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New findings of multiple inscriptions show evidence of early Christianity at the "Burnt Church" near Galilee. The church was burned down in the early 7th Century by Islamic invaders.

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Researchers have recently uncovered four new inscriptions near Galilee that showcase evidence of early Christianity at a site commonly known as the "Burnt Church."

The four inscriptions were discovered while archaeologists were cleaning Byzantine mosaics at the Martyrion of Theodoros church, located at Hippos near the Sea of Galilee, reported All Israel News late last month.

The church is also known as the "Burnt Church" because it was burned down by Islamic Persian invaders in the early seventh century.

One Greek inscription found read: "Offering in favor of salvation and succor for Urania and Theodoros. Lord God, accept! Amen! In the time of indiction 4 and year 619."

Professor Gregor Staab of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of Cologne in Germany said that Urania and Theodoros likely created a private chapel as a final resting place for themselves at the site.

Staab went on to explain that the structure of the inscriptions implied that the Greek language had become distorted by local languages, noting that the "language of the mosaic inscriptions shows a remarkably strong decline both in the phonetic rendering and in the grammatical rules."

"[I]t was unthinkable to come up with the idea of using a language other than Greek - even if one was aware that this language was no longer mastered to the extent actually required," he continued, as reported by All Israel News.

"The original language of Christian liturgy and prayer to God was Greek, so it had to be considered impossible to deviate from using it in the Christian context."

The researchers also believed that the worship space would have segregated men and women, and also would have kept those who had not yet been baptized from the congregation, as well.

The Martyrion of Theodoros church was originally constructed sometime in the late fifth or early sixth centuries, and built in the Byzantine style, with carpets and mosaics with Christian symbolism.

The church is one of seven that has been discovered in the area, according to Haaretz, with other inscriptions being found by the excavation team back in 2019.

The space was known for its impressive view of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus performed many of His miracles and oversaw his earthly ministry, as recorded in the Gospels.

Email: michael.gryboski@christianpost.com Follow Michael Gryboski on Facebook: michael.gryboski Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter: MichaelGryboskiCP

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Archaeological discovery: Mosaic evidence of Early Christianity at 'Burnt Church' near Galilee

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Researchers have recently uncovered four new inscriptions near Galilee that showcase evidence of early Christianity at a site commonly known as the "Burnt Church." The four inscriptions were discovered while archaeologists were cleaning Byzantine mosaics at the Martyrion of Theodoros church, located at Hippos near the Sea of Galilee, reported All Israel News late last month.

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This article describes how "Wakanda Forever" highlighted mesoamerican culture by creating a character who originates from the Yucatan peninsula. Aztec and Mayan culture is seen by the inclusion of art, mythology, and language.

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In Marvel lore, Namor the Sub-Mariner, the half-human, half-merman ruler of the underwater kingdom Atlantis, is neither straightforward villain nor hero. An unwavering defender of his people, the aquatic antihero was one of the entertainment company's first characters, appearing in 1939's Marvel Comics #1alongside the Human Torch and the unmasked detective Angel.

In the decades since his debut, Namor has alternatively battled and teamed up with some of Marvel's most beloved superheroes, from Captain America to T'Challa (better known as Black Panther). Now, he's making his live-action debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2018's Black Panther.

Portrayed by Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta, the silver-screen version of Namor has a reimagined backstory, reigning over Talokan, a Mesoamerican-inspired underwater civilization, instead of the legendary Atlantis. Much like T'Challa's home of Wakanda, Talokan is a small, secretive, yet powerful kingdom. But while T'Challa opened Wakanda to the rest of the world at the end of Black Panther, Namor remains steadfast in his desire to keep Talokan hidden from outsiders.

"Maybe the most important twist in the character is that he's not a selfish person," Huerta tells Entertainment Weekly. "[Namor is] taking care of a community. He's not an individualist. He's part of a tribe."

Who is Namor?

In the comics, Namor is the mutant son of a human explorer and an Atlantean princess. Endowed with superior strength and swimming skills, he can also fly, making him a worthy adversary. He bears great resentment toward terrestrial civilizations that contaminate his ocean realm (among them the Nazis, whom the antihero fights in several World War II-era comics).

Kurly Tlapoyawa, an archaeologist, author and ethnohistorian who studies Mesoamerican civilizations, says Namor has always been depicted differently from the rest of Marvel's largely Eurocentric character lineup. His sleek, dark hair, widow's peak and pointy ears offer visual cues that he is a "nonwhite character," Tlapoyawa adds.

Growing up, Tlapoyawa, who is an Indigenous Chicano of Nawa descent, found Namor's " otherness " relatable. The character's fierce commitment to his people, rather than an ideology or the pursuit of power, led the young Tlapoyawa to view Namor as heroic, loyal and even romantic.

"When you look at his motivation in the comic books," the scholar says, "it was always about how [he could] protect his people. His loyalty was to his character, and that made him interesting."

Wakanda Forever's Namor adheres to a similar code of ethics. "Here is a man who believes 100 percent that he is the hero in his own story," says producer Nate Moore in a statement. "He doesn't see himself as a villain, because in Namor's eyes, what he is doing he's doing to protect a people who have already made it through a tragic history." (In the comics, Atlantis sinks below the sea following the Great Cataclysm, a disaster unleashed by the Celestials, a race of cosmic beings featured in the 2021 Marvel film ; in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, Talokan starts out as an underwater shelter for Indigenous people seeking refuge from Spanish colonization.)

What are the Mesoamerican influences behind Namor and Talokan?

While the comic versions of Namor and Atlantis take their cue from Greek mythology, Wakanda Forever draws on a different source of inspiration: Mesoamerica, a historic region spanning modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Mesoamerican Indigenous groups include the Maya, the Olmec, the Aztecs (or Mexica), and the Toltec.

One of the biggest changes to Namor's MCU story is his kingdom's rebranding as Talokan, a name likely derived from " Tlālōcān," an Aztec paradise overseen by the rain god Tlāloc. Namor himself also has a new look, though Huerta retains the comic book character's signature skimpy shorts, winged ankles and pointed ears.

Costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who won an Academy Award for her work on the first Black Panther film, created a series of intricate feathered headdresses for the Talokan ruler. "We were inspired by all of the pageantry that you see in Mesoamerican history," she tells Men's Health. "There are these vases that they painted to depict figures in headdresses and all kinds of clothing that I used to inspire the clothing of the Talokan." Carter and her colleagues added jade, kelp and other aquatic elements to the headdresses in order to channel underwater creatures like lionfish and sharks.

Namor's most impressive headdress alludes to a name bestowed upon him by his people. As M'Baku, leader of the Wakandan Jabari Tribe, explains in the new film's trailer, "His people do not call him general or king. They call him Ku'ku'lkán. The feathered serpent god." The moniker comes directly from the Maya, who worshipped a god of the same name and form. To the Aztecs, this feathered serpent deity was more commonly known as Quetzalcóatl.

"We worked with historians who were experts on [Maya] culture to learn about what part of the trajectory of the ancient Mesoamerica area we would draw from," Carter tells Men's Health. "And so we looked at beautiful sculptures of different scenes depicting the lifestyle of post-classic Yucatán, and the feathered-serpent figures were the ones that were the most powerful looking."

Why is Namor's kingdom called Talokan instead of Atlantis?

The legend of Atlantis, an advanced civilization supposedly lost beneath the waves thousands of years ago, first appeared in a Platonic parable around 360 B.C.E. In the Greek philosopher's telling, Atlantis ' half-god, half-human founders wielded immense power and riches that corrupted their character, leading them to lose the favor of the gods and fall in battle to the superior Athenians. As punishment for the Atlanteans' greed and immorality, the gods sent fires and earthquakes to submerge their home.

For centuries, few believed Atlantis was anything more than the fictitious subject of a morality tale. Then, in 1882, Ignatius L. Donnelly, a former congressman from Minnesota, published a book titled Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. In it, the fringe politician argued that Atlantis was a real civilization that passed its knowledge on to later cultures, including the Maya and the Egyptians. This version of events, says Tlapoyawa, looked overwhelmingly like the story of colonialism, in which white Europeans supposedly "civilized" the rest of the world.

By attributing the Maya's advancements to another civilization, Donnelly and writers who followed in his footsteps suggested that "Indigenous people were [not] smart enough to develop ideas on their own," Tlapoyawa tells . John W. Hoopes, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, adds, "It's impossible to separate the story of Atlantis from myths of white supremacy."

When Tlapoyawa learned that Namor would be portrayed as a Mesoamerican character, he "heard alarms go off." He adds, "That association with Atlantis has a long history that's rooted in racism. So the concern [was] how much is [the film] going to play into that."

Director RyanCoogler frames Atlantis' reinvention as Talokan as a way of offering audiences a new perspective on the lost civilization. "There have been a lot of representations and creative depictions of Atlantis based off of Plato's Atlantis, the Greco-Roman concept of a city sunk into the sea. That idea exists in a lot of different ways," he tells . "We wanted our film to exist alongside those movies and be different. It was really out of respect to the audience, not wanting to give them something similar to other things that have come before it."

Production designer Hannah Beachler spent two years building the film's underwater world, working closely with Carter, Coogler and Maya historians to faithfully reflect its Mesoamerican influences. Still, however closely Wakanda Forever hews to Mesoamerican tradition, the fact remains that it's a superhero movie about two fictional civilizations. "It's not a documentary film," Tlapoyawa says. "There's only so much that can be grounded in reality." For him, how thoughtfully the film represents Mesoamerican identity is more important than how closely it sticks to the actual history.

Hoopes criticizes Wakanda Forever 's blending of elements from different Mesoamerican cultures-for instance, the Aztec paradise Tlālōcān and the Maya serpent god Ku'ku'lkán. "It's too late [for the filmmakers] to be careful," he says. This conflation of cultures "results in misconceptions and stereotypes about people's real ancestors. ... Is there such a thing as a generic European? It's like confusing China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, or worse, generic Africans or Native people."

Why is Wakanda Forever's Indigenous representation so important?

In addition to Huerta (who learned to speak the Mayan language for his role), Wakanda Forever's Talokan cast includes Mexican actress Mabel Cadena as Namor's cousin Namora and Venezuelan actor Alex Livinalli as the warrior Attuma.

"To me, it's crazy because I can find in the movie the little things from my Mexican culture," Cadena tells . "And if you hear the Mayan language, it's like, 'Oh my God, can you believe we have representation for the first time in a movie like this?'"

Tlapoyawa lauds the film's Indigenous representation and casting, particularly that of 41-year-old Huerta, who is an outspoken critic of racism in his home country of Mexico. Yet the archaeologist remains fearful that Wakanda Forever could play into inaccurate, dangerous stereotypes about Indigenous peoples, whom he says are "taught to be ashamed" of themselves by a society grappling with the legacy of colonialism.

"If you dress Indigenous, you speak your language [and] you live in your community, you're punished for that," Tlapoyawa says.

Poorly presented pop culture depictions "can have a negative impact on how [viewers] see Maya people," Tlapoyawa adds. On the flip side, "a movie like Wakanda Forever has the opportunity to really help young [Indigenous] kids say, 'We're not ignorant, we're not lazy, we're not stupid,' the way that society tells us we are."

While Wakanda and Talokan are fictional, the African and Latin American cultures they represent are very real. How these cultures are "depicted in a movie that's going to be a global phenomenon," Tlapoyawa says, will have a tangible effect on how they're perceived by the public.

Despite his concerns about Wakanda Forever, Tlapoyawa is excited for the film's release and Namor's debut. He views the project as an incredible opportunity for Hollywood to "do its homework" and feature groups that are so often marginalized in these types of stories.

"I'm glad Mesoamerica is being included," he says. "I want [the movie] to be a success. And I want Huerta to be a global superstar."

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The Mesoamerican Influences Behind Namor From 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever'

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In Marvel lore, Namor the Sub-Mariner, the half-human, half-merman ruler of the underwater kingdom Atlantis, is neither straightforward villain nor hero. An unwavering defender of his people, the aquatic antihero was one of the entertainment company's first characters, appearing in 1939's Marvel Comics #1 alongside the Human Torch and the unmasked detective Angel.

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This is an interesting article about the actual affects of location, climate, and seasons on what the diets of our ancestors looked like.

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Our Ancestors Ate a Paleo Diet, With Carbs

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A modern hunter-gatherer group known as the Hadza has taught researchers surprising things about the highly variable menu consumed by humans past

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This post was about a lady who stayed with the Maasai people and it talked about how most of them do not know their age, but rather they just identify with their age sets.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anniina Sandberg (@theanthropologisttraveler)

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This article explains how a study of reptiles and other land vertebrates was able to trace the origin of vocal communication back to a common ancestor from 407 million years ago.

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The use of vocalizations as a resource for communication is common among several groups of vertebrates: singing birds, croacking frogs, or barking dogs are some well-known examples. These vocalizations play a fundamental role in parental care, mate attraction and various other behaviors. Despite its importance, little is known about when and at what stage in the evolutionary history of vertebrates this behavior first appeared. Comparative analyses can provide insights into the evolutionary origin of acoustic communication, but they are often plagued by missing information from key groups that have not been broadly studied.
Acoustic abilities are widespread in land vertebrates
An international research team led by the University of Zurich (UZH) has therefore focused on species that have never been accessed before. Their study includes evidence for 53 species of four major clades of land vertebrates -- turtles, tuataras, caecilians and lungfishes -- in the form of vocal recordings and contextual behavioral information accompanying sound production. "This, along with a broad literature-based dataset including 1800 different species covering the entire spectrum shows that vocal communication is not only widespread in land vertebrates, but also evidence acoustic abilities in several groups previously considered non-vocal," says first author Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, PhD student at the Paleontological Institute and Museum of UZH. Many turtles, for example, which were thought to be mute are in fact showing broad and complex acoustic repertoires.
Last common ancestor lived about 407 million years ago
To investigate the evolutionary origins of acoustic communication in vertebrates, the researchers combined relevant data on the vocalization abilities of species like lizards, snakes, salamanders, amphibians, and dipnoi with phylogenetic trait reconstruction methods. Combined with data of well-known acoustic clades like mammals, birds, and frogs, the researchers were able to map vocal communication in the vertebrate tree of life. "We were able to reconstruct acoustic communication as a shared trait among these animals, which is at least as old as their last common ancestor that lived approximately 407 million years before present," explains Marcelo Sánchez, who led the study.
Acoustic communication did not evolve multiple times
So far, the scientific consensus favored a convergent origin of acoustic communication among vertebrates since the morphology in hearing apparatus and its sensitivity as well as the vocal tract morphology vary considerably among vertebrates. But according to the UZH researchers, the available evidence for this hypothesis lacks relevant data from key species so far considered non-vocal or neglected. "Our results now show that acoustic communication did not evolve multiple times in diverse clades, but has a common and ancient evolutionary origin," concludes Sánchez.

Journal Reference:

Alex C. Kwan, David E. Olson, Katrin H. Preller, Bryan L. Roth. The neural basis of psychedelic action. Nature Neuroscience, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41593-022-01177-4

Cite This Page:

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evolutionary biology; frogs and reptiles; nature; new species; evolution; charles darwin; origin of life; fossils

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Vocal communication originated over 400 million years ago

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Acoustic communication is not only widespread in land vertebrates like birds and mammals, but also in reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. Many of them are usually considered mute, but in fact show broad and complex acoustic repertoires. According to researchers, the evolutionary origin of vocal communication dates back more than 400 million years.

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This article describes the finding of an entire community of Neanderthals, which is rare.

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The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia.

Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.

All of the Neanderthals were heavily inbred, a consequence, the researchers believe, of the Neanderthals' small population size, with communities scattered over vast distances and numbering only about 10 to 30 individuals.

Laurits Skov, first author on the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said the fact that the Neanderthals were alive at the same time was "very exciting" and implied that they belonged to a single social community.

Neanderthal remains have been recovered from numerous caves across western Eurasia - territory the heavy-browed humans occupied from about 430,000 years ago until they became extinct 40,000 years ago. It has previously been impossible to tell whether Neanderthals found at particular sites belonged to communities or not.

"Neanderthal remains in general, and remains with preserved DNA in particular, are extremely rare," said Benjamin Peter, a senior author on the study in Leipzig. "We tend to get single individuals from sites often thousands of kilometres, and tens of thousand of years apart."

In the latest work, researchers including Svante Pääbo, who won this year's Nobel prize in medicine for breakthrough studies on ancient genomes, examined DNA from the remains of Neanderthals found in the Chagyrskaya cave and nearby Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.

Neanderthals sheltered in the caves about 54,000 years ago, seeking cover to feast on the ibex, horse and bison they hunted as the animals migrated along the river valleys the caves overlook. Beyond Neanderthal and animal bones, tens of thousands of stone tools were also found.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how the ancient DNA points to the Neanderthals living at the same time, with some being members of the same family.

Further analysis revealed more genetic diversity in Neanderthal mitochondria - the tiny battery-like structures found inside cells which are only passed down the maternal line - than in their Y chromosomes, which are passed down from father to son. The most likely explanation, the researchers say, is that female Neanderthals travelled from their home communities to live with male partners. Whether force was involved is not a question DNA can answer, however. "Personally, I don't think there is particularly good evidence that Neanderthals were much different from early modern humans that lived at the same time," said Peter.

"We find that the community we study was likely very small, perhaps 10 to 20 individuals, and that the wider Neanderthal populations in the Altai mountains were quite sparse," Peter said. "Nevertheless, they managed to persevere in a rough environment for hundreds of thousands of years, which I think deserves great respect."

Dr Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin, called the study a "milestone" as "the first genomic snapshot of a Neanderthal community".

"Understanding how their societies were organised is important for so many reasons," Cassidy said. "It humanises these people and gives rich context to their lives. But also, down the line if we have more studies like this, it may also reveal unique aspects of the social organisation of our own Homo sapiens ancestors. This is crucial to understanding why we are here today and Neanderthals are not."

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DNA of 13 Neanderthals reveals 'exciting' snapshot of ancient community

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The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia. Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.

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I found a recent article about the discovery of skeletons found under a department store found in Wales. It was a burial ground for many people around the 16th century.

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(Image credit: Dyfed Archaeological Trust)

Archaeologists in Wales have unearthed the skeletal remains of more than 240 people - about half of which were children - in a cemetery that they believe was once part of a medieval friary.

Scientists made the discovery during an ongoing excavation of what was once St. Saviour's Priory, a holy site founded in 1256 by a Dominican order of monks. (Earlier this year, archeologists from the same team uncovered 17 skeletons in a different section of the site, which is located in Haverfordwest, a town in the southwestern Welsh county of Pembrokeshire.)

While the cemetery is thought to be associated with the friary, it wasn't uncommon for members of the surrounding community to be buried there for a small fee.

"It was considered the town cemetery," Fran Murphy (opens in new tab), the head of archaeological services at Dyfed Archaeological Trust, the organization that is excavating the site, told Live Science. "It was well used for many years from the 12th to the 16th centuries - everybody was buried there, not just monks and friars. It offers a snapshot of the community."

The friars who lived at St. Saviour's were known as "Black friars" due to the color of their attire, and would often preach Catholic teachings in the streets, becoming a visible part of the surrounding community.
Related: 86 skeletons unearthed from hidden medieval graveyard in Wales
Of the skeletons discovered, several "showed signs of trauma, including puncture wounds in their skulls," Murphy said. However, she said that there could be "many causes for that" and they won't know until the remains undergo further investigation. However, it is known that the area was "besieged in 1405 by [the Welsh military commander] Owain Glyndŵr and they could be victims of that conflict," according to (opens in new tab).

Archaeologists also found several crypts within the cemetery, including one containing the skeletal remains of someone "we think was a priest," Murphy said.

(Image credit: Dyfed Archaeological Trust)

"In his hands he held a pewter bowl on top of a patterned plate similar to the one used during communion to hold the wafer," she said. "This burial in particular indicates the vocation of that person."

During the dig, Murphy and her team also found several ornate floor tiles, which they believe may have been the remnants of a former church that sat on the site.

St. Saviour's remained operational until the 16th century, when the crown sold the property following the split between Henry VIII, king of England and Wales, and the Catholic Church, Live Science previously reported.

"We think that during the dissolution of the friary [in the 1500s], the church next to it was demolished," Murphy said, "but we're not sure exactly when that occurred."

In addition to the cemetery, the former priory also housed a number of buildings, including dormitories, scriptoriums (rooms devoted to writing and manuscripts), stables and a hospital, BBC News reported.

More recently, the site was home to Ocky White, a locally owned department store that closed in 2013 after more than a century of being in business. The excavations are part of an ongoing construction project that will include a future food emporium.

"Historical and cultural artifacts are a part of our Welsh heritage," Terry Edwards, managing director of John Weaver Contractors, the firm responsible for the construction project, said in a (opens in new tab). "They are a finite, non-renewable resource."

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Hundreds of medieval skeletons, half of them children, discovered under Wales department store

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(Image credit: Dyfed Archaeological Trust) Archaeologists in Wales have unearthed the skeletal remains of more than 240 people - about half of which were children - in a cemetery that they believe was once part of a medieval friary. Scientists made the discovery during an ongoing excavation of what was once St.

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Recent discoveries in ancient human evolution

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Recent discoveries in ancient human evolution

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This article discusses recent relevant anthropological discoveries in Anthropology in 2022.

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Discoveries about Ancient Human Evolution Win 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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Svante Pääbo’s work on sequencing the DNA of Neandertals and Denisovans, which won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, revealed surprising interbreeding among human species

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This article is about neanderthal DNA being found in a Siberian cave and what that DNA shows about the lives on neanderthals.

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Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home.

For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives.

The discovery of the family - reported on 19 October in Nature - and seven other individuals (including a pair of possible cousins from another clan) in the same cave, along with two more from a nearby site, represents the largest ever cache of Neanderthal genomes. The findings also suggest that Neanderthal communities were small, and that females routinely left their families to join new groups.

Gleaning insights into kinship and social structure is new territory for ancient-genome studies, which have typically focused on broader population history, says Krishna Veeramah, a population geneticist at Stonybrook University in New York. "The fact that we can do this with Neanderthals is incredible."

Buried treasure

Set on the banks of the Charysh River in the foothills of the Altai mountains, Chagyrskaya is 100 kilometres west of Denisova Cave, an archaeological treasure trove in which humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans (and at least one Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid) all lived intermittently over some 300,000 years,. Excavations of Chagyrskaya, however, have so far revealed only Neanderthal remains, dated to between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and characteristic stone tools.

In 2020, a genome sequence from a female Neanderthal from Chagyrskaya suggested she belonged to population distinct from those that occupied Denisova Cave much earlier. To study the cave's inhabitants in greater depth, a team of researchers led by palaeogeneticist Laurits Skov and population geneticist Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted DNA from 17 other ancient-human remains from Chagyrskaya, as well as several from a nearby cave, called Okladnikov.

The Chagyrskaya remains - teeth and bone fragments - yielded complete and partial genomes from 11 individuals (samples from Okladnikov were poorly preserved, and only two had enough DNA to extract and sequence).

With this trove, the researchers confirmed that Chagyrskaya's residents were more closely related to Neanderthals living in Europe around the same time than to those who occupied Denisova Cave tens of thousands of years earlier.

When Skov started comparing the genomes from Chagyrskaya, he got the surprise of his career. Two individuals, an adult male and a teenage female, shared half of their DNA, a situation that could occur only if they were siblings or a parent and child. To determine the relationship, the researchers examined mitochondrial DNA - which is maternally inherited and would therefore be identical between siblings and between a mother and child, but not between a father and child. This differed between the male and female, suggesting that they were father and daughter.

The researchers found more family members as they continued to examine the genetic material. They found that the father had two types of mitochondrial DNA - a characteristic known as heteroplasmy - that were shared by two other adult males from the cave, suggesting that they were all from the same maternal lineage. Heteroplasmies usually vanish after a few generations, says Skov, so the three probably lived around the same time. His team also identified members of another Neanderthal family: a male and female who were second-degree relatives, such as cousins.

"It makes you wonder what the familial relationship between these individuals were and how they were interacting with each other," says Skov. "It is a little glimpse into a Neanderthal family."

Social structures

The glut of Neanderthal genomes - which nearly doubles the number now available - has allowed researchers to look at other aspects of Neanderthal life. The genomes of the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals all had low diversity between maternal and paternal copies, a sign that the interconnected population of breeding adults was low. Researchers have uncovered similar patterns in mountain gorillas, which typically live in communities of fewer than 20 individuals, and other threatened species.

The researchers also found that the maternally inherited mitochondrial genomes were vastly more diverse than were the Y-chromosomes, which are passed down along the male line. One explanation for this is a steady influx of females from different Neanderthal communities, Skov says. Modelling from the team suggests that the patterns observed in genetic diversity would occur if more than half of women in small communities were born elsewhere.

"I think we can say this social structure was present in most Neanderthals," says palaeogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Spain. A decade ago, his team analysed 12 Neanderthals buried in a Spanish cave and found diverse mitochondrial DNA in women, but not in men, which they interpreted as evidence that females had left their communities. This makes Lalueza-Fox wonder whether it was mobile Neanderthal women who encountered - and mated with - Homo sapiens in other parts of Eurasia. Other scientists caution that Neanderthal groups living elsewhere or at other times might have adopted different social customs. "Until you get more points on the board, you can't tell," says Veeramah.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a writer and archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, is surprised that remains from so many related individuals - who were part of highly mobile hunter-gathering communities - have been recovered from one site. Especially perplexing is the presence of one baby teeth and two barely worn permanent teeth belonging to the same adolescent male. "To me, it suggests that this community of Neanderthals, either they tend to stay in their sites for quite a long time, or they revisit them very often," she says.

Chagyrskaya Cave is also chock full of bison and horse remains, and Skov and his colleagues think that the site served as a hunting camp of sorts during these animals' seasonal migrations. These hunts could have created opportunities for disparate Neanderthal communities to meet and mix, Sykes suggests. "I don't think Neanderthals were planning to meet up with each other, but it offers that opportunity."

The Chagyrskaya family is likely to grow. Only one-third of the cave has been excavated so far, and Skov and his colleagues have analysed less than one-quarter of the Neanderthal remains already discovered. Skov hopes that future studies can build more complete Neanderthal family trees - and perhaps find the teenage girl's mother. "She's probably also in there," he says.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03339-7

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First known Neanderthal family discovered in Siberian cave

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Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home. For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives.

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This article is about high class people in Medieval Norway having stronger bones than lower class people. The terms seem to be used correctly and it is interesting how socioeconomic status can have some patterns with biology. 

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This article is about high class people in Medieval Norway having stronger bones than lower class people. The terms seem to be used correctly and it is interesting how socioeconomic status can have some patterns with biology. 

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones: Higher status individuals -- especially women -- were taller and had stronger bones, according to buried remains

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In medieval Norway, high status individuals tended to be taller and to have stronger bones, possibly as a result of a favorable lifestyle, according to a new study.

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This article is about neanderthal DNA being found in a Siberian cave and what that DNA shows about the lives on neanderthals.

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Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home.

For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives.

The discovery of the family - reported on 19 October in Nature - and seven other individuals (including a pair of possible cousins from another clan) in the same cave, along with two more from a nearby site, represents the largest ever cache of Neanderthal genomes. The findings also suggest that Neanderthal communities were small, and that females routinely left their families to join new groups.

Gleaning insights into kinship and social structure is new territory for ancient-genome studies, which have typically focused on broader population history, says Krishna Veeramah, a population geneticist at Stonybrook University in New York. "The fact that we can do this with Neanderthals is incredible."

Buried treasure

Set on the banks of the Charysh River in the foothills of the Altai mountains, Chagyrskaya is 100 kilometres west of Denisova Cave, an archaeological treasure trove in which humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans (and at least one Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid) all lived intermittently over some 300,000 years,. Excavations of Chagyrskaya, however, have so far revealed only Neanderthal remains, dated to between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and characteristic stone tools.

In 2020, a genome sequence from a female Neanderthal from Chagyrskaya suggested she belonged to population distinct from those that occupied Denisova Cave much earlier. To study the cave's inhabitants in greater depth, a team of researchers led by palaeogeneticist Laurits Skov and population geneticist Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted DNA from 17 other ancient-human remains from Chagyrskaya, as well as several from a nearby cave, called Okladnikov.

The Chagyrskaya remains - teeth and bone fragments - yielded complete and partial genomes from 11 individuals (samples from Okladnikov were poorly preserved, and only two had enough DNA to extract and sequence).

With this trove, the researchers confirmed that Chagyrskaya's residents were more closely related to Neanderthals living in Europe around the same time than to those who occupied Denisova Cave tens of thousands of years earlier.

When Skov started comparing the genomes from Chagyrskaya, he got the surprise of his career. Two individuals, an adult male and a teenage female, shared half of their DNA, a situation that could occur only if they were siblings or a parent and child. To determine the relationship, the researchers examined mitochondrial DNA - which is maternally inherited and would therefore be identical between siblings and between a mother and child, but not between a father and child. This differed between the male and female, suggesting that they were father and daughter.

The researchers found more family members as they continued to examine the genetic material. They found that the father had two types of mitochondrial DNA - a characteristic known as heteroplasmy - that were shared by two other adult males from the cave, suggesting that they were all from the same maternal lineage. Heteroplasmies usually vanish after a few generations, says Skov, so the three probably lived around the same time. His team also identified members of another Neanderthal family: a male and female who were second-degree relatives, such as cousins.

"It makes you wonder what the familial relationship between these individuals were and how they were interacting with each other," says Skov. "It is a little glimpse into a Neanderthal family."

Social structures

The glut of Neanderthal genomes - which nearly doubles the number now available - has allowed researchers to look at other aspects of Neanderthal life. The genomes of the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals all had low diversity between maternal and paternal copies, a sign that the interconnected population of breeding adults was low. Researchers have uncovered similar patterns in mountain gorillas, which typically live in communities of fewer than 20 individuals, and other threatened species.

The researchers also found that the maternally inherited mitochondrial genomes were vastly more diverse than were the Y-chromosomes, which are passed down along the male line. One explanation for this is a steady influx of females from different Neanderthal communities, Skov says. Modelling from the team suggests that the patterns observed in genetic diversity would occur if more than half of women in small communities were born elsewhere.

"I think we can say this social structure was present in most Neanderthals," says palaeogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Spain. A decade ago, his team analysed 12 Neanderthals buried in a Spanish cave and found diverse mitochondrial DNA in women, but not in men, which they interpreted as evidence that females had left their communities. This makes Lalueza-Fox wonder whether it was mobile Neanderthal women who encountered - and mated with - Homo sapiens in other parts of Eurasia. Other scientists caution that Neanderthal groups living elsewhere or at other times might have adopted different social customs. "Until you get more points on the board, you can't tell," says Veeramah.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a writer and archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, is surprised that remains from so many related individuals - who were part of highly mobile hunter-gathering communities - have been recovered from one site. Especially perplexing is the presence of one baby teeth and two barely worn permanent teeth belonging to the same adolescent male. "To me, it suggests that this community of Neanderthals, either they tend to stay in their sites for quite a long time, or they revisit them very often," she says.

Chagyrskaya Cave is also chock full of bison and horse remains, and Skov and his colleagues think that the site served as a hunting camp of sorts during these animals' seasonal migrations. These hunts could have created opportunities for disparate Neanderthal communities to meet and mix, Sykes suggests. "I don't think Neanderthals were planning to meet up with each other, but it offers that opportunity."

The Chagyrskaya family is likely to grow. Only one-third of the cave has been excavated so far, and Skov and his colleagues have analysed less than one-quarter of the Neanderthal remains already discovered. Skov hopes that future studies can build more complete Neanderthal family trees - and perhaps find the teenage girl's mother. "She's probably also in there," he says.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03339-7

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First known Neanderthal family discovered in Siberian cave

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Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home. For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives.

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Skaftö wreck's cargo tells a tale of 15th century trade routes.

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Skaftö wreck's cargo tells a tale of 15th century trade routes

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Skaftö wreck's cargo tells a tale of 15th century trade routes

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This article reveals new information about how trade was cunducted in the Middle Ages. For example, the fact that calcium oxide (CaO) "was exported from Gotland in the 15th century." This is relevant as it provides insight into the resources different people had access to and how they were interacting with each other economically.

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Research at the University of Gothenburg has shown that the Skaftö wreck had probably taken on cargo in Gdańsk in Poland and was heading towards Belgium when it foundered in the Lysekil archipelago around 1440. Modern methods of analysis of the cargo are now providing completely new answers about the way trade was conducted in the Middle Ages.

"The analyses we have carried out give us a very detailed picture of the ship's last journey and also tell us about the geographical origins of its cargo. Much of this is completely new knowledge for us," says Staffan von Arbin, a maritime archaeologist.

For example, it was not previously known that calcium oxide (CaO), commonly known as quicklime or burnt lime, was exported from Gotland in the 15th century.

In 2003, the Skaftö wreck was found at the bottom of the sea off Lysekil, north of Gothenburg. But it is only now that researchers have been able to carry out analyses of its cargo using new, modern methods.

An international research team, headed by maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin at the University of Gothenburg, has succeeded in mapping the origins of its cargo and the probable route of the ship. The study contributes new knowledge about the goods traded in the Middle Ages and the trade routes in that period.

The cargo included copper, oak timber, quicklime, tar, and bricks and roof tiles. Samples of the cargo have been taken up from the wreck during previous underwater archaeological investigations carried out by the Bohusläns museum. But it's only now that analyses of its cargo have been possible using modern analysis methods.
From Gotland in Sweden
With these analyses, the researchers have been able to establish that the copper was mined in two areas in what is currently Slovakia, for example. The analyses also show that the bricks, timber and probably also the tar originated in Poland, while the quicklime is apparently from Gotland.

According to medieval sources, copper was transported from the Slovakian mining districts in the Carpathian Mountains via river systems down to the coastal town of Gdańsk (Danzig) in Poland. In the Middle Ages, Gdańsk was also the dominant port for exporting Polish oak timber.

"It is therefore very likely that it was in Gdańsk that the ship took on its cargo before it continued on what would be its final voyage."
Heading for Belgium
The composition of the cargo indicates that the ship was on its way to a western European port when, for unknown reasons, it foundered in the Bohuslän archipelago. Here, too, the research team have drawn conclusions from historical sources.

"We believe that the ship's final destination was Bruges in Belgium. In the 15th century, this city was a major trading hub. We also know that copper produced in Central Europe was shipped on from there to various Mediterranean ports, including Venice."

The study presents the recent investigations of the composition of the cargo. These results were then compared with other sources from the same period, archaeological as well as historical. The study has been published in the article Tracing Trade Routes: Examining the Cargo of the 15th-Century Skaftö Wreck, in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Facts in brief

The Skaftö wreck, which was discovered in 2003, dates back to the late 1430s and is believed to have sunk around 1440. The wreck was the subject of archaeological examinations between 2005 and 2009 by the Bohusläns museum under the leadership of maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin.

'The study just published is part of Staffan von Arbin's upcoming doctoral thesis in archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, which deals with medieval maritime transport geography in the now-Swedish region of Bohulän, which during this period was part of Norway.

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lost treasures; ancient civilizations; cultures; archaeology; anthropology; ancient dna

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Skaftö wreck's cargo tells a tale of 15th century trade routes

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Research has shown that the Skaftö wreck had probably taken on cargo in Gdansk in Poland and was heading towards Belgium when it foundered in the Lysekil archipelago around 1440. Modern methods of analysis of the cargo are now providing completely new answers about the way trade was conducted in the Middle Ages.

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This article talks about how the effects social media has on the voting culture in Brazil. Most of the terms in the article were used correctly.

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Article begins

Politics on social media may be exciting and even fun. But is it good for democracy?

Jair Bolsonaro's sweeping victory in the 2018 Brazilian elections took many people by surprise, within and outside Brazil. Yet from another angle, this success is just another chapter in a wider global story of radical right-wing populists rising to power over the past decade or so. Indeed, parallels between Bolsonaro's political style and that of other leaders such as Donald Trump or Narendra Modi are striking, suggesting that their electoral efficacy may have stemmed, at least in part, from similar media infrastructures. Many scholars in anthropology and allied disciplines, myself included, have been following one clue in this respect: the increasing digitalization of electoral campaigns and of voter choice and behavior.

