able to place a quarter of the residents in Sardinia directly to their home village and most of the remaining residents within 50km of their village. The results for Oceania were no less impressive with almost 90 per cent success of tracing islanders exactly to their island.
"This is a significant improvement compared to the alternative SPA tool that placed Oceanians in India," said Elhaik.
"In his third book, children's author L. Frank Baum revealed that Oz resided around Australia. It always troubled me that if I ever met anyone claiming to be from the wonderful world of Oz, I would like to be able to verify their origins and now we can!
"This technique also means that we can no longer easily classify people's ethnic identities with one single label. It is impossible for any of us to tick one box on a form such as White British or African as we are much complex models with our own unique identities. The notion of races is simply not plausible."
Tracing our ancestry is now a major social trend and genealogy is the number one hobby in America. An estimated one million people in the USA have already had their DNA genotyped. People can explore their DNA by simply taking a swab from inside their mouth and sending it to a company such as 23andme or ancestry.com for costs ranging from $99-$200.
Dr Elhaik's co-author, Dr Tatiana Tatarinova, developed a website making GPS accessible to the public.
"To help people find their roots, I developed a website that allows anyone who has had their DNA genotyped to upload their results and use GPS to find their ancestral home," said Dr Tatarinova, who is also an Associate Professor of Research Paediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.
"We were surprised by the simplicity and precision of this method. People in a given geographical area are more likely to have similar genetics. When they also have genetic traits typically found in other, distant regions, the geographical origin of those traits is generally the closest location where those traits can be found."
According to the researchers, in ethnically-diverse regions like the UK or US, where many people know only a few generations of their descendants, this kind of screening has huge, important medical implications.
Discovery of a certain genotype might indicate the potential for a genetic disease and suggest that diagnostic testing be done. Also, as scientists learn more about personalized medicine, there is evidence that specific genotypes respond differently to medications -- making this information potentially useful when selecting the most effective therapy and appropriate dosage. The investigators are currently designing a study to correlate pharmacokinetics -- the time course of drug metabolism -- with genotype.
Scientists Uncover Evidence of Change from Hunting to Herding at Early Neolithic Settlement
An international team of researchers examining the earliest known pre-ceramic Neolithic mound site in Turkey, calledAşıklı Höyük, suggests that humans shifted from hunting wild ungulates and small animals to managing sheep and goats at the site over a period of a few hundred years beginning on or before 8200 BCE.
The mound, located in south-central Turkey about 25 km southeast of Aksaray, Turkey, has been the subject of a number of studies and excavations in recent years, beginning with Professor Ian A. Todd in 1964. Subsequent investigations included salvage excavations by Professor Ufuk Esin (University of Istanbul) beginning in 1989, followed by those of Nur Balkan-Ath, also of Istanbul University, and more recent excavations in 2010.
Site finds have been stratified into 5 different levels, with the oldest (or earliest) being 5. The most significant findings for these study purposes were discovered in level 4, which contained evidence of human habitation dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period (a time period generally defined as lasting from 8500-5500 BCE), which is thought by many scholars to mark the transition from a hunter-gatherer way of life to a more settled way of life, including the beginnings of animal domestication.
Above and below: Multiple excavations at Aşıklı Höyük have revealed the telling stratigraphic sequencing of the site. Above credit Kvaestad, Wikimedia Commons, below credit Sarah Murray, Wikimedia Commons.
"This site preserves a surprisingly detailed record of human–animal interactions in a formative settlement," write study authors Mary C. Stiner, et al., in their recently released report. It is in part reflected in the gradual change in the human diet at the location:
A faunal trend through Levels 4–2 reveals a strategic trade-off in the meat diet, from a broad-spectrum strategy that emphasized diverse wild small animals and ungulates to a concerted exploitation of caprines [sheep and goats] in particular. Caprines constitute less than half of the total number of identified skeletal specimens (NISP) in upper Level 4, but caprines increase gradually to 85– 90% by the end of the time series in upper Level 2. The caprines were mainly sheep, which outnumbered goats by a factor of three or more in all periods.*
In addition, the study authors suggested that age-sex distributions of the caprines in upper Level 4 indicate selective manipulation [breeding] by humans by or before 8200 BCE, and that evidence of animal dung accumulation between structures demonstrates that the animals were held captive inside the settlement at that time.