A long-time member of Congress from Rio de Janeiro who gained media visibility in free-to-air TV shows and on the internet by " speaking his mind" against political correctness and "breaking taboos" concerning military rule in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ran virtually his entire 2018 presidential campaign on digital media. On Facebook, his personal page had more engagement than any professional media outlet. Bolsonaro, his family (three of his sons are also politicians), and others on the rising "New Right" became highly popular internet celebrities, boosted by supposedly spontaneous profiles and pages-some of which were recently removed by Facebook and Twitter-that helped spread the candidate's word to virtually all segments of the Brazilian population. These profiles and pages did not deploy conventional political language, but rather the straightforward, fun, sometimes outrageous, and always charismatic language of internet and entertainment cultures. On the messaging app WhatsApp, official and unofficial pro-Bolsonaro content spread like wildfire, from large public groups of up to 256 users to people's private groups and personal chats.

As the formal round of televised debates began, Jair Bolsonaro's performance was ambivalent. Not as resourceful and professional as most of his adversaries, he claimed to be guided by three simple principles, which cameras captured written down on the palm of his hand: God, family, nation. Bolsonaro only attended the first such debates, however. In early September, one month from the first round of the elections, he suffered a knife attack during a street rally that kept him off the campaign trail for weeks. Yet it was precisely at this moment that his voter intention figures took off. How to make sense of this apparent paradox?

Bolsonaro's bid worked not just due to a bold, ingenious digital communication strategy, but because the environment in which elections played out had changed. The 2018 elections took place in the aftermath of five years of deep political and economic instability in Brazil, fueled by massive antiestablishment protests in 2013 ( see Dent and Pinheiro-Machado 2013) and one presidential impeachment in 2016 under corruption charges ( see Ansell 2018). But something else happened during this period: the massification of smartphones and along with them the zero-ratings apps Facebook and WhatsApp. As one Facebook user put it bluntly as the prospect of Bolsonaro's victory became unavoidable: what the legacy media and other political forces failed to understand was that for many Brazilians at that point WhatsApp was the internet. And this terrain had been virtually taken over by Bolsonaro.

The details of Bolsonaro's victory unveil some of the deeper challenges that the mediatization of electoral communication on social media and associated voter choice and behavior pose to liberal democracies' traditional model of political representation. In particular, it foregrounds the role of what scholars of new media have been calling context collapse: how "contextual porousness is exacerbated by the affordances of social media and the dynamics of networked publics" ( Davis and Jungerson 2014, 479). While some convincingly argue that the colonization of all social spheres by neoliberal economic rationality sowed the seeds for the rise of illiberal politics in the West and elsewhere (see for example, Brown 2019), others foreground how digitalization furthered this process by collapsing key differentiations that sustained liberal democracy in the past: between public and private spheres; representative and represented; person and office; authenticity and fabrication; spontaneity and control; human and nonhuman agency; and between the spheres of politics, religion, science, economy, entertainment, kinship, and so forth ( Chun 2016; Mirowski 2019).

Bolsonaro's campaign claimed its impressive efficacy for being freely conducted by common citizens in street rallies and especially on online platforms that were popular at the time, including Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. Ongoing electoral and criminal investigations in Brazil are showing that such efforts may have been boosted by an invisible influence operation led by digital communication experts in what the press has been calling a "hate cabinet." The jury is still out as to who led and paid for such an operation, but both quantitative and qualitative evidence assembled thus far suggests that Bolsonaro's social media campaign was not entirely bottom-up and organic ( see Tardáguila, Benevenuto, and Ortellado 2018).

Politics and entertainment, fact and fiction, collapsed into a campaign where voters were called on by their peers to join in a life-and-death struggle to protect the country from a common enemy or to help Bolsonaro win what felt like a highly competitive FIFA World Cup final.

Analyses of metadata from pro-Bolsonaro public groups on WhatsApp conducted by multiple Brazilian research teams disclosed the operation of a multicentered, segmented network set up on the app in order to bulk-message unauthored and unreferenced memes, video, audio, long and short texts, and links to fishy "alternative media" sites paid for by interest-based ads ( Machado 2018). Yet the architecture of such digital environments often made it difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate between authentic and automated behavior, spontaneity and manipulation. On Facebook and Twitter, bots spoke and behaved just like Bolsonaro's followers, and vice-versa. On WhatsApp, context collapse between public and private, once pillars of the liberal public sphere, was especially disruptive. Users received a flood of supposedly spontaneous political memes, audio messages, and videos featuring ordinary folks from peers and private groups of family, friends, neighbors, and other personal relations. This was before the app started to flag "forwarded" messages, so it was often impossible to discern between original and shared content. Cryptography made sure peer-to-peer messaging was kept hidden from public view, while in practice WhatsApp operated less as a one-to-one private messaging app than as a kind of "dark" social media ( Evangelista and Bruno 2019).

As with all populist leaders, Bolsonaro's political communication also sought to collapse differences between representative and represented, leader and followers. Social media environments afford this unmediated effect; in fact, its marketing-based architecture is meant to do just that. Close, personal, even intimate relations between influencers and their fan base are a pillar of the contemporary influence industry. Today's consumers (or more accurately, prosumers) no longer trust artificial, manipulative mass marketing; they want to make an "authentic" choice. The same holds for contemporary politics. Bolsonaro presented himself as a true embodiment of the Brazilian people, with all his flaws and incapacities, opposed to an elite of highbrow professional politicians and experts. He might not know much, but at least he was honest and authentic.

It was digital media that made this connection between populist leader and "the people" real. On WhatsApp, voters shared personal messages and demands requesting that they be forwarded "until it reaches the president's smartphone." On Facebook and Twitter, Bolsonaro made sure to respond directly to fans on a regular basis. In this, he was no different from other successful celebrities and digital influencers, who must continuously perform authenticity and spontaneity, regularly crowdsource content from followers, enact personal relations with them, and carefully manage the loop between self and fan base. To stay afloat in a highly competitive online attention economy, influencers must provide ever more new content to keep followers from disengaging. The pro-Bolsonaro campaign did just that, by providing a regular flow of entertaining content, and enveloping voters in an atmosphere of permanent threat. Each day, voters received audio messages on WhatsApp of supposed whistleblowers denouncing schemes by the mainstream media, some foreign power, or the Brazilian Left. Alarmist messages announcing fresh "news" would link to YouTube channels specialized in conspiratorial narratives ranging from George Soros's plans of global domination, to Islamic terrorists conspiring with Venezuela to kill Bolsonaro.

Digital architecture afforded the sharing not only of political content between leader and followers, but of the populist grammar itself. The "reverse engineering" I did of the underlying design of pro-Bolsonaro content bulk-messaged on WhatsApp revealed highly recurrent patterns, reminiscent of digital marketing but with a populist twist toward building what Ernesto Laclau (2005) describes as equivalence against a common enemy ( see Cesarino 2020a). Binary memes would construct a black-and-white world where the only alternative to Bolsonaro's victory was its opposite: the economic, security, and moral chaos wrought by the Left. Gestalt-based color and image association, heavy reliance on audio and visual language, and reverse mimesis of the enemy (same form with inverted content) enticed audiences toward visceral belonging to one group, and equally visceral repulsion toward the other. This grammar, I have suggested, was itself replicated subconsciously, by mobilizing people through both negative and positive affect, emerging socialities, and deeply embodied personal and group identities ( Cesarino 2019; 2020b). Politics and entertainment, fact and fiction, collapsed into a campaign where voters were called on by their peers to join in a life-and-death struggle to protect the country from a common enemy or to help Bolsonaro win what felt like a highly competitive FIFA World Cup final. And indeed, his campaign successfully appropriated Brazil's utmost symbol of patriotic pride-the national soccer team's yellow shirt-as its own.

In democratic societies, Web 2.0 has ushered in a crisis of public trust in established institutional mediations of professional journalism, academia, science, the courts, and representative politics (see for example, Graan, Hodges, and Stalcup 2020). In such moments of crisis when established structures fail to guide people's cognition and behavior, the nature of politics itself changes, seeming to revert to what anthropologists may call "elementary forms." People turn to affect and morality to make political judgments; to what they can see and hear for themselves (which increasingly means online videos) ( see Zoonen 2012); to what makes sense in terms of their immediate experience and personal trajectories; to the opinion of those around them, including group-think across like-minded (and often algorithmically formed, see Lury and Day 2019) online communities and echo chambers; to "spontaneous" narratives on YouTube claiming to reveal some truth hidden behind a veil of deception cast by hypocritical and parasitic elites; to mystical and theological ways of explaining political casualties; and even to narrative frames taken from TV shows, streamed series, movies, or sports. Criteria for judging politics collapses with those prevalent in other social spheres, such as personal and kin relations, religion, digital influence marketing, or the entertainment industry.

Each day, voters received audio messages on WhatsApp of supposed whistleblowers denouncing schemes by the mainstream media, some foreign power, or the Brazilian Left.

At a deeper level, many such elementary forms of enacting politics resonate with concepts from nonliberal perspectives on modern politics such as Ernesto Laclau's structural theory of populism, and even with "classic" anthropological theory elaborated in order to make sense of political and epistemic forms in nonmodern societies. This happens not just because paradigm crisis leads individuals to look for less-mediated access to the "real," as Thomas Kuhn ( 2012) famously argued, but because the current architecture of the internet is designed to extract precisely such elementary forms from cognitive layers concerned with formation of habit, embodied memory, and affect (see Chun 2016). By collapsing differences between public and private, human and machine, individual and collective cognition (see Lury and Day 2019), digitalization challenges the model of subjectivity, choice, and behavior that has sustained liberal democracies for centuries. Bolsonaro's case illustrates well these challenges, and how certain emergent political forces-the so-called Alternative Right or New Right-have mustered these structural changes to their own advantage.

Finally, by collapsing a wide range of categorical differentiations that have historically sustained liberal representative democracy, digitalization helps bring about context collapse between religious and secular politics and temporalities ( Reed 2019). As Bolsonaro's physical body was removed from campaigning in the aftermath of the knife attack, the "glorious body" of the people (Kantorowicz 1997) swiftly took his place in a holy battle for the nation's future, to be waged on a messianic temporality of impending destruction. The body of the nation and the body of the leader became each other's metaphors, to the point of collapsing differences between them. As the late Venezuelan anthropologist and pioneer in populism studies Fernando Coronil put it, "Violence pushes the limits of the permissible, opening up spaces where customary and unexpected meanings and practices are brought together in unprecedented ways, illuminating hidden historical landscapes in a flash. ... Individual biography and collective history seem momentarily united, as history and the body become each other's terrains" ( Coronil and Skurski 1991, 290). On WhatsApp and social media, an atmosphere and rhythm based on permanent threat to Bolsonaro's life was henceforth established. Images showcased the stark contrast between the green and yellow shirt he was wearing when stabbed and the red blood of the wound-the knife happened to pierce Bolsonaro's stomach right by the word "Brazil" (the shirt read "Brazil is my party") (see Maia 2018).

From this moment onward, pro-Bolsonaro memetics summoned his followers to act as self-appointed "Jair's marketing agents," "Jair's army," "Jair's shield," "Jair's electoral inspectors," and "Bolsonaro's robots." They readily took over the camping on his behalf, and were kept busy executing small commands such as online cancelling campaigns or inspecting voting machines on polling day. What I call the "king's digital body" was thus formed: a kaleidoscopic, segmented structure combining the kind of microtargeted, personalized marketing basic to the contemporary internet's data economy with the kind of mass marketing required to win a majority-based presidential election. Bolsonaro's and his followers' identities became simultaneously more than one, and less than many (Lury and Day 2012): a fractal topology that bypasses representative democracy's separation between person and office, collapses contextual differentiation between politics and other social spheres, and thus challenges some of its deepest organizational foundations.

Emily Thiessen is an illustrator and climate justice organizer living in Lekwungen Territories/Victoria, BC. She holds an anthropology degree and has a fire for creative troublemaking. You can see her work at emilythiessen.ca.

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When Brazil's Voters Became Followers - Anthropology News

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Politics on social media may be exciting and even fun. But is it good for democracy? Jair Bolsonaro's sweeping victory in the 2018 Brazilian elections took many people by surprise, within and outside Brazil. Yet from another angle, this success is just another chapter in a wider global story of radical right-wing populists rising to power over the past decade or so.

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The Kenosha County Medical Examiner's Office continues to try and identify a man who was found dead in Pleasant Prairie nearly three decades ago.The body was found dead on Aug. 27, 1993, by a photographer who was walking in the 12700 blocks of the Soo Line railroad tracks. At the time, an autopsy, forensic anthropology exam, forensic dental exam and a reconstruction of the decedent's tattoo were performed, but the man was not identified.In December 2014, the medical examiner's office and Pleasant Prairie police met and decided to submit John Doe's skull to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for a secondary forensic anthropology examination, forensic odontology examination and DNA extraction.In June of 2016, UNTCHI told the Kenosha County Medical Examiner's Office that the man was between 40 and 60 years old with Hispanic, Native American or Caucasian ancestry. A facial reconstruction of the 1993 John Doe was done and the reconstruction results were shared in May 2017.He has still not been identified, but advanced genetic genealogy has detailed that he is of Native American descent, with family possibly being from Keshena, Shawano, Langlade, Calumet or Waupaca areas. Investigators also determined the man has relatives from the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. Anyone with interest should call the Pleasant Prairie Police Department at 262-694-7353.

The Kenosha County Medical Examiner's Office continues to try and identify a man who was found dead in Pleasant Prairie nearly three decades ago.

The body was found dead on Aug. 27, 1993, by a photographer who was walking in the 12700 blocks of the Soo Line railroad tracks.

At the time, an autopsy, forensic anthropology exam, forensic dental exam and a reconstruction of the decedent's tattoo were performed, but the man was not identified.

In December 2014, the medical examiner's office and Pleasant Prairie police met and decided to submit John Doe's skull to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for a secondary forensic anthropology examination, forensic odontology examination and DNA extraction.

In June of 2016, UNTCHI told the Kenosha County Medical Examiner's Office that the man was between 40 and 60 years old with Hispanic, Native American or Caucasian ancestry.

A facial reconstruction of the 1993 John Doe was done and the reconstruction results were shared in May 2017.

He has still not been identified, but advanced genetic genealogy has detailed that he is of Native American descent, with family possibly being from Keshena, Shawano, Langlade, Calumet or Waupaca areas. Investigators also determined the man has relatives from the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

Anyone with interest should call the Pleasant Prairie Police Department at 262-694-7353.

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kenosha county medical examiner's office

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Kenosha County medical examiner still trying to ID John Doe found in 1993

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The Kenosha County Medical Examiner's Office continues to try and identify a man who was found dead in Pleasant Prairie nearly three decades ago.The body was found dead on Aug. 27, 1993, by a photographer who was walking in the 12700 blocks of the Soo Line railroad tracks.

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This article is about two of the oldest human DNA found in paleolithic population in Britain. It shows the similarities and the distinctions of the 2 populations around the time of the Ice Age.

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The first genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the UK -- the oldest human DNA obtained from the British Isles so far -- indicates the presence of two distinct groups that migrated to Britain at the end of the last ice age, according to new research.

Published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the new study by UCL Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute researchers reveals for the first time that the recolonisation of Britain consisted of at least two groups with distinct origins and cultures.

The study team explored DNA evidence from an individual from Gough's Cave, Somerset, and an individual from Kendrick's Cave, North Wales, who both lived more than 13,500 years ago. Very few skeletons of this age exist in Britain, with around a dozen found across six sites in total. The study, which involved radiocarbon dating and analysis as well as DNA extraction and sequencing, shows that it is possible to obtain useful genetic information from some of the oldest human skeletal material in the country.

The authors say that these genome sequences now represent the earliest chapter of the genetic history of Britain, but ancient DNA and proteins promise to take us back even further into human history.

The researchers found that the DNA from the individual from Gough's Cave, who died about 15,000 years ago, indicates that her ancestors were part of an initial migration into northwest Europe around 16,000 years ago. However, the individual from Kendrick's Cave is from a later period, around 13,500 years ago, with his ancestry from a western hunter-gatherer group. This group's ancestral origins are thought to be from the near East, migrating to Britain around 14,000 years ago.

Study co-author Dr Mateja Hajdinjak (Francis Crick Institute) said: "Finding the two ancestries so close in time in Britain, only a millennium or so apart, is adding to the emerging picture of Palaeolithic Europe, which is one of a changing and dynamic population."

The authors note that these migrations occurred after the last ice age when approximately two-thirds of Britain was covered by glaciers. As the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, drastic ecological and environmental changes took place and humans began to move back into northern Europe.

Study co-author Dr Sophy Charlton, who undertook the study whilst at the Natural History Museum, said: "The period we were interested in, from 20-10,000 years ago, is part of the Palaeolithic -- the Old Stone Age. This is an important time period for the environment in Britain, as there would have been significant climate warming, increases in the amount of forest, and changes in the type of animals available to hunt."

As well as genetically, the two groups were found to be culturally distinct, with differences in what they ate and how they buried their dead.

Study co-author Dr Rhiannon Stevens (UCL Institute of Archaeology) said: "Chemical analyses of the bones showed that the individuals from Kendrick's Cave ate a lot of marine and freshwater foods, including large marine mammals.

"Humans at Gough's Cave, however, showed no evidence of eating marine and freshwater foods, and primarily ate terrestrial herbivores such as red deer, bovids (such as wild cattle called aurochs) and horses."

The researchers discovered that the mortuary practices of the two groups also differed. Although there were animal bones found at Kendrick's Cave, these included portable art items, such as a decorated horse jawbone. No animal bones were found that showed evidence of being eaten by humans, and the scientists say that this indicates the cave was used as a burial site by its occupiers.

In contrast, animal and human bones found in Gough's Cave showed significant human modification, including human skulls modified into 'skull-cups', which the researchers believe to be evidence for ritualistic cannibalism. Individuals from this earlier population seem to be the same people who created the Magdalenian stone tools, a culture known also for iconic cave art and bone artefacts.

Gough's Cave is also the site where Britain's famous Cheddar Man was discovered in 1903, dated to 10,564-9,915 years BP. In this study, Cheddar Man was found to have a mixture of ancestries, mostly (85%) western hunter-gatherer and some (15%) of the older type from the initial migration.

Co-author Dr Selina Brace (Natural History Museum) said: "We really wanted to find out more about who these early populations in Britain might have been.

"We knew from our previous work, including the study of Cheddar Man, that western hunter-gatherers were in Britain by around 10,500 years BP, but we didn't know when they first arrived in Britain, and whether this was the only population that was present."

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ancient civilizations; archaeology; early humans; fossils; human evolution; cultures; anthropology; origin of life

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UK's oldest human DNA obtained, revealing two distinct Palaeolithic populations

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The first genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the UK -- the oldest human DNA obtained from the British Isles so far -- indicates the presence of two distinct groups that migrated to Britain at the end of the last ice age, according to new research.

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Viking Textiles Show Women Had Tremendous Power

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Viking Textiles Show Women Had Tremendous Power

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Viking Textiles Show Women Had Tremendous Power

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Cloth from Viking and medieval archaeological sites shows that women literally made the money in the North Atlantic

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DNA of 13 Neanderthals reveals ‘exciting’ snapshot of ancient community

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DNA of 13 Neanderthals reveals ‘exciting’ snapshot of ancient community

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Hao Zheng

This shows a discovery of a Neanderthal family in Siberia via DNA, which may shed light on why Neanderthals became extinct and Sapiens dominated.

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The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia.

Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.

All of the Neanderthals were heavily inbred, a consequence, the researchers believe, of the Neanderthals' small population size, with communities scattered over vast distances and numbering only about 10 to 30 individuals.

Laurits Skov, first author on the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said the fact that the Neanderthals were alive at the same time was "very exciting" and implied that they belonged to a single social community.

Neanderthal remains have been recovered from numerous caves across western Eurasia - territory the heavy-browed humans occupied from about 430,000 years ago until they became extinct 40,000 years ago. It has previously been impossible to tell whether Neanderthals found at particular sites belonged to communities or not.

"Neanderthal remains in general, and remains with preserved DNA in particular, are extremely rare," said Benjamin Peter, a senior author on the study in Leipzig. "We tend to get single individuals from sites often thousands of kilometres, and tens of thousand of years apart."

In the latest work, researchers including Svante Pääbo, who won this year's Nobel prize in medicine for breakthrough studies on ancient genomes, examined DNA from the remains of Neanderthals found in the Chagyrskaya cave and nearby Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.

Neanderthals sheltered in the caves about 54,000 years ago, seeking cover to feast on the ibex, horse and bison they hunted as the animals migrated along the river valleys the caves overlook. Beyond Neanderthal and animal bones, tens of thousands of stone tools were also found.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how the ancient DNA points to the Neanderthals living at the same time, with some being members of the same family.

Further analysis revealed more genetic diversity in Neanderthal mitochondria - the tiny battery-like structures found inside cells which are only passed down the maternal line - than in their Y chromosomes, which are passed down from father to son. The most likely explanation, the researchers say, is that female Neanderthals travelled from their home communities to live with male partners. Whether force was involved is not a question DNA can answer, however. "Personally, I don't think there is particularly good evidence that Neanderthals were much different from early modern humans that lived at the same time," said Peter.

"We find that the community we study was likely very small, perhaps 10 to 20 individuals, and that the wider Neanderthal populations in the Altai mountains were quite sparse," Peter said. "Nevertheless, they managed to persevere in a rough environment for hundreds of thousands of years, which I think deserves great respect."

Dr Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin, called the study a "milestone" as "the first genomic snapshot of a Neanderthal community".

"Understanding how their societies were organised is important for so many reasons," Cassidy said. "It humanises these people and gives rich context to their lives. But also, down the line if we have more studies like this, it may also reveal unique aspects of the social organisation of our own Homo sapiens ancestors. This is crucial to understanding why we are here today and Neanderthals are not."

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DNA of 13 Neanderthals reveals 'exciting' snapshot of ancient community

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The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia. Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.

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New analysis of obsidian blades reveals dynamic Neolithic social networks

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New analysis of obsidian blades reveals dynamic Neolithic social networks

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This article details how the trade of obsidian reveals the complex networks of Neolithic societies 12,000 years ago. Obsidian these blades would find their way up to 1,000 miles from their origin in eastern Turkey or Armenian Volcanoes and pass through many hands, hinting at an economic system of exchange, most likely for food.

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New analysis of obsidian blades reveals dynamic Neolithic social networks

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An analysis of obsidian artifacts excavated during the 1960s at two prominent archaeological sites in southwestern Iran suggests that the networks Neolithic people formed in the region as they developed agriculture are larger and more complex than previously believed. The study has applied state-of-…

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The Anthropology of Grace and the Grace of Anthropology

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The Anthropology of Grace and the Grace of Anthropology

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The Anthropology of Grace and the Grace of Anthropology

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Surely the anthropology of religion can no more ignore Western theology than the anthropology of law can ignore Western jurisprudence.

- Andrea Hallback

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Abstract This introduction calls for an 'anthropology of grace', arguing that an ethnographically informed theory of grace will offer valuable interpretive tools not only to scholars of religion but also to anthropologists of law, economics, and power.

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Key phases of human evolution coincide with flickers in eastern Africa's climate

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Key phases of human evolution coincide with flickers in eastern Africa's climate

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Sediment cores from Ethiopia are studied to reveal climate shifts in that area that altered human evolution 600,000+ years ago. The terms in this article are used correctly.

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Three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal over the last 620,000 years, an analysis of environmental proxies from a lake sediment record has revealed. The project explores the youngest chapter in human evolution by analysing lacustrine sediments in close vicinity to paleo-anthropological key sites in eastern Africa using scientific deep drilling. The research endeavour included more than 22 researchers from 19 institutions in 6 countries, and was led by Dr Verena Foerster at the University of Cologne's Institute of Geography Education. The article 'Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution' has now appeared in Nature Geoscience.

Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of the evolution and dispersal of modern humans and their ancestors is not well established. Particularly for the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, there are no continuous high-resolution paleo-environmental records available for the African continent.

The research team extracted two continuous 280-metre sediment cores from the Chew Bahir Basin in southern Ethiopia, an area where early humans lived and developed during the Pleistocene. Chew Bahir is very remotely situated in a deep tectonic basement in close vicinity to the Turkana area and the Omo-Kibish, key paleo-anthropological and archaeological sites. The cores yielded the most complete record for such a long period ever extracted in the area, revealing how different climates influenced the biological and cultural transformation of humans inhabiting the region.

An interdisciplinary team including geoscientists, sedimentologists, micro-paleontologists, geologists, geographers, geochemists, archaeologists, chronologists, and climate modellers worked towards recovering the two continuous sediment cores, from which so-called proxies (like microfossils or elemental variations) were used to glean data to reconstruct the region's climate history. Archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, and evolutionary anthropologists then identified phases of climatic stress as well as more favourable conditions and interpreted how these factors changed human habitats, influencing human biological and cultural evolution as well as their dispersal.

Specifically, the scientists found that various anatomically diverse hominin groups inhabited the area during a phase of long-lasting and relatively stable humid conditions from approximately 620,000 to 275,000 years BP (Before Present). However, a series of shorter abrupt and extreme arid pulses interrupted this long generally stable and wet phase. Most likely, this resulted in a fragmentation of habitats, shifts in population dynamics and even the extinctions of local populations. As a result, small, reproductively and culturally isolated populations then had to adapt to dramatically transformed local environments, likely stimulating the appearance of the many geographically and anatomically distinct hominin groups and the separation of our modern human ancestors from archaic groups.

A phase with significant climate swings resulting in regularly transformed habitats in the area from approximately 275,000 to 60,000 years BP repeatedly resulted in environmental shifts from lush vegetation with deep fresh water lakes to highly arid landscapes with the extensive lakes reduced to small saline puddles. In this phase, the population groups gradually transitioned from Acheulean technologies (oval hand axes made of stone and primarily associated with Homo ergaster/erectus) to more sophisticated Middle Stone Age technologies. This crucial phase also encompasses the emergence of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa as well as key human social, technological, and cultural innovations that could have buffered early Homo sapiens from the impacts of severe environmental changes. 'These innovations, such as more varied toolkits and long-distance transport, would have equipped modern humans with an unprecedented adaptability to the repeated expansions and contractions of habitats,' said Dr Foerster, the paper's lead author.

The phase from approximately 60,000 to 10,000 years BP saw the most extreme environmental fluctuations, but also the most arid phase of the entire record, which could have acted as a motor for continuous indigenous cultural change. The scientists believe that the brief alignment of humid pulses in eastern Africa with wet phases in north-eastern Africa and the Mediterranean was key to opening favourable migration routes out of Africa on a roughly north-south axis along the East African Rift System (EARS) and into the Levant, facilitating the global dispersal of Homo sapiens.

'In view of current threats to the human habitat from climate change and the overuse of natural resources through human activity, understanding how the relationship between climate and human evolution has become more relevant than ever,' Foerster concluded.

This research is part of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP). In order to evaluate the impact that different timescales and magnitudes of climatic shifts have had on the living conditions of early humans, the project has cored five lake archives of climate change during the last 3.5 million years. All five sites in Kenya and Ethiopia are located in close vicinity to paleoanthropological key sites covering various steps in human evolution, with the site in southern Ethiopia exploring the youngest chapter.

As part of HSPDP, the project has received funding from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 806 'Our Way to Europe'. CRC 806 was based at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen and received generous financial and infrastructural support from these institutions from 2009 to 2021.

Journal Reference:

Verena Foerster, Asfawossen Asrat, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Erik T. Brown, Melissa S. Chapot, Alan Deino, Walter Duesing, Matthew Grove, Annette Hahn, Annett Junginger, Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr, Christine S. Lane, Stephan Opitz, Anders Noren, Helen M. Roberts, Mona Stockhecke, Ralph Tiedemann, Céline M. Vidal, Ralf Vogelsang, Andrew S. Cohen, Henry F. Lamb, Frank Schaebitz & Martin H. Trauth. Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution. Nature Geoscience, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01032-y

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climate; global warming; environmental awareness; environmental policy; human evolution; early humans; early climate; anthropology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Key phases of human evolution coincide with flickers in eastern Africa's climate

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Three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal over the last 620,000 years, an analysis of environmental proxies from a lake sediment record has revealed. The project explores the youngest chapter in human evolution by analysing lacustrine sediments in close vicinity to paleo-anthropological key sites in eastern Africa using scientific deep drilling.

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Central Asia has been identified as a key region for human ancestors

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Central Asia has been identified as a key region for human ancestors

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The interior of Central Asia has been identified as a key route for some of the earliest hominin migrations across Asia in a new study led by Dr. Emma Finestone, Assistant Curator of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The study's findings indicate that the steppe, semi-arid and desert zones of Central Asia were once favorable environments for hominins and their dispersal into Eurasia.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars from institutions that span four continents set out to expand the limited knowledge of early hominin activity in the Central Asian lowlands. The team included Dr. Paul Breeze and Professor Nick Drake from Kings College London, Professor Sebastian Breitenbach from Northumbria University Newcastle, Professor Farhod Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences, and Professor Michael Petraglia from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.

"Central Asia connects several zones that played important roles in hominin dispersals out of Africa and through Asia" Dr. Finestone said. "Yet we know comparatively little about the early occupation of Central Asia. Most of the archaeological material is not dated and detailed paleoclimate records are scarce, making it difficult to understand early hominin dispersal and occupation dynamics in that region."

The team compiled and analyzed paleoclimatic and archaeological data from Pleistocene (ca. 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) Central Asia. This included building a dataset of Paleolithic stone tools and analyzing a mineral deposit that formed in a cave (a stalagmite) in southern Uzbekistan. Tool-making and tool modification are key to human ability to migrate to new environments and to overcome environmental challenges. Ancient hominins moved their tools with them as they dispersed. The researchers studied the location of stone tools and the environmental conditions that were reflected in the stalagmite as it grew at the end of the Marine Isotope Stage 11 (a warm period between glacials MIS 12 and MIS 10) around 400,000 years ago.

Dr. Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences said relatively little is known about the region's earliest toolmakers because the majority of Lower Paleolithic (the earliest subdivision of Paleolithic stone tools) occurrences in Central Asia lack reliable context for dating and environmental reconstruction.

"Despite the potential importance of Central Asia to early dispersals, our knowledge of the Lower Paleolithic across this vast and diverse landscape has been limited."

"We compiled data on Paleolithic findings from across Central Asia, creating a dataset of 132 Paleolithic sites -- the largest dataset of its kind" said Professor Petraglia, a senior author on the study. "This allowed us to consider the distribution of these sites in the context of a new high-resolution speleothem-based multi-proxy record of hydrological changes in southern Uzbekistan from the Middle Pleistocene."

"Cave deposits are incredible archives of environmental conditions at the time of their growth. Using geochemical data from stalagmites we gain insights into seasonal to millennial-scale changes in moisture availability and the climatic dynamics that governed rain- and snowfall. Our work suggests that the local and regional conditions did not follow simple long-term trends but were quite variable." said Professor Breitenbach, who lead the stalagmite-based analysis.

"We argue that Central Asia was a favorable habitat for Paleolithic toolmakers when warm interglacial phases coincided with periods when the Caspian Sea was experiencing consistently high water levels, resulting in greater moisture availability and more temperate conditions in otherwise arid regions" said Dr. Finestone. "The patterning of stone tool assemblages also supports this."

During periodic warmer and wetter intervals, the local environment of arid Central Asia could have been a favorable habitat and was frequented by Lower Paleolithic toolmakers producing bifaces (stone tools that have been worked on both sides).

"Interdisciplinary work that bridges archaeology with paleoclimate models are becoming increasingly necessary for understanding human origins" said Dr. Finestone. "In the future, the databases generated in this study will continue to allow us to ask questions about the context of hominin dispersals."

Journal Reference:

Emma M. Finestone, Paul S. Breeze, Sebastian F. M. Breitenbach, Nick Drake, Laura Bergmann, Farhod Maksudov, Akmal Muhammadiyev, Pete Scott, Yanjun Cai, Arina M. Khatsenovich, Evgeny P. Rybin, Gernot Nehrke, Nicole Boivin, Michael Petraglia. Paleolithic occupation of arid Central Asia in the Middle Pleistocene. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (10): e0273984 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273984

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geography; caving; earth science; desert; cultures; anthropology; early humans; human evolution

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Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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A new study on early human migration shows that semi-arid and desert zones of Central Asia may have served as key areas for the dispersal of hominins into Eurasia during the Middle Pleistocene.

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This article is about a recently excavated Anglo-Saxon royal hall dating back to over 1400 years ago. It was potentially the home of the Kings of East Anglia, and may even have a connection to the famous Sutton Hoo warrior.

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(Image credit: Suffolk County Council "Rendlesham Revealed" project)

Archaeologists in the east of England have unearthed the remains of an elaborate hall that Anglo-Saxon monarchs and warriors feasted in roughly 1,400 years ago.

The remains of the royal hall - near the village of Rendlesham in Suffolk, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) northeast of London - are only a few miles north of the famous Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo and a few miles south of another ship burial near the village of Snape (opens in new tab).

Archaeologists think both the Sutton Hoo and Snape burials were of rulers who had lived for a time at Rendlesham during their respective reigns, between about A.D. 570 and 720.

"These are the burials of individual kings who would have stayed at Rendlesham over a period of about 150 years," Faye Minter, the senior archaeological officer for Suffolk County Council, told Live Science.

"It's a royal residence, but the kings move around - they don't just live in one place," she said. "So it's highly likely that, at some point, the kings of East Anglia would have been living or staying at Rendlesham."
Related: Skull reveals Anglo-Saxon teen's nose and lips were cut off 1,100 years ago
Minter is leading the excavations of the largest hall in the royal compound at the site, which covers an area of about 15 acres (6 hectares). The foundations show it was a timber building measuring about 75 feet (23 m) long and 33 feet (10 m) wide; whoever built the compound constructed it on raised land and surrounded it with a boundary ditch.

It's likely there were once up to 10 halls in the compound for the king and his retinue of hundreds of people, but only the largest hall has been confirmed by the latest excavations, she said.

Archaeologists have worked at the Rendlesham site since 2008, and the recent excavations are part of the Rendlesham Revealed (opens in new tab) project, which includes the work of hundreds of volunteers from local communities.

(Image credit: Suffolk County Council "Rendlesham Revealed" project)

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Anglo-Saxon settlement

The royal compound at Rendlesham was part of a larger settlement founded in the fifth century A.D., soon after the traditional date for the start of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, from about A.D. 450.

"The overall settlement is about 50 hectares [124 acres] in size, but from the late sixth century, you get a defined area [of the royal compound] within the larger settlement," Minter said. "So they put the royal residence within an Anglo-Saxon settlement that was already locally important."

The royal residence is recorded in the writings of the eighth-century English scholar Bede, who identified it as the place where in A.D. 662 the East Anglian king Aethelwald (also spelled Aethelwold) sponsored the baptism of King Swithelm of the East Saxons (a kingdom near London also known as Essex). Swithelm was an adult at this time, and his baptism represented the conversion of his kingdom from paganism to Christianity; Aethelwald's dynasty had been Christian for decades.

The royal hall was first identified in 2015 by aerial photography, which showed cropmarks at the site that indicated the positions of its largest posts, Minter said. But it wasn't excavated until this summer, when archaeological trenches revealed fragments of glass drinking vessels and pottery; dress jewelry; personal items, such as copper pins; an iron knife; and the remains of food preparation and feasting, which indicated that vast quantities of beef and pork had been consumed there - a luxury at a time when Anglo-Saxons mainly ate vegetables.

Royal residence

Archaeologists think the royal compound at Rendlesham was occupied by the king and his warriors for several months at a time - as long as the food lasted - before they'd move on to a different residence somewhere else in the kingdom.
Related: Medieval map of Britain may reveal evidence of mythological islands
"We think it probably would have been seasonal," Minter said. "They would have come with a lot of warriors and a big retinue, and it probably would have increased the population of the settlement quite a lot."

"And I think they would have sort of 'eaten the cupboard bare' and then moved on to the next place, so they could be seen as ruling over the whole kingdom," she said.

East Anglia, comprising the modern English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, was one of the seven main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain, known as the Heptarchy; the others were Essex, Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Northumbria and Mercia. They were founded soon after the collapse of rule in Britain, a date traditionally held to be A.D. 409. But historians and archaeologists debate the scale, nature and impact of the "invasion" of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes from Northern Europe. A September study published in the journal (opens in new tab) analyzed the DNA of nearly 500 people who were buried in England between A.D. 400 and 900. The results suggested that there was a large migration of people with Northern European ancestry into England, but that this wave of people were likely migrants, not invaders.

In any case, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were unified in the ninth century under Alfred the Great, a king of Wessex; they eventually gave England its name, which means "land of the Angles."

Christopher Scull, a historian and archaeologist at Cardiff University in Wales and an academic adviser for the Rendlesham Revealed project, said in a statement (opens in new tab) that the latest finds were of "international importance."

"Only at Rendlesham do we have the wider settlement and landscape context of an early English royal center, together with an assemblage of metalwork that illuminates the lives and activities of its inhabitants across the social range," he said.

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Anglo-Saxon hall where kings and warriors dined discovered in England

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(Image credit: Suffolk County Council "Rendlesham Revealed" project) Archaeologists in the east of England have unearthed the remains of an elaborate hall that Anglo-Saxon monarchs and warriors feasted in roughly 1,400 years ago.

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Genetic Study Reveals Info about Anglo-Saxon Migragtion

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Genetic Study Reveals Info about Anglo-Saxon Migragtion

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The anglo-saxon migration: New insights from genetics: Genetic and archaeological study reveals large-scale continental migration into the East of England during the early Medieval Period

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In the largest early-medieval population study to date, an interdisciplinary team consisting of geneticists and archaeologists analyzed over 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The results show in detail one of the largest population transformations i…

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221003110238.htm

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Ribe was an important trading town in the Viking Age. At the beginning of the 8th century, a trading place was established on the north side of the river Ribe, to which traders and craftsmen flocked from far and wide to manufacture and sell goods such as brooches, suit buckles, combs and coloured glass beads.

When glass became a scarce commodity in the Early Medieval time, coloured glass cubes -- so-called tesserae -- were torn down from mosaics in abandoned Roman and Byzantine temples, palaces and baths, transported North and traded at emporia towns such as Ribe, where the beadmakers melted them down in large vessels and shaped them into beads.

Until now, archaeologists have assumed that the pearl makers used the opaque white tesserae as raw material for the production of white, opaque beads.
Smart and sustainable production
And it is here that a geochemist and an archaeologist from Aarhus University together with a museum curator from Ribe have made a surprising discovery, which they have just published in the scientific journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences:

The chemical composition of white Viking beads from one of the earliest workshops showed that the glassmakers had found a more sustainable way to save time and wood for their furnaces: crush gold-gilded, transparent glass cubes, remelt them at low temperature, stir to trap air in the form of bubbles, and finally wrap the glass around an iron mandrel to form beads and voila! -- opaque white beads created in a short time using a minimum of resources.

The valuable ultra-thin sheets of gold stuck to the surface of the gold mosaic stone were of course salvaged by the glassmaker prior to remelting the glass, but the new findings show that some gold inevitably had ended up in the melting pot. Tiny drops of gold in the white beads, the many air holes (which is why the beads are opaque), as well as the fact that there are no chemical color tracers present, the researchers show that it was in fact the gold mosaic stones that was the raw material for the beads.

Such traces of gold were found not only in the white but also in the blue beads from the same workshop. Here the chemistry shows that the glassmaker's recipe consisted of a mixture of the blue and golden mosaic stones. Mixing them was necessary because the Roman blue mosaic stones contained high concentrations of chemical substances which made them opaque -- and therefore ideal for mosaics, but not for blue beads. By thus diluting the chemical substances, the result was the deep blue, transparent glass that we know from Viking Age beads.
Connoisseur craftsmanship
The bead maker in Ribe could instead have chosen to dilute the glass mixture with old shards from funnel beakers, which were also found in the workshop. But these turned out to be old, contaminated, Roman glass that had been remelted over and over again.

"And the glassmakers in Ribe were clearly connoisseurs who preferred the clearest glass they could get their hands on," says Gry Hoffmann Barfod from the Department of Geoscience at Aarhus University. She adds:

"For a geochemist, it has been a privilege to work with the fantastic material, and to discover how relevant the knowledge stored here is for our society today."
Interdisciplinary research
The interdisciplinary study was a collaboration between Gry Barfod, Søren Sindbæk, professor of archeology at the Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Urban Network Development (UrbNet) at Aarhus University, and museum curator Claus Feveile at the Museum of Southwest Jutland specializing in the Viking Age and Ribe's earliest history.

"The most outstanding achievements at the Ribe trading site were not just the products, but also the circular economy and their awareness to preserve limited resources" states professor Søren Sindbæk.

And museum curator Claus Feveile comments:

"These exciting results clearly show the potential of elucidating new facts about the vikings. By combining our high-resolution excavations with such chemical analyses I predict many more revelations in the near future."

Søren Sindbæk and Claus Feveile headed the archaeological excavations of the Northern Emporium Project from 2016-2018, where new high-definition approaches for the first time allowed for a resolution down to a few decades within the extremely well-preserved Ribe stratigraphy. The finds from the excavations are currently displayed inside reconstructed replicas of the beadmakers' workshops in the new special exhibition at the Ribe viking museum.

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acoustics; electronics; chemistry; energy and resources; ancient civilizations; archaeology; lost treasures; anthropology

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Upcycling in the past: Viking beadmakers' secrets revealed

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The Viking Age bead makers were more advanced than previously believed. A new interdisciplinary study shows that around year 700 AD, craftsmen in Ribe, Denmark, used surprisingly sophisticated and sustainable methods when giving old Roman glass mosaics new life as glass beads.

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Unearthing Everyday Life at an Ancient Site in Greece

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Unearthing Everyday Life at an Ancient Site in Greece

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This article tells of an excavation site at Iklaina where researchers had the opportunity to learn about the Ancient community's culture and history.

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Unearthing Everyday Life at an Ancient Site in Greece

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Excavations in the Peloponnesian village of Iklaina are yielding rich insights into the lives of the Mycenaean civilization’s general population.

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This article talks about the nuance of jazz's development, focusing on the development of swing tempo.

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It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing - all you've got to do is stagger your timing.

For decades, fans of jazz music have debated why some songs have swing - the characteristic swaying feeling that compels feet to tap and heads to bop. Now, scientists may finally have an answer to Louis Armstrong's classic song "What Is This Thing Called Swing?" and the secret lies in the timing of jazz soloists.

After listening to original and digitally tweaked piano recordings, jazz musicians were more than seven times as likely to rate music as "swinging" when the soloist's timing was partially delayed with respect to the rhythm section, researchers report October 6 in Communications Physics.

In jazz, musicians are trained to swing eighth notes, or extend the duration of their downbeats - every other eighth note - and shorten the beats in between to create a galloping rhythm. But the technique on its own doesn't explain swing, says physicist Theo Geisel. Computer-generated jazz songs with swung eighth notes still lack the style's swaying feel ( SN: 2/17/22).

Past research hinted that swing might arise from differences in the timing between musicians within a band ( SN: 1/2/18). So Geisel and colleagues tweaked only the timing of the soloists in jazz recordings on a computer and asked professional and semiprofessional jazz musicians to rate each recording's swing.

Musicians were nearly 7.5 times as likely to judge music as more swinging when the soloists' downbeats were minutely delayed with respect to the rhythm section, but not their offbeats.

Got swing?

In a new study, jazz musicians rated the "swing" of these recordings of the song "Jordu" by Duke Jordan. The first recording is an unaltered version, and the second recording has been manipulated to increase the delay of the soloist's downbeats by a very small amount. The musicians rated the tweaked recording as having more swing than the original.

Original recording of "Jordu"

Downbeats delayed in "Jordu"

Audio: C. Nelias et al/ Communications Physics 2022

Most of the musicians couldn't put their finger on what was causing the effect, says Geisel, of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. "Professional jazz musicians who have played for many years apparently have learned to do this unconsciously."

The researchers also analyzed 456 jazz performances from various artists and found almost all soloists used downbeat delays, with an average delay of 30 milliseconds. This average held across the jazz subgenres of bebop, swing and hardbop, though there was some variation, Geisel says. "For faster tempos, the delays get smaller."

Looking ahead, Geisel intends to investigate how "laid-back playing" - a popular style of delaying both downbeats and offbeats in jazz - influences swing.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

Editor's Note:

This story was updated October 17, 2022, to correct who composed the song "Jordu." It was Duke Jordan, not Clifford Brown.

Nikk Ogasa is a staff writer who focuses on the physical sciences for Science News. He has a master's degree in geology from McGill University, and a master's degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing - all you've got to do is stagger your timing. For decades, fans of jazz music have debated why some songs have swing - the characteristic swaying feeling that compels feet to tap and heads to bop.

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A grave found in Late Viking Age eastern Norway looks uncannily similar to one of the most immaculate graves from the Roman Age in Norway, from the Hunn burial site in Østfold. A rich burial site, it possesses 145 visible burial mounds from a two-thousand-year historical span. This large site dates from sometime around the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Viking Age, roughly 1100 BC to 1050 AD.

The site has been the subject of multiple studies by Julie Lund, an Associate Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. The project titled "Using the Past in the Past. Viking Age Scandinavia as a Renaissance?", has had two research papers published, with the latest published this April for Archaeological Dialogues , building upon previous work from the Cambridge Archaeological Journal . The key takeaway? Different groups in the Viking Age used distinctive references to relate to a larger shared past.

Near and Distant Pasts - A Distinguishing Factor

"The Vikings made use of the past in a more subtle way than previously believed. For example, they distinguished between a near and a distant past. This can be seen in female graves where heirlooms such as jewelry have been laid down, while in other graves, such as Store Vikingegrav, items have been included that copy objects dating back to the Roman period 700 years earlier," says Lund.

She further explained that Hunn is a special burial site because of the representation of almost all periods of prehistory. Continuous usage and occupation for thousands of years has contributed to many layers of history. What is particularly surprising is how and why the Vikings chose to occupy the singularly most spectacular Roman-era grave in the landscape.

According to Lund, it is a deliberate decision to create a sort of continuum with a Roman-era past. In general, historical terms, these kinds of allusions of reuse around monuments, buildings, and graves have referred to some kind of symbolism related to power. Lund's analysis hopes to move away from that and provide a different kind of model.

"Distinguishing between near and distant pasts is probably not something that we regard as being particularly special. However, what we can see is that they made connections with a specific part of the past at a time when they did not have much of an idea about the past," she explained.
The Roman-era grave Stubhøj and Store Vikingegrav at the Hunn burial site in Østfold are marked with kerbstones. (Julie Lund / University of Oslo )
Looking at the Sites - Similarities and Differences

According to a press release by the University of Oslo , the area has three sites - the Western site (graves dating to the Roman times), the Migration period, the Iron Age and the Viking Age. What caught the attention of Lund and fellow researchers were two graves in particular - built hundreds of years apart from each other. The Roman grave has been named Stubhøj, and the similar grave from the Viking Age is called Store Vikingegrav, which translates to the 'Large Viking Grave'.

Assessing the similarities between both graves, one thing that stood out was that both graves occupied the best parts of the site. The Roman grave lay on top of a ridge while the Vikings was built on a slope of the same ridge.

Both graves are marked by kerbstones that encircle the graves and are even stoned. The burial mounds thus acquired an 'older' look, while also acting as a replica of sorts, allowing a certain kind of 'timelessness' to creep in.

Even the insides were copied - both graves possess weapons, shields, rare drinking horns, riding spurs and have furnished burial chambers. This interior similarity is still a cause for some confusion - after all, the Roman grave hadn't been opened till the 1900s, almost 900 years after the Vikings made theirs'!

Departure and Continuum: Vikings and Romans

"Stubhøj is the first inhumation grave that we know of today. Between the Bronze Age and the date of this Roman Age grave they used to burn their dead. So, this is a departure from a thousand-year-old tradition of cremation," explained Lund.

Top image: The Vikings copied the riding spurs from Roman times, and similar spurs have only been found far down in Central Europe. Source: Mårten Teigen/Kulturhistorisk Museum, /
The probable explanation is that through word of mouth and oral traditions, the Vikings replicated what they'd heard and were thus able to create these graves. Stories of the Roman burials , the grandeur, the gifts, the alliances created through this important ritual of death were all preserved through memory. It is also perhaps a way of choosing how to be remembered for the Vikings, who are reinterpreting important tradition, and thereby creating a certain perception.

"When you use elements from the past, you make it exist or relevant in the present. This is how material culture affects people and vice versa. Using the past and copying a Roman-era grave indicates that they were not just trying to create something that looked old. The past also provided them with a narrative about who they were. Consequently, the Vikings' use of the past concerned social relationships, self-awareness and identity," she concludes.

By Sahir Pandey

References

Liljeroth, J. 2022. Findings show that the Vikings' self-image was influenced by Ancient Rome . Available at: https://www.hf.uio.no/iakh/english/research/news-and-events/news/2022/findings-show-that-the-vikings-self-image-was-influenced-by-ancient-rome.html.

Lund, J. 2021. Kerbing Relations through Time: Reuse, Connectivity and Folded Time in the Viking Age . Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/kerbing-relations-through-time-reuse-connectivity-and-folded-time-in-the-viking-age/107860E57C87AF191894D902D99DA4E4.

Lund, J., Furholt, M., & Austvoll, K. 2022. Reassessing power in the archaeological discourse. How collective, cooperative and affective perspectives may impact our understanding of social relations and organization in prehistory . Archaeological Dialogues, 29(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774321000445.

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Late Viking Age Grave Imitating A Roman Age Grave, Not Just Allusion to Power

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A grave found in Late Viking Age eastern Norway looks uncannily similar to one of the most immaculate graves from the Roman Age in Norway, from the Hunn burial site in Østfold. A rich burial site, it possesses 145 visible burial mounds from a two-thousand-year historical span.

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Diego Castillo - Humans Used ‘high-tech’ Glue As Early As 100,000 Years Ago by Stephen Beech 

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Diego Castillo - Humans Used ‘high-tech’ Glue As Early As 100,000 Years Ago by Stephen Beech 

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This article talks about a glue that was complex and elaborate to create however was still created showing humans innovative abilities.

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Early humans were using high-tech 'glue' made from a local conifer in Africa 100,000 years ago, a new study has revealed.

In the Middle Stone Age, early Homo sapiens utilized adhesive made from local Podocarpus trees to attach stone tools to wooden spears.

Scientists say the substance has "excellent" adhesive properties and can only be produced via an "elaborate" process.

Dr. Patrick Schmidt and Ph.D. student Tabea Koch, from the University of Tübingen in Germany, mapped out the production in a joint study with Professor Edmund February from the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

A specialist from Harrison and Harrison Organ Builders applies traditional glue as he carries out refurbishment work on York Minster's organ pipes on March 20, 2019 in Durham, England. (Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

The research team says the fact that early modern humans did not resort to more readily available adhesives tens of thousands of years ago is a testament to their innovative abilities and skills.

Dr. Schmidt said: "Adhesives have been discovered at several Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa, mostly as residues on scrapers or stone blades that had been glued to handles or spears.

"Chemical analysis had shown that such glue was often extracted from yellowwoods. This is surprising because yellowwoods do not exude tree resins or any other sticky substance", he said adding that "the leaves of the yellowwoods contain small amounts of resin, which you have to distill out."

The team discovered two ways to manufacture the glue.

Dr. Schmidt said: "It's quite simple to burn the leaves directly next to flat stones.

He said the second option is more difficult and time-consuming. In it, the leaves have to be heated in a kind of underground distillery for several hours, so that the tar drips into a container. It is not known which method was used.

Dr. Schmidt says that either way, it was astonishing that early modern humans at that time did not use any plants other than yellowwoods as sources of glue.

"People could have simply collected tree resin", Koch said. "In several species that occurred in their environment, it flows visibly from the trunk. And some plants release sticky latex when the leaves break off."

A dead giant sequoia (R), scorched by the SQF Complex wildfire in 2020, stands by a live giant sequoia (C) on August 24, 2022 in Sequoia National Forest, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The team found the explanation with the help of standard laboratory tests, such as those used in the adhesives industry:

Dr. Schmidt said: "Our tar distilled from yellowwoods had particularly good mechanical properties and proved to be stronger than all other naturally occurring adhesive substances of the Stone Age in South Africa; it was able to hold significantly larger loads."

The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Produced in association with SWNS Talker.

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Humans Used 'high-tech' Glue As Early As 100,000 Years Ago - Zenger News

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Early humans were using high-tech 'glue' made from a local conifer in Africa 100,000 years ago, a new study has revealed. In the Middle Stone Age, early Homo sapiens utilized adhesive made from local Podocarpus trees to attach stone tools to wooden spears.

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Instagram user questions evolution from apes and chimps to humans and commenters offer answers.

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Instagram user questions evolution from apes and chimps to humans and commenters offer answers.

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This user poses an interesting question almost in a joking manner but commenters answer from many different points of view. Some cited the creation theory while others explained that we evolved from a common ancestor.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Zahir Alarakhia (@zahir_0092)

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones

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This article discusses how socioeconomic status connects with health and bones after the examination of their remains.

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones: Higher status individuals -- especially women -- were taller and had stronger bones, according to buried remains

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In medieval Norway, high status individuals tended to be taller and to have stronger bones, possibly as a result of a favorable lifestyle, according to a new study.

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This article discusses a record of one of the earliest forms of astrology. The usage of such a chart could have had religious significance, or it could have been used for navigation.

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First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment

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Fabled star catalogue by ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus had been feared lost.

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Treasures of Afghan History found in  efforts with France and Afghanistan

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Treasures of Afghan History found in  efforts with France and Afghanistan

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In this article, they discuss how this new finding of Homo heidelbergensis (the last common ancestor to Neanderthals) can give us a better idea on how these species adapted and lived.

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Prehistoric stone tools found in a cave in Poland 50 years ago have just been identified as some of the oldest ever discovered in the region.

The tools from the Tunel Wielki cave in Małopolska are between 450,000 and 550,000 years old. This dating may allow scientists to learn more about the humans who made them, and their migration and habitation in Central Europe across prehistory.

For example, the timeframe likely means that the tools were made by extinct human species Homo heidelbergensis, usually considered the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans (us). And it means the region was inhabited by humans at a time that Central Europe's harsh climate would have required significant physical and cultural adjustment.

"This is an extremely interesting aspect of analyses for us," archaeologist Małgorzata Kot of the University of Warsaw in Poland explained to Science in Poland.

"We can examine the limits of the possibilities of survival of Homo heidelbergensis, and thus observe how he adapted to these adverse conditions."

Tunel Wielki cave was excavated in the 1960s, with archaeologists returning again to the site in 2016. Layers of material were dated to the Holocone, dating back to around 11,700 years ago, and the Middle Paleolithic, stretching as far as 40,000 years ago.

But archaeologist Claudio Berto of the University of Warsaw thought the dating was at odds with what he was observing. Animal bones recovered from the site, he concluded, were almost certainly older than 40,000 years.

So, in 2018, Kot and her team returned to the cave. They reopened and extended one of the trenches, carefully examining the different layers of material accumulated over the years, and collecting more bone material to analyze.

They found that the upper layers did indeed contain the bones of animals that lived in the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene. But the bottom layer was distinctly older. It contained the bones of several species that lived half a million years ago: the European jaguar, Panthera gombaszoegensis; the Mosbach wolf, ancestor to modern gray wolves, Canis mosbachensis; and Deninger's bear, Ursus deningeri.

The layer that yielded the bones also contained evidence of flint knapping, including flint flakes, the "blanks" from which other tools can be shaped, and the cores from which they are struck. There were also some finished tools, such as knives.

"Since these items come from the same layer as the bones, it means that their age is very similar," Kot explained. "This assumption was confirmed by excavations carried out in the cave in 2018. They confirmed the arrangement of layers described by researchers half a century ago. We also discovered more production waste and animal bones."

Previously, she added, there were only two known sites in Poland with tools from around the same time period: Trzebnica and Rusko. But the Tunel Wielki cave artifacts are different. Several archaeological sites in the area show evidence of ancient human habitation - but they are all open-air sites.

To find artifacts dating from that time in a cave is, according to Kot, very unexpected.

"We were surprised that half a million years ago people in this area stayed in caves, because those were not the best places to camp," she noted.

"Moisture and low temperature would discourage that. On the other hand, a cave is a natural shelter. It is a closed space that gives a sense of security. We found traces that may indicate that the people who stayed there used fire, which probably helped tame these dark and moist places."

Also of interest was the technique used to knap the flint found in the cave. This technique is the simplest used by ancient humans, and, at the time the tools were created, rarely used as a primary mode; usually, it was only used on poor-quality materials, or when flint was in short supply.

Only one other site, Isernia La Pineta in Italy, was using the technique as the primary one. The Tunel Wielki flint was not poor quality, nor was it scarce, being locally obtained. This was also the case for Isernia La Pineta; finding a second site with the same characteristics might help archaeologists work out the reason these ancient humans used that specific technique.

Next, the team hopes to return to the cave to try and search for bones of Homo heidelbergensis.

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

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Half-a-Million Year Old Signs of Extinct Human Species Found in Poland Cave

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Prehistoric stone tools found in a cave in Poland 50 years ago have just been identified as some of the oldest ever discovered in the region. The tools from the Tunel Wielki cave in Małopolska are between 450,000 and 550,000 years old.

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This article discusses the development of how the nature around certain societies was domesticated to the taste buds of their respective people.

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As someone who grew up in the Philippines, I have always loved hot, spicy foods. A typical Filipino meal includes some mix of soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar, citrus, and peppers, which can be used to customize the flavor of a dish. I always make sure to pile on lots of red and green peppers or to add a dash of Tabasco. At one point, I even planted some chili plants in my family's backyard and tried making hot sauce with my cousin Franz. [1]

When I stayed for an extended period in Mexico in 2021, one of the biggest pleasures was the food's spiciness-from the salsa verde (a green sauce usually spiced by jalapeño peppers) to the aguachile (a ceviche-like dish typical of Mexico's Pacific coast, made of shrimp marinated in lime and chili peppers, among other ingredients). Beyond the kinds of peppers that one can buy in local grocery stores in many places in the world-such as habañeros, jalapeños, and chile de arbol-there was a bewildering assortment of peppers with distinct shapes, sizes, and levels of spiciness. These ranged from the peppercorn-like chiltepin to the bell-like cascabel, all readily available in the nearest supermercado.

In fact, all of the world's chili peppers-including the labuyo peppers that we typically use in the Philippines-likely came from the first domesticated chili plants ( Capsicum annuum) in what is now Mexico. They were imported as part of the Columbian exchange, which saw the two-way transfer of ideas, animals, plants, diseases, and people between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Americas following Christopher Colombus' first transatlantic voyage in the late 15th century.

Unthinkable as it may sound today, the cuisines we have come to associate with spiciness-Indian, Thai, Korean, and Chinese, among others-had no chili peppers at all before their introduction in the 16th century onward. Prior to that, those cuisines relied on other spices or aromatics to add heat to dishes, such as ginger, likely native to southern China, or black pepper, native to India.

How did chili peppers become part of the human diet beginning in the Americas an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago? And why were they eventually embraced by the rest of the world?

These questions fascinate me not just because of my personal love for hot sauce, but because, as an anthropologist, I am deeply interested in how culture shapes our human senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

While our bodily senses are mediated by various receptors, how we interpret sensory stimuli depends on our previous experiences and our personal preferences, both of which are in turn influenced by the environments we grow up in. To give just one example, anthropologists have investigated how even color (that is, how we would "see" or visually perceive a particular object) is not universal but differs across societies.

Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that the human propensity for spiciness is borne of necessity. They posit that because peppers (and other spicy foods, including wasabi) have natural antimicrobial properties that can help preserve perishable foods, humans developed a taste for them, particularly in tropical climates where food spoils easily. (In the evolution of the chili plant itself, the emergence of capsaicin, which creates the burning sensation in chiles, appears to be linked with its ability to ward off fungi.)

Psychology researchers, on the other hand, have posited that some people's preference for capsaicin-containing foods is related to thrill-seeking tendencies. Psychologists Paul Rozin and Deborah Schiller concluded this back in 1980, drawing on an experiment that involved giving people increasingly spicy doses of chili. "Eating of chili, riding on roller coasters, taking very hot baths, and many other human activities can be considered instances of thrill seeking or enjoyment of 'constrained risks,'" they wrote. More recent studies have associated the preference for chiles with personality traits like "sensation seeking" and "sensitivity to reward." The recent popularity of chili eating competitions can be seen as an extreme example of these tendencies.

Beyond these biological and psychological investigations, anthropologists and those in related fields have also contributed to our understanding of why particular groups tend to prefer spicier foods by bringing in the element of culture. As anthropologists have documented over the years, humans can eat a diverse range of foods-so our decisions about what to eat often speak to much more than our biological or psychological needs. They reflect our societies and their values.

In some parts of Mexico, for instance, the preference for hotter foods is tied to notions of national and regional identities. The cultural historian Esther Katz cites an expression shared by Indigenous Mixtec people from Oaxaca: " S omos fuertes porque comemos puro chile " ("We are strong, since we eat nothing but pepper"). The association between eating spicy foods and certain personality traits, such as courage or spunk, can be a way for some people to distinguish themselves from other groups, even those living within the same country.

Further illustrating this point, chili peppers figure in regional identities in Communist China, and even regional rivalries. A common saying goes: "The Sichuanese are not afraid of hot chiles; no degree of heat will frighten off the people of Guizhou; but those Hunanese are terrified of food that isn't hot!" The leader of the Communist revolution, Mao Zedong, was a native of Hunan who pointedly connected the revolutionary spirit with the ability to handle spice.

Mao is said to have remarked: "Without chili peppers there would be no revolution."

Spiciness is also connected in some places with gender identities. For instance, in Japan, as anthropologist Jon Holtzman has investigated, men were traditionally expected to prefer spicy foods (and alcohol) and to disdain sweet foods. Attitudes toward food preferences have changed alongside shifts in Japanese societal notions of masculinity in the 20th century-though sweetness is still sometimes associated more with women and children.

Of course, it goes without saying that tastes change along with societies. Indeed, certain food products that may seem unpalatable or even disgusting to some can become well-loved by others. Take, for instance, the food spread Vegemite becoming part of Australian national identity, or guinea pigs, traditionally eaten by Indigenous communities in the Andes, becoming part of Peruvian fine dining in recent years.

And even within a particular group, individuals have their own preferences. Associating certain ethnicities with food preferences can lead to inaccurate generalizations and damaging stereotypes. An eighth grader named Jacquelin Rojas from the U.S. summarized this point succinctly on a website inviting people to distill their thoughts about race. "Not all Mexicans like spicy foods," she wrote.

In the end, there is no single explanation that can account for why some people desire spicy foods while others don't. Regardless, the travels of chili peppers across continents and over the centuries shows just how far some humans-myself included-will go to spice up our diets and everyday lives.
This Gideon Lasco is an anthropologist and a physician based in Manila, the Philippines. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and his MD from the University of the Philippines, where he currently teaches anthropology. His research includes the chemical practices of young people, the meanings of human height, the politics of health care, and the lived realities of the Philippine "drug war." Lasco has a weekly column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where he writes about health, culture, and society. Follow him on Twitter @gideonlasco. was originally published on Sapiens, an anthropology magazine.

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As someone who grew up in the Philippines, I have always loved hot, spicy foods. A typical Filipino meal includes some mix of soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar, citrus, and peppers, which can be used to customize the flavor of a dish.

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This article talks about the oldest DNA sample found in the UK.

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The first genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the UK -- the oldest human DNA obtained from the British Isles so far -- indicates the presence of two distinct groups that migrated to Britain at the end of the last ice age, according to new research.

Published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the new study by UCL Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute researchers reveals for the first time that the recolonisation of Britain consisted of at least two groups with distinct origins and cultures.

The study team explored DNA evidence from an individual from Gough's Cave, Somerset, and an individual from Kendrick's Cave, North Wales, who both lived more than 13,500 years ago. Very few skeletons of this age exist in Britain, with around a dozen found across six sites in total. The study, which involved radiocarbon dating and analysis as well as DNA extraction and sequencing, shows that it is possible to obtain useful genetic information from some of the oldest human skeletal material in the country.

The authors say that these genome sequences now represent the earliest chapter of the genetic history of Britain, but ancient DNA and proteins promise to take us back even further into human history.

The researchers found that the DNA from the individual from Gough's Cave, who died about 15,000 years ago, indicates that her ancestors were part of an initial migration into northwest Europe around 16,000 years ago. However, the individual from Kendrick's Cave is from a later period, around 13,500 years ago, with his ancestry from a western hunter-gatherer group. This group's ancestral origins are thought to be from the near East, migrating to Britain around 14,000 years ago.

Study co-author Dr Mateja Hajdinjak (Francis Crick Institute) said: "Finding the two ancestries so close in time in Britain, only a millennium or so apart, is adding to the emerging picture of Palaeolithic Europe, which is one of a changing and dynamic population."

The authors note that these migrations occurred after the last ice age when approximately two-thirds of Britain was covered by glaciers. As the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, drastic ecological and environmental changes took place and humans began to move back into northern Europe.

Study co-author Dr Sophy Charlton, who undertook the study whilst at the Natural History Museum, said: "The period we were interested in, from 20-10,000 years ago, is part of the Palaeolithic -- the Old Stone Age. This is an important time period for the environment in Britain, as there would have been significant climate warming, increases in the amount of forest, and changes in the type of animals available to hunt."

As well as genetically, the two groups were found to be culturally distinct, with differences in what they ate and how they buried their dead.

Study co-author Dr Rhiannon Stevens (UCL Institute of Archaeology) said: "Chemical analyses of the bones showed that the individuals from Kendrick's Cave ate a lot of marine and freshwater foods, including large marine mammals.

"Humans at Gough's Cave, however, showed no evidence of eating marine and freshwater foods, and primarily ate terrestrial herbivores such as red deer, bovids (such as wild cattle called aurochs) and horses."

The researchers discovered that the mortuary practices of the two groups also differed. Although there were animal bones found at Kendrick's Cave, these included portable art items, such as a decorated horse jawbone. No animal bones were found that showed evidence of being eaten by humans, and the scientists say that this indicates the cave was used as a burial site by its occupiers.

In contrast, animal and human bones found in Gough's Cave showed significant human modification, including human skulls modified into 'skull-cups', which the researchers believe to be evidence for ritualistic cannibalism. Individuals from this earlier population seem to be the same people who created the Magdalenian stone tools, a culture known also for iconic cave art and bone artefacts.

Gough's Cave is also the site where Britain's famous Cheddar Man was discovered in 1903, dated to 10,564-9,915 years BP. In this study, Cheddar Man was found to have a mixture of ancestries, mostly (85%) western hunter-gatherer and some (15%) of the older type from the initial migration.

Co-author Dr Selina Brace (Natural History Museum) said: "We really wanted to find out more about who these early populations in Britain might have been.

"We knew from our previous work, including the study of Cheddar Man, that western hunter-gatherers were in Britain by around 10,500 years BP, but we didn't know when they first arrived in Britain, and whether this was the only population that was present."

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ancient civilizations; archaeology; early humans; fossils; human evolution; cultures; anthropology; origin of life

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UK's oldest human DNA obtained, revealing two distinct Palaeolithic populations

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The first genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the UK -- the oldest human DNA obtained from the British Isles so far -- indicates the presence of two distinct groups that migrated to Britain at the end of the last ice age, according to new research.

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This article is about the steady decline in birth rate in China. This had led to several problems in our world. The major problem is that the population structure is extremely disproportionate. The article used all anthropology terms right.

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The population is the foundation of sustainable development. When an economy grows to a certain magnitude, population aging is inevitable due to declining fertility, increasing life expectancy, and population migration1,2. The world's major economies are facing the problem of population aging, and the global fertility decline has become an inevitable trend3,4,5. As the world's largest developing country, although China's total population is still rising, the birth rate has declined, and the problem of population aging is becoming more and more severe6,7. China has made significant adjustments to population policy to supply the population with more suitable for the demand of steady economic growth. For example, China began implementing the "universal two-child " policy in January 2016, which allowed all families to have two children8,9. Actually, China's birth rate increased in 2016 and 2017, then reached 13.57% and 12.64% respectively, but then entered a period of decline. In the long run, the continued decline in the birth rate will bring a series of negative impacts, such as the imbalance of the population structure, the increased retirement burden of the working population, the deepening of social conflicts, and the economy development will be restricted in the future and so on. Therefore, the birth rate problem has become a hot topic in the current society and a critical problem that the Chinese government urgently needs to solve.

The problem of regional differences has always been one of the most common and essential problems all around the world10,11,12. With the increasingly significant regional differences in population, scholars from various countries began to analyze population data from a spatial perspective. For example, Velarde et al.5 analyzed the fertility trend and influencing factors of young women in Chile from 1992 to 2012. Their study found that the average fertility rate of adolescents has declined by 25% over the past 20 years, the affluent areas are lower than the poor areas, and fertility rates varied considerably between regions. Nandi et al.4 analyzed the trends and influencing factors of the total birth rate and repeat birth rate among Georgia adolescents from 2008 to 2016. Their study found that adolescents' overall fertility and repeated fertility rates have decreased significantly since 2008, especially in areas with poor reproductive health care conditions. With the deepening of China's reform and opening up, the regional development differences problem has become increasingly prominent, which has become an essential factor affecting social harmony13,14,15,16. Hu17 described the uneven geographical distribution of China's population and the economy as early as the 1930s. He divided China into two parts of similar size, east and west, with the western part accounting for 3.7% of the country's total population. In contrast, the eastern part accounted for 96.3% of the country's total population. Zhang et al.3 used descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analysis methods to analyze the fertility willingness and influencing factors of the population in mainland China. Their study found that fertility intentions will inevitably decline due to the lack of a good fertility environment, rising education levels and increasing monthly household income. Wu et al.18 used a spatial econometric model to analyze the spatial pattern characteristics and driving factors of population aging in China. Their study found that uneven economic development is the main reason for China's aging population, which is high in the east and low in the west. Wei et al.19 analyzed the distribution characteristics and dynamic laws of the Chinese population using the spline-based method. Their study found that the economic development of China's provinces is uneven, the growth rate of the resident population varies significantly, the total population growth rate is declining rapidly, and the problem of population aging is prominent. Chen et al.20 analyzed the regional differences and influencing factors of population aging in China from 1995 to 2011 using the Theil index method. Their study found that the regional differences in population aging in China are apparent, fluctuating repeatedly and increasing gradually.

At present, China's population structure is undergoing significant changes. With the birth rate becoming the focus of sociology, the regional difference in population birth rate has become a new hotspot in geographical research. However, studies that analyze the population structure at multiple spatial levels are still rare, and our research has just made up for this gap. In this article, the spatial regions are stratified by natural geographic regions, and a hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-temporal model is established. The model parameters are estimated by the integrated nested Laplace approximations21,22,23 (INLA) algorithm . This study reveals the regional differences and temporal development trend of birth rate by analyzing the birth population and influencing factors in the Chinese Mainland. In addition, this study can not only serve as a reference for studying regional differences in birth rate but also put forward relevant suggestions and practical measures.

From 2011 to 2019, the birth rate of 31 provinces in mainland China is shown in Fig. 1. In the spatial dimension, the birth rate in northeast China is low, while that in northwest and southwest China is high, and shows a trend of gradually increasing from east to west, with obvious spatial heterogeneity. From 2011 to 2013, the birth rate in northwest, southwest and central China showed an upward trend, and from 2014 to 2015, it showed a downward trend. From 2016 to 2017, the birth rate in most parts of China, except northeast China, showed an apparent upward trend. It declined gradually after 2018, especially in northwest, southwest, central and South China.

The trend of birth rate changes in 31 provinces in mainland China from 2011 to 2019.