"Taken together," the researchers conclude, "the zooarchaeological and geoarchaeological evidence demonstrate an emergent process of caprine management that was highly experimental in nature and oriented to quick returns. Stabling was one of the early mechanisms of caprine population isolation, a precondition to domestication."*
Anatomically Modern Humans Left Africa Earlier Than Previously Thought, Suggests Study
An international team of scientists conducting an analysis of the genetic diversity and cranial measurements of 10 African and Asian human populations conclude that anatomically modern humans may have dispersed out of Africa earlier than previously thought, and in more than one stage: initially into Asia by taking a southern route through Arabia as much as 130,000 years ago; and later into Northern Eurasia on a more northerly route 50,000 years ago.
The timing and nature of early modern human dispersal out of Africa has long been disputed among scholars, with competing theories or models about how and when it all occurred. The research team analyzed their data within the framework of the competing models, and came up with the model that best fits the results. "We tested for the first time to our knowledge the spatiotemporal dimensions of competing out-of-Africa dispersal models," write Hugo Reyes-Centeno and colleagues in their report, "analyzing in parallel genomic and craniometric data. Our results support an initial dispersal into Asia by a southern route beginning as early as ∼130 ka and a later dispersal into northern Eurasia by ∼50 ka."* Reyes-Centeno is a paleoanthropologist with the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. Other researchers included Katerina Harvati, also of Eberhard Karls University; Silvia Ghirotto and Guido Barbujani of the University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy; and Florent Détroit and Dominique Grimaud-Herve of the National Museum of Natural History, Paris, France.
"This is consistent with archaeological evidence for modern human occupation in the southern Arabian Peninsula at ∼125 ka," write the authors. "This date [130,000 ka] is in intriguingly closer correspondence with the genetic divergence estimates for our sampled populations, with a calendar date of divergence between Melanesians and South Africans at ∼116 ka, for example. No modern human fossils have been discovered in the southern Arabian Peninsula, but lithic artifacts show affinities with African assemblages, including those discovered alongside the fossil remains at Herto, Ethiopia, dated between ∼154–160 ka."*
Genetic studies and fossil evidence show that the first common ancestral population of modern humans resided in Africa between ∼100–200 ka, and that members of one branch left Africa by between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago. A prominent theory suggests that over time these humans replaced earlier human populations such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. Many scholars posit that the date of the earliest successful "out of Africa" migration took place about 60,000 years ago, according to genetic evidence, although recent archaeological finds on the Arabian Peninsula have suggested the possibility of a much earlier migration.
First Eurasians left Africa up to 130,000 years ago
A team of researchers led by the University of Tübingen's Professor Katerina Harvati has shown that anatomically modern humans spread from Africa to Asia and Europe in several migratory movements. The first ancestors of today's non-African peoples probably took a southern route through the Arabian Peninsula as early as 130,000 years ago, the researchers found. The study is published by Professor Katerina Harvati and her team from the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Ferrara, Italy, and the National Museum of Natural History, France. The study appears in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists tested different hypothetical dispersal scenarios, taking into account the geography of potential migration routes, genetic data and cranial comparisons. They found that the first wave of migration out of Africa started earlier than previously thought, taking place as early as the late Middle Pleistocene -- with a second dispersal to northern Eurasia following about 50,000 years ago.
Most scientists agree that all humans living today are descended from a common ancestor population which existed 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa. The decreasing genetic and phenotypic diversity observed in humans at increasing distances from Sub-Saharan Africa has often been interpreted as evidence of a single dispersal 50,000 to 75,000 years ago. However, recent genetic, archaeological and palaeoanthropological studies challenge this scenario.
Professor Harvati's team tested the competing out-of-Africa models of a single dispersal against multiple dispersals of anatomically modern humans. The scientists compared modern human crania from different parts of the world, neutral genetic data, and geographical distances associated with different dispersal routes. Likewise, they reconstructed population split times from both the genetic data and as predicted by each competing model. Because each dispersal scenario is associated with specific geographic and temporal predictions, the researchers were able to test them against the observed neutral biological distances between groups, as revealed from both genetic and cranial data.
"Both lines of evidence -- anatomical cranial comparisons as well as genetic data -- support a multiple dispersal model," says Katerina Harvati. The first group of our ancestors left Africa about 130,000 years ago and followed a coastal route through the Arabian Peninsula to Australia and the west Pacific region. "Australian aborigines, Papuans and Melanesians were relatively isolated after the early dispersal along the southern route," says Hugo Reyes-Centeno, first author of the study and member of the Tübingen team. He adds that other Asian populations appear to be descended from members of a later migratory movement from Africa to northern Eurasia about 50,000 years ago.