Geographical differences

The geographic variation of birth rates in mainland China is mainly reflected in two levels, level 1 and level 2. The spatial effect on the birth rate is influenced by the spatial effect on two levels, that is, under the influence of the spatial effect on the level 2, it is affected by the spatial effect on the level 1. where the relative risk of spatial effects on level 1 \(exp\{\mu _{i} + v_{i}\}\), the relative risk of spatial effects on level 2 \(exp\{ \omega _{j} + \xi _{j } \}\), and the common relative risk of spatial effects on both levels \(exp\{\mu _{i} + v_{i} + \omega _{j } + \xi _{j } \}\) are shown in Tables 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Under the combined effect of the two levels of spatial effects, Guangdong have the lowest relative risk and less than 0.5, and Beijing, Hainan, Zhejiang, Guangxi,Ningxia, Hebei, Hunan, Tibet, Tianjin, Guizhou,Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Henan have higher relative risk. The results show that the spatial effect of Guangdong, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Chongqing, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Hubei, Fujian, Shanghai, Jilin, Yunnan, Anhui, Liaoning, Heilongjiang and Gansu has a negative effect on the birth rate, while the spatial effect of Beijing, Hainan, Zhejiang, Guangxi, Ningxia, Hebei, Hunan, Tibet, Tianjin, Guizhou,Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Henan has a higher positive effect on the birth rate.

Time differences

During the period 2011 to 2019, the birth rate in mainland China is subject to a combination of temporal structural and temporal unstructured effects. The relative risk of temporal structure effect is \(exp\{\gamma _{t } \}\), the relative risk of temporal unstructured effect is \(exp\{\phi _{t} \}\), and the relative risk of temporal combined effect is \(exp\{\gamma _{t} + \phi _{t} \}\) is shown in Fig. 2. From 2011 to 2019, the impact of temporal unstructured effect \(\phi _{t}\) was almost unchanged, and the relative risk level remained at about 1. From 2011 to 2015, the risk level of temporal structure effect \(\gamma _{t }\) fluctuated around 1. After an obvious upward trend from 2015 to 2017, it began to decline from 2018. From the perspective of the overall time effect, from 2011 to 2015, the combined effect of the temporal structured effect \(\gamma _{t }\) and temporal unstructured effect \(\phi _{t}\) on fertility fluctuated between negative and positive. From 2015 to 2017, the time common effect positively impacted the fertility rate, and it increased yearly. After 2017, the positive impact of time common effect on fertility gradually decreased and finally became negative.

The posterior mean of the relative risk of the temporal effects in the model (1).

Spatio-temporal differences

Figure 3 shows the trend chart of the relative risk \(exp \{ \delta _{it }+\zeta _ {jt } \}\) of the common space-time interaction effect at the two levels between 2011 and 2019. In this study, the space-time interaction effect is the residual explanation of fertility under the space effect and time effect. As a substitute for the unknown unobservable effect, it is used to explain the deviation trend of space and time and depict the potential spatial pattern that fluctuates with time. The influence of spatial pattern on level 1 will show structural change with time trend, reflecting the interaction effect of spatial structural effect and time structure effect. The influence of spatial pattern on level 2 will not show structural spatial change with time trend, reflecting the interaction effect of spatial random effect and time random effect. Under the combined effect of Spatio-temporal interaction effects at the two levels, The main manifestations of Spatio-temporal trends are as follows: From 2011 to 2019, the relative risk of the Spatio-temporal interaction effect did not show a clear change trend. Among them, the Spatio-temporal interaction effects of Gansu, Liaoning, Hunan, and Xinjiang significantly positively impact the birth rate. In contrast, the Spatio-temporal interaction effects of Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Qinghai, Sichuan, Chongqing, and Guangxi have a relatively high negative impact on the birth rate.

The relative risk under the combined effects of spatio-temporal interaction on two levels.

In this paper, we establish a hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-temporal model and estimate the model parameters by the INLA algorithm, to explore geographic differences and temporal trends of the birth rates in mainland China from 2011 to 2019. The results show that the economic development is unbalanced, the birth rate is generally declining, the population growth rate is slowing down, and the population aging is severe in the Chinese Mainland. The birth rate has apparent spatial heterogeneity, and the difference between provincial regions is more significant than in natural geographical regions. The spatial dimension mainly shows that the northeast is low, the northwest and southwest are high, and the birth rate has an upward trend from east to west. These trends are caused by unbalanced economic development, different fertility attitudes, and differences in fertility security, reflecting regional differences in spatial effects. Regarding the time dimension, the changing birth rate trend is mainly affected by the overall economy and fertility policy that year, reflecting the temporal effect difference in birth rates. From 2011 to 2019, the birth rate mainly showed a downward trend. Although in 2016 and 2017, the birth rate in most parts of China established a significant increase, the rise gradually declined after 2018. For example, the birth rate growth from 2015 to 2017 is related to the "universal two-child" policy in 2016. However, due to the lack of a relevant security system after the universal two-child policy, residents' growth level of per capita disposable income could not meet the burdens caused by the second child's birth, so the birth rate began to decline again after 2017. It shows that the country can temporarily affect its birth rate through policies like allowing all families to have two children. However, to achieve stable growth in the birth rate, it is still necessary to establish full fertility protection measures in the follow-up.

Based on the results of this study, this paper makes the following recommendations: first, it is necessary to speed up the process of economic construction in the western region, further reduce the problem of unbalanced and insufficient development among various areas in mainland China, and promote long-term balanced population development. Second, we must raise the fertility awareness of all residents, especially in economically developed areas such as North China and South China. Residents'GDP and average disposable income are high, but the birth rate is low, and the birth rate has excellent room for improvement. Third, we must protect women's legitimate rights and interests, establish a comprehensive assistance and security system for families with two or three children, and further implement maternity security and supporting measures for residents in various regions.

Data source

Considering data acquisition's feasibility and completeness, this paper selects the birth population data of 31 provinces in mainland China from 2011 to 2019. To fully reflect the trend of geographical differences and try to minimize the interpretation of other influencing factors, this article interprets the influencing factors in the space as a spatial effect, analyzes the influencing factors in time as the time effect, and interprets the remaining effects as an inseparable Spatio-temporal interaction effect. Since the seven natural geographical divisions are based on science and follow the relevant zoning principles, the seven natural geographical divisions are regarded as large-scale, and the provincial regions are considered small-scale spatial stratification. Because the detailed data of the east, central and west of Inner Mongolia and the south-central and northeast of Hebei are not available, those are divided into north China in this study. The seven natural geographical regions are coded as \(j = 1,2,\ldots ,7\), the province are coded as \(i = 1,2,\ldots , 31\), and the time are coded as \(t = 1,2,\ldots , 9\). Finally, summarize the data as a physical geography spatiotemporal data of districts, provinces, and time classification. The above data on births are taken from the National Bureau of Statistics ( http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/).

Modeling

Construction of a two-level Poisson spatial multiscale model based on hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-temporal model24:

where \(i=1, \ldots , 31, j=1, \ldots , 7\), and \(i \in j\). i and j represent the observation indices at the provincial and natural geographical regions scales, respectively. \(i \in j\) represents the smaller provincial scale nested in the larger Natural geographical regions scale. The provincial and the Natural geographical regions scale are called level 1 and level 2, respectively. t represents the time observation index, \(t=1, \ldots , 9\). \(Y_{it}\) represents the number of births on the ith region in year t. \(E_{it}\) represents the expected number of births in the ith region in year t. \(\rho _{it}\) represents the relative risk of births. \(\alpha\) stands for the average log relative risk. \(\mu _{i}\) and \(v_{i}\) represent the spatial structural and unstructured spatial effects at level 1, respectively, forming the spatial effect at level 1. \(\gamma _{t}\) and \(\phi _{t}\) represent the time structural and unstructured time effects at level 1, and their sums together form the time effect. \({\omega _{j }}\) and \({\xi _{j }}\) represent the structural and unstructured spatial effects at level 2, respectively, which together form the spatial effect at level 2. \(\delta _{it}\) and \(\zeta _{jt}\) are used as spatio-temporal interaction effects on level 1 and level 2, respectively, and the four types of Spatio-temporal interactions25 are shown in Table 4.

Priority specification

The INLA algorithm is a fast calculation method proposed by Rue et al.21 for latent Gaussian models that satisfy the Gaussian Markov random field conditions. In the INLA algorithm, the latent random field of model (1) is \(\varvec{x} = \{ \varvec{\eta }, \alpha , \varvec{\mu } , \varvec{v} , \varvec{\gamma } , \varvec{\phi } ,\varvec{\delta } , \varvec{\omega } , \varvec{\epsilon } , \varvec{\zeta } \}\), the set of hyperparameters is \(\varvec{\theta }=\{ \tau _{\mu }, \tau _{v} , \tau _{\gamma }, \tau _{\phi },\tau _{\delta }, \tau _{\omega }, \tau _{\xi }, \tau _{\zeta } \}\), the distribution of hyperparameters is \(log\varvec{\theta } \sim log ~Gamma (0.5, 0.000 5)\), with precision matrix \(Q(\varvec{\theta })\). The prior information on the spatial structure effects \(\{ \mu _{i}, \omega _{j} \}\) is expressed by the intrinsic conditional autoregressive model25,26,27 (ICAR). Let \(m = \{ \mu _{i}, \omega _{j} \}\), then its conditional distribution is:

where \(\tau _{m}=\left\{ \tau _{\mu }, \tau _{\omega }\right\} , \tau _{\mu }\) and \(\tau _{\omega }\) are the accuracy parameters of the spatial structure effects on level 1 and level 2, respectively. n represents the number of regions, \(n=31\) when modeling \(\mu _{i}\) and \(n=7\) when modeling \(\omega _{j}\). \(c \sim d\) represents the region c adjacent to the region d. \(n_{c}\) represents the number of neighboring regions that share an edge with region c. The spatial correlation between regions is defined by their spatial adjacency:

The temporal structure effect \(\gamma _{ t}\) obeys the first-order random walk model25,26 (RW1), whose conditional distribution is:

where \(\sigma _{\gamma }^{2}=\frac{1}{\tau _{\gamma }}\), \(\tau _{\gamma }\) is the precision parameter for the time structure effect. The fixed effect is denoted \(s = \{\alpha \}\), and its prior information is modeled as \(s \sim N(0,10^{6})\). The unstructured effect is denoted \(g = \{v_{i}, \xi _{j}, \phi _{t}\}\), whose prior information is modeled as \(g \sim Normal(0,\frac{1}{\tau _{g} } )\). Where \(\tau _{g} = \{ \tau _{v},\tau _{\xi },\tau _{\phi } \}\), \(\tau _{v}\), \(\tau _{\xi }\) and \(\tau _{\phi }\) represent the accuracy parameters of the unstructured spatial effect at level 1, the unstructured spatial effect at level 2, and the unstructured time effect, respectively. The Spatio-temporal interaction effect is denoted as \(r = \{ \delta _{i t }, {\zeta _{jt}} \}\), and its prior information is modeled as \(r \sim Normal(0,\frac{1}{\tau _{r} R_{r}} )\). where \(\tau _{r} = \{ \tau _{\delta }, \tau _{\zeta } \}\) is an unknown scalar, and \(R_{r} = \{ R_{\delta }, R_{\zeta } \}\) is a structure matrix that denoted as the Kronecker product25, set by the interaction type in Table 4.

Model selection

Model (1) has four Spatio-temporal interaction types at level 1 and level 2, respectively. However, due to the superposition of interaction types at two levels, model (1) has 16 choices in Spatio-temporal interaction. In order to find the most appropriate interaction type for model (1) at both levels, we first disregard the spatial and Spatio-temporal interaction effects at level 2. At this point, we can get the model (2):

The selection information of four spatiotemporal interaction types on level 1 of the model (2) is shown in Table 5. DIC represents the deviance information criterion28,29, a statistical indicator to compare Bayesian models' fitting effect and complexity. WAIC represents the widely applicable informationcite30,31, which is not affected by parameterization and is close to the Bayesian cross-validation results. It can be concluded from Table 5 that the DIC and WAIC of the model (2) under type 2 are the smallest, so chosen type 2 as the Spatio-temporal interaction type on level 1 of the model (1). After determining the Spatio-temporal interaction type on level 1 of the model (1), the DIC and WAIC under the four Spatio-temporal interaction types on level 2 are shown in Table 6. By comparing the values of DIC and WAIC in Table 6, type 3 is selected as the Spatio-temporal interaction type on level 2 of the model (1).

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11961065).

Authors and Affiliations

College of Mathematics and System Science, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, 830046, Xinjiang, China

Jinwei Zhang, Shuzhen Ding & Xijian Hu

Contributions

J.W.Z., X.J.H. and S.Z.D. designed the research and advanced research progress. J.W.Z. analyzed the data and wrote the paper. X.J.H. and S.Z.D. provided amendments. X.J.H. review the final paper. All authors approved the final paper and accepted the accountability for all aspects of the work.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xijian Hu.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Analysis of spatial and temporal impact differences of birth rate in mainland China - Scientific Reports

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The continuing decline in the birth rate has led to a series of problems, such as the disproportion of population structure and severe aging population, which have restricted the country's economic development. To have a deeper understanding of the geographical differences and influencing factors of the birth rate, this paper collects and organizes the birth population data of 31 provinces in mainland China from 2011 to 2019.

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Flexibility of 15th century European armor 

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Flexibility of 15th century European armor 

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/CjyV-iMJIBN/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

This shows the flexibility of reconstructed European armor which can be viewed through an anthropological lens as the study of antiquated arms and armor.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 1.4M+ Comrades (@historyinmemes)

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As already written in the post, I found a Twitter thread about a new exhibition in the National Museum of Anthropology located in New Mexico that opened up to the public this past week. These are a few preview photos of what you could find there.

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National Artist Kidlat Tahimik gives the media a preview of his exhibition 'Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural' at the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila on Monday, October 17. It will be open to the public on Saturday, October 22. 📸: Rappler

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National Artist Kidlat Tahimik gives the media a preview of his exhibition 'Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural' at the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila on Monday, October 17. It will be open to the public on Saturday, October 22. 📸: Rappler https://t.co/cRjtOah0NC

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National Artist Kidlat Tahimik gives the media a preview of his exhibition 'Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural' at the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila on Monday, October 17. It will be open to the public on Saturday, October 22. 📸: Rappler pic.twitter.com/cRjtOah0NC
— Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) October 17, 2022

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National Artist Kidlat Tahimik gives the media a preview of his exhibition 'Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural' at the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila on Monday, October 17. It will be open to the public on Saturday, October 22. 📸: Rappler https://t.co/cRjtOah0NC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
National Artist Kidlat Tahimik gives the media a preview of his exhibition 'Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural' at the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila on Monday, October 17. It will be open to the public on Saturday, October 22. 📸: Rappler https://t.co/cRjtOah0NC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
National Artist Kidlat Tahimik gives the media a preview of his exhibition 'Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural' at the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila on Monday, October 17. It will be open to the public on Saturday, October 22. 📸: Rappler

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Earliest Known Amputation Was Performed in Borneo 31,000 Years Ago

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Earliest Known Amputation Was Performed in Borneo 31,000 Years Ago

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The article talks about the early known amputation that was performed about 31,000 years ago.

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Perhaps it took place in the shelter of a cave, or maybe outside where the tropical sun made it easier for the surgeon to see. The nervous young patient could have been fully alert, or sedated somehow with a concoction of medicinal plants from the surrounding forest, before the sharp stone did its grim work. Such fascinating details will likely always be speculation but an amazing fossil find makes one fact clear; 31,000 years ago, a young hunter-gatherer in Borneo had their lower left leg surgically amputated-and they survived.

Archaeologists working in a remote part of Indonesian Borneo have discovered what may be the earliest known example of a successful amputation-predating the next oldest such surgery by an amazing 24,000 years. A team of Indonesian and Australian researchers described the find this week in Nature.

The skeleton shows that a youngster's lower left leg was skillfully severed and, despite the deadly risks of blood loss and infection, healed successfully. The leg bones show growth proving that the patient, though not very mobile, lived for years after the amputation, likely thanks to extensive community care during their convalescence and beyond. Scientists aren't sure whether the patient was male or female, but the stature makes male more likely. The amputation suggests that at least some foragers of Southeast Asia had developed significant medical knowledge and techniques long before the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago, after which other examples begin to appear in the archaeological record.

"It's a remarkable find, and I do think it's consistent with an amputation that's been done surgically," says Charlotte Roberts, a bioarchaeologist at Durham University who specializes in paleopathology and wasn't involved in the research. "I can't imagine what that child went through."

The largely complete skeleton of a 19- or 20-year-old Homo sapiens was found during 2020 excavations at a site called Liang Tebo. The cave is in the remote Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, a rugged, rarely-visited landscape of limestone cliffs and forest accessible only by boat.

Early human remains are scarce in the region, and the authors suggest this may be the oldest known burial of a modern human that has ever been found in the region's islands. During the dig, the find took on a whole new level of intrigue as the team discovered that the skeleton's lower leg was entirely missing. The limb had been not broken or smashed, but cleanly removed, and the archaeologists found unusual boney overgrowth on the remaining fragments of the tibia and fibula. That overgrowth matched overgrowth seen in modern clinical cases of amputations.

Further investigations showed that the bone developed atrophy, indicating the part of the limb that remained was a stump with limited use. Investigations into this remodeling of bone structure showed some six to nine years of such changes. "This confirms that the surgery was not fatal, not infected and likely occurred during late childhood," says Tim Maloney, who specializes in the archaeology of Borneo at Griffith University, in Australia, and co-authored the study.

To perform a successful operation, prehistoric surgeons must have had knowledge of anatomy. They sliced through not only bone but muscles, veins and nerves in such a way that the patient didn't bleed to death or go into a fatal state of shock. Their scalpels were likely the flaked lithic edges common to the era; the skeleton's grave was associated with fine flakes of a stone called chert, which can produce extremely sharp edges. Afterwards the surgeons may have employed a tourniquet or cauterizing, though neither would leave clear evidence on the skeleton and so remain unknown possibilities.

What seems certain, however, is that the patient enjoyed a considerable level of post-op care.

"It is highly unlikely that this individual could have survived the procedure without intensive nursing care, including blood loss and shock management, and regular wound cleaning," Maloney notes. He believes the successful operation implies that the community also had some understanding of antiseptic and antimicrobial management to prevent fatal infection. In this, their foraging lifestyle and forest environment might have proved to be advantages.

"Given these people lived in an area of the Earth's tropics, home to some of the highest plant biodiversity, many with known medicinal properties, there is a strong case that adapting to this rainforest environment may have stimulated the development of advanced medical knowledge including plant processing for treatments."

Whatever methods were employed they clearly worked, producing a well-healed amputation with no lasting skeletal evidence of complications or infections. During the years the patient lived and grew as an amputee, he very likely received ongoing assistance from the community while living a mobile lifestyle in this mountainous rainforest terrain.

"They actually made a conscious decision to look after this person," says Roberts. "It seems to me that during this person's life, and even at their death, as we can see from the funerary context, they were cared for very well."

The evidence for prehistoric amputations, or surgeries of any kind, is relatively scarce. But some intriguing examples of serious medical procedures have been found. Some Egyptian mummies are amputees, including one fitted with an amazing 3,000-year-old prosthetic toe. Skulls from a Ukrainian cemetery show that trepanation, drilling a hole in the human skull, was practiced more than 9,000 years ago. The practice also occurred across the world from Ancient Greece to the Incan Empire. By 5,300 years ago, humans in northern Spain were performing ear surgery, cutting into a patient's skull to relieve pain.

Previously, the oldest example of successful amputation surgery was found in France, where some prehistoric surgeon had deliberately, carefully severed the left forearm of an elderly male farmer about 7,000 years ago. The use of advanced surgical and medical techniques like the examples above is often linked to the dawn of agriculture, some 12,000 years ago, when settled communities and cultures began to develop. But life in Borneo was entirely different. The employment of such medical skill there, among hunter gatherers who were frequently on the move, is another piece of evidence suggesting that their cultures may have been quite sophisticated. Some of the world's oldest known figurative paintings, cattle-like animals painted on cave walls at least 40,000 years ago, have also been found in this same region of Borneo.

The incredibly rare nature of the amputee skeleton find, however, makes it difficult to say if the amputation was itself an isolated act by an extraordinary human or group, or whether it is indicative of medical practices more common in prehistoric Borneo.

"There is little doubt advanced medical knowledge was well versed here 31,000 years ago," Maloney says, "although just how widespread that was is unknown."

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Earliest Known Amputation Was Performed in Borneo 31,000 Years Ago

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Perhaps it took place in the shelter of a cave, or maybe outside where the tropical sun made it easier for the surgeon to see. The nervous young patient could have been fully alert, or sedated somehow with a concoction of medicinal plants from the surrounding forest, before the sharp stone did its grim work.

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In this NPR article, a Syria discovered a mosaic which is a rare discovery. The mosaic is of a "Roman mythology, demigod hero Hercules slayed Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, in one of his 12 labors." The rich history of this mosaic is slowly being studied, and the Museum hopes to preserve it.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/24/uk-two-genetic-groups-humans-last-ice-age-dna-reveals

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Britain was home to at least two genetically distinct groups of humans at the end of the last ice age, the oldest human DNA from the UK has revealed.

About 19,000 years ago, ice sheets that had covered much of Britain were melting and the landscape once again became habitable to humans. Evidence of their return dates back to about 15,500 years ago. These early groups crossed now submerged land that once connected Britain to mainland Europe.

Human remains from the late ice age have been found at only a handful of sites in Britain, including at Gough's Cave in Somerset and Kendrick's Cave in Llandudno, Wales. The former is famous for having been home to "Cheddar Man" - an individual who lived about 10,000 years ago - as well as older remains that showed signs of cannibalism.

Now researchers have extracted and analysed DNA from two individuals found at these sites - the oldest DNA from Britain.

"We can see that there are two different genetic ancestry present in Britain during this late glacial period, which is perhaps not what we expected to find," said Dr Sophy Charlton, the first author of the study from the University of York.

Writing in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Charlton and colleagues report how they carried out an isotope analysis on the remains, allowing them to unpick the contribution of different food sources to their diet, and hence refine their radiocarbon dating.

An engraved human bone from Gough's Cave, Somerset. Photograph: Natural History Museum

Supporting previous work, the team found that the Gough's Cave individual mainly relied on terrestrial animals, such as horses, while the diet of the Kendrick's Cave individual included marine creatures.

The researchers then analysed nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from the two individuals. The results reveal that the remains from Gough's Cave are from a female who lived about 14,900 years ago. This female, who was cannibalised, shared ancestry with an individual discovered in a cave in Belgium, known as Goyet Q2, who lived 15,000 years ago.

This ancestry, linked to groups that expanded from south-west Europe, has been associated with particular types of stone tools, treatment of the dead, cave art and other practices that have been labelled Magdalenian culture. Indeed, Magdalenian-style artefacts were found at Gough's Cave.

However, despite Kendrick's Cave containing a Magdalenian-style stone tool and a cut bovid bone from the time of the Gough Cave female, the remains from Kendrick's Cave showed a different ancestry. This individual, a male who lived about 13,500 years ago, shares ancestry with 14,000-year-old remains found in Villabruna, northern Italy. Such ancestry is associated with western hunter-gatherers who expanded from south-east Europe or the near east.

The researchers say the results suggest Kendrick's Cave may have had multiple occupations.

Dr Selina Brace, a co-author of the study from the Natural History Museum, said the results were unexpected given a mixture of the two ancestries had previously been found in older human remains from southern Europe, with the new study revealing Cheddar Man also had such dual ancestry.

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The team said the results suggest that at least two different human groups, with different ancestries, diets and cultures - including funerary practices - were present in Britain at the end of the last ice age.

However, Dr Rhiannon Stevens, a co-author of the work from University College London, said the study only looked at two individuals, meaning cautionwas needed when trying to draw together the different data. For example, she said, Magdalenian people elsewhere in Europe were known to have eaten fish.

Prof Paul Pettitt of Durham University, who was not involved in the research, said archeological work had previously revealed that the Gough's Cave and Kendrick's Cave humans were not contemporaries, and had offered clues as to their diet and ancestry.

But he said the new research highlighted the power of ancient DNA analysis to solve the mystery of whether abrupt changes in culture in prehistory were caused by population movements and ruptures, or by the spread of ideas - with the research suggesting that in this case the former was at play.

"In keeping with what prehistorians have long known about the highly mobile, small populations of ice age hunter-gatherers, this [research] adds evidence to the growing picture of remarkably small, ecologically fragile human groups spread thinly across late Pleistocene Europe," he said.

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UK had at least two genetically distinct human groups at end of last ice age, DNA reveals

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Britain was home to at least two genetically distinct groups of humans at the end of the last ice age, the oldest human DNA from the UK has revealed. About 19,000 years ago, ice sheets that had covered much of Britain were melting and the landscape once again became habitable to humans.

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This article talks about cave art discovered in Alabama recently that is the largest of its kind in North America. The art was projected to be created at a time where the humans of the area were transitioning from nomadic to agricultural tribes.

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North America’s Largest Cave Art Discovered in Alabama

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The cave is so shallow that the artists would not have been able to see the drawings in their entirety, meaning they worked from their imaginations.

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Hi, this article touches on the significance of cacao in Mayan culture and its widespread use.

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Among ancient Mayas, cacao was not a food exclusive to the elite

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It was the money that grew on trees. Said to be a gift from the gods, cacao for the ancient Maya was considered sacred, used not only as currency, but in special ceremonies and religious rituals. It’s the progenitor plant of chocolate, and notions of luxury are embedded in its lore.

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Natives who helped anthropology research 

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Natives who helped anthropology research 

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This is an article detailing how the work of indigenous peoples working for famous anthropologists significantly contributed to their findings, although they are largely uncredited for their hard work.

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Unsung Native Collaborators in Anthropology

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Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead could not have achieved success without their local assistants’ insider knowledge and extensive labor.

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This article is about how people tended to be healthier if they had higher economic standing in medieval Norway.

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones: Higher status individuals -- especially women -- were taller and had stronger bones, according to buried remains

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In medieval Norway, high status individuals tended to be taller and to have stronger bones, possibly as a result of a favorable lifestyle, according to a new study.

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History shows buried under the soil at this state park that many indigenous groups originally inhabited this land and not whites.

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Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia gets about 800,000 visitors every year, but park archaeologist Stacey Young said only a few are aware of the history beneath their feet.

Sesqui, as many vistors call it, was established as a "whites-only" park by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s as a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation.

But it wasn't always a park. Sesqui has a rich history of being home to different peoples dating back centuries.

"A lot of that history is erased," Young said.

The University of South Carolina's Department of Anthropology is helping to uncover this hidden history.

The 1,400 acres of towering pine trees and winding trails among South Carolina's Sandhills region were first home to Indigenous tribes such as the Congaree, Wateree, Catawba and Cherokee, who are often associated with Richland County.

During the antebellum period, the park was the plantation of James Douglass. This altered the natural landscape of the area, and the lasting impacts can still be seen today. The present-day lake was born of Jackson Creek, which Douglass dammed to create a pond.

The land was also used for logging and turpentine extraction, which eventually led to deforestation.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries following the Civil War, Sesqui was cultivated by African American tenant farmers. Soon, there was a growing African American community. Parts of the park were once the sites of churches and schools serving this community.

But these communities were essentially evicted off the land once the area was chosen to become a state park, said Kelly Goldberg, a clinical assistant professor of anthropology.

"We thought it would be a great chance to both teach students the importance of that history, while also teaching them the archaeology tools to uncover it," Goldberg said.

Over the summer, Young, along with a team of students and professors at USC, coordinated a dig at Sesqui. Goldberg said they began with more than 100 dig tests. The team dug three to four pits a day, from 50 to 100 centimeters deep, depending on the soil.

Soon they found physical evidence of the park's history. They discovered former sites of houses, trash pits and an old fence line. Remnants of bricks, nails, window glass and ceramic were indicative of former homesteads. They also found doll parts, belt buckles and buttons, as well as horseshoes and pieces of plows and machinery parts.

They also found confirmation that the site was once occupied by Indigenous peoples.

"It reiterates that this land has been used by different groups of people over time," Goldberg said.

Lauralee Martin, a student on the team, is earning her graduate certificate in archaeology and cultural resources management.

She said many of her anthropology classes have involved theory and law. This experience gave her a more practical, hands-on look at fieldwork and how it works. The discoveries they made made it even more gratifying, she said.

"It was eye opening to learn that something I had just kind of lived with my whole life was actually very historically convoluted," Martin said. "It was a new layer of knowledge that made me appreciate the park a little bit more."

Young said that archaeology at Sesqui is a "work in progress." There is potential for larger excavations in the future, she said.

"It's important to document the history because it gives us a better understanding of where we are today," Young said.

The department is still working on processing artifact data. Weekly archaeology nights, usually on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. in the Hamilton College building, are open to the public, where folks can interact with the department's findings.

This story was originally published October 23, 2022 1:00 AM.

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History found under the soil at state park in Columbia

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Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia gets about 800,000 visitors every year, but park archaeologist Stacey Young said only a few are aware of the history beneath their feet. Sesqui, as many vistors call it, was established as a "whites-only" park by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s as a part of President Franklin D.

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Most important 18th century map of California

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Most important 18th century map of California

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In this Instagram post, we learn about one of the most important 18th century maps of California.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bonhams Books (@bonhamsbooks)

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Discovery of Family Heirlooms in prehistoric times

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Discovery of Family Heirlooms in prehistoric times

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The remains of a 10,000 year old infant give us insight into tools families made to help them move their infants more easily and into family heirlooms. - Tomas Marin

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The authors of a new article published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory argue that they have found evidence of the use of baby carriers 10,000 years ago at the Arma Veirana site in Liguria, Italy.

The research, led by Arizona State University's Claudine Gravel-Miguel, PhD, also includes the University of Colorado Denver's Jamie Hodgkins, PhD, an Associate Professor of Anthropology, and a co-principal investigator on the excavation of Arma Veirana.

Because material used to make the first baby carriers does not preserve well in the archaeological record and because prehistoric baby burials are very uncommon, evidence for prehistoric baby carriers is extremely rare. The site-which includes the oldest documented burial of a female infant in Europe, a 40- to 50-days-old baby, nicknamed Neve-has both. Researchers used innovative analytical methods to extract hard-to-obtain information about perforated shell beads found at the site.

The study used a high-definition 3D photogrammetry model of the burial combined with microscopic observations and microCT scan analyses of the beads to document in detail how the burial took place and how the beads were likely used by Neve and her community in life and in death.

The results of this research show that the beads were likely sewn onto a piece of leather or cloth that was used to wrap Neve for her burial. This decoration contained more than 70 small, pierced shell beads and four big, pierced shell pendants, the likes of which have yet to be found elsewhere. Most of the beads bear heavy signs of use that could not have been produced during Neve's short life, demonstrating they were handed down to her as heirlooms.

"Given the effort that had been put into creating and reusing these ornaments over time, it is interesting that the community decided to part with these beads in the burial of such a young individual, said Gravel-Miguel. "Our research suggests that those beads and pendants likely adorned Neve's carrier, which was buried with her."

Relying on ethnographic observations of how baby carriers are adorned and used in some modern hunter-gatherer societies, this research suggests that Neve's community may have decorated her carrier with beads in order to protect her against evil. However, it is possible that her death signalled that those beads had failed, and it would have been better to bury the carrier rather than reuse it.

"Infant burials are so rare, and this one had so many beads," said Hodgkins. "Being able to look at the use wear and positioning of the ornaments around the infant to determine that these beads were handed down and the infant was wrapped in a way that matches the form of a baby carrier is truly a unique glimpse into the past, giving us a connection to this tragic event that happened so long ago."

University of Colorado Denver
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-022-09573-7
Header Image Credit : University of Colorado Denver

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A 10,000-year-old infant burial provides insights into the use of baby carriers and family heirlooms in prehistory

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The authors of a new article published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory argue that they have found evidence of the use of baby carriers 10,000 years ago at the Arma Veirana site in Liguria, Italy. - HeritageDaily - Archaeology News

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Howdy, this article is about the paleolithic occupation of Tibet and how it is unique because of the elevation the excavation site is at.

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The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago
https://t.co/jdctOPmKB6

Occupation from ∼40 to 30Kya, site has yielded a range of stone tools indicating adaptive ability of humans to harsh environments

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The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago

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The Nwya Devu Paleolithic site in Tibet, 4600 meters above sea level, preserves evidence of early human high-altitude adaptation.

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The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago
https://t.co/jdctOPmKB6

Occupation from ∼40 to 30Kya, site has yielded a range of stone tools indicating adaptive ability of humans to harsh environments https://t.co/x9QSI3omFA

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The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years agohttps://t.co/jdctOPmKB6

Occupation from ∼40 to 30Kya, site has yielded a range of stone tools indicating adaptive ability of humans to harsh environments pic.twitter.com/x9QSI3omFA
— MU-Peter Shimon 🀄 (@MU_Peter) October 24, 2022

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The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
The Nwya Devu Paleolithic site in Tibet, 4600 meters above sea level, preserves evidence of early human high-altitude adaptation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago
https://t.co/jdctOPmKB6

Occupation from ∼40 to 30Kya, site has yielded a range of stone tools indicating adaptive ability of humans to harsh environments https://t.co/x9QSI3omFA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago
https://t.co/jdctOPmKB6

Occupation from ∼40 to 30Kya, site has yielded a range of stone tools indicating adaptive ability of humans to harsh environments https://t.co/x9QSI3omFA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago
https://t.co/jdctOPmKB6

Occupation from ∼40 to 30Kya, site has yielded a range of stone tools indicating adaptive ability of humans to harsh environments

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The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
The Nwya Devu Paleolithic site in Tibet, 4600 meters above sea level, preserves evidence of early human high-altitude adaptation.

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This article highlights the recent discovery of Svante Pääbo and his awarding of a Nobel Prize and how some places around the world with huge genetic diversity are understudied because of the lack of funding in the community.

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For the first time, a Nobel Prize recognized the field of anthropology, the study of humanity. Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in the study of ancient DNA, or aDNA, was awarded the 2022 prize in physiology or medicine for his breathtaking achievements sequencing DNA extracted from ancient skeletal remains and reconstructing early humans' genomes - that is, all the genetic information contained in one organism.

His accomplishment was once only the stuff of Jurassic Park-style science fiction. But Pääbo and many colleagues, working in large multidisciplinary teams, pieced together the genomes of our distant cousins, the famous Neanderthals and the more elusive Denisovans, whose existence was not even known until their DNA was sequenced from a tiny pinky bone of a child buried in a cave in Siberia. Thanks to interbreeding with and among these early humans, their genetic traces live on in many of us today, shaping our bodies and our disease vulnerabilities - for example, to COVID-19.

The world has learned a startling amount about our human origins in the last dozen years since Pääbo and teammates' groundbreaking discoveries. And the field of paleogenomics has rapidly expanded. Scientists have now sequenced mammoths that lived a million years ago. Ancient DNA has addressed questions ranging from the origins of the first Americans to the domestication of horses and dogs, the spread of livestock herding and our bodies' adaptations - or lack thereof - to drinking milk. Ancient DNA can even shed light on social questions of marriage, kinship and mobility. Researchers can now sequence DNA not only from the remains of ancient humans, animals and plants, but even from their traces left in cave dirt.

Alongside this growth in research, people have been grappling with concerns about the speed with which skeletal collections around the world have been sampled for aDNA, leading to broader conversations about how research should be done. Who should conduct it? Who may benefit from or be harmed by it, and who gives consent? And how can the field become more equitable? As an archaeologist who partners with geneticists to study ancient African history, I see both challenges and opportunities ahead.

Building a better discipline

One positive sign: Interdisciplinary researchers are working to establish basic common guidelines for research design and conduct.

In North America, scholars have worked to address inequities by designing programs that train future generations of Indigenous geneticists. These are now expanding to other historically underrepresented communities in the world. In museums, best practices for sampling are being put into place. They aim to minimize destruction to ancestral remains, while gleaning the most new information possible.

But there is a long way to go to develop and enforce community consultation, ethical sampling and data sharing policies, especially in more resource-constrained parts of the world. The divide between the developing world and rich industrialized nations is especially stark when looking at where ancient DNA labs, funding and research publications are concentrated. It leaves fewer opportunities for scholars from parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas to be trained in the field and lead research.

The field faces structural challenges, such as the relative lack of funding for archaeology and cultural heritage protection in lower income countries, worsened by a long history of extractive research practices and looming climate change and site destruction. These issues strengthen the regional bias in paleogenomics, which helps explain why some parts of the world - such as Europe - are so well-studied, while Africa - the cradle of humankind and the most genetically diverse continent - is relatively understudied, with shortfalls in archaeology, genomics and ancient DNA.

Making public education a priority

How paleogenomic findings are interpreted and communicated to the public raises other concerns. Consumers are regularly bombarded with advertisements for personal ancestry testing, implying that genetics and identity are synonymous. But lived experiences and decades of scholarship show that biological ancestry and socially defined identities do not map so easily onto one another.

I'd argue that scholars studying aDNA have a responsibility to work with educational institutions, like schools and museums, to communicate the meaning of their research to the public. This is particularly important because people with political agendas - even elected officials - try to manipulate findings.

For example, white supremacists have erroneously equated lactose tolerance with whiteness. It's a falsehood that would be laughable to many livestock herders from Africa, one of the multiple centers of origin for genetic traits enabling people to digest milk.

Leaning in at the interdisciplinary table

Finally, there's a discussion to be had about how specialists in different disciplines should work together.

Ancient DNA research has grown rapidly, sometimes without sufficient conversations happening beyond the genetics labs. This oversight has provoked a backlash from archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and linguists. Their disciplines have generated decades or even centuries of research that shape ancient DNA interpretations, and their labor makes paleogenomic studies possible.

As an archaeologist, I see the aDNA "revolution" as usefully disrupting our practice. It prompts the archaeological community to reevaluate where ancestral skeletal collections come from and should rest. It challenges us to publish archaeological data that is sometimes only revealed for the first time in the supplements of paleogenomics papers. It urges us to grab a seat at the table and help drive projects from their inception. We can design research grounded in archaeological knowledge, and may have longer-term and stronger ties to museums and to local communities, whose partnership is key to doing research right.

If archaeologists embrace this moment that Pääbo's Nobel Prize is spotlighting, and lean in to the sea changes rocking our field, it can change for the better.

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What's next for ancient DNA studies after Nobel Prize honors groundbreaking field of paleogenomics

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For the first time, a Nobel Prize recognized the field of anthropology, the study of humanity. Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in the study of ancient DNA, or aDNA, was awarded the 2022 prize in physiology or medicine for his breathtaking achievements sequencing DNA extracted from ancient skeletal remains and reconstructing early humans' genomes - that is, all the genetic information contained in one organism.

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Here is an Instagram post about ancient human remains discovered in the town of San Juan near Uyuni, Bolivia. Ancient humans remains can often tell us how humans lived in ancient times. This Instagram post was posted 1 day ago.

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This Instagram account recolors old photos as a way of educating people about the past 200 years. Color makes these particular photo more engaging and eye catching than a black and white photo. Anthropology explores the human condition with the intention of educating people for a better today. I would say that this account relates to anthropology since it takes artifacts from the past and displays them in a way to engage and educate the public.

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LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF PRENATAL AND POSTNATAL ENVIRONMENTS ON ADOLESCENT IMMUNOCOMPETENCE

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LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF PRENATAL AND POSTNATAL ENVIRONMENTS ON ADOLESCENT IMMUNOCOMPETENCE

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The most recent research has showed that the fetal and infant origins of several adult cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, but the longterm consequences of early environments for human immune function remain to be investigated.  These findings provide support for the importance of fetal and early infant programming of the immune function. The report states that "Adolescents who were born small-for-gestational age have been found to be less likely to mount an adequate antibody response to vaccination than appropriate- for-gestational age peers."

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Philippines

Long-term effects of prenatal and postnatal environments on adolescent immunocompetence

Recent research has considered the fetal and infant origins of several adult cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, but the longterm consequences of early environments for human immune function remain to be investigated. With collaborators at the Carolina Population Center and the Office of Population Studies, we are investigating the association between prenatal undernutrition and adolescent immunocompetence in the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Study.

Findings

Adolescents who were born small-for-gestational age have been found to be less likely to mount an adequate antibody response to vaccination than appropriate- for-gestational age peers. High rates of diarrhea in early infancy increase the likelihood of an adequate antibody response, as did rapid weight gain in infancy. Thymic hormone production in adolescence was also enhanced in individuals who grew rapidly in infancy, and reduced in those born small-for-gestational age.

These findings provide support for the importance of fetal and early infant programming of immune function. Additional research is needed to explore the moderators of early environment effects, the mechanisms linking these environments to later outcomes, and their specific immunological consequences.

Relevant Publications

McDade, T.W., Kuzawa, C., Adair, L.S., and M. Beck (2004). Prenatal and early postnatal environments are significant predictors of IgE concentration in Filipino adolescents. Clinical and Experimental Allergy 34: 44-50.

McDade, T.W., Beck, M.A., Kuzawa, C. and L.S. Adair (2001). Prenatal undernutrition, postnatal environments, and antibody response to vaccination in adolescence. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 74: 543-548.
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Philippines: Department of Anthropology - Northwestern University

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Recent research has considered the fetal and infant origins of several adult cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, but the longterm consequences of early environments for human immune function remain to be investigated. With collaborators at the Carolina Population Center and the Office of Population Studies, we are investigating the association between prenatal undernutrition and adolescent immunocompetence in the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Study.

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This article describes the recent dna found in the British isles that shows the earliest evidence of human life in this area.

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Chinese Tea porters along Sichuan’s rugged trails

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Chinese Tea porters along Sichuan’s rugged trails

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This article explains about how for 250 years before the 1950s many people in china took the job of tea porters. These tea porters carried about 16 million pounds of black tea every year over the eastern Himalaya and into Tibet.

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Writer and National Geographic Society Explorer Paul Salopek's Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. He sends this dispatch from Sichuan Province, in China.

Tianquan County, Sichuan Province, China"I saw them when I was a young boy. They were always bent over."

Meet Chen Shou Kang: friendly, bald, energetic even in his 80s, the unofficial historian of the village of Wayao Guan, located in the lumpy mountains of western China. Chen is remembering the last beifu he ever saw. Beifu: the legendary tea porters who for 250 years shouldered impossible burdens of black tea over the eastern Himalaya and into Tibet. Across generations of such trade, perhaps two million bearers may have inched over China's perilous tea roads, carrying individual loads as heavy as a modern refrigerator. They did this wearing grass sandals or barefoot, over 11,000-foot elevations, for weeks at a stretch. Often, they managed only a few dozen steps before pausing from exhaustion.

"They were poor. They had no other choice," old Chen explains. "By the 1950s they were replaced by trucks."

Rummaging through his backroom museum, Chen suddenly grins. He holds up an object made of bamboo: a strange, bladelike tool. It is an antique "sweat wiper" designed to scrape perspiration from the brows and eyes. A long time ago, it once dangled by a string from the wooden pack frame of a tea porter. An artifact from an emphatically bygone era. From a different planet. A relic of extreme human experience-of boggling endurance-that today is virtually impossible to access or comprehend.

I am walking across the world. The heaviest item in my rucksack is a laptop computer weighing two pounds. On this segment of my trek through China, I am joined by three philosopher friends. Li Mengchi is a seeker who guides tourists into the deserts of Arabia. Yang Wendou is a sage who teaches schoolchildren Yunnanese culture. And Cheng Xinhao is the brilliant maker of conceptual art videos. Walking, they argue the merits of idealism over realism, of memory over forgetting. They sing the Mandarin version of "The Internationale" in the driving rain.

Together we hike over Erlang Shan, a stormy, 11,200-foot massif that once tested the old tea porters' will. The colossal peak looms over fading trading paths between Kangding-a historic Tibetan outpost of tea markets and icy winters-and Ya'an, a lush, lowland hub of tea production in Sichuan Province, some 130 miles to the east.

This rugged borderland is notorious for its hazards.

The ramparts of the Tibetan Plateau knife up from the Sichuan Basin into an austere world of heavy fogs, ice, snow, and strong winds. Landslides and rockfalls are common. We slip, crazy-legged, up and down steep goat trails greased by wet mud. We hopscotch along abandoned roads that are chopped to pieces by flash floods. Dripping cedars loom out of the heavy mists. Rotten snow clings to the blue pine shadows. At rest stops, we sometimes spot curious holes drilled into flat bedrock. These small cavities were worn by the action of thousands of wooden guaizi: the indispensable walking sticks of a vanished army of tea porters. Catching their breath, the tough beifu would fit their t-shaped alpenstocks into such sockets to prop up their enormous packs, which they rarely removed on the trail.

By the early 1700s, say historians, the expanding Qing Dynasty had pushed into Sichuan's ethnic Tibetan regions, and began exporting vast consignments of the region's cheap, dark tea to the peoples of the Himalaya. At its peak, this commerce moved nearly 16 million pounds of tea a year, all of it pressed into dry bricks, and the bulk of it transported from the plantations on human backs. People were more economical conveyances than packhorses. Most of the carriers were men. But women and children sometimes portered too. Their thousands of cargoes ended up steeping in millions of cups of yak butter tea.

"Heavy, long-distance carrying is well-known elsewhere in the world, particularly in Nepal," writes Patrick Booz, an expert on the Chinese tea trade at Columbia University, in New York, "but nowhere else-ever-did porters carry loads of such awful weight, with such little time for rest."

The beifu traversed the length of Sichuan's tea roads in about 20 days. Their burdens were so crushing they averaged just seven miles a day. Two hundred and fifty pounds was considered a moderate load, Booz notes. But packs tipping 400 pounds weren't unusual.

"I can still feel the pain," says Wang Shikang, 89, among the last living beifu in the village of Kang Zhi. "I have rheumatism in my knees and back."

Wang's eyes glitter in the leather shield of his face as he recalls his days as a teenager in the twilight of the foot trade, before paved roads penetrated the region during World War II. He slept on plank beds with scores of other rag-wrapped carriers at porters' inns. He gulped cold dumplings to fuel his outraged muscles. Each trek to the alpine tea markets earned a palmful of coins: a survival wage that bought a sackful of corn or rice.

"There used to be many robbers between Kangding and Luding," Wang says loudly, in the way of the hard of hearing. "The bandits couldn't care less about our tea. They always attacked us on the return trip, after we'd been paid. We walked in groups of 20 for protection."

The wretched beifu faced other hardships.

Some were press-ganged into the armies of China's civil war between communists and nationalists. Porters collapsed of hunger or exposure on frozen mountain trails. Others fell to their deaths. The corpses were rolled into anonymous graves. Their loads were carried on.

"But there was happiness even in bitter times," old Chen, the village historian, tells me. "My grandfather carried a flute along with his heavy load. He played music on rest stops."

Tottering onward in slow columns, Chen says, the beifu swapped jokes and stories to ease their suffering. In mixed groups there was flirting. Such human resilience isn't reflected in the somber statues honoring the porters in Ya'an, still a tea-growing center.

We plod a noisy highway down from the drizzly mountains.

Our small party samples tea at modern plantations that pack their harvests into souvenir versions of the bamboo-wrapped tea bricks hauled by the old-time carriers. My colleagues Yang and Cheng debate the role of imagination. ("Dreamers end up with hard lives.") And on the last miles of the ghostly tea trails of Sichuan, we encounter our first human being on foot: a lone young woman filming herself on a phone, chatting with her followers on social media, as she pushes a cart to Tibet.

The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Explorer Paul Salopek and the Out of Eden Walk project since 2013.  Explore the project here.

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Walking in the footsteps of China's historic caravans of tea porters

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Writer and National Geographic Society Explorer Paul Salopek's Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. He sends this dispatch from Sichuan Province, in China. Tianquan County, Sichuan Province, China"I saw them when I was a young boy.

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Fr Antonio Borg created a publication of the fact of contemporary man, and the conformance of nature by which is partaken by his goals and projects. Antonio explains that the nature of man is controlled by the fundamental concepts of the moral, Christ, and relationships which shapes a human individual. Which he explains thoughtfully in his book called antropologia Cristiana.

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Christian anthropology presented to Gozo bishop

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Fr Antonio Borg gives copy of Antropologia Cristiana to Anton Teuma

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What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature

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What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature

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This article explains the impact colonialism has on rituals within indigenous cultures. It also reveals the impact rituals have on the human species.

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On a tropical island in the South West Pacific, a few dozen men gather in the rainforest. They are wearing long trousers but no shoes or shirts, and red paint marks the initials U.S.A. on their bare chests. Carrying thick bamboo poles painted with red stripes, the men greet each other cordially and muck around for a while.

Suddenly, the toll of a bell abruptly changes the mood. Everyone stands upright, looking solemn and purposeful. A frail-looking older man in a worn-out military jacket several sizes too large shouts something in Bislama, a pidgin language common in Vanuatu, and the men get in formation. They place their bamboo poles on their shoulders like rifles, and at the next command begin marching in lockstep through the jungle.

Their destination is a clearing in the forest that looks like a landing strip. But the only airplane present is a full-size wooden replica of a light aircraft. On one side of the strip lies a control tower made of bamboo. On the other sits a satellite dish built of mud and straw. Undeterred by the apparent lack of any actual aviation technology, some of the men light torches and place them alongside the runway. Others use flags to wave landing signals. Everyone raises their gaze to the sky in anticipation.

They wait. But the planes never come.

Scenes like this have been [1] The scene above is an amalgamation of various accounts but draws especially on depictions of John Frum followers on Tanna, an island in the nation of Vanuatu. See, for example, the documentary reported by anthropologists and other observers in various parts of Melanesia since the late 19th century.Waiting for John. When Indigenous communities throughout the area had their first encounters with colonial forces, they marveled at the material abundance the foreigners brought with them. During World War II, when many Melanesians worked for U.S. and Australian military forces, they observed soldiers who never seemed to engage in any productive activities, such as fishing, hunting, working the land, or crafting anything. All they did was march up and down, raise flags, chant anthems, and signal toward the sky.

And when they did that, metal birds appeared and dropped all kinds of goods for them. The Indigenous observers concluded that the strange rituals were causing the cargo to arrive.

With the end of the war, the military bases were abandoned and the goods ceased to arrive. To get the cargo to return, local chiefs began organizing ceremonies that mimicked the rituals of the troops. Soon, elaborate myths and theologies developed around those rituals. Surely, the cargo must have been a gift from the gods-their own ancestors. After all, who else could be capable of producing such wealth? The foreigners had merely discovered the rituals that unlocked these treasures.

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What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature

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On a tropical island in the South West Pacific, a few dozen men gather in the rainforest. They are wearing long trousers but no shoes or shirts, and red paint marks the initials U.S.A. on their bare chests. Carrying thick bamboo poles painted with red stripes, the men greet each other cordially and muck around for a while.

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This tweet highlights an article about potential overlap between the lives of Neanderthals and modern humans. The leading theory is that while there may have been overlap, modern humans replaced Neanderthals fairly quickly. However, this article presents that they may have had a shared culture and coexisted for some time.

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This Kennis & Kennis paleoart is just incredible. From @ScienceMagazine's piece, 'Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe.' https://t.co/XGYwUAb5UA

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Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe

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But findings, based on a reevaluation of radiocarbon dating data, aren’t swaying some experts

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This Kennis & Kennis paleoart is just incredible. From @ScienceMagazine's piece, 'Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe.' https://t.co/XGYwUAb5UA https://t.co/fx1HYZ2E0C

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This Kennis & Kennis paleoart is just incredible. From @ScienceMagazine's piece, 'Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe.' https://t.co/XGYwUAb5UA pic.twitter.com/fx1HYZ2E0C
— Paige Madison (@FossilHistory) October 17, 2022

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Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe

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But findings, based on a reevaluation of radiocarbon dating data, aren’t swaying some experts

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This Kennis & Kennis paleoart is just incredible. From @ScienceMagazine's piece, 'Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe.' https://t.co/XGYwUAb5UA https://t.co/fx1HYZ2E0C

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
This Kennis & Kennis paleoart is just incredible. From @ScienceMagazine's piece, 'Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe.' https://t.co/XGYwUAb5UA https://t.co/fx1HYZ2E0C

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This Kennis & Kennis paleoart is just incredible. From @ScienceMagazine's piece, 'Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe.' https://t.co/XGYwUAb5UA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].title
Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped, shared culture in Western Europe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
But findings, based on a reevaluation of radiocarbon dating data, aren’t swaying some experts

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Black Death Shaped the Evolution of Immunity Genes

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Black Death Shaped the Evolution of Immunity Genes

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This article discusses how researchers discovered that certain protein producing genes survived more than the opposing genes.

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The Black Death shaped the evolution of immunity genes, setting the course for how we respond to disease today

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An international team of scientists who analyzed centuries-old DNA from victims and survivors of the Black Death pandemic has identified key genetic differences that determined who lived and who died, and how those aspects of our immune systems have continued to evolve since that time.

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The new species of humans where found very similar to Homo Sapiens by using tools normally associated with them.

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By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent

Researchers working in Israel have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human that lived alongside our species more than 100,000 years ago.

They believe the remains uncovered near the city of Ramla represent one of the "last survivors" of a very ancient human group.

The finds consist of a partial skull and jaw from an individual who lived between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago.

The team members think the individual descended from an earlier species that may have spread out of the region hundreds of thousands of years ago and given rise to Neanderthals in Europe and their equivalents in Asia.

The scientists have named the newly discovered lineage the "Nesher Ramla Homo type".

Dr Hila May of Tel Aviv University said the discovery reshaped the story of human evolution, particularly our picture of how the Neanderthals emerged. The general picture of Neanderthal evolution had in the past been linked closely with Europe.

"It all started in Israel. We suggest that a local group was the source population," she told BBC News. "During interglacial periods, waves of humans, the Nesher Ramla people, migrated from the Middle East to Europe."

The team thinks that early members of the Nesher Ramla Homo group were already present in the Near East some 400,000 years ago. The researchers have noticed resemblances between the new finds and ancient "pre-Neanderthal" groups in Europe.

"This is the first time we could connect the dots between different specimens found in the Levant" said Dr Rachel Sarig, also from Tel Aviv University.

"There are several human fossils from the caves of Qesem, Zuttiyeh and Tabun that date back to that time that we could not attribute to any specific known group of humans. But comparing their shapes to those of the newly uncovered specimen from Nesher Ramla justify their inclusion within the [new human] group."

Dr May suggests that these humans were the ancestors of Neanderthals.

"The European Neanderthal actually began here in the Levant and migrated to Europe, while interbreeding with other groups of humans."

Others travelled east to India and China, said Prof Israel Hershkovitz, suggesting a connection between East Asian archaic humans and Neanderthals in Europe.

"Some fossils found in East Asia manifest Neanderthal-like features as the Nesher Ramla do," he said.

The researchers base their claims on similarities in features between the Israeli fossils and those found in Europe and Asia, though their assertion is controversial. Prof Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, has recently been assessing Chinese human remains.

"Nesher Ramla is important in confirming yet further that different species co-existed alongside each other in the region at the time and now we have the same story in western Asia," he said.

"However, I think it's a jump too far at the moment to link some of the older Israeli fossils to Neanderthals. I'm also puzzled at suggestions of any special link between the Nesher Ramla material and fossils in China."

The Nesher Ramla remains themselves were found in what used to be a a sinkhole, located in an area frequented by prehistoric humans. This may have been an area where they hunted for wild cattle, horses and deer, as indicated by thousands of stone tools and bones of hunted animals.

According to an analysis by Dr Yossi Zaidner at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, these tools were constructed in the same manner that modern humans of the time also made their implements.

"It was a surprise that archaic humans were using tools normally associated with Homo sapiens. This suggests that there were interactions between the two groups," Dr Zaidner said.

"We think that it is only possible to learn how to make the tools through visual or oral learning. Our findings suggest that human evolution is far from simple and involved many dispersals, contacts and interactions between different species of human."

Follow Pallab on Twitter.

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The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

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New type of ancient human discovered in Israel

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By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent Researchers working in Israel have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human that lived alongside our species more than 100,000 years ago. They believe the remains uncovered near the city of Ramla represent one of the "last survivors" of a very ancient human group.

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Archaeologists found 2,700 year old stone carvings in Iraq. Researchers were able to date the carvings to the reign of King Sennacherib, who was in power from 705–681 B.C.E.

- Alex Stevens

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Archaeologists have discovered stunning Assyrian rock carvings in the Iraqi city of Mosul that date back 2,700 years.

The reliefs, which are in remarkably good condition, feature intricately carved grape vines, warriors with bows and arrows and palm trees. Officials announced that the discoveries will eventually become part of a new archaeological park, per the Agence France-Presse (AFP).

A team of American and Iraqi archaeologists discovered the eight marble slabs while working to restore the Mashki Gate, a structure that was once an entrance to the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Researchers were able to date the carvings to the reign of King Sennacherib, who was in power from 705-681 B.C.E.

"We were all awestruck and virtually speechless. It was like a dream," University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Michael Danti, who directs the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program, tells CNN 's Christian Edwards. "No one predicted that we would be finding Sennacherib reliefs in a city gate."

More than 10,000 archaeological sites are located in Iraq, where some of the world's earliest cities once stood. But in recent years, many of those sites have become targets.

In 2016, the Islamic State bulldozed parts of the Mashki Gate. This destruction was part of a larger effort to destroy pre-Islamic artifacts and historic sites between 2014 and 2017, as the group seized parts of Iraq and Syria.

"Access to cultural heritage is a human right, and groups like ISIS want to sever those links forever as part of their campaign of cultural cleansing and genocide," said Danti.

Restored in the 1970s, the Mashki Gate "was an iconic part of Mosul's skyline, a symbol of the city's long history," writes the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH), which is supporting the current restoration efforts, on its website. And that, it adds, is precisely why it was targeted: "because it was a symbol of Iraq's long history."

The researchers believe the relics once decorated Sennacherib's palace, after which they were moved to the Mashki Gate, possibly during his grandson's rule, as Fadel Mohammed Khodr, head of the Iraqi archaeological team, tells the AFP.

When they were placed at the Mashki Gate, the slabs were partially buried. As a result, the portions of the carvings that remained unground were preserved-even through the destruction in 2016. On the other hand, the sections that were not buried have faded away entirely.

When the restoration is complete, ALIPH intends to transform the Mashki Gate into an education center, where visitors can learn about the history of Nineveh.

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Archaeologists Unearth 2,700-Year-Old Stone Carvings in Northern Iraq

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Archaeologists have discovered stunning Assyrian rock carvings in the Iraqi city of Mosul that date back 2,700 years. The reliefs, which are in remarkably good condition, feature intricately carved grape vines, warriors with bows and arrows and palm trees. Officials announced that the discoveries will eventually become part of a new archaeological park, per the Agence France-Presse (AFP).

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This article discusses how Ice in Anarctica is not as healthy as it should be and it is causing cracks in it. This in turn will cause sea levels to rise by 2050 and potentially ruin millions of homes for people.

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On December 26, 2019, Erin Pettit trudged across a plain of glaring snow and ice, dragging an ice-penetrating radar unit the size of a large suitcase on a red plastic sled behind her. The brittle snow crunched like cornflakes underneath her boots-evidence that it had recently melted and refrozen following a series of warm summer days. Pettit was surveying a part of Antarctica where, until several days before, no other human had ever stepped. A row of red and green nylon flags, flapping in the wind on bamboo poles, extended into the distance, marking a safe route free of hidden, deadly crevasses. The Thwaites Ice Shelf appeared healthy on the surface. But if that were the case, Pettit wouldn't have been there.

Pettit was studying defects within the ice, akin to hidden cracks in an enormous dam, that will determine when the ice shelf might crumble. When it does, the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it could flow right into the ocean, pushing up sea levels around the planet, flooding coastal cities worldwide.

From a distance, the ice shelf looks flat, but as Pettit walked she saw the guide flags ahead of her rise and fall against the horizon-a sign that she was walking across an undulating surface. To Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, this was significant. It meant that the ice's underside was a rolling landscape-not what anyone expected. In satellite images, the center of the ice shelf looks stable. But it isn't, Pettit says: "There are five or six different ways this thing could fall apart."

The Thwaites Ice Shelf begins where the massive Thwaites Glacier meets the West Antarctic coast. The shelf is a floating slab of ice, several hundred meters thick, extending roughly 50 kilometers into the Southern Ocean, covering between 800 and 1,000 square kilometers. For the past 20 years, as the planet has warmed, scientists using satellites and aerial surveys have been watching the Thwaites Ice Shelf deteriorate. The decline has caused widespread alarm because experts have long viewed the Thwaites Glacier as the most vulnerable part of the larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice shelf acts as a dam, slowing its parent glacier's flow into the ocean. If the shelf were to fall apart, the glacier's slide into the sea would greatly accelerate. The Thwaites Glacier itself holds enough ice to raise the global sea level by 65 centimeters (about two feet). The loss of the Thwaites Glacier would in turn destabilize much of the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with enough ice to raise sea levels by 3.2 meters-more than 10 feet.

Even the most optimistic greenhouse gas emissions scenarios indicate that by 2050 humanity will likely be locked in to at least two meters of sea-level rise in the coming centuries. That will put the homes of at least 10 million people in the U.S. below the high tide line. If the Thwaites Glacier collapses and destabilizes the heart of West Antarctica, then sea-level rise jumps to five meters, placing the homes of at least 20 million U.S. people and another 50 million to 100 million people worldwide below high tide. Although Sacramento, Calif., is not the first city that comes to mind when imagining sea-level rise, it would lose 50 percent of its homes as ocean water pushes 80 kilometers inland through low-lying river deltas. The fate of thousands of coastal towns worldwide hangs on events unfolding in Antarctica right now.

Since 1992 the glacier has hemorrhaged a trillion tons of ice. It is currently losing an additional 75 billion tons of ice every year, and the rate is increasing. What happens next, however, depends on processes that can't be studied from the air-flaws within the shelf that could break it apart, accelerating the glacier's demise. That's why, in 2018, the British National Environmental Research Council and the U.S. National Science Foundation launched a $50-million effort called the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration to study the glacier and its ice shelf up close.

The collaboration involved eight research teams, including one that reported this September that the glacier was retreating faster than had been predicted just a few years ago. Two of the teams visited the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf between November 2019 and January 2020. Pettit's team examined the central part of the shelf, looking at structural defects and ocean currents underneath. I accompanied her team as an embedded journalist, earning my keep with unskilled labor, much of it involving a snow shovel. Another team investigated the back edge of the ice shelf along the continent's submerged shore, sending a remotely operated submarine down a narrow hole to explore a crucial environment hidden under 600 meters of ice, where the shelf is melting most quickly. The results paint a worrisome picture. The ice shelf "is potentially going to go a lot faster than we expected," Pettit says.

Antarctica's ice sheet has consistently surprised those who study it. In February 1958 researchers in West Antarctica, 700 kilometers inland from the coastline, drilled four meters into the snow, lowered in 450 grams of explosives and detonated it with a muffled fuff that sprayed snow in the air. Geophones sitting facedown on the ice recorded the sound waves that reflected off the hard ground far below. By measuring the return time, Charles Bentley, then a graduate student at Columbia University, made a shocking discovery: the ice in this location was more than 4,000 meters thick-several times thicker than anyone expected- and rested on an old ocean floor 2,500 meters below sea level.

By the 1970s researchers were flying ice-penetrating radar in airplanes that crisscrossed the region. The scattered surveys confirmed that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits in a broad basin, deepest toward the center, with large glaciers spilling into the sea through gaps in the basin's outer rim. Even as scientists testified to Congress in the late 1970s about carbon dioxide and the dangers of global warming, most of them didn't think that Antarctica would lose its ice anytime soon. But in 1978 John Mercer, a glaciologist at the Ohio State University, sounded the alarm that West Antarctica represented "a threat of disaster." If the ice sheet lost the shelves separating it from the sea, it might crumble far more quickly than people imagined. Three years later Terry Hughes, a glaciologist at the University of Maine, called out two specific coastal glaciers-Thwaites and Pine Island-as "the weak underbelly" where the collapse of the ice sheet would most likely begin. A pair of papers published in 1998 and 2001 by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showed that these two glaciers were indeed thinning, melting from beneath, allowing ocean water to intrude farther inland under the ice.

Additional aerial surveys since then have shown that the Thwaites Glacier is especially troubling. The ground underneath the glacier is a relentless slope that drops deeper as it moves inland from the outer, seaward edge, allowing warm ocean water to slide under the glacier, melting it from below. As the ice thins, losing weight, it is also expected to lift off the bed and float on the intruding warm, dense water, allowing the water to penetrate even farther-eventually reaching the 2,500-meter trench at the heart of the continent. If that happens, "you're going to unload the West Antarctic Ice Sheet," says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who traveled with Pettit's team in 2019-2020.

The glacier flows into the sea in two arms that move at different speeds. The "fast arm" on its western side is a fragile, floating "ice tongue." In satellite images it resembles a shattered windshield, composed of hundreds of icebergs a kilometer or two across drifting into the ocean. The "slow arm," on the glacier's eastern side, is a smaller ice shelf that for years seemed more stable. The front edge butts into a submarine mountain ridge 40 kilometers off the coast. This ridge acts like a doorstop, creating back pressure that holds the ice shelf together.

Pettit and her team chose the mountain-buttressed eastern shelf for their expedition. In satellite images, the shelf's central region appeared relatively stable, its surface smooth enough for small ski-mounted planes to land. A pair of mountaineers could scout for hidden crevasses and establish safe routes, allowing the team to move around freely. Pettit worried that visiting an apparently undamaged part of the ice shelf might limit their opportunity to learn something new. She didn't need to worry.

Antarctic fieldwork requires sending tons of fuel, food and survival gear ahead of time. The field team has to be supported by layers of transport, workers and staging camps. All told, the Thwaites research expeditions required several hundred thousand kilograms of equipment and supplies delivered by ships, planes and convoys of tractors towing sleds across hundreds of kilometers of ice that had been searched ahead of time for crevasses. The British Antarctic Survey and the U.S. Antarctic Program staged some of that gear a year or two in advance. But in Antarctica, even this kind of preparation isn't enough to avoid complications.

In September 2019, two months before I joined Pettit's team as they departed for the frozen continent, they received new satellite images showing two new rifts in the ice shelf. These "daggers" originated where the ice collides with the undersea mountain; the rifts had surged inward toward the coast, to within five kilometers of our planned destination. Expedition leaders worried that one of these rifts could rip through the camp, but the team decided to press forward, with a colleague back home tracking the rifts via satellite. After a series of storms delayed the expedition by a few weeks, we reached the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf in mid-December 2019. We assembled a row of tents, protected from the constant easterly winds by walls of snow blocks shoveled and handsawed from the landscape, and set up gear for what would be a month of arduous work to come.

The first couple of days were relatively warm. Our boots plunged deeply into the slushy snow, and puddles of meltwater pooled up along the tents. A series of giant ice cliffs, eight kilometers away, were visible to the south. Those upheavals marked the zone where the ice cracked and flexed as it transitioned from a grounded glacier into a floating ice shelf.

As the weather cooled and the snow hardened, Pettit made her first long walks, dragging her radar along preplanned lines. The radar provided two-dimensional profiles of the ice shelf's internal layers, like the slices of a hospital MRI scan. Those first glimpses proved far more interesting than Pettit expected.

Her radar showed that layers in the top 25 meters of the shelf were smooth and mostly flat, but below that they suddenly turned jagged. Pettit speculated that the jagged layers had been part of the ice when it juddered across the rocky coastline bed and started to float seaward, perhaps 15 years before; they were forever imprinted with the trauma of that transition. The smooth layers represented snow that had fallen on top since then, when the ice was afloat.

More surprising, Pettit found that the shelf's underside-a place that human eyes had never seen-looked strangely ordered, as if it had somehow been sculpted intentionally. The underside was corrugated with a series of trenches that ran perpendicular to the direction of ice flow, like waves offshore from a beach. Each trench was 500 to 700 meters wide and cut as far as 50 meters up into the ice, the height of a 12-story building. "These things are huge," Pettit told me. Oddest of all, the trench walls weren't smooth, as one might expect of melting ice. They were stair-stepped terraces, with a series of vertical walls each five to eight meters tall, like the sides of an open-pit mine. "We don't know what these stepped things are," she said.

These stair-stepped trenches had escaped detection in previous surveys. Airborne radar measurements are taken from planes moving at least 150 kilometers per hour, so each reading is an average over a long swath of ice. Pettit dragged her radar at a stately three kilometers per hour, allowing her to capture a much finer-grained picture.

As Pettit was getting her first look at the strange terraced structures, her colleagues were starting to see hints of another unexpected observation: the bottom of the ice was not melting the way they expected. On January 2, I wolfed down a breakfast of dehydrated porridge with Christian Wild, a postdoctoral scholar who works with Pettit. He and I then drove a snowmobile out into a frigid snowfall. The sound of the engine was muffled, and the wan light seemed to seep in from all directions, leaving no shadows, no texture and no hint of the approaching bumps that we trundled over. We steered along our GPS line, with just enough visibility to see each new flag appear silently into view, then dissolve behind us in a gentle slurry of snowflakes.

At a series of stops, Wild used high-precision radar to measure the thickness of the ice shelf, accurate to a few millimeters. He had already measured the same points a week earlier. Because satellite estimates suggested the ice shelf was thinning an average of two or three meters per year, he expected to find the ice three to six centimeters thinner than the week before. To his astonishment, he saw almost no thinning. "It doesn't make any sense," he said toward the end of a long day.

Back at camp, other team members prepared to measure the temperature of the ocean currents flowing under the ice shelf. Over several days they tossed 6,000 kilograms of hard snow, one block at a time, into a canvas-sided tank the size of a large hot tub. They melted the snow and heated the water, then used it to make a hole as wide as a dinner plate 250 meters down through the shelf. Scambos lowered a string of sensors through this hole into the ocean water below. For the next year or two this sensor station, powered in part by solar panels on a small steel tower, would measure the water temperature, salinity and currents.

Initial readings showed that warm, dense water was indeed flowing under the shelf. At two degrees above freezing, it should be "enough to melt many meters of ice over the course of a year," Scambos said. But the ice wasn't feeling the heat. A layer of cold water sat up against the shelf's underside. Because that water came from the melting of glacial ice (which itself comes from snow), it contained little salt, so it was buoyant, hugging the bottom of the shelf and shielding it from the warmer, saltier water below.

By the end of the expedition Pettit's team had encountered a series of revelations that defied previous views of the ice shelf. First, its underside was eroded with deep trenches, and the slopes of those trenches were organized into stair-stepped terraces. Second, the ice didn't appear to be thinning at the points Wild measured, which disagreed with satellite surveys. Finally, the underside of the shelf didn't seem to be feeling heat from the deep ocean, because it was insulated by a layer of cold, buoyant water. This set of findings was difficult to explain, but another research expedition, operating not far away, would help make sense of the surprises.

Eight kilometers southeast of Pettit's camp, the other group of scientists was getting a first look at the ice shelf's grounding line-the long contour of ground where ice lifts off the land and floats on the sea. In this hidden place, scientists believed the underside of the ice was melting most quickly.

On January 11, 2020, researchers at the camp lowered a black-and-yellow cylindrical vehicle, as wide as two hands and 3.5 meters long, by cable into a narrow hole in the ice. Engineers led by Britney Schmidt, a planetary and polar scientist now at Cornell University (then at the Georgia Institute of Technology), had spent eight years developing this remotely operated vehicle, called Icefin. They had driven it under sea ice more than a meter thick and under the edges of two small ice shelves, where it could be winched out by cable if it got stuck. But they had never lowered this precious object through such a massive slab.

Schmidt sees Icefin as a prototype of a probe that will one day explore vast bodies of water in the outer solar system, hidden underneath 10 or 20 kilometers of ice on Jupiter's and Saturn's moons. In Antarctica, Icefin would measure the ocean temperatures, currents and rates of melting under the ice. Perhaps more important, its video cameras and sonar would allow the researchers to visually explore this remote environment. Schmidt wasn't looking to validate any of Pettit's observations per se, but the two researchers were working relatively close by, on the same ice shelf, so serendipity could play a role.