The researchers are confident that continued field work and advances in genetics will allow for fine-tuning of models of human expansion out of Africa. So far we can only speculate whether, for example, severe droughts in East Africa occurring between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago prompted migration or had an impact on the local evolution of human populations. The southern route region is a vast geographical space that has been understudied by archaeologists and anthropologists, so future work in this area will help support their findings.
Archaeologists at the University of York are challenging the traditional view that Neanderthal childhood was difficult, short and dangerous.
A research team from PALAEO (Centre for Human Palaeoecology and Evolutionary Origins) and the Department of Archaeology at York offer a new and distinctive perspective which suggests that Neanderthal children experienced strong emotional attachments with their immediate social group, used play to develop skills and played a significant role in their society.
The traditional perception of the toughness of Neanderthal childhood is based largely on biological evidence, but the archaeologists, led by Dr Penny Spikins, also studied cultural and social evidence to explore the experience of Neanderthal children.In research published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, they found that Neanderthal childhood experience was subtly different from that of their modern human counterparts in that it had a greater focus on social relationships within their group. Investigation of Neanderthal burials suggests that children played a particularly significant role in their society, particularly in symbolic expression.
The research team, which also included Gail Hitchens, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford, say there is evidence that Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured children for months and often years. The study of child burials, meanwhile, reveals that the young may have been given particular attention when they died, with generally more elaborate graves than older individuals.Neanderthal groups are believed to have been small and relatively isolated, suggesting important implications for the social and emotional context of childhood. Living in rugged terrain, there will have been little selection pressure on overcoming the tendency to avoid outside groups with a consequent natural emotional focus on close internal connections.
Dr Spikins, who has a new book on why altruism was central to human evolutionary origins, How Compassion Made Us Human, (Pen and Sword) published later this year, said: "The traditional view sees Neanderthal childhood as unusually harsh, difficult and dangerous. This accords with preconceptions about Neanderthal inferiority and an inability to protect children epitomising Neanderthal decline.
"Our research found that a close attachment and particular attention to children is a more plausible interpretation of the archaeological evidence, explaining an unusual focus on infants and children in burial, and setting Neanderthal symbolism within a context which is likely to have included children.
"Interpretations of high activity levels and frequent periods of scarcity form part of the basis for this perceived harsh upbringing. However, such challenges in childhood may not be distinctive from the normal experience of early Palaeolithic human children, or contemporary hunter-gatherers in particularly cold environments. There is a critical distinction to be made between a harsh childhood and a childhood lived in a harsh environment."
Humans and Neandertals interbred, new method confirms
Technical objections to the idea that Neandertals interbred with the ancestors of Eurasians have been overcome, thanks to a genome analysis method described in the April 2014 issue of the journalGenetics. The technique can more confidently detect the genetic signatures of interbreeding than previous approaches and will be useful for evolutionary studies of other ancient or rare DNA samples.
"Our approach can distinguish between two subtly different scenarios that could explain the genetic similarities shared by Neandertals and modern humans from Europe and Asia," said study co-author Konrad Lohse, a population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh. The first scenario is that Neandertals occasionally interbred with modern humans after they migrated out of Africa. The alternative scenario is that the humans who left Africa evolved from the same ancestral subpopulation that had previously given rise to the Neandertals.
Many researchers argue the interbreeding scenario is more likely, because it fits the genetic patterns seen in studies that compared genomes from many modern humans. But the new approach completely rules out the alternative scenario without requiring all the extra data, by using only the information from one genome each of several types: Neandertal, European/Asian, African and chimpanzee.
The same method will be useful in other studies of interbreeding where limited samples are available. "Because the method makes maximum use of the information contained in individual genomes, it is particularly exciting for revealing the history of species that are rare or extinct," said Lohse. In fact, the authors originally developed the method while studying the history of insect populations in Europe and island species of pigs in South East Asia, some of which are extremely rare.
Lohse cautions against reading too much into the fact that the new method estimates a slightly higher genetic contribution of Neandertals to modern humans than previous studies. Estimating this contribution is complex and is likely to vary slightly between different approaches.
"This work is important because it closes a hole in the argument about whether Neandertals interbred with humans. And the method can be applied to understanding the evolutionary history of other organisms, including endangered species," said Mark Johnston, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genetics.
Ancient nomads spread earliest domestic grains along Silk Road, study finds
Findings push back earliest known East-West interaction along Slik Road by 2,000 years
Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.
"Our findings indicate that ancient nomadic pastoralists were key players in an east-west network that linked innovations and commodities between present-day China and southwest Asia," said study co-author Michael Frachetti, PhD, an associate professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and principal investigator on the research project.
"Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said.
The study, to be published April 2 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, establishes that several strains of ancient grains and peas had made their way across Eurasia thousands of years earlier than previously documented.
While these crops have been known to exist much earlier in ancient China and Southwest Asia, finding them intermingled in the Bronze Age burials and households of nomadic pastoralists provides some of the earliest concrete signs for east-west interaction in the vast expanse of Eurasian mountains and the first botanical evidence for farming among Bronze Age nomads.
Bread wheat, cultivated at least 6,000 years ago in Southwest Asia, was absent in China before 2500 B.C. while broomcorn millet, domesticated 8,000 years ago in China, is missing in southwest Asia before 2000 B.C. This study documents that ancient grains from eastern China and soutwest Asia had made their way to Kazakhstan in the center of the continent by 2700-2500 B.C. (nearly 5,000 years ago).
"This study starts to rewrite the model for economic change across Eurasia," said first author Robert Spengler, PhD, a paleoethnobotanist and research associate in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL.
"It illustrates that nomads had diverse economic systems and were important for reshaping economic spheres more generally."
Findings are based on archaeobotanical data collected from four Bronze Age pastoralist campsites in Central Eurasian steppe/mountains: Tasbas and Begash in the highlands of Kazakhstan and Ojakly and Site 1211/1219 in Turkmenistan.
"This is one of the first systematic applications of archaeobotany in the region, making the potential for further future discovery very exciting," Spengler said.
Frachetti and a team of WUSTL researchers led the on-site excavations, working closely with archaeologists based in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Italy. Spengler conducted the paleoethnobotany laboratory work at WUSTL, under the directorship of Gayle J. Fritz, PhD, professor of archaeology and expert in human-plant relationships.
"Finding this diverse crop assemblage at Tasbas and Begash illustrates first evidence for the westward spread of East Asian and Southwest Asian crops eastward, and the surprise is that it is nomads who are the agents of change," Frachetti said.
Europeans have three times more Neanderthal genes for lipid catabolism than Asians or Africans
Contemporary Europeans have as many as three times more Neanderthal variants in genes involved in lipid catabolism than Asians and Africans.
Although Neanderthals are extinct, fragments of their genomes persist in modern humans. These shared regions are unevenly distributed across the genome and some regions are particularly enriched with Neanderthal variants. An international team of researchers led by Philipp Khaitovich of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai, China, show that DNA sequences shared between modern humans and Neanderthals are specifically enriched in genes involved in the metabolic breakdown of lipids. This sharing of genes is seen mainly in contemporary humans of European descent and may have given a selective advantage to the individuals with the Neanderthal variants.
The researchers analyzed the distribution of Neanderthal variants in the genomes of eleven contemporary human populations of African, Asian and European descent. They found that genes involved in the lipid synthesis contained a particularly high number of Neanderthal variants in contemporary humans of European origin, but not in Asians and Africans.
"These sequences show signs of recent positive selection," says Philipp Khaitovich of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai, China. "This may indicate that they give modern humans carrying the Neanderthal genotype a selective advantage."
Analyzing the influence of Neanderthal variants on lipid processing in modern humans, the researchers further found recent evolutionary changes in lipid concentration and expression of metabolic enzymes in brains of humans of European origin.
"We don't know what these lipid concentration changes do to the brain, but the fact that Neanderthal variants might have changed our brain composition has interesting implications," says Philipp Khaitovich. Further work is needed, however, in order to fully assess the potential functional effects of these changes.
Language 'evolution' may shed light on human migration out-of-Beringia: Relationship between Siberian, North American languages
This polar projection map of Asia and North America shows the approximate terminal Pleistocene shoreline. The center of geographic distribution of Yeniseian and Na-Dene language is in Beringia. From this center burgundy arrows extend toward the North American coast and into Siberia. A blue arrow indicates Interior dispersals of Na-Dene.