After descending through the 600 meters of ice, the vehicle emerged into a layer of ocean water only 50 meters deep. Schmidt, sitting in a nearby tent, steered Icefin with her thumbs on the controller of a PlayStation 4 console. The glassy ceiling of the ice's underside scrolled past on her video monitor as Icefin glided along, sending video up its fiber-optic tether. For eight hours Schmidt guided the vehicle as far as two kilometers from the borehole, into narrow spaces where less than a meter of water separated the ice above from the gravelly, gray-brown seafloor below. This was newly exposed seafloor; the thinning ice had pulled away from it only a few days or weeks before. An occasional fish or shrimp drifted by.

In most places, the currents were sluggish, and close to the ice the water was stratified. As the vehicle approached the grounding line, the water near the ice was at most one degree Celsius above freezing, even though warmer water lay only a few meters away. Icefin's measurements suggested that the underside of the ice was melting at a modest rate of about two meters a year. In some places, meltwater had refrozen onto the bottom of the glacier, revealing a distinct layer of crystal-clear ice, several centimeters thick. Satellite observations had shown this region rapidly thinning, so the findings were at odds with the team's expectations, says Keith Nicholls, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey, who co-led the research at the camp. The overall lack of melting was puzzling, he said: "Extraordinary, really."

As Icefin swam around, it occasionally encountered a clue that would help explain not only these unanticipated observations but also what Pettit's team had found. Cruising slowly along the shelf's fairly flat underside, Icefin came across a vertical wall cut up into the ice-a stair-stepped terrace like Pettit had seen in her radar traces. And the ice on the terrace walls seemed to be melting far more quickly than the surrounding horizontal underside. In the video, there were blurry ripples in the water, where Icefin's spotlight refracted through gushing eddies of saltwater and freshwater swirling together. Icefin also frequently found dark cracks gaping in the ice-basal crevasses as wide as 100 meters. Schmidt steered Icefin up into several of the crevasses, and there again, she found the water swirling and blurry, suggesting the ice may have been melting quickly.

At the December 2021 American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans, Schmidt's team presented a careful analysis of Icefin's data, confirming that the vertical ice surfaces are playing a pivotal role in the demise of the Thwaites Ice Shelf. Peter Washam, a research scientist at Cornell, reported that the terrace walls were melting five times more quickly than horizontal ice surfaces, losing 10 or more meters of ice a year. The crevasse walls were melting even more quickly-up to 10 times as fast, losing 20 meters of ice a year. Washam noted that the water currents became turbulent as they encountered these steep surfaces, and this brought water into contact with the ice in ways that more efficiently melted it.

The vertical steps may originate from subtle ups and downs present on the ice's underside when it first pulls up from the bed along the grounding line. The ice might fracture and melt more quickly in these uneven spots, steepening the slope-which increases the melt rate, causing the slope to steepen even more, until it forms a terrace wall that is nearly vertical. As ice melts from these vertical surfaces, the terrace walls migrate horizontally, Scambos says. A basal crevasse that is 10 meters across might widen to 30 or even 50 meters within a year. The melting of the Thwaites Ice Shelf's underside isn't a uniform process; it is highly localized, directed by the topography interacting with currents.

If most of the melt is happening on the vertical ice faces, that could help explain why Wild saw no signs of thinning in many of the places he measured. After returning home in 2020, Pettit plotted Wild's points on her radar survey lines showing the terrace walls. In each case, Wild's measurements fell some distance from the closest wall, in a spot where the ice base was horizontal and so maybe not melting much. This isn't unusual, Pettit says, because the walls are spaced far enough apart that Wild was unlikely to hit one by chance. The instrument station that Scambos left behind also seems to be located some distance from the nearest wall; it, too, has shown very little ice thinning.

If the vertical walls are melting quickly, they should also be migrating horizontally across the ice base, Pettit says. At some point, one of those vertical faces will sweep past Scambos's instrument station, "and we will see a huge amount of melt in a short time," she says-perhaps eight meters in a week. "If we see that, it would be supercool."

Schmidt's observations may also explain another feature of the terraced trenches Pettit saw near camp. After Pettit returned home, she examined her radar traces and noticed something peculiar: in the highest segment of a trench, she often saw a stack of inverted U-shaped radar reflections-the classic signature of a crevasse penetrating up into the ceiling. This might occur because the thinner ice over a trench sags like a flimsy bridge; as the ice flexes downward, its bulging belly cracks open. This newly formed basal crevasse may pull in warmer water from below. That would cause the walls of the crevasse to melt and migrate outward, widening until its ceiling is broad enough that it also sags and cracks open-a repeating cycle that could drive cracks ever farther into the ice above.

The massive terraced trenches may have started out as individual basal crevasses, like the ones Schmidt saw eight kilometers upstream at the grounding zone. When Elisabeth Clyne, then a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, examined radar traces from around the grounding zone, she saw signs that as crevasses moved farther out toward the sea, at roughly 600 meters a year, they were already starting to grow wider and taller through cycles of melting, sagging and cracking. She reported her analysis at the 2021 AGU meeting in New Orleans. Pettit suspects that these trenches may eventually penetrate all the way up through the shelf or at least cut far enough up through the ice that the shelf becomes prone to breaking from other stresses. This process could splinter the shelf into an unsteady mass of giant, shifting shards that will no longer stabilize one of Antarctica's largest glaciers.

Although Thwaites's western ice tongue lost 80 percent of its area in the past 25 years, the eastern shelf shrunk only about 15 percent. Its seaward snout remains pressed against the undersea mountain ridge, which crests roughly 400 meters underneath the ocean's surface. The pressure from this "pinning point" holds the ice together, but the status quo may not last much longer.

In February 2022 Wild published an analysis of satellite measurements showing that the front face of the ice in contact with the underwater mountain ridge is thinning by 30 centimeters a year. At that rate, it will lift off the top of the mountains in the next 10 years. Wild expects that when this happens, the eastern ice shelf will rapidly "disaggregate" into a flotilla of icebergs. But it may meet its end even sooner. If focused terrace melting is driving cracks upward through the ice, that could amplify the mechanical stresses that are already tearing at the shelf.

Massive splintering is already happening just upstream of the mountain ridge. Over the past decade the ice there has fragmented into a logjam of long shards held together only by pressure and friction. A series of satellite images, stitched into an animation by Andrew Fleming of the British Antarctic Survey, shows that these shards are sliding past one another with increasing ease. As a result, the splintering shelf is starting to deform and flow around the mountain ridge more quickly and in new directions, like a river that parts as it flows around a boulder. The mountain-once a stabilizing buttress-is now acting as a wedge, sending several "dagger" rifts surging back toward land. These are the same rifts that we saw via satellite just before we left for Antarctica in 2019.

"The thing is falling apart," says Karen Alley, a glaciologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, who published an analysis of these ice-flow patterns in November 2021. Even if the ice disconnects from the mountain ridge more slowly than expected, another scenario could doom the shelf. Those dagger rifts could keep lengthening until they intersect with the rising trenches advancing seaward from shore. This intersection of structural defects could lead to a shattering of the entire shelf.

In every scenario, the eastern ice shelf will meet a fate similar to the western ice tongue: its constituent shards will disconnect and drift away. Once that happens the eastern trunk of the Thwaites Glacier will break away from its pinning point, and the western trunk could also speed up. "This whole thing is going to go much faster once the ice [shelf] is all cleared out," Scambos predicts.

Pettit's team left Thwaites in late January 2020, but they are still monitoring the shelf's health using solar-powered instruments they lowered into the ocean through holes drilled through the ice. In January 2022 Scambos and Wild returned to our camp site for a few chaotic days to retrieve the data. Antenna and solar towers that once rose seven meters above the ice were mostly buried in hard, icy snow. Scambos, Wild and two other workers used ice-penetrating radar to find the buried instruments. They then chain-sawed narrow pits six meters down into the ice to retrieve the treasured data cards.

In hopes of getting another year of data out of his instruments, Scambos reinforced the steel towers that had been bent like paper clips and reset the modems that had been fried by static discharge during windstorms. Sensors on the towers had detected winds up to 250 kilometers per hour-nearly Category 5 hurricane speeds and twice what Scambos expected.

GPS units from those stations show that in the two and a half years since they were installed, the ice shelf's seaward movement increased from 620 meters a year to 980 meters a year. As Scambos and Wild gazed down from their Twin Otter plane this past January, they spotted several new tears in the shelf-three kilometers long and several hundred meters wide-where it lifts off the seafloor. Ragged cliffs of ice tilted 50 meters up into the air, exposing deep layers that had not seen daylight for thousands of years. "I think it's losing contact with everything that used to be bracing it," Scambos says. Not only is the ice shelf separating from its pinning point. As it speeds up, it is also stretching and tearing away from the glacier upstream.

The team was so alarmed that Pettit and Wild decided they will return this December to install a new instrument station: "BOB," short for Breakup Observer. They hope BOB will survive long enough to record the final throes of the ice shelf as it fractures into shards. It might not take long.

Scambos speculates that as Pettit and Wild camp on the ice shelf in December, they may wake up one morning to find themselves on a free-floating iceberg. "As long as they're not near one of the rifts, they're not even going to know" at first, he says. Any sounds or vibrations from a crevasse breaching the surface from below might be muffled. Subtle clues will gradually alert them. As the iceberg slowly rotates, their handheld GPS will seem to guide them in the wrong direction, and the sun might also move the wrong way. "You're on this giant white lily pad," Scambos says, "and your only reference is that you're used to having the sun in a certain place at a certain time of day."

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Antarctica’s Collapse Could Begin Even Sooner Than Anticipated

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On December 26, 2019, Erin Pettit trudged across a plain of glaring snow and ice, dragging an ice-penetrating radar unit the size of a large suitcase on a red plastic sled behind her. The brittle snow crunched like cornflakes underneath her boots-evidence that it had recently melted and refrozen following a series of warm summer days.

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In Norway, high class people had stronger bones

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In Norway, high class people had stronger bones

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This article discusses how the high class people are taller and tend to have stronger bones than the other people. It says that people below the higher class do not have stronger bones because of the way they live and how the size of their bodies effect this. The high class had better nutrition, physical activity, etc. Bone density has varied through population and effecting the economies.

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones: Higher status individuals -- especially women -- were taller and had stronger bones, according to buried remains

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In medieval Norway, high status individuals tended to be taller and to have stronger bones, possibly as a result of a favorable lifestyle, according to a new study.

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Modern-day hookup culture and its effects.

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Modern-day hookup culture and its effects.

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This article talks about the psychological and physical risks that come with hookup culture. This is very relevant in today's world, especially as college students.

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Julia O'Reilly

Step 1: Fuck feelings.

Step 2: Fuck.

Urban Dictionary defines "hookup culture" as "the era that began in the early 1990s and has since prevailed on college campuses and elsewhere when hooking up has replaced traditional dating as the preferred method of heterosexual liaison." Forgive me for being extreme, as I've always been one for theatrics, but, in my experience, that eloquent definition has almost always boiled down to the two simple steps listed above. It's a rite of passage that welcomes one into the community of sloppy frat hookups and one-night stands, whose "morning after" relish-to-regret ratio is often inconsistent, to put it generously.

But is it healthy? While not every rendezvous that comes with embracing this "whimsical" culture ends at home base, it doesn't make anyone immune to the health detriments that are risked by this practice.

Health-wise, not everyone has as jaded an outlook on modern-day hookup practices as myself. A study by the National Library of Medicine, including self-reports from first-year college women, found that the common benefits of hookup culture included sexual satisfaction at 23 percent, general positive emotions at 21 percent, increased confidence at 11 percent and clarification of feelings at 11 percent. Overall, 71 percent of the women studied reported at least one benefit. And it's true that sex is a very natural human experience, and many argue that a lack of relationship status shouldn't keep people from engaging in sexual activity. There are also known health benefits to sexual activity. ScholarshipPoints says that "being sexually active improves your immune system, improves your mood, lowers your blood pressure, can ease stress or anxiety and basically improves your overall health in general." And this collection of "feel good" effects shouldn't just be reserved for the lucky few who can check off the box next to "taken." This, I do agree with. I mean, as an advocate and longtime checker of the box next to "going to die alone," I'd like to believe there's even hope for a cause as lost as myself.

While I do respect the argument in theory, I just don't see how these positive outcomes outweigh the negative health-related ones The American Psychological Association says that hookups can lead to "emotional and psychological injury, sexual violence, sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy." And, while people are vulnerable to some of these regardless of the nature of their relationships, hookup culture increases the likelihood and extent to which these harm an individual tenfold. Without the monogamy of a typical relationship, college students are at the disposal of the infamous gray area. Labels like "friends with benefits'' or other pseudo-commitments can lead to a "false sense of security that might make people be less cautious," as described by a health and wellness educator at Boston University. Often, the contingencies of hookup culture, such as being less comfortable and transparent and spending less time getting to know the person, result in false perceptions of others' sexual histories and practices, increasing the health risks of engaging in sexual activity with that person. People think they can tell if someone is clean, disease-free and safe to be intimate with because of superficial assumptions. These assumptions, formed "by looking at them, by the way they dress and by the people they associate with," are the result of our generation's snap judgments, the Boston University educator says.

Let's talk STDs. No, this is not an acronym for a Greek life organization, but rather that of the infamous Sexually Transmitted Disease. The polygamy of hookup culture, or engaging with multiple sexual partners, greatly increases the chances of transmission. According to the CDC, Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually-transmitted disease on college campuses. It is the cause of several kinds of cancer, including cervical and genital, and has become a huge issue for young people as it often lacks noticeable symptoms. This makes transmission through oral or penetrative sex much more likely. And the worst part is that there is no cure. While this is not the case for all STDs, many do have long-lasting or residual impacts, and that is the difference. While happy moods and de-stressing are valid health benefits of sex, they remain short-lived. However, unwanted pregnancy, STDs and the emotional damage that comes with traumatic sexual experiences can present life-long consequences for an unsuspecting individual.

In my experience, hookup culture has its share of ups and downs, which often takes the form of ghosts of makeouts past and the occasional fella who just fell off the face of the earth. But I'm lucky in that the only scathing aftermath it has really left me with is a pathetic track record, an ever-dwindling faith in men and a strict code of "men are assholes until proven otherwise." But this is not true for everyone and, while I cannot pretend to understand what it must be like to endure some of the health-threatening repercussions that come with hookup culture, I do know that it's time we start raising awareness of these dangers instead of just saying, "Oh, it's college." Because it is just college, until it's not. Until "it's chlamydia" or "it's sexual assault" or "it's positive."
Julia O'Reilly is a sophomore majoring in biology.

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Hookup culture poses serious health risks

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Step 1: Fuck feelings. Step 2: Fuck. Urban Dictionary defines "hookup culture" as "the era that began in the early 1990s and has since prevailed on college campuses and elsewhere when hooking up has replaced traditional dating as the preferred method of heterosexual liaison."

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This article talks about social media and its impact on peoples mental health and their behavior.

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When I was nine years old, my parents gave me my own cell phone to communicate with me when I needed to be picked up from dance rehearsals. I was allowed to text my friends too. I also spent a large amount of time interacting with classmates in middle school on AIM and Yahoo Instant Messenger. Soon everyone around me had Facebook in high school and then, by college, all of my classmates engaged in social media, including Instagram and Snapchat. Most of my initial interactions with my friends involved simply texting or messaging each other in order to start a conversation before calling. As I grew older, I spent more and more time engaging with people online, and most of my social interactions that I had while online began to dictate my happiness.

Media anthropology is the "cross-cultural study of communication through electronic media, radio, television and film, recorded music, the Internet, and print media and links linking linguistic and cultural anthropology" (Miller, 2007, p.188). In the last decade, with the growth of Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, We Chat, Instagram, Reddit and Snapchat, social media usage has increased exponentially, especially among the younger generations. According to Emile Durkheim, people become cohesive and powerful by creating social ties and sharing "thought and action processes" (Durkheim, 1965). Human relations have been characterized by little face-to-face interactions and more social participation in the online world (Antoci et al, 2015). While there is the belief that technology is simply destroying people's lives and leading to worse mental-health problems and isolation, many positive associations with social media usage include increased interaction and the ability to stay connected to friends and family on forums. One author touches on social media influencers, I will highlight specific behaviors and mental aspects that go hand in hand with social media usage.

In this blog post, happiness, shyness, and loneliness are presented along with reasons for engaging on social media platforms. A brief description of the types of benefits, risks, and ill-effects of engaging online is introduced. By drawing briefly on the most recent literature, I show how social media usage affects overall wellbeing and mental health.

Social Media and Happiness

According to Helliwang and Wang (2014), happiness can be best associated with people who are most satisfied with their lives, enjoy doing positive things for others and themselves, and embody a broader sense of life purpose (p.390). The authors show that happiness increases with more social interactions between friends and family, and even an additional 1.7 hr in the company of friends improves overall well-being (Helliwang et al, 2014). However, in-person connectivity has begun to become more obsolete and people spend more time socializing by chatting or texting online.

Internet activity allows for connectedness and stronger ties to form an online community. Individuals feel a stronger need to remain connected without having to commute to see a friend. Recent findings suggest that a lack of in-person socializing may be having an affect on well-being and happiness for adolescents. Nearly all kids, even at the of ten, have their own cell-phone and teens spend an average of 6.67 hr/day on social media, 4.6 hr/day (Jensen et al, 2019).

Alternatively, people find themselves comparing themselves to others, which can cause sadness and unhappiness. Some studies have shown that happiness can also decrease with social media usage, so it is difficult to say that social media can cause happiness or unhappiness. The rise of group chatrooms, forums, and a section for comments on sites such as Yahoo, Youtube and Facebook has also made room for group communities and social interactions, some positive and negative, which will be explained more in-depth in the following sections.

Social Media and Loneliness

Often, engaging on multiple social media platforms, and chatting with friends online or strangers can become a substitute for in-person interactions, leading to higher levels of loneliness (Nie et al, 2002). Loneliness has been defined as a "deficit in social skills, having preference for online interactions, and also compulsive internet use" (Peng 2009). Less face-to-face interactions and more texting has evolved as the norm contemporary society. In a 2007 study, "hyperpersonal possibilities" of mobile communications appeared; participants who already defined themselves as lonely individuals preferred to talk on the phone via voice while anxious participants in this study only wanted to text and stated that it is a "superior medium" for contact (Reid et al, 2007). Overuse of the internet can also be correlated with frequency of depression or avoiding responsibilities including work, chores or school (McKenna & Bargh, 200; Nie et al, 2002).

Loneliness can still exist despite having many social interactions in-person. In 2014, a panel survey with 361 Hong Kong students revealed that feelings of loneliness increased over a period of time regardless of how much time was spent with family and friends (Yao et al, 2014). Interacting with close friends and family does not serve as a substantial alternative for reducing loneliness, even though it could temporarily negate some isolation. This study shows that a "vicious cycle" between loneliness and internet addiction is not necessarily dependent on social media platforms and the internet, but on the individual itself (Yao et al, 2014).

Alternatively, new insights hint at the difficulty in determining the cause and effect of the decline of an individual's well-being while engaging on social media sites. People may turn to social media because they already feel lonely, or the social media content that someone viewed may have caused them to feel isolated (Yavich et al, 2019).

Social Media and Shyness

According to Orr and researchers (2009), shyness is defined by "anxiety reactions (e.g. discomfort, aversion of gaze) and inhibition of normal social behaviors especially when sharing an environment with others." Recent studies (Orr et al, 2009; Deters, 2012) in the last decade have looked at how individuals who deem themselves as shy make use of internet chatrooms, e-mails and instant messaging. Social media platforms link these shy individuals to larger social structures online (Ridgeway 2006). People have reported having made more satisfying long-lasting relationships through chatrooms and instant messaging. The time spent on cell phone applications could promote interactions between people and encourage one on one communication between people on applications.

Shyness does not restrict individuals from having a plentiful number of online conversations, while those that do not have many friends to engage with online choose to evade face-to-face or voice communication (Madell and Muncer, 2006; Orr et al, 2009) Overall, these findings reveal that shyness may be one of the many reasons for individuals seeking online social media platforms more frequently than extroverted people.

Social Networks

In the most recently established articles, social networks have been characterized as a means of sharing content, interacting with family members, friends or coworkers, developing a reputation or advertising a business, and finding community resources (Yavich et al, 2019). Writing on one's timeline, clicking like or posting, has become a present-day meaningful mode of communication for many age groups. (Antoci et al, 2018). Many studies have looked at the relationship between well-being and mental health and have acknowledged a direct decline in social interactions between the user and friends and family after extensive internet usage. Social media use is both indirectly and directly associated with depression, anxiety, or other psychosocial dysfunctions, but further research suggests that the purpose of what the social media is being used for and the personal characteristics of the user need to be considered as well (Reid et al, 2007). Due to a paucity of research on Instagram and Snapchat, this next section focuses on how social media platforms such as Facebook might elevate shy people, but increase loneliness, depression, anxiety and enforce low-productivity and multitasking.

Facebook: Shyness, Civility, Loneliness, or Depressed

According to Yavich et al (2019), Facebook is the most dominant of all social networks today, where people connect and maintain ties with current or old friends while accessing information about each other (Statista 2018). It is referred to by many university students as a "social glue", allowing students to reinforce their political or religious beliefs and make new friends (Yavich et al, 2019). Researchers also found that students who had a high number of "friends" on Facebook reported to have a higher level of loneliness (Skues et al, 2012), but students who used less social platforms had high scores of loneliness, because they had less social activity in their daily life (Deters & Mehl, 2012).

A study in 2018 was conducted to understand the effect of trust depending on the civility or incivility of the interactions taken place on social media platforms. The participants that engaged or anonymously viewed civil Facebook interactions were more trusting (Antoci et al, 2018). Online trusting behaviors are characterized by mutual respect, more professional and genuine interactions, genuine words, happy emoticons, and the emergence of more rational topics (Antoci et al, 2018; 2016).

On the contrast, incivil behaviors can include "harassing behavior ranging from aggressive commenting in online threads, incensed discussion, rude critiques to outrageous claims, hate speech, and more severe forms of harassment such as purposeful embarrassment even physical threats"(Anderson et al, 2014; Antoci et al, 2016). These harmful behaviors manifest in many different ways in other people's minds on all forms of media, not just Facebook, and could result in depression, stress, anxiety, self-loathing or other negative behaviors offline (Davila et al, 2012). In a social media study, women in southeast Turkey have gained larger communities by making use of social networks like Facebook, but there have been increasing situations where men will harass them with incivil behaviors (Miller at al, 2021).

In South Italy, divorce has substantially increased due to partners catching their significant other's lies and infidelity through social media (Miller et al, 2021). Many people who are committed to a relationship prefer to actually close their Facebook accounts. Some Chinese women have even been inspecting their husband's accounts or phones to see if they are committing adultery.

Other findings suggest that personality traits also affect a person's desire to go on Facebook, including people who already exhibit anxiety, loneliness, or shyness. People that have social anxieties are reported to use Facebook quite frequently and have fewer friends in real life, while extroverts who use Facebook less than those with social anxieties have more friends offline (Orr et al, 2009) (Yavich et al, 2019). According to researchers at University at Windsor, shy individuals exhibit more favorable attitudes towards Facebook because it allows them to express themselves without the stress of face-to-face communication, and also provides some form of anonymity (Orr et al, 2009). By using the Revised Check and Buss Shyness Scale (20 items rated on a 5-point Likert Scale), shyness was positively correlated with the amount of time spent on Facebook and negatively correlated with the amount of added Facebook friends (Orr et al, 2009). However, their findings cannot be generalized to other Facebook users who are not college-aged-students, because their sample size contained university students only. It is suggested that their study be replicated with non-university students or a larger sample of students, in order to understand how shyness is correlated with Facebook usage (Orr et al, 2009; Madel et al, 2006).

Status Updating and Social Snacking on Facebook

In an online study conducted by Deters et al (2012), participants were asked to post more than they usually did. Other participants receiving the control condition didn't receive any requirements or instructions. The results revealed that updating one's status constantly with different topics representing relationships, sports, events, politics, popular culture, over seven days, had the most effect on reducing loneliness (Deters et al, 2012; Preacher & Hayes, 2004).

Participants felt stronger ties and connectedness to their Facebook friends through a phenomenon reinforced by Deters et al (2012) and termed by Gardner, Pickett and Knowles (2005) known as "social snacking." Social snacking entails looking through old photos or emails, and serves as a symbolic social behavior meant to reduce loneliness and remind one of their existing connections, and also temporarily helps someone to endure their lack of socialization in the real world. While private messages, e-mails, and phone calls were not tracked, updating and writing new statuses incited attention to other users and motivated friends to initiate interaction or reconnect. The idea of social snacking validates how Facebook can both increase or decrease satisfaction with how often someone responds or comments.

Alternatively, in this same study, receiving direct feedback (likes and comments) did not promote the need to create more status updates. Social inclusion was stimulated by the act of liking and commenting. Status updates "draw attention to the user" and can act as a variable in inspiring other viewers and lurkers to comment or "like." However, this study only looked at the quantity of the status updates and not the quality. The quality of any type of post should be further assessed in the future for any social media platform.

Social Media and Depression

The relationship between depression and social media is a widely discussed, debated and much enhanced topic. Social media can play a negative role in elevating depression or a positive one by numbing it. The symptoms of depression have been found among people who spend a lot of time on Facebook and partake in activities such as uploading photos and videos, posting statuses and comparing themselves to others (Rosen et al, 2013; ). Additionally, surfing the web aimlessly or partaking in some risky behaviors has been reported to be associated with depression and even loneliness (Krau et al, 2012).

Online Group or Individual Support for Mental Illnesses or Physical Ailments

People who already have mental illnesses or physical ailments have been turning to social media platforms and online forums to seek advice, share their experiences or just receive overall support. With Western medicalization, a particular issue is labeled and generally requires treatment. Peer-to-peer connections have the potential to promote physical and mental well-being (Naslund et al, 2016). Individuals have described the majority of their interactions on these types of forums as helpful, supportive and positive. Overall, online peer support allows for a sense of hope and contributes to overall cohesive and collective group behavior, including group reciprocity, happiness and minimizing loneliness (Naslund et al, 2014).

However, problems can occur with these online groups, such as misdiagnosing someone with a mental disease or suggesting types of treatment or hospitalization that are not necessary. Health problems should not be diagnosed online, and should be read with caution. Frustration, sadness and even aggressive behaviors can occur. Online lurkers who do not participate in online discussions can make individuals feel exposed and may even create false perceptions of mental illness or physical ailments. (Anderson et al, 2014).

As social information and discussions occur online every second, methodologies for conducting research on interpersonal communications and emotions online has been largely debated. However, the observations of real-world data without any type of interference is a methodological strength and allows researchers to analyze conversations that occur naturally (Naslund et al, 2014). The current literature may be lacking because there is no way to receive any knowledge of the types of individual motivations or intentions to post comments, or reveal health information without crossing ethical lines. In these types of online support groups, future research should explore if individuals feel empowered to post on these forums while considering the types of risks and mutual inclusions or exclusions globally that exist online.

Significance in Anthropology

The internet has considerably changed how we communicate with one another or regard each other. (Weiser, 2001). The contradicting results as to whether social media affect one's emotional or mental state may exist because the past studies have been more broad and less generalized to one specific platform, age group, and demographic. While there has been an abundance of literature on mental health, recent findings suggest that there is a lack of clarity about how social media truly affect individuals globally. There are recent findings that show shyness, loneliness, depression, and happiness increase and also decrease with social media usage. Ultimately, these non-linear associations between technology and mental health are not extreme (Jensen et al, 2019). More research needs to be completed in order to understand the various cultural differences and engagements with social media platforms.

References

Antoci, Angelo and Bonelli, Laura and Paglieri, Fabio and Reggiani, Tommaso and Sabatini, Fabio (2018). Civility and Trust in Social Media. IZA Discussion Paper No. 11290. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3117274

Antoci, A., Sabatini, F., and Sodini, M. (2015). Online and offline social participation and social poverty traps. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 39(4):229-256.

Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard, Dietram A. Scheufele, Michael A. Xenos, Peter Ladwig, The "Nasty Effect:" Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 19, Issue 3, 1 April 2014, Pages 373-387, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12009

Akin, A., & İskender, M. (2011). Internet Addiction and Depression, Anxiety and Stress. International online journal of educational sciences, 3(1).

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Examples of higher self-esteem with the usage of Facebook

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Media Anthropology: Social Media, Global Behavior, and Mental Health

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When I was nine years old, my parents gave me my own cell phone to communicate with me when I needed to be picked up from dance rehearsals. I was allowed to text my friends too. I also spent a large amount of time interacting with classmates in middle school on AIM and Yahoo Instant Messenger.

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In this article it discusses how humans living in southwest Asia may have started keeping and caring for animals nearly 13,000 years ago, roughly 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.

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Humans may have started tending animals almost 13,000 years ago

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Remnants from an ancient fire pit in Syria suggest that hunter-gatherers were burning dung as fuel by the end of the Old Stone Age.

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Oldest invasions reveal changes and innovation within ancient civilizations.

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Oldest invasions reveal changes and innovation within ancient civilizations.

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This recent article reveals the oldest wars known to date in human history. As different invading cultures took control of new regions, they changed the structure and function of governments, technology, and ancient culture.

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The history of mankind is filled with wars, battles, and skirmishes. So many wars have been fought in recorded history that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Some of the world's most famous wars are well-known for their strategy, casualties, or implications. Others are lesser known but no less important in the scope of human history.

There are many recorded wars in history, but some stand out from the rest. These 14 are among the oldest recorded wars in history and have survived through time as some of the most impactful battles ever fought. These are not only fascinating for their historical value but also for what they can teach us about mankind today, as we still struggle with similar issues and challenges that we faced as early as 3,000 years ago.

14. Elam's Invasion into Mesopotamia

Elam's invasion into Mesopotamia was a conflict that took place in the early 12th century BC between the forces of the Elamite Empire, based in southwestern Iran, and the Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia.

The invading Elamites captured and sacked the Assyrian capital of Assur, but were eventually driven back by Assyrian forces. The conflict left the Assyrian Empire weakened, and opened the way for the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

13. Campaigns of Rim-Shin I

The Campaigns of Rim-Sin I were a series of military campaigns waged by the king of Larsa, Rim-Sin I, against the city-state of Eshnunna, located to the north of Larsa. The campaigns began around 1740 BCE and continued for almost two decades. They resulted in the conquest of Eshnunna by Larsa and the incorporation of that city-state into the Larsa Empire.

The campaigns were fought for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Larsa and Eshnunna had long been rivals, competing for dominance in the region. Secondly, Eshnunna had recently conquered the city-state of Isin, one of Larsa's allies, and Rim-Sin I saw this as an opportunity to strike against his enemy while they were weakened.

Finally, the campaigns also served to increase Rim-Sin I's power and prestige and to extend Larsa's influence further north.

12. Fall of the Neo-Sumerian Empire

The Fall of the Neo-Sumerian Empire was marked by the collapse of the Akkadian empire, the rise of the Amorites, and the end of the Sumerian city-states. This period was one of great upheaval and saw the fall of many powerful empires and kingdoms. The Neo-Sumerian Empire was no exception, and its fall was a major event in ancient Mesopotamian history.

The Neo-Sumerian Empire was a short-lived period of Sumerian hegemony in Mesopotamia. The Neo-Sumerian Empire was established by King Sargon of Akkad, who conquered all of Mesopotamia and united the city-states under his rule.

11. Ur-Nammu's Conquest of Lagash

Ur-Nammu, the third king of the Sumerian city-state of Ur, conquered the city-state of Lagash around 2150 BCE. The conquest was part of a broader military campaign that saw Ur-Nammu's forces take control of much of southern Mesopotamia.

During the conquest of Lagash, Ur-Nammu's forces captured the city's king, En-mebaragesi, and sacked the city. En-mebaragesi was then brought back to Ur and executed. The conquest of Lagash was a major victory for Ur-Nammu, as it significantly expanded his kingdom's territory and power.

10. Fall of the Gutian Dynasty

The Fall of the Gutian Dynasty was a period of great upheaval in the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Sumer. It began with the overthrow of the Gutian king Tirigan by the Sumerian king Utu-hengal around 2119 BCE and ended with the defeat of the last Gutian king, Erridupizir, by the king of Akkad, Sargon of Akkad, in 2004 BCE.

The Gutian Dynasty was short-lived, but its impact was profound, as it ushered in a period of instability and chaos that would last for centuries.

9. Gutian's Conquests in the Akkadian Empire

The Gutian people were a group of nomadic people who originated from the steppes of Central Asia. In the early 21st century BC, they began to migrate westward into the Akkadian Empire, which was then one of the most powerful empires in the world.

The Gutians quickly conquered the empire, toppling the Akkadian king, Naram-Sin and ruling in his place.

The Gutian period was a time of great turmoil and upheaval in the Akkadian Empire. The Gutians were very different from the Akkadians, and they imposed their own harsh and often brutal rule on the empire.

Many Akkadian cities were destroyed or abandoned during this time, and the once-great empire never fully recovered from the Gutian conquest.

8. Invasion of Elam

The Invasion of Elam was a military campaign that took place around 2270 BCE, during which the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Elam, based in what is now southwestern Iran. The Assyrians had made several attempts to conquer Elam, but had always been unsuccessful.

However, in 1275 BC, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser I finally managed to defeat the Elamites in battle, and over the next few years he steadily conquered the rest of their territory. By 1250 BC, the Assyrians had completely conquered Elam and destroyed its capital, Susa.

The Elamites were then annexed into the Assyrian Empire and became part of the empire's vast population.

7. Formation of the Akkadian Empire

The Akkadian Empire was an ancient Mesopotamian empire centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region. It emerged as a political entity around 2334 BC, when King Sargon of Akkad united all the major city-states of southern Mesopotamia under his rule.

The Akkadian Empire reached its height under Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, who conquered much of the surrounding region, including parts of the Levant and Elam.

The empire eventually collapsed due to economic decline and internal civil war, followed by attacks from barbarian groups in the west.

6. Lugal-Anne-Mundu's Campaign on Ur

The Lugal-Anne-Mundu's War Campaigns on Ur were a series of military campaigns waged by Lugal-Anne-Mundu around 2500 BCE.

These campaigns were aimed at consolidating Ur's control over Mesopotamia and expanding its sphere of influence. During this time, Ur became the most powerful state in the region, and its king was considered the "king of kings."

These campaigns were directed against the city of Uruk, which was ruled by the rival King Enmebaragesi. After a long siege, Uruk was captured and its king was deposed. This victory gave Ur control over the important trade routes between Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf.

The last campaign was against the city of Eshnunna, which was ruled by the king Ilu-Shuma. Eshnunna was captured, and Ilu-Shuma was deposed. This victory gave Lugal-Anne-Mundu control over the entire region of Mesopotamia.

5. Campaigns of Eannatum

The Campaign Wars of Eannatum were a series of military campaigns waged by the king of Lagash, Eannatum, around 2500 BCE. These campaigns culminated in the defeat of the neighboring city-state of Umma and the establishment of Lagash as the dominant power in the region.

The exact course of the war is not known, but it is thought to have lasted for several years and involved a number of battles.

For centuries, the two city-states had been engaged in an intermittent conflict over control of the fertile plain of Gu-edina. In c. 2450 BCE, Eannatum of Lagash, who had only recently come to power, led his army against Umma in an attempt to finally resolve the issue.

The campaign was a resounding success, and Eannatum's army captured the city of Umma after a long siege.

4. Campaigns of Sneferu

Sneferu's campaign was a time of great change and upheaval in ancient Egypt. Sneferu, the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, embarked on a massive building program that saw the construction of some of the most iconic structures in Egyptian history, including the Great Pyramid of Giza.

This period was also marked by a number of military campaigns, as Sneferu sought to consolidate his power and extend Egyptian control over neighboring lands.

These campaigns were largely successful and resulted in the annexation of a number of territories, including Nubia and parts of the Levant.