Evolutionary analysis applied to the relationship between North American and Central Siberian languages may indicate that people moved out from the Bering Land Bridge, with some migrating back to central Asia and others into North America, according to a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 12, 2014 by Mark Sicoli, from Georgetown University and Gary Holton from University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Languages evolve slowly overtime and may even follow human migratory patterns. A proposed language family known as the Dené-Yeniseian suggests that there are common language elements between the North American Na-Dene languages and the Yeniseian languages of Central Siberia. To investigate this further, scientists employed a technique originally developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between biological species called phylogenetic analysis, where a tree is constructed to represent relationships of common ancestry based on shared traits. Scientists used linguistic phylogeny to work out how approximately 40 languages from the area diffused across North America and Asia. The authors first coded a linguistic dataset from the languages, modeled the relationship between the data, and then modeled it against migration patterns from Asia to North America, or out-of-Beringia.
Results show an early dispersal of Na-Dene along the North American coast with a Yeniseian back migration through Siberia and a later dispersal of North American interior Na-Dene languages. Sicoli explained, "we used computational phylogenetic methods to impose constraints on possible family tree relationships modeling both an Out-of-Beringia hypothesis and an Out-of-Asia hypothesis and tested these against the linguistic data. We found substantial support for the out-of-Beringia dispersal adding to a growing body of evidence for an ancestral population in Beringia before the land bridge was inundated by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age."
Although the authors cannot conclusively determine the migration pattern just from these results, and state that this study does not necessarily contradict the popular tale of hunters entering the New World through Beringia, it at the very least indicates that migration may not have been a one-way trip. This work also helps demonstrate the usefulness of evolutionary modeling with linguistic trees for investigating these types of questions.
These finding suggest that phylogenetics may be used to explore the implications of deep linguistic relationships.
Natural selection has altered the appearance of Europeans over the past 5,000 years
Grave with an about 5,000 years old skeleton from a kurgan of the Yamnaya culture near the town Kirovograd in Ukraine.
There has been much research into the factors that have influenced the human genome since the end of the last Ice Age. Anthropologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and geneticists at University College London (UCL), working in collaboration with archaeologists from Berlin and Kiev, have analyzed ancient DNA from skeletons and found that selection has had a significant effect on the human genome even in the past 5,000 years, resulting in sustained changes to the appearance of people.
The results of this current research project have been published this week in an article entitled "Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 years" in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
For a number of years population geneticists have been able to detect echoes of natural selection in the genomes of living humans, but those techniques are typically not very accurate about when that natural selection took place. The researchers in Mainz and London now decided to take a new approach. This involved analyzing DNA from archaeological skeletons and then comparing the prehistoric data with that of contemporary Europeans using computer simulations. Where the genetic changes could not be explained by the randomness of inheritance, the researchers were able to infer that positive selection played a role, i.e., that frequency of a certain mutation increased significantly in a given population.
While investigating numerous genetic markers in archaeological and living individuals, Sandra Wilde of the Palaeogenetics Group at the JGU Institute of Anthropology noticed striking differences in genes associated with hair, skin, and eye pigmentation. "Prehistoric Europeans in the region we studied would have been consistently darker than their descendants today," says Wilde, first author of the PNAS article. "This is particularly interesting as the darker phenotype seems to have been preferred by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. All our early ancestors were more darkly pigmented." However, things must have changed in the last 50,000 years as humans began to migrate to northern latitudes.
"In Europe we find a particularly wide range of genetic variation in terms of pigmentation," adds co-author Dr. Karola Kirsanow, who is also a member of the Palaeogenetics Group at Mainz University. "However, we did not expect to find that natural selection had been favoring lighter pigmentation over the past few thousand years." The signals of selection that the Mainz palaeogeneticists and their colleagues at University College London have identified are comparable to those for malaria resistance and lactase persistence, meaning that they are among the most pronounced that have been discovered to date in the human genome. The authors see several possible explanations. "Perhaps the most obvious is that this is the result of adaptation to the reduced level of sunlight in northern latitudes," says Professor Mark Thomas of UCL, corresponding author of the study. "Most people of the world make most of their vitamin D in their skin as a result UV exposure. But at northern latitudes and with dark skin, this would have been less efficient. If people weren't getting much vitamin D in their diet, then having lighter skin may have been the best option."
"But this vitamin D explanation seems less convincing when it comes to hair and eye color," Wilde continues. "Instead, it may be that lighter hair and eye color functioned as a signal indicating group affiliation, which in turn played a role in the selection of a partner." Sexual selection of this kind is common in animals and may also have been one of the driving forces behind human evolution over the past few millennia.