3. Kish-Elam War

The Kish-Elam War was a conflict between the kingdoms of Elam and Kish. The precise dates of the war are unknown, but it is thought to have occurred sometime between 1900 and 1600 BCE. The war was fought over control of the city of Susa, which was located in Elam and had significant strategic and economic importance.

During the course of the war, Kish was able to maintain control of Susa and defeat Elam. The details of the war are not well known, but it is thought that the Kishites used superior military tactics and were better prepared than the Elamites.

This victory allowed the Kishites to become a dominant power in the region and establish themselves as a major kingdom.

2. Hor-Aha's Nubia Campaign

Hor-Aha's Nubia Campaign was a series of battles fought between the forces of the Egyptian pharaoh Hor-Aha and the kingdom of Kush. Hor-Aha led his army south into Nubia in an attempt to subdue the kingdom. The Kushites, led by their king Kashta, put up a fierce resistance, but eventually Hor-Aha's forces prevailed.

The Kushites were driven out of their capital at Napata, and Kush was annexed by Egypt.

The Nubia Campaign was a major victory for the Egyptians and helped to solidify their control over the region. It also marked the beginning of the Egyptian occupation of Kush, which would last for centuries.

1. Battle of the Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt

The Battle of Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt was a turning point in Egyptian history and is considered the oldest recorded war in human history.

It marked the end of the period of chaos and conflict known as the First Intermediate Period and the beginning of the period of stability and prosperity known as the Middle Kingdom.

The Battle of Unification was fought between the forces of Upper Egypt, under the command of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, and the forces of Lower Egypt, under the command of Intef II. The battle was a resounding victory for Upper Egypt, and resulted in the unification of the two kingdoms.

Intef II was killed in the battle, and his son, Intef III, was captured. He was later executed by Mentuhotep II. The Battle of Unification ushered in a new era of Egyptian history, one that would see the rise of the Middle Kingdom.

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14 Oldest Wars Recorded in History - Oldest.org

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The history of mankind is filled with wars, battles, and skirmishes. So many wars have been fought in recorded history that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Some of the world's most famous wars are well-known for their strategy, casualties, or implications.

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This article describes how through DNA analysis researchers were able to discover the likely mating habits of the Siberian Neanderthals.

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DNA from a group of Neandertals who lived together and a couple of others who lived not far away has yielded the best genetic peek to date into the social worlds of these ancient hominids.

As early as around 59,000 years ago, Neandertal communities in a mountainous part of Central Asia consisted of small groups of close relatives and adult female newcomers, researchers report October 19 in Nature.

That social scenario comes courtesy of DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of 13 Neandertals found at two caves in the foothills of southern Siberia's Altai Mountains. Estimates of overall genetic similarity among these Stone Age folks indicate that they formed communities of about 20 individuals, with females often migrating from their home groups to those of their mates, say evolutionary geneticist Laurits Skov of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues.

It's unknown whether Altai Neandertals' small-scale lifestyle was unusual, perhaps due to living in a sparsely populated area, or mirrored Neandertal practices elsewhere in Asia and Europe. Large numbers of Neandertals in Central Europe transformed a forest into grassland around 125,000 years, suggesting they could scale up communities when needed ( SN: 12/15/21).

Skov's group studied the DNA of 11 Neandertals from Chagyrskaya Cave and two Neandertals from Okladnikov Cave ( SN: 1/27/20). The Chagyrskaya individuals included a father and his teenage daughter as well as an adult female and an 8- to 12-year-old boy, who was possibly her nephew or grandson.

In the Chagyrskaya group, mitochondrial DNA, typically inherited from the mother, displayed greater diversity than DNA from the Y chromosome, which is inherited only by males. The enhanced mitochondrial DNA variety suggests that adult females frequently moved into that community while the males stayed put, the researchers suspect.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences for Science News since 1984. He writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues.

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Ancient DNA unveils Siberian Neandertals' small-scale social lives

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DNA from a group of Neandertals who lived together and a couple of others who lived not far away has yielded the best genetic peek to date into the social worlds of these ancient hominids.

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This article describes a rare mineral getting more rare spelling problems for MRI imaging. how will the medical community and the world solve this issue?

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A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas's most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs.

Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives balloons their buoyancy also powers the vital medical diagnostic machines. An MRI can't function without some 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium keeping its magnets cool enough to work. But helium - a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth's crust - is running low, leaving hospitals wondering how to plan for a future with a much scarcer supply.

"Helium has become a big concern," said Mahadevappa Mahesh, professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Baltimore. "Especially now with the geopolitical situation."

Helium has been a volatile commodity for years. This is especially true in the U.S., where a Texas-based federal helium reserve is dwindling as the government tries transferring ownership to private markets.

Until this year, the U.S. was counting on Russia to ease the tight supply. An enormous new facility in eastern Russia was supposed to supply nearly one-third of the world's helium, but a fire last January derailed the timeline. Although the facility could resume operations any day, the war in Ukraine has, for the most part, stopped trade between the two countries.

Now, four of five major U.S. helium suppliers are rationing the element, said Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. These suppliers are prioritizing the health care industry by reducing helium allotments to less essential customers.

"Helium is on allocation for sure," said Donna Craft, a regional construction manager for Premier Inc. who contracts with helium suppliers for some 4,000 hospitals. "We're probably not blowing up balloons in the gift shop anymore."

Hospitals haven't canceled patients' MRIs or shut down machines yet. They have seen helium costs rise at an alarming rate, though - possibly up to 30%, Kornbluth guessed. But without an end in sight for the helium shortage, the future of MRI remains uncertain.

'An essential commodity'

MRI, short for magnetic resonance imaging, has been a staple of health care since the 1980s. The massive machines provide high-resolution images that allow doctors to see details in organs, bones and tissue that may not show up on X-rays.

"You get these sharp images, and you can distinguish soft tissues," said Dr. Scott Reeder, chief of MRI at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "It's central to many things we do in modern medicine." MRIs help doctors diagnose brain tumors, strokes, spinal cord injuries, liver diseases and cancer. The 3D images, experts say, are irreplaceable.

Instead of relying on X-rays, which emit trace amounts of radiation to peer inside the body, MRIs use magnetic fields and radio waves. When someone lies stock-still inside the tube-shaped magnetic field, their body's atoms align with strong magnetic currents. Pulses of radio waves then tell the machine's sensors which tissues are where, and the machine renders its image.

Keeping an MRI's magnetic current superconductive requires extreme cold. That's where helium comes in: With a boiling point of minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid helium is the coldest element on Earth. Pumped inside an MRI magnet, helium lets the current travel resistance-free.

"Helium is how the magnet continuously exists," Mahesh said. "It's an essential commodity."

At any point, an MRI machine contains about 2,000 liters of liquid helium, though suppliers need to replenish any helium that boils off. Mahesh estimates that an MRI machine uses 10,000 liters of liquid helium over its life span. (According to GE Healthcare, a manufacturer of the machines, that life span is 12.8 years.) In 2015, there were roughly 12,000 machines in the U.S., making MRIs one of the biggest helium consumers in the world, far above balloon stores.

In contrast, spectators have an estimated 400,000 cubic feet of helium to thank for suspending all of the tractor-trailer-size balloons in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Converted to liquid form, that helium would only keep about two MRIs operational for their life span.

No quick fix

The problem is that no other element is cold enough for the MRI. "There's no alternative," Craft, of Premier Inc., said. "Without helium, MRIs would have to shut down."

Manufacturers like GE Healthcare and Siemens Healthineers recognize this vulnerability. "We are concerned about shortages in the helium market," said Ioannis Panagiotelis, chief marketing officer of MRI at GE. "Every industry and hospital with an MR system has been affected."

GE and Siemens are both developing MRIs requiring less liquid helium. Siemens recently introduced one requiring just 0.7 liters, and, according to Panagiotelis, GE rolled out a machine that's "1.4 times more efficient than previous models." These technologies aren't widely available, though, and replacing the country's 12,000 MRI machines - each weighing up to 50,000 pounds - is anything but a quick fix. Meanwhile, hospitals keep installing additional conventional MRI machines to meet demand for diagnostic scans.

"The concern is the shortage becomes so acute we can't set up new scanners," Reeder said. The University of Wisconsin, he said, has plans to open a new cancer center with two MRIs. "When we install those systems, what's going to happen if there's no helium?"

Mahesh said Johns Hopkins is also adding another MRI to its fleet, and it'll be the same "workhorse scanner" as its 22 other machines.

As doctors dread possible worst-case scenarios, scientists who use liquid helium for research are already there. When suppliers began rationing this summer, Harvard University physicists Amir Yacoby and Philip Kim shut down around half of their labs' projects. On the opposite side of the country, the University of California, Davis reported that one of its helium suppliers cut allocations by half, including for medical use.

"The shortage is motivating us to figure out ways of doing the same experiments without the liquid helium," Yacoby said. The forced innovation may preview what's to come for MRIs, and it may be necessary, shortage or no shortage.

"There's only a finite amount of helium in the Earth's crust," Kim said. "Once it evaporates off, it's completely lost into outer space."

CORRECTION (October 26, 10:56 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the company Donna Craft works for. It is Premier Inc., not Premier Health.

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The world is running out of helium. Here's why doctors are worried.

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A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas's most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs. Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives balloons their buoyancy also powers the vital medical diagnostic machines. An MRI can't function without some 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium keeping its magnets cool enough to work.

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Scientists have new theory on Origin of State

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Scientists have new theory on Origin of State

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Thought this article was particularly interesting about how they depended on cereal in early civilizations. Cereal was a huge factor in societies for coming up with like taxes and industralization.
cole brantley

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Our Ancestors Ate a Paleo Diet, With Carbs

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This article discusses how our archeological and environmental evidence shows what our ancestors ate in the past. With the abundance of fad diets and an innumerable number of fitness influencers, there is almost no way to know what you’re supposed to eat to become the healthiest version of yourself. Maybe the answer lies in our ancestors, who literally evolved over millions of years to best digest and take advantage of the food sources around them.

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Our Ancestors Ate a Paleo Diet, With Carbs

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A modern hunter-gatherer group known as the Hadza has taught researchers surprising things about the highly variable menu consumed by humans past

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This article discusses how in ancient Norway, the high class elites actually developed stronger bones due to their healthier diets and better quality of life.

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In medieval Norway, high-class people had stronger bones: Higher status individuals -- especially women -- were taller and had stronger bones, according to buried remains

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In medieval Norway, high status individuals tended to be taller and to have stronger bones, possibly as a result of a favorable lifestyle, according to a new study.

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Ancient Kingdom Recently Found to Suffer from Climate-Based Food Shortage

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Ancient Kingdom Recently Found to Suffer from Climate-Based Food Shortage

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This article discusses the recent findings of an ancient Kingdom of Palmyra and its defeat that was subtly aided by a growing population and a climate-based food shortage. I see lots of these topics discussed on sites like this and some twitter accounts as well, and the terms were certainly used correctly.

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Scientists find evidence for food insecurity driving international conflict two thousand years ago

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Researchers have identified climate-driven changes to food availability as a factor behind dramatic historical events that led the oasis city of Palmyra in Syria to its ultimate demise.

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Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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This article talks about the Anthropological discovery that Central Asia was a key crossroads for the dispersal of early people.

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The interior of Central Asia has been identified as a key route for some of the earliest hominin migrations across Asia in a new study led by Dr. Emma Finestone, Assistant Curator of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The study's findings indicate that the steppe, semi-arid and desert zones of Central Asia were once favorable environments for hominins and their dispersal into Eurasia.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars from institutions that span four continents set out to expand the limited knowledge of early hominin activity in the Central Asian lowlands. The team included Dr. Paul Breeze and Professor Nick Drake from Kings College London, Professor Sebastian Breitenbach from Northumbria University Newcastle, Professor Farhod Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences, and Professor Michael Petraglia from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.

"Central Asia connects several zones that played important roles in hominin dispersals out of Africa and through Asia" Dr. Finestone said. "Yet we know comparatively little about the early occupation of Central Asia. Most of the archaeological material is not dated and detailed paleoclimate records are scarce, making it difficult to understand early hominin dispersal and occupation dynamics in that region."

The team compiled and analyzed paleoclimatic and archaeological data from Pleistocene (ca. 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) Central Asia. This included building a dataset of Paleolithic stone tools and analyzing a mineral deposit that formed in a cave (a stalagmite) in southern Uzbekistan. Tool-making and tool modification are key to human ability to migrate to new environments and to overcome environmental challenges. Ancient hominins moved their tools with them as they dispersed. The researchers studied the location of stone tools and the environmental conditions that were reflected in the stalagmite as it grew at the end of the Marine Isotope Stage 11 (a warm period between glacials MIS 12 and MIS 10) around 400,000 years ago.

Dr. Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences said relatively little is known about the region's earliest toolmakers because the majority of Lower Paleolithic (the earliest subdivision of Paleolithic stone tools) occurrences in Central Asia lack reliable context for dating and environmental reconstruction.

"Despite the potential importance of Central Asia to early dispersals, our knowledge of the Lower Paleolithic across this vast and diverse landscape has been limited."

"We compiled data on Paleolithic findings from across Central Asia, creating a dataset of 132 Paleolithic sites -- the largest dataset of its kind" said Professor Petraglia, a senior author on the study. "This allowed us to consider the distribution of these sites in the context of a new high-resolution speleothem-based multi-proxy record of hydrological changes in southern Uzbekistan from the Middle Pleistocene."

"Cave deposits are incredible archives of environmental conditions at the time of their growth. Using geochemical data from stalagmites we gain insights into seasonal to millennial-scale changes in moisture availability and the climatic dynamics that governed rain- and snowfall. Our work suggests that the local and regional conditions did not follow simple long-term trends but were quite variable." said Professor Breitenbach, who lead the stalagmite-based analysis.

"We argue that Central Asia was a favorable habitat for Paleolithic toolmakers when warm interglacial phases coincided with periods when the Caspian Sea was experiencing consistently high water levels, resulting in greater moisture availability and more temperate conditions in otherwise arid regions" said Dr. Finestone. "The patterning of stone tool assemblages also supports this."

During periodic warmer and wetter intervals, the local environment of arid Central Asia could have been a favorable habitat and was frequented by Lower Paleolithic toolmakers producing bifaces (stone tools that have been worked on both sides).

"Interdisciplinary work that bridges archaeology with paleoclimate models are becoming increasingly necessary for understanding human origins" said Dr. Finestone. "In the future, the databases generated in this study will continue to allow us to ask questions about the context of hominin dispersals."

Journal Reference:

Emma M. Finestone, Paul S. Breeze, Sebastian F. M. Breitenbach, Nick Drake, Laura Bergmann, Farhod Maksudov, Akmal Muhammadiyev, Pete Scott, Yanjun Cai, Arina M. Khatsenovich, Evgeny P. Rybin, Gernot Nehrke, Nicole Boivin, Michael Petraglia. Paleolithic occupation of arid Central Asia in the Middle Pleistocene. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (10): e0273984 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273984

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geography; caving; earth science; desert; cultures; anthropology; early humans; human evolution

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Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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A new study on early human migration shows that semi-arid and desert zones of Central Asia may have served as key areas for the dispersal of hominins into Eurasia during the Middle Pleistocene.

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Fernando Espinoza - The usage of "Male" and "Female" in Biological Anthropology and its many controversial issues.

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Fernando Espinoza - The usage of "Male" and "Female" in Biological Anthropology and its many controversial issues.

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The British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology commonly referred to as BABOQ, is not only aware of the issues that sex and gender pose in their field, but they write about how medication for those transitioning can affect bone growth and lead to the wrong identification of gender. According to the article, the sex is determined using features found in skeletal remains primarily found on the pelvic notch; however, the way that bone growth can be heavily affected by how early one may begin taking hormonal medication. The article makes one think outside the box by outlining the many factors in affect when determining something as simple as sex in anthropology. I highly suggest you all take a look at the website for yourself! :))

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In the month of July [2022], a number of articles were published online, primarily from politically right-wing American-based newspapers, with headlines claiming that LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] activists are pushing for archaeologists to stop assigning labels of male and female to human remains. In these articles, the authors misuse and misrepresent the writing (published research and social media posts) of students and academics working in archaeology who are engaging in constructive theoretical debates around topics of biological sex and/or gender identity in osteoarchaeology [the study of human skeletal remains] or forensic anthropology [the application of the study of human skeletal remains to forensic contexts]. It is important to note two things before proceeding:

1. Gender identity and biological sex, though related, are not synonymous for each other and are treated as such throughout this statement.

2. There is no organised campaign within the LGBT rights movement focussed on stopping osteoarchaeologists/forensic anthropologists from labelling human remains as male or female.

3. The language used to discuss and describe biological sex and gender identities is constantly evolving as people examine these topics at a personal, community, and/or conceptual level. As such BABAO acknowledges that the language used in this statement is representative of when this statement was written and may not remain in current or common usage.

The purpose of this brief statement is to present BABAO's response to these articles by explaining how archaeologists, primarily osteoarchaeologists, engage with the topics of biological sex and gender identity in human remains.

What is biological sex?

Biological sex is determined by differences between individuals at many levels of their biology, from their outward physical appearance, their internal anatomy and sex organs, their unique hormonal makeup, and their genetics and chromosomes. In the majority of the human population, an individual's sex chromosomes will align with the other biological levels where sex-based differences appear. This can be seen as an individual with XX chromosomes having biological traits that are considered to be female, and an individual with XY chromosomes having biological traits considered to be male.

At birth, sex is typically assigned by doctors based on the outward appearance of a baby's genitalia: however, as discussed above, biological sex is more complex than this, and an individual may exhibit some traits commonly considered to be female, some commonly considered male, and some atypical from either. Individuals who show these combinations of biological traits, which can occur across all levels of human biology, are intersex. However, some intersex variation may not affect an individual's outward appearance, so it is possible for an individual to be unaware of being intersex, and to consider themselves biologically male or female due to how their body has developed.

What is gender?

Gender is a set of socially constructed norms, behaviours, and roles that are most commonly associated with being male or female. Both in the past and the present gender is frequently conflated with biological sex. Historically, religions and societies which are patriarchal have taught and reinforced a gender binary of male and female. European colonialism and missionary work often forced this view onto Indigenous cultures, leading to the persecution of those with more complex gender identities who fell outside of the coloniser's perceived sex=gender binary.

In the modern western world, individuals whose gender does not align with their biological sex may choose to identify as transgender or trans. They may identify with the male, or female gender, or even between or outside of this binary. Individuals from non-western cultures may choose to identify as trans or may have their own gender categories which they identify with instead. There are many examples, both in the modern world and in the past, of communities of individuals whose gender identity falls outside of the male and female binary, such as Mexico's "Muxe", India's "Hijra", or the Ancient Roman "Galli".

Biological sex and gender identity in archaeology

When examining biological sex and gender identity in archaeology we are constrained to the skeletal remains of individuals and the manner in which they were buried (i.e., where and how they were buried, were they buried with objects and where were these placed, etc.) The information we can gain from this is important, but it is limited.

When working with human remains, osteoarchaeologists have begun to emphasise the limitations of their methods by using terms such as estimated sex or skeletal sex rather than biological sex. This is because the skeleton is only one part of the human biology where sex differences occur, and archaeologists rarely have access to soft tissues, DNA, or other chemical data which could provide additional insights into an individual's sex. Additionally, sex assessment is inaccurate for skeletal individuals who died before going through puberty, as puberty is when hormonal changes drive the development of the many physiological differences between biologically male and female individuals. As such, it is difficult - if not impossible - to assess sex from the skeletons of infants and children without using genetic or other chemical analyses.

A large range of methods have been developed to allow osteoarchaeologists to identify skeletons which are more female or male in their physical shape. Some parts of the skeleton are more reliable than others as a result of their form and function. For example, the shape of the pelvis and skull are highly related to an individual's sex. There are also some parts of the skeleton that show little difference between the sexes and so are not reliable indicators of sex (such as the vertebrae, hands, and feet). All the skeletal traits used by osteoarchaeologists to assess an individual's sex exist on a continuum between an extremely male presentation and an extremely female presentation, with more indeterminate presentations existing in the middle (Fig 1.).

Figure 1: The standard stages for scoring the greater sciatic notch within the pelvis (indicated by the arrow). With the trait moving from a wide notch (female: score 1) narrowing through an indeterminate sex (score 3) to a small notch (male: score 5). After White and Folkens (2005).
It is possible for different parts of the same skeleton to appear more female or more male than other parts, due to the skeleton's reaction to disease, physical exercise, ageing, etc. Because the development of the skeleton is driven by a range of factors, not simply an individual's genetics, there is also variation both geographically and chronologically in how much an individual, and whole cemetery populations, may develop more extreme expressions of sexual skeletal variability. When a complete skeleton is available to study, the osteoarchaeologist will consider as many traits as possible to decide on an individual's skeletal sex. The accuracy of this assessment may be as high as 95%. However, when skeletons are incomplete or poorly preserved, fewer or less accurate traits may have to be used, and the confidence in the final sex assessment will be low. As such, it is common in osteological reports to include a range of categories for sex such as "male", "probably male", "sex unknown", "probably female", and "female" to consider the degree of uncertainty that is present in these methods, and to reflect individuals for whom it isn't possible to estimate sex based on their skeleton.

The development of biomolecular methods within archaeology has created two new ways to provide information about a skeletal individual's sex chromosomes. The study of ancient DNA (aDNA) allows geneticists to identify the sex chromosomes of an individuals. There are cases where this may contradict the estimated sex of the individual based on osteological analysis or identify intersex individuals. The study of peptide (proteins) in tooth enamel has allowed archaeologists to test for the presence or absence of a "Y" sex chromosome. This method may be used where aDNA has not been preserved in the skeleton and is a less destructive or expensive method compared to aDNA analysis. However, both of these methods have limits in what they can tell us, and are open to risks such as sample contamination (aDNA only) or analytical error (both methods), which may lead to false results.

Information regarding the gender identity of excavated individuals is frequently very limited. In rare cases, archaeologists may encounter individuals buried with identifying information such as a gravestone, burial monument, or coffin plate, which identifies them by a name we know was gendered by their society. However, it is likely a grave marker would reflect an individual's public identity, and may not represent their personal gender identity.

Grave goods have been widely used by archaeologists to infer gender identity, although the difficulties of doing this have not always been fully appreciated. While certain objects may have been associated with gender identities in the past, it is easy to project modern day gender norms onto grave goods. A good example of this appears within Viking/Scandinavian studies, where early 20 - century European archaeologists initially assumed that individuals buried with swords were warriors and therefore male, as being a soldier was associated with men in the archaeologist's own culture. Through the re-examination of these remains, using both skeletal and, in some cases, aDNA evidence, it has been shown that some individuals buried with swords were biologically female or, in one case, intersex. However, we do not know how exactly these individuals would have described their own gender, but these examples demonstrate the complex interplay between an individual, their sex, gender, how they were buried, and what this might tell us about how they lived.

The identification of trans, or gender non-conforming, individuals from their skeletons is highly limited. It may be possible to identify archaeological individuals who appear to be skeletally male, but their burial appears typical for a female gendered individual. But these interpretations are limited by archaeologists' own cultural perceptions, our often-limited knowledge of how past cultures and societies may have viewed, expressed, and discussed gender diversity, and our inability to accurately know how skeletal individuals personally identified. For modern trans individuals encountered in forensic cases, there may be indicators present that imply a possible trans identity (personal effects, clothing associated with a specific gender, surgical implants), however what evidence may be available from the skeleton itself is not well understood. Within the current suite of gender affirming surgeries available to trans individuals the vast majority are focused on soft tissues. Facial surgery is something which some individuals may choose to have, with portions of the nose or jaw/chin being surgically altered into shapes that are deemed to be more typically masculine or feminine. However, many of these plastic surgeries, both skeletal and soft tissue, are not exclusively performed on trans individuals, so they cannot be taken as a definitive sign of trans identity. Additionally, it is currently unknown what the long-term effects of puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy are on the skeletons and general physiology of trans individuals. As such, it is going to take time for forensic anthropologists to create methodologies that are inclusive of trans individuals.

In summary, osteoarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists have to consider both the biological sex and gender identity of an individual. As such, these professionals understand that biological sex exists on a spectrum, of which skeletons and the sexual variation they show is only one part of a greater whole. They also understand that the assessment of sex using skeletons is not 100% accurate and this analysis may not align with an individual's biological sex or gender identity. By remaining conscious of this uncertainty, osteoarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists work to encompass the complexities of societal structures and identities attested to in written and oral histories and mythologies, whilst also benefiting modern society and families through individual identification following mass casualty events, missing persons cases, or homicides.
Sources used
White, T., and Folkens, P. 2005. The Human Bone Manual. London. Elsevier Academic Press.

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BABAO Statement on Sex Estimation - BABAO

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In the month of July [2022], a number of articles were published online, primarily from politically right-wing American-based newspapers, with headlines claiming that LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] activists are pushing for archaeologists to stop assigning labels of male and female to human remains.

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This article shows some recent Archaeological Headlines. One that is especially interesting and related to anthropology is the first section of the article which highlights a neanderthal community seen through DNA mapping of 13 people. These 13 were found in caves in southern Siberia. These people had more genetic diversity in their mitochondrial (motherly) DNA than in their Y chromosome (fatherly DNA) indicating the women left home to live with their male partners. This article also has more information often other recent anthropology topics.

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New Study Analyzes Louisiana's Poverty Point Earthworks
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI-According to a statement released by Washington University in St. Louis, Tristram R. Kidder and his colleagues conducted a new investigation of a site on Ridge West 3 at Poverty Point, a 3,000-year-old site in northern Louisiana known for its well-preserved, 72-foot-tall earthen mound and concentric half-circle ridges. Artifacts found within and around the ridges suggest that people lived there, Kidder said. New radiocarbon dating, microscopic analysis of soil, and magnetic measurements of soils at Ridge West 3 found no evidence of weathering between layers of soil, suggesting that the earthwork had been built rapidly, he added. These hunter-gatherers therefore had a large, organized labor pool to move such large amounts of earth, he explained. The analysis also suggests that the soil was mixed from clays, silts, and sand to make the structures strong and erosion-resistant. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Southeastern Archaeology. For more on Poverty Point, go to " Archaic Engineers Worked on a Deadline."
Wooden Piles Reveal History of Balkan Settlement
BERN, SWITZERLAND-According to a statement released by the University of Bern, researchers led by Albert Hafner have dated some 800 submerged wooden posts on what were the eastern banks of Lake Orhid, which is located in the southwest Balkans, through a study of their tree rings and radiocarbon dating. It had been previously thought that the site, known as Ploča Mičov Grad, was first built around 1000 B.C. and densely inhabited, but the range of dates indicates that dwellings were first built at the site in the middle of the fifth millennium B.C. Over time, new structures were built on top of the old ones into the second millennium B.C., thus explaining the large number of wooden piles. Hafner explained that the lake bed's sediments also hold artifacts from the settlement such as harvested grain, plants, and animal remains that will offer information about the development of agriculture in the Balkans. To read about excavations during construction of a pipeline through the Balkans, go to " Letter from Albania: A Road Trip Through Time."
Traces of Beer Detected in 9,000-Year-Old Vessels in China
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE-According to a statement released by Dartmouth College, evidence of a fermented beverage has been found in residues from drinking vessels unearthed at a 9,000-year-old burial site at Qiaotou, which is located in southern China's Yangtze River Valley. The burial contained the skeletons of two people whose remains had been placed in a platform mound surrounded by a ditch. Pits in the mound contained numerous pots of varying sizes painted with white slip in abstract designs. Many of them were still intact. Researcher Jiajing Wang said the analysis detected starch granules, fossilized plant matter, mold, and yeast consistent with a sweet, cloudy beverage brewed from rice, a grain known as Job's tears ( Coix lacryma-jobi), and unidentified tubers. Rice was in the early stages of domestication at the time, she added, so the labor-intensive drink may have served a ritual purpose, perhaps related to the burial of the dead. Read the original scholarly article about this research in . To read about a Wari administrative center in southern Peru that produced a typically corn-based fermented beverage called chicha, go to " Alcohol Through the Ages: Forging Wari Alliances."
Neanderthal Tooth from Iran Dated to Middle Paleolithic Period
ZAGROS, IRAN-According to a Tehran Times report, an international team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists led by Saman Heydari-Guran has analyzed the tooth of a six-year-old Neanderthal child discovered in western Iran's Baba Yawan rock shelter in 2017. The child's tooth was found among animal bones and stone tools of a type associated with Neanderthal remains at other sites in the Zagros region. The researchers have dated the tooth to between 43,000 and 41,000 years ago. The region is thought to have been inhabited by Neanderthals from about 80,000 years ago until 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, when modern humans entered the area. Read the original scholarly article about this research in . To read about another Neanderthal child's tooth found in the Zagros Mountains, go to " World Roundup: Iran."

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Archaeological News from Archaeology Magazine - Archaeology Magazine

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New Study Analyzes Louisiana's Poverty Point Earthworks ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI-According to a statement released by Washington University in St. Louis, Tristram R. Kidder and his colleagues conducted a new investigation of a site on Ridge West 3 at Poverty Point, a 3,000-year-old site in northern Louisiana known for its well-preserved, 72-foot-tall earthen mound and concentric half-circle ridges.

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Luis Cavazos - more families being discovered in our world

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Luis Cavazos - more families being discovered in our world

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Deep in a cave in Russia, this article is able to highlight different fragments of what shape to be one of the first known families of the Neanderthals. This family was left abandoned in a cave and passed away, likely due to starvation, to be only recently discovered by a group of scientists.

I personally feel that this piece of information is able to represent of our development of humans how we progressed throughout the years, decades, centuries, progressed and developed as we connect to one another and find this piece of history of how humans were like and how they experiences life in those ages. I find it very fascination how the time around us is changing very fast and we're able to look back at these times.

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An artist's rendering of a Neanderthal father and daughter. DNA from fossils in a Russian cave have revealed the first known Neanderthal family. Credit... Tom Björklund

Matter

Fossilized bone fragments of a father, teenage daughter and other related Neanderthals were found alongside stone tools and butchered bison bones.

An artist's rendering of a Neanderthal father and daughter. DNA from fossils in a Russian cave have revealed the first known Neanderthal family. Credit... Tom Björklund

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Analyzing fossils from a cave in Russia, scientists have found the first known Neanderthal family: a father, his teenage daughter and others who were probably close cousins.

The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, painted a tragic picture of our extinct relatives, who roamed Eurasia tens of thousands of years ago. The family, part of a band of 11 Neanderthals found together in the cave, most likely died together, scientists said, possibly from starvation.

The study was carried out by a team of researchers that included Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who for 25 years has been uncovering the secrets of Neanderthals, from extracting their DNA from cave floor dirt to replicating their brain cells. Earlier this month, he won the Nobel Prize for his efforts.

"I would not have thought we would be able to detect a father and daughter from bone fragments, or Neanderthal DNA in cave sediments, or any other of the things that are now becoming almost routine," said Dr. Pääbo, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "It has been an amazing journey."

For his first study of Neanderthal DNA in 1997, Dr. Pääbo and his colleagues drilled into a skull cap discovered in 1856 in a German quarry. Over the next few years, they gathered more DNA from other museum specimens, collecting hints about the evolution of Neanderthals and their links with living humans. Eventually, Dr. Pääbo and his collaborators dug up enough ancient DNA to reconstruct the entire Neanderthal genome.

The new discovery came from a Siberian cave called Chagyrskaya. Paleoanthropologists with the Russian Academy of Sciences began digging there in 2007, unearthing fragments of Neanderthal bones and teeth. The researchers have also found 90,000 stone tools in the cave, along with butchered bison bones.

The cave may have served as a seasonal home for the Neanderthals. They may have come to Chagyrskaya to hunt bison that migrated each year to graze on the nearby grasslands.

In 2020, Dr. Pääbo and his colleagues published the first DNA findings from Chagyrskaya: a full genome collected from a Neanderthal woman's finger bone. Her genes showed that she was more closely related to Neanderthals more than 3,000 miles away in Croatia than those just 65 miles away in another cave known as Denisova.

That kinship suggests that the Neanderthals in Siberia did not belong to a single population. They expanded east from Europe at least twice - first to Denisova, then tens of thousands of years later to Chagyrskaya.

Dr. Pääbo's team continued testing other Neanderthal fossils from the cave. They hit a genetic mother lode, ending up with DNA from 11 individuals: six adults and five children. The fossils - along with the stone tools and bison bones - all rested in the same layer of sediment in the cave.

"Archaeologists call this a 'short occupation,'" said Laurits Skov, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a co-author of the new study. In other words, the bones were all trapped in this layer of dirt within a relatively short span of time, geologically speaking. "But 'short' here means a couple thousand years or less."

Still, Dr. Skov thinks that the 11 Neanderthals all lived around the same time. That's because many of them were close relatives.

Image

Paleoanthropologists with the Russian Academy of Sciences first began digging in the Chagyrskaya Cave in 2007, unearthing fragments of Neanderthal bones and teeth. Credit... Bence Viola

To look for kinship among the Neanderthals, Dr. Skov and his colleagues scanned the DNA of the fossils for tiny variations. Two of the fossils shared enough variations that they had to be first-degree relatives. One came from a broken vertebra that appeared to belong to an adult male. The other came from a tooth that seemed to come from a teenage female. If these estimated ages were accurate, then the specimens could have come from siblings, or from a father and his daughter.

The DNA from the fossils allowed the researchers to pin down the relationship more precisely. The scientists took advantage of the fact that mothers pass down an extra set of genes to their children, called mitochondrial DNA. The Chagyrskaya man and the girl had different mitochondrial DNA, ruling out a sibling relationship.

"So that means that we can prove that this was in fact a father and a daughter," Dr. Skov said.

Other fossils offered hints of other familial relationships. The father proved to be a close relative of two other adult males at Chagyrskaya. And an adult woman and a boy also shared enough DNA that they were likely related.

Dr. Skov said that the kinship of the Neanderthals suggested that they all died at once. "It seems to be one event that they all die in," Dr. Skov said. If they had died at different times, that would mean the group would have returned to the same cave over many years to bury each member - a scenario Dr. Skov considers very unlikely.

Researchers have found other evidence of Neanderthals dying in large numbers. In 2010, a team of researchers in Spain reported that a dozen Neanderthals perished around 49,000 years ago when a cave roof collapsed on them.

Dr. Skov said there's no sign of such a disaster at Chagyrskaya. He speculated that the band's bison hunts failed one year, leading to starvation.

None of the 11 Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya showed any genetic link to the Neanderthals of the Denisova Cave. But Dr. Skov and his colleagues discovered a connection to a third cave nearby known as Okladnikov. Two Neanderthal fossils found at Okladnikov have genetic links to Chagyrskaya. Dr. Skov and his colleagues combined the 13 Neanderthals from the two caves to create a genetic profile of their entire population.

In one analysis, they compared the genetic diversity of males and females. The researchers found that the Y chromosomes shared by the males were fairly similar. The mitochondrial DNA passed down from mothers to their children, on the other hand, was very diverse.

This pattern emerges in many human societies in which the men tend to stay in the group where they were born and where the women often move to new groups before having children. Dr. Skov and his colleagues concluded that among Neanderthals, it was the women who moved from band to band.

"We estimate that between 60 to 100 percent of women in any community actually come from other communities," Dr. Skov said.

Dr. Skov and his colleagues then added up the genetic diversity in the Neanderthals to get clues about the size of their population. Larger populations tend to have more genetic diversity.

"Given these particular patterns of diversity that we see in the data, we can see that there's not a lot of it," Dr. Skov said.

That lack of diversity most likely means that Neanderthals in Siberia lived in small bands of 20 people or fewer. It also means that the entire population of Neanderthals in Siberia was very low - perhaps fewer than a thousand. "It's similar to that of the mountain gorilla, which is an endangered species," Dr. Skov said.

Lara Cassidy, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the work may only reveal the social structure of Neanderthals who lived on the eastern edge of their range.

The harsh Siberian winters might have kept their numbers lower than elsewhere, she pointed out. Getting DNA from bands of Neanderthal groups in the Middle East or Europe could reveal a clearer picture of how they lived across the entire range.

"There's going to be more to come, so this is a definite milestone," she said.