"We were expecting to find that changes in the human genome were the result of population dynamics, such as migration. In general we expect genetic changes due to natural selection to be the exception rather than the rule. At the same time, it cannot be denied that lactase persistence, i.e., the ability to digest the main sugar in milk as an adult, and pigmentation genes have been favored by natural selection to a surprising degree over the last 10,000 years or so," adds Professor Joachim Burger, senior author of the study. "But it should be kept in mind that our findings do not necessarily mean that everything selected for in the past is still beneficial today. The characteristics handed down as a result of sexual selection can be more often explained as the result of preference on the part of individuals or groups rather than adaptation to the environment."
Toilet paper in antiquity...
"...That revelation appears in an article entitled “Toilet Hygiene in the Classical Era,” by French anthropologist and forensic medicine researcher Philippe Charlier and his colleagues. Their report examines tidying techniques used way back—and the resultant medical issues. Such a study is in keeping with the BMJ's tradition of offbeat subject matter for its late December issue—as noted in this space five years ago: “Had the Puritans never left Britain for New England, they might later have fled the British Medical Journal to found the New England Journal of Medicine.”
The toilet hygiene piece reminds us that practices considered routine in one place or time may be unknown elsewhere or elsetime. The first known reference to toilet paper in the West does not appear until the 16th century, when satirist François Rabelais mentions that it doesn't work particularly well at its assigned task. Of course, the ready availability of paper of any kind is a relatively recent development. And so, the study's authors say, “anal cleaning can be carried out in various ways according to local customs and climate, including with water (using a bidet, for example), leaves, grass, stones, corn cobs, animal furs, sticks, snow, seashells, and, lastly, hands.” Sure, aesthetic sensibility insists on hands being the choice of last resort, but reason marks seashells as the choice to pull up the rear. “Squeezably soft” is the last thing to come to mind about, say, razor clams.
Charlier et al. cite no less an authority than philosopher Seneca to inform us that “during the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar water.” Talk about your low-flow toilets. The authors go on to note the use of rounded “fragments of ceramic known as ‘pessoi’ (meaning pebbles), a term also used to denote an ancient board game.” (The relieved man on the Museum of Fine Arts's wine cup is using a singular pessos for his finishing touches.) The ancient Greek game pessoi is not related to the ancient Asian game Go, despite how semantically satisfying it would be if one used stones from Go after one Went.
According to the BMJ piece, a Greek axiom about frugality cites the use of pessoi and their purpose: “Three stones are enough to wipe.” The modern equivalent is probably the purposefully self-contradictory “toilet paper doesn't grow on trees.”
Some pessoi may have originated as ostraca, pieces of broken ceramic on which the Greeks of old inscribed the names of enemies. The ostraca were used to vote for some pain-in-the-well-you-know to be thrown out of town—hence, “ostracized.” The creative employment of ostraca as pessoi allowed for “literally putting faecal matter on the name of hated individuals,” Charlier and company suggest. Ostraca have been found bearing the name of Socrates, which is not surprising considering they hemlocked him up and threw away the key. (Technically, he hemlocked himself, but we could spend hours in Socratic debate about who took ultimate responsibility.)
Putting shards of a hard substance, however polished, in one's delicate places has some obvious medical risks. “The abrasive characteristics of ceramic,” the authors write, “suggest that long term use of pessoi could have resulted in local irritation, skin or mucosal damage, or complications of external haemorrhoids.”
...."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/toilet-tissue-anthropologists-uncover-all-the-ways-weve-wiped/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
Stones and ceramic pieces? Those people where some hard-core dudes. It definitely will make me look upon the term "ostracized" in more than one way from now on.
Talking Neanderthals challenge the origins of speech
A model of an adult Neanderthal male head and shoulders on display in the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Reconstruction based on the Shanidar 1 fossil (c. 80-60 kya).
We humans like to think of ourselves as unique for many reasons, not least of which being our ability to communicate with words. But ground-breaking research by an expert from the University of New England shows that our 'misunderstood cousins,' the Neanderthals, may well have spoken in languages not dissimilar to the ones we use today.
Pinpointing the origin and evolution of speech and human language is one of the longest running and most hotly debated topics in the scientific world. It has long been believed that other beings, including the Neanderthals with whom our ancestors shared Earth for thousands of years, simply lacked the necessary cognitive capacity and vocal hardware for speech.
Associate Professor Stephen Wroe, a zoologist and palaeontologist from UNE, along with an international team of scientists and the use of 3D x-ray imaging technology, made the revolutionary discovery challenging this notion based on a 60,000 year-old Neanderthal hyoid bone discovered in Israel in 1989.
"To many, the Neanderthal hyoid discovered was surprising because its shape was very different to that of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. However, it was virtually indistinguishable from that of our own species. This led to some people arguing that this Neanderthal could speak," A/Professor Wroe said.
"The obvious counterargument to this assertion was that the fact that hyoids of Neanderthals were the same shape as modern humans doesn't necessarily mean that they were used in the same way. With the technology of the time, it was hard to verify the argument one way or the other."
However advances in 3D imaging and computer modelling allowed A/Professor Wroe's team to revisit the question.
"By analysing the mechanical behaviour of the fossilised bone with micro x-ray imaging, we were able to build models of the hyoid that included the intricate internal structure of the bone. We then compared them to models of modern humans. Our comparisons showed that in terms of mechanical behaviour, the Neanderthal hyoid was basically indistinguishable from our own, strongly suggesting that this key part of the vocal tract was used in the same way.
"From this research, we can conclude that it's likely that the origins of speech and language are far, far older than once thought."
From surf to turf: Archaeologists and chemists trace ancient British diets
The change by our ancestors from hunter-gathers to farmers is one of the most intensively researched aspects of archaeology. Now a large-scale investigation of British archaeological sites dating from around 4,600 BC to 1,400 AD has examined millions of fragments of bone and analysed over 1,000 cooking pots.
The team, led by Professor Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, developed new techniques in an effort to identify fish oils in the pots. Remarkably, they showed that more than 99 per cent of the earliest farmer's cooking pots lacked sea food residues.
Other clues to ancient diets lie within human bones themselves, explored by the Cardiff group led by Dr Jacqui Mulville. The sea passes on a unique chemical signature to the skeletons of those eating seafood; while the early fisher folk possessed this signature it was lacking in the later farmers.
Lead author of the study, Dr Lucy Cramp said: "The absence of lipid residues of marine foods in hundreds of cooking pots is really significant. It certainly stacks up with the skeletal isotope evidence to provide a clear picture that seafood was of little importance in the diets of the Neolithic farmers of the region."
Returning to the pots, the Bristol team used a compound-specific carbon isotope technique they have developed to identify the actual fats preserved in the cooking pots, showing that dairy products dominated the menu right across Britain and Ireland as soon as cattle and sheep arrived.
The ability to milk animals was a revolution in food production as, for the first time humans did not have to kill animals to obtain food. As every farmer knows, milking stock requires a high level of skill and knowledge.
In view of this, team member, Alison Sheridan from the National Museum of Scotland concludes that: "The use of cattle for dairy products from the earliest Neolithic confirms the view that farming was introduced by experienced immigrants."
Viewed together the findings show that Early British hunters feasted on venison and wild boar and ate large quantities of sea food, including seals and shellfish. With the introduction of domestic animals some 6,000 years ago they quickly gave up wild foods and fishing was largely abandoned, and people adopted a new diet based around dairying.
Dr Cramp continued: "Amazingly, it was another 4,000 years before sea food remains appeared in pots again, during the Iron Age, and it was only with the arrival of the Vikings that fish became a significant part of our diet."
Dr Mulville said: "Whilst we like to think of ourselves as a nation of fish eaters, with fish and chips as our national dish, it seems that early British farmers preferred beef, mutton and milk."
Why people changed so abruptly from a seafood to farming diet remains a mystery. Professor Evershed said: "Since such a clear transition is not seen in the Baltic region, perhaps the hazardous North Atlantic waters were simply too difficult to fish effectively until new technologies arrived, making dairying the only sustainable option."
###
The study was funded by the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) with research on the Irish material funded by the European Union EU FP7 (Marie Curie Actions). It was a collaboration between the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff, the National Museum of Scotland and a number of other regional museums.
Paper
'Immediate replacement of fishing with dairying by the earliest farmers of the northeast Atlantic archipelagos' by Lucy J. E. Cramp, Jennifer Jones, Alison Sheridan, Jessica Smyth, Helen Whelton, Jacqui Mulville, Niall Sharples and Richard P. Evershed in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
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