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First Known Family of Neanderthals Found in Russian Cave

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Matter Fossilized bone fragments of a father, teenage daughter and other related Neanderthals were found alongside stone tools and butchered bison bones. An artist's rendering of a Neanderthal father and daughter. DNA from fossils in a Russian cave have revealed the first known Neanderthal family. Credit...

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Michelle Estrada - Tina Lasisi wants to untangle the evolution of human hair

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Michelle Estrada - Tina Lasisi wants to untangle the evolution of human hair

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This article talks about recent studies that have been made to find out how different hair textures, and specially curly hair textures, were adaptive for human ancestors living in different environments. It is very interesting, considering hair texture and color has mainly been seen as a trait to determine race, and there's not a lot of previous research done to see exactly why and how these traits developed.

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Though humans' nearly hairless bodies stick out like a cowlick among other primates, our nakedness isn't unique in the world of mammals. Dolphins and whales are naked, says biological anthropologist Tina Lasisi of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. There are naked mole-rats. "Elephants, depending on how you look at them, are kind of naked," she says. "But we're the only weirdos that are naked except for our head."

Our species traded off much of our body hair for more sweat glands, an evolutionary adaptation that helps us regulate body heat more efficiently. But what about another uniquely human feature? We're the only animals known to express tightly curled hair, like that seen in many people of African descent. Lasisi wants to know why and how it came to be.

Backstory

For decades, traits that have been associated with racial categories, such as skin pigmentation and hair texture, have gone understudied or ignored among anthropologists, Lasisi says. Much of the study of human biological variation was deserted after the post-World War II backlash against eugenics, a racist field birthed from the idea that humankind could be improved if those deemed to have desirable traits were selectively allowed to reproduce. Since then, research on human variation has largely focused instead on traits that are not overtly racialized, such as lactose intolerance and adaptations to high altitudes.

But studying all forms of human variation is crucial to understanding our species's evolution, Lasisi says. Studying variation in a way that normalizes rather than dampens or paints differences in a bad light is key not only to righting anthropology's harmful legacy, but also ethical, socially responsible and sound science, she says.

Lasisi discovered biological anthropology as an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge. As a Black person who spent many of her formative years among white people in the Netherlands, she was always aware of skin color. She vividly remembers learning that human skin pigmentation evolved as an adaptation to ultraviolet radiation - research pioneered by anthropologist Nina Jablonski of Penn State, who would later become Lasisi's primary adviser. "It's like a lightbulb went off in my head," Lasisi says, and it made her wonder, "What else out there can be explained by evolution?"

Her interest in the origins of curly hair grew in part as an effort to understand her own locks. "Research is me-search," Lasisi says. But when she first began, there wasn't much science to comb through, and methodologies for measuring hair texture were either unreliable or inefficient.

Standout research

As part of her Ph.D. research, Lasisi worked with a team of anthropologists, thermal engineers and physiologists to study how curly hair might have given our bipedal ancestors a leg up in the hot and dry African savanna.

The team placed a variety of wigs made of human hair onto heat-sensing models and measured heat transfer in different environments. In dry settings, curly hair, especially tightly curled hair, protected the scalp from solar radiation while releasing more heat from the head than straight hair. Lasisi speculates that the larger amount of air space within curly hair is what does the trick.

To underpin her efforts and support future hair research, Lasisi developed an improved and standardized way of measuring hair curvature and cross-sectional shape. The technique involves segmenting, washing and taking pictures of hair strands and then running the images through an open-source computer program that she created.

Measuring these characteristics on a continuous spectrum (much like we do height, for instance), she argues, is a better way of studying hair texture than the long-standing practice of classifying hair into discrete categories, such as straight, wavy or curly. Such discrete categories are not standardized among experts and can become subjective, she says. They also obscure the immense variation that exists, even on a single person's head, and especially among curly hair.

Cloudy categories

Hair with similar curvatures can be perceived as straight, wavy or curly, as seen in this figure that compares the self-reported hair texture of 140 people of European and African ancestry with the actual curvature of their hair samples.

Self-reported hair texture vs. measured curvature

Lasisi is doing highly technical work that hasn't been part of the conversation, says Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. "Before Tina, very few people were working on hair texture in the same way."

Lasisi will bring this experience to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as an assistant professor in 2023, where she'll continue her studies on human variation.

Reaching out

Lasisi wants everyone to be included in conversations about what makes humans human. She has appeared on the podcast Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness (of Queer Eye fame). She also hosts a PBS digital show on human evolutionary biology called Why Am I Like This?, which she helps conceptualize and write.

What's more, Lasisi has cultivated a community of curious science seekers on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Through short-form videos marked by her signature wit and humor, such as her "Melanin March" series or "Darwin's greatest hits against white supremacy," Lasisi educates thousands of followers on human variation, how to talk about race and ethnicity from an anthropological perspective, and much more. She even gives prospective anthropologists career tips and behind-the-scenes glimpses of life in academia. Two-way discussions let her learn from her audience, which she calls her "little focus groups."

In a series of videos on TikTok, Tina Lasisi introduces viewers to melanin, its different types and what it's got to do with squid ink, mushrooms and watermelons.

Lasisi hopes her research and outreach will inspire and provide a helpful framework for more nuanced discussions about race, ethnicity, ancestry and human diversity - and that her visibility as a Black anthropologist will encourage other people of color to ask questions that are important to them. "I want to put enough information out there in the world, and [have] enough people out there in the world who have a grasp of that information," she says, "so that we can see human variation for the beautiful, magnificent, complex thing that it is."
Want to nominate someone for the next SN 10 list? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

A version of this article appears in the October 8, 2022 issue of Science News.

Aina Abell is the editorial assistant at Science News. She holds a bachelor's degree in biological sciences from the University of Southern California.

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How one scientist seeks to untangle the evolution of human hair

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Though humans' nearly hairless bodies stick out like a cowlick among other primates, our nakedness isn't unique in the world of mammals. Dolphins and whales are naked, says biological anthropologist Tina Lasisi of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. There are naked mole-rats.

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‘Animism’ recognizes how animals, places and plants have power over humans – and it’s finding renewed interest around the world

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‘Animism’ recognizes how animals, places and plants have power over humans – and it’s finding renewed interest around the world

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Solis Sisco- This article is very thought provoking. It really differentiated the terms and made me feel like that way of life and mindfulness would benefit us all.

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Shamans from the organization Tengeri conduct an offering ritual in 2013 to Bukhe Bator, the spirit master of the Selenga River, Republic of Buryatia, Russian Federation. Roberto Quijada, CC BY-NC

A movement known as " new animism," which seeks to secure personhood rights for nonhuman beings through legal means, is gaining a following around the globe.

New animist environmental activists are not the only ones using the term. Animism itself has become fashionable. Some spirituality bloggers talk about animism as a way to deepen one's spiritual relationship to nature. Scholars - from anthropologists to philosophers - have taken a renewed interest in the concept.

Most of these people are using animism in a very general, and inaccurate, way, to mean the belief that everything in nature has a soul. The renewed interest in animism stems from the hope that people will behave in more ecologically sustainable ways if they believe that the natural world around them is alive.

However, as an anthropologist of religion who works with people whose religious practices were traditionally described as animist, I believe the reality is both more interesting and more complicated. Animism is not a religion or even a set of beliefs about nature having a soul. It's a term used by scholars to classify religious practices through which human beings cultivate relationships with more powerful beings that reside in the world around us.

A history of the term

The term animism was coined by an early anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor, in 1870. Tylor argued that Darwin's ideas of evolution could be applied to human societies; he classified religions according to their level of development.

He defined animism as a belief in souls: the existence of human souls after death, but also the belief that entities Western perspectives deemed inanimate, like mountains, rivers and trees, had souls.

Animism was, in Tylor's view, the first stage in the evolution of religion, which developed from animism to polytheism and then to monotheism, which was the most "civilized" form of religion. From this perspective, animism was the most primitive kind of religion, while European, Protestant Christianity was seen as the most evolved of all religions.

Tylor was not the first to make this argument. Scottish philosopher David Hume, for example, made a very similar argument in the " Natural History of Religion," in 1757. Tylor was, however, the first to use the term animism and the classification scheme as part of what was then the nascent field of anthropology, the scientific study of human society.

Animism is therefore not a religion but a term for classifying a type of religion, one which was, in the 1870s at least, deemed by European and American scholars to be less civilized. The racist conception that some groups of people were less civilized than others was integral to the initial definition.

Around the turn of the 19th century, scholars used Tylor's term to classify a wide array of rituals. James Frazer and Geza Roheim, for example, used animism to argue for similarities among the practices of Indigenous populations, ancient Greeks and European peasants. Animism was used to describe the psychology of Native Americans and Siberian shamans asking spirit masters to offer up game to hunters. By the 1940s, however, the term, and the practice of classifying cultures by their level of development, had fallen out of favor.

Why, then, are environmental activists embracing a term with this complicated history?

An alternative to 'dominion'

In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr., himself a devout Christian, argued that the world's environmental problems came from Christian dominion theology. In this reading of the biblical account of Genesis, humans are the only part of creation that is made in the image of God, which is usually interpreted to mean that humans, unlike all else in creation, have souls.

This theology gives humans - through Adam and Eve - dominion over the Earth. White argued that through its creation story, Christianity set up a dichotomy between inanimate matter and animate spirit that lifts humans above creation and turns the rest of the world - from animals and plants to rocks, soil and water - into "resources" to be used.

It is important to note that this is only one of many Christian interpretations of Genesis. On the other hand, White's argument was that this idea of dominion is what makes environmental exploitation under capitalism possible, and that argument was compelling to many environmentalists, who began to develop an interest in Indigenous belief systems as a way to fix environmental problems.

Relationships of power and obligation

What is important to understand about animism is that it is not a religion per se, nor is it a matter of merely believing that a mountain or a glacier has a soul. Animism describes practices that establish a relationship between places and people, usually one that recognizes places, animals and plants have power over people.

I study the way urban Buryats, members of an Indigenous population of Siberia, are reviving pre-Soviet forms of animism and shamanism. Many of their rituals involve asking for blessings and protection from beings such as rivers, lakes and mountains, and from ancestors who are located in the landscape - all practices that create relationships of obligation between people and place.

There is a wide range of practices that contemporary scholars consider to be animist, ranging from rules about what you can and cannot do near a glacier and making offerings to the spirit masters of Lake Baikal to representing the will of mountains in political negotiations.

In all these instances, rituals establish relationships of obligation that tie humans to the land, and the land to the humans who live on it. Instead of human dominion over the landscape, in animist cosmologies, humans live under the dominion of the landscape around them.

No magic bullet

Animism is not a religion one can convert to but rather a label used for worldviews and practices that acknowledge relationships between nature and the animal world that have power over humans and must be respected.

These practices can be religious rituals, but they can also be forms of environmental care, farming practices or protests, such as those conducted by the water protectors at Standing Rock, known as the No Dakota Access Pipeline, also called by the hashtag #NoDAPL. Protests like the #NoDAPL aren't what most people are used to thinking of as "religion," and, as a result, media accounts often miss the obligations to place and land that motivate protesters.

New Zealand's 2017 act recognizing the Whanganui River as a legal person, the culmination of decades of Maori activism, could be described as animism taking a legal form. Additionally, when Indigenous practices are labeled animist religion, it is easy to overlook the very real biological and ecological scientific knowledge of these communities.

Animist practices are as variable as the peoples and places engaging in such relationships. Indigenous and animist perspectives illustrate that there are many different relationships possible between humans and the world around them, and many environmentalists are finding these alternatives instructive, despite the troubled history of the term.

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'Animism' recognizes how animals, places and plants have power over humans - and it's finding renewed interest around the world

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A movement known as " new animism," which seeks to secure personhood rights for nonhuman beings through legal means, is gaining a following around the globe. New animist environmental activists are not the only ones using the term. Animism itself has become fashionable.

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Drew Kough - Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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Drew Kough - Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221021181032.htm

Hello! I’m Drew Kough, and the article I found discusses the idea that Central Asia was used as a migration route for early human migration. The article admits that, at the moment, not too much is known about the location when it comes to travel and settlements of early humans, so this information has helped increase the understanding of the area.

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The interior of Central Asia has been identified as a key route for some of the earliest hominin migrations across Asia in a new study led by Dr. Emma Finestone, Assistant Curator of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The study's findings indicate that the steppe, semi-arid and desert zones of Central Asia were once favorable environments for hominins and their dispersal into Eurasia.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars from institutions that span four continents set out to expand the limited knowledge of early hominin activity in the Central Asian lowlands. The team included Dr. Paul Breeze and Professor Nick Drake from Kings College London, Professor Sebastian Breitenbach from Northumbria University Newcastle, Professor Farhod Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences, and Professor Michael Petraglia from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.

"Central Asia connects several zones that played important roles in hominin dispersals out of Africa and through Asia" Dr. Finestone said. "Yet we know comparatively little about the early occupation of Central Asia. Most of the archaeological material is not dated and detailed paleoclimate records are scarce, making it difficult to understand early hominin dispersal and occupation dynamics in that region."

The team compiled and analyzed paleoclimatic and archaeological data from Pleistocene (ca. 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) Central Asia. This included building a dataset of Paleolithic stone tools and analyzing a mineral deposit that formed in a cave (a stalagmite) in southern Uzbekistan. Tool-making and tool modification are key to human ability to migrate to new environments and to overcome environmental challenges. Ancient hominins moved their tools with them as they dispersed. The researchers studied the location of stone tools and the environmental conditions that were reflected in the stalagmite as it grew at the end of the Marine Isotope Stage 11 (a warm period between glacials MIS 12 and MIS 10) around 400,000 years ago.

Dr. Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences said relatively little is known about the region's earliest toolmakers because the majority of Lower Paleolithic (the earliest subdivision of Paleolithic stone tools) occurrences in Central Asia lack reliable context for dating and environmental reconstruction.

"Despite the potential importance of Central Asia to early dispersals, our knowledge of the Lower Paleolithic across this vast and diverse landscape has been limited."

"We compiled data on Paleolithic findings from across Central Asia, creating a dataset of 132 Paleolithic sites -- the largest dataset of its kind" said Professor Petraglia, a senior author on the study. "This allowed us to consider the distribution of these sites in the context of a new high-resolution speleothem-based multi-proxy record of hydrological changes in southern Uzbekistan from the Middle Pleistocene."

"Cave deposits are incredible archives of environmental conditions at the time of their growth. Using geochemical data from stalagmites we gain insights into seasonal to millennial-scale changes in moisture availability and the climatic dynamics that governed rain- and snowfall. Our work suggests that the local and regional conditions did not follow simple long-term trends but were quite variable." said Professor Breitenbach, who lead the stalagmite-based analysis.

"We argue that Central Asia was a favorable habitat for Paleolithic toolmakers when warm interglacial phases coincided with periods when the Caspian Sea was experiencing consistently high water levels, resulting in greater moisture availability and more temperate conditions in otherwise arid regions" said Dr. Finestone. "The patterning of stone tool assemblages also supports this."

During periodic warmer and wetter intervals, the local environment of arid Central Asia could have been a favorable habitat and was frequented by Lower Paleolithic toolmakers producing bifaces (stone tools that have been worked on both sides).

"Interdisciplinary work that bridges archaeology with paleoclimate models are becoming increasingly necessary for understanding human origins" said Dr. Finestone. "In the future, the databases generated in this study will continue to allow us to ask questions about the context of hominin dispersals."

Journal Reference:

Emma M. Finestone, Paul S. Breeze, Sebastian F. M. Breitenbach, Nick Drake, Laura Bergmann, Farhod Maksudov, Akmal Muhammadiyev, Pete Scott, Yanjun Cai, Arina M. Khatsenovich, Evgeny P. Rybin, Gernot Nehrke, Nicole Boivin, Michael Petraglia. Paleolithic occupation of arid Central Asia in the Middle Pleistocene. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (10): e0273984 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273984

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geography; caving; earth science; desert; cultures; anthropology; early humans; human evolution

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Central Asia identified as a key region for human ancestors

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A new study on early human migration shows that semi-arid and desert zones of Central Asia may have served as key areas for the dispersal of hominins into Eurasia during the Middle Pleistocene.

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Race against time to find ancient Indigenous carvings on boab trees

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Race against time to find ancient Indigenous carvings on boab trees

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Carvings in boab trees are as significant as rock art for Indigenous Australians. Now, there is a race against time to document the ancient art in the bark of boabs before the remarkable heritage trees die.

I thought this was very interesting, as well as tragic to see the trees dying. It seems like they used all terms correctly, and this article allowed me to understand the ancient art of Indigenous carvings in Australia and how their society functioned. -Marie Yanchak

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Researchers are working with a group of First Nations Australians in a race against time, and some of the roughest terrain on Earth, to document ancient art in the bark of Australia's boab trees.

Carvings in the boab trees tell the stories of the King Brown Snake (or Lingka) Dreaming in a remote area of the Tanami desert, which straddles the border of Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

After more than two years of fieldwork, the research team from The Australian National University (ANU), The University of Western Australia and University of Canberra, working alongside five Traditional Owners, found 12 trees with carvings.

Researcher Professor Sue O'Connor, from the ANU School of Culture, History and Language, said many of the carved trees are already several hundreds of years old and there is some urgency to produce high-quality recordings before these remarkable heritage trees die.

"Unlike most Australian trees, the inner wood of boabs is soft and fibrous and when the trees dies, they just collapse," Professor O'Connor said.

"Sadly, after lasting centuries if not millennia, this incredible artwork, which is equally as significant as the rock art Indigenous Australians are famous for, is now in danger of being lost.

Traditional Owner Brenda Garstone said it's important Indigenous knowledge and stories are not lost and continue to be shared for generations.

"We are in a race against time to document this invaluable cultural heritage," she said.

Professor O'Connor said Australian boabs have never been successfully dated.

"They are often said to live for up to 2,000 years but this is based on the ages obtained from some of the massive baobab trees in South Africa which are a different species," she said. "We simply don't know how old the Australian boabs are.

"It is vital we obtain some direct ages for these remarkable Australian trees, which help tell the story of First Nations Australians and are the source of a rich cultural heritage.

"There are hundreds more boabs visible on Google Earth, which we didn't manage to get to on this trip. They remain to be checked for carvings on our next Tanami adventure.

"We hope that our research will bring the art in the bark of these remarkable trees to many more Australians so that they can be appreciated for generations to come."

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trees; botany; biology; nature; ancient civilizations; cultures; fossils; anthropology

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Race against time to find ancient Indigenous carvings on boab trees

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Researchers are working with a group of First Nations Australians in a race against time, and some of the roughest terrain on Earth, to document ancient art in the bark of Australia's boab trees.

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Archaeologists digging at a stone age grave site discovered "bog-bones" which are thought to be 10,500 years old, making them the oldest bones to be found in Germany.

-Connor Zuspan

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10,500-year-old Bones Found in Bog are Germany’s Oldest Human Remains

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Archaeologists digging at a Stone Age campsite in northern Germany have found 10,500-year-old cremated human bones.

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This article depicts a Swedish scientists process in his research over the Neanderthal.

Edgar Santos

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Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in medicine Oct. 3 for his discoveries, such as sequencing the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals. (Video: AP, Photo: Frank Vinken For Max-Planck-Gesellschaft/AP)

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient DNA helped change our understanding of human origins.

Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments. It was a "seemingly impossible task," said Anna Wedell, a member of the Nobel committee.

The work was transformative, showing that Neanderthals mixed with prehistoric humans after they migrated out of Africa, and the vestiges of those interactions live on in the genomes of many present-day people. Pääbo's efforts laid the foundation of a new field of science that uses ancient DNA as a new stream of information to probe human evolution.

Pääbo, 67, learned he had won the prize in a midmorning phone call from the Nobel committee shortly before he was set to depart to pick up his daughter from an overnight stay with her nanny, he said in a recorded interview posted by the Nobel website. When he saw the call was from Sweden, he suspected that it was someone calling about the upkeep of his small summer house there - perhaps a broken lawn mower.

"He was overwhelmed. He was speechless, very happy," Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly, said. "He was incredibly thrilled about this award."

Say good morning to our new medicine laureate Svante Pääbo!

Pääbo received the news while enjoying a cup of coffee. After the shock wore off, one of the first things he wondered was if he could share the news with his wife, Linda.

Photo: Linda Vigilant pic.twitter.com/l27hnzojaL
- The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

As a young scientist, Pääbo focused on understanding how adenoviruses interacted with the immune system. But he had long been intrigued by human origins, and he worked on isolating DNA from Egyptian mummies as a side project.

At the time, the ancient DNA field was "kind of a joke," full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"It was Svante who came along and made this into a science," Hawks said.

For decades, Pääbo chipped away at the difficult task of analyzing ancient DNA, devising ways to overcome the technical challenges of working with samples that degrade and change chemically over time and are easily contaminated. He worked largely on DNA from extinct animals, but always with the goal of bringing the techniques he was developing to modern humans' extinct, big-brained relatives, Neanderthals.

Once he had developed those methods, he brought together a large consortium of scientists and built the relationships necessary to obtain the ancient bone fragments needed to take on the monumental task of trying to decipher the genome of Neanderthals.

That work disrupted the prevailing view of human origins. Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago, but they emerged into a world filled with other hominid species - and mixed with them as they migrated.

"Until quite recently, 1,400 generations or so ago, there were other forms of humans around - and they mixed with our ancestors and have contributed to us today. The last 40,000 years is quite unique in human history, in that we are the only form of humans around," Pääbo said in the Nobel interview Monday. "Until that time, there were almost always other types of humans that existed."

Pääbo and colleagues showed that long-extinct Neanderthals live on in our DNA. As modern humans migrated outside of Africa, they mixed with Neanderthals. Those ancient genes live on, making up about 1 to 2 percent of the genomes of non-African people today. From a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Russia, he discovered a new species of early hominid, the Denisovans.

This genetic inheritance is relevant for understanding aspects of modern human health. A version of a gene that gives people an advantage at high altitude that is common among people living in Tibet has Denisovan origins. Some genes that influence how present-day people's immune systems respond to infections are inherited from Neanderthals.

During the pandemic, Paabo found that a genetic risk factor associated with severe cases of covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals, carried by about half of people in South Asia and about 1 in 6 people in Europe.

"These are profound things that happened to human biology, and we need to know about it - it is an important part of the inheritance," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. "It's changed our biology and the history of everybody. We all know we are all mixed."

Reich said the prize was a thrilling recognition for a scientist he considers a close friend and collaborator - and for a burgeoning field of science that has transformed science's view of the human species.

Reich was a key part of the consortium that helped determine that Neanderthals had mixed with humans, and said that when he joined the project, he - like many in the field - expected not to find evidence of mixing between Neanderthals and humans.

"When we saw the first evidence that it had occurred ... it was surprising and unexpected, and I thought it was likely to be an error of our analysis - and I spent a lot of time trying to make it go away," Reich said.

Ultimately, multiple lines of evidence supported the conclusion.

Before Pääbo's contributions, scientists were limited to studying ancient bones and artifacts to understand human ancestors. His work has established a new field of science, paleogenomics, which uses ancient DNA analysis to probe questions about prehistoric life.

While Pääbo's scientific work has been transformative, some wondered whether it would win a Nobel, often considered science's highest honor, because it wasn't an obvious fit with the traditional categories. In science, Nobels are awarded to medicine or physiology, physics and chemistry.

Hawks, however, argues that understanding human ancestry and evolution is a direct view into understanding deep questions about health and disease. Ancient DNA gave scientists entry to aspects about ancient humans and their relatives that would otherwise be inaccessible.

"This isn't just a strange thing about our evolution that we're learning - it's relevant to our health," Hawks said. "It matters because our ancestry is what is affecting our health, and when you uncover the genes that we inherited from these distant ancestors that matter to our health, you're going to open a new window into understanding human disease."

Forty years earlier, Pääbo's father, biochemist Sune Bergström, shared a Nobel Prize with two other scientists. Pääbo revealed that he was the "secret extramarital son" of Bergstrom in his biography, "Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes." He said Monday that he wished he could share the news with his mother.

"The biggest influence in life was my mother, with whom I grew up," Pääbo said. "It makes me a bit sad she can't experience this day."

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Nobel awarded to Swedish scientist who deciphered the Neanderthal genome

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The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient DNA helped change our understanding of human origins. Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments.

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Human's skin relationship with the sun has evolved

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Human's skin relationship with the sun has evolved

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This article speaks about how our skin's relationship with the sun has changed over the centuries. A biological anthropologist discusses the reasons why this has occurred. An example touched on that stood out to me are our evolution from hunting and gathering ways of living, to indoor factorial more stationary ways of life. Moreover, the anthropologist discusses how as humans have created ways for sun protection, such as sunblock or umbrellas, they have also evolved into acts of privilege viewing lighter skin as more 'acceptable'.

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The sun's rays often feel good on your skin, but can cause serious damage. Maksim Chernyshev/EyeEm via Getty Images

Human beings have a conflicted relationship with the sun. People love sunshine, but then get hot. Sweat gets in your eyes. Then there are all the protective rituals: the sunscreen, the hats, the sunglasses. If you stay out too long or haven't taken sufficient precautions, your skin lets us you know with an angry sunburn. First the heat, then the pain, then the remorse.

Were people always this obsessed with what the sun would do to their bodies? As a biological anthropologist who has studied primates' adaptations to the environment, I can tell you the short answer is "no," and they didn't need to be. For eons, skin stood up to the sun.

Skin, between you and the world

Human beings evolved under the sun. Sunlight was a constant in people's lives, warming and guiding them through the days and seasons. Homo sapiens spent the bulk of our prehistory and history outside, mostly naked. Skin was the primary interface between our ancestors' bodies and the world.

Human skin was adapted to whatever conditions it found itself in. People took shelter, when they could find it, in caves and rock shelters, and got pretty good at making portable shelters from wood, animal skins and other gathered materials. At night, they huddled together and probably covered themselves with fur "blankets." But during the active daylight hours, people were outdoors and their mostly bare skin was what they had.

During a person's lifetime, skin responds to routine exposure to the sun in many ways. The surface layer of the skin - the epidermis - becomes thicker by adding more layers of cells. For most people, the skin becomes gradually darker as specialized cells kick into action to produce a protective pigment called eumelanin.

This remarkable molecule absorbs most visible light, causing it to look very dark brown, almost black. Eumelanin also absorbs damaging ultraviolet radiation. Depending on their genetics, people produce different amounts of eumelanin. Some have a lot and are able to produce a lot more when their skin is exposed to sun; others have less to start out with and produce less when their skin is exposed.

My research on the evolution of human skin pigmentation has shown that the skin color of people in prehistory was tuned to local environmental conditions, primarily to local levels of ultraviolet light. People who lived under strong UV light - like you'd find near the equator - year in and year out had darkly pigmented and highly tannable skin capable of making a lot of eumelanin. People who lived under weaker and more seasonal UV levels - like you'd find in much of northern Europe and northern Asia - had lighter skin that had only limited abilities to produce protective pigment.

With only their feet to carry them, our distant ancestors didn't move around much during their lives. Their skin adapted to subtle, seasonal changes in sunlight and UV conditions by producing more eumelanin and becoming darker in the summer and then losing some pigment in the fall and winter when the sun wasn't so strong. Even for people with lightly pigmented skin, painful sunburns would have been exceedingly rare because there was never a sudden shock of strong sun exposure. Rather, as the sun strengthened during spring, the top layer of their skin would have gotten gradually thicker over weeks and months of sun exposure.

This is not to say that the skin would have been undamaged by today's standards: Dermatologists would be appalled by the leathery and wrinkled appearance of the sun-exposed skin of our ancestors. Skin color, like the levels of sun itself, changed with the seasons and skin quickly showed its age. This is still the case for people who live traditional, mostly outdoor, lives in many parts of the world.

There is no preserved skin from thousands of years ago for scientists to study, but we can infer from the effects of sun exposure on modern people that the damage was similar. Chronic sun exposure can lead to skin cancer, but rarely of the variety - melanoma - that would cause death during reproductive age.

Indoor living changed skin

Until around 10,000 years ago - a drop in the bucket of evolutionary history - human beings made their living by gathering foods, hunting and fishing. Humanity's relationship with the sun and sunlight changed a lot after people started to settle down and live in permanent settlements. Farming and food storage were associated with the development of immovable buildings. By around 6000 B.C. many people throughout the world were spending more time in walled settlements, and more time indoors.

While most people still spent most of their time outside, some stayed indoors if they could. Many of them started protecting themselves from the sun when they did go out. By at least 3000 B.C., a whole industry of sun protection grew up to create gear of all sorts - parasols, umbrellas, hats, tents and clothing - that would protect people from the discomfort and inevitable darkening of the skin associated with lengthy sun exposure. While some of these were originally reserved for nobility - like the parasols and umbrellas of ancient Egypt and China - these luxury items began to be made and used more widely.

In some places, people even developed protective pastes made out of minerals and plant residues - early versions of modern sunscreens - to protect their exposed skin. Some, like the thanaka paste used by people in Myanmar, still persists today.

An important consequence of these practices in traditional agricultural societies was that people who spent most of their time indoors considered themselves privileged, and their lighter skin announced their status. A "farmer's tan" was not glamorous: Sun-darkened skin was a penalty associated with hard outdoor work, not the badge of a leisurely vacation. From Great Britain to China, Japan and India, suntanned skin became associated with a life of toil.

As people have moved around more and faster over longer distances in recent centuries, and spend more time indoors, their skin hasn't caught up with their locations and lifestyles. Your levels of eumelanin probably aren't perfectly adapted to the sun conditions where you live and so aren't able to protect you the same way they might have your ancient ancestors.

Even if you're naturally darkly pigmented or capable of tanning, everyone is susceptible to damage caused by episodes of sun exposure, especially after long breaks spent completely out of the sun. The "vacation effect" of sudden strong UV exposure is really bad because a sunburn signals damage to the skin that is never completely repaired. It's like a bad debt that presents itself as prematurely aged or precancerous skin many years later. There is no healthy tan - a tan doesn't protect you from further sun damage, it's the sign of damage itself.

People may love the sun, but we're not our ancestors. Humanity's relationship with the sun has changed, and this means changing your behavior to save your skin.

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Human skin stood up better to the sun before there were sunscreens and parasols - an anthropologist explains why

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Our ancient ancestors didn't have clothes or houses - but that constant exposure to the sun helped their skin protect itself from the worst sun damage.

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Obsidian blade findings reveal previously unknown social network of Neolithic people 

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Obsidian blade findings reveal previously unknown social network of Neolithic people 

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Upon further research into some obsidian artifacts found in the 1960's. Anthropologists found that the people during the neolithic period had a larger, more complex social network than previously thought.  Upon analysis, the artifacts indicated that there were many more neolithic settlements than we had thought. This helped them further understand the population increase over time, during and after the neolithic period.

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An analysis of obsidian artifacts excavated during the 1960s at two prominent archaeological sites in southwestern Iran suggests that the networks Neolithic people formed in the region as they developed agriculture are larger and more complex than previously believed, according to a new study by Yale researchers.

The study, published Oct. 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to apply state-of-the-art analytical tools to a collection of 2,100 obsidian artifacts housed at the Yale Peabody Museum. The artifacts were unearthed more than 50 years ago at Ali Kosh and Chagha Sefid, sites on Iran's Deh Luran Plain that yielded important archaeological discoveries from the Neolithic Era - the period beginning about 12,000 years ago when people began farming, domesticating animals, and establishing permanent settlements.

Original analyses performed shortly after the artifacts were discovered had suggested people first acquired the obsidian - volcanic glass - from Nemrut Dağ, a now dormant volcano in Eastern Turkey, and then relied on an unknown second source for the material. This new elemental analysis showed the obsidian came from seven distinct sources, including Nemrut Dağ, in present-day Turkey and Armenia, which is as far as about 1,000 miles on foot from the excavation sites.

"It wasn't a simple pattern of people obtaining obsidian from one source and then shifting to the next," said Ellery Frahm, an archaeological scientist in the Department of Anthropology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the study's lead author. "Rather, our analysis shows that they were acquiring obsidian from an increasingly diverse number of geological sources over time - a trend that was impossible to detect with the technology and methods available 50 years ago."

The new analysis, combined with computer modeling, indicates that there were intensifying connections among Neolithic people, suggesting the presence of a greater number of settlements between the source volcanoes and the two sites where the artifacts were unearthed thousands of years later, Frahm said.

The artifacts were collected in the 1960s during multiple excavations of the two sites led by Frank Hole, the C.J. MacCurdy Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Yale. The initial analyses were based largely on the artifacts' appearance, specifically their color when held up to sunlight. A subset of 28 artifacts were then subjected to an elemental analysis method common at the time that involved grinding them into powder.

Frahm and coauthor Christina M. Carolus, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, are the first researchers to study the elemental composition of the obsidian artifacts since these early analyses. They used state-of-the-art portable X-ray fluorescence instruments, which allowed them to examine the entire collection without damaging the artifacts.

"Every aspect of the discoveries made at these sites had been revisited since the 1960s except the elemental composition and sourcing of the obsidian artifacts," Carolus said. "A lot more is known about the source volcanoes today than 50 years ago, and we know that sorting obsidian by color will miss a lot of nuances. Fortunately, we have instruments the size of cordless drills that, in a matter of seconds and without destroying material, give us a more accurate elemental signature than anything that was possible in the past."

Scientists widely believed that humanity's transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture produced a period of rapid population growth due to the increased birth rates made possible by enhanced food supplies and permanent settlements. Finding evidence of this demographic shift often requires excavating locations that include burial sites, which can indicate a given settlement's population and provide a clearer picture of how agriculture allowed people to disperse across a landscape, Frahm said.

The researchers' analysis of the obsidian provided similar evidence.

"Tracing these obsidian artifacts from their sources to their endpoints offers insight into how they moved from hand to hand to hand over time, which helps us better understand population changes in the region during the Neolithic Era," Frahm said. "It suggested there were larger social networks and more settlements between the source volcanoes and the excavation sites than we previously thought."

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New analysis of obsidian blades reveals dynamic Neolithic social networks

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An analysis of obsidian artifacts excavated during the 1960s at two prominent archaeological sites in southwestern Iran suggests that the networks Neolithic people formed in the region as they developed agriculture are larger and more complex than previously believed, according to a new study by Yale researchers. The study, published Oct.

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Researchers have come up with a new way to identify Neanderthal remains at Cueva de los Moros in Spain. By analyzing the zinc isotopes located within the dental enamel, they can determine the diet and therefore the species. They found that Neanderthals in this location were highly carnivorous.

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This article goes over the oldest known amputation in human history. Scientists believe that the person who underwent this operation was a child, and lived to at least six years after the operation. Scientists also found that the people who operated on this child held extreme knowledge the human anatomy, due to the precision of where the cuts were.

-Diego Zavala

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A child who lived on the Indonesian island of Borneo around 31,000 years ago underwent the oldest known surgical operation, an amputation of the lower left leg, researchers say.

One or more hunter-gatherers who performed the operation possessed detailed knowledge of human anatomy and considerable technical skill, enabling the youngster to avoid fatal blood loss and infection, say archaeologist Tim Maloney of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, and colleagues.

Healed bone where the lower leg was amputated indicates that the ancient youth survived for at least six to nine years after surgery before dying at age 19 or 20, the investigators report September 7 in Nature. Since there is no evidence of crushing from an accident or an animal's bite at the amputation site, the researchers suspect that an unidentified medical problem led to the operation.

Maloney's team excavated this individual's remains in 2020 from a grave inside a large, three-chambered cave. Radiocarbon dating of burned bits of wood just below the grave along with another dating technique on a tooth from the youth's lower jaw let the researchers estimate when the surgery took place.

Until now, the oldest known amputation involved a farmer from France whose left forearm was surgically removed nearly 7,000 years ago. In North Africa, surgeries to create skull openings may have occurred as early as 13,000 years ago ( SN: 3/31/22).

Faced with rapid wound infections in a tropical region, ancient people on Borneo developed antiseptic treatments from local plants, Maloney's group suspects. It's unknown what type of tool was used in the Stone Age operation or whether the patient was sedated with a plant-based concoction.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences for Science News since 1984. He writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues.

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The oldest known surgical amputation occurred 31,000 years ago

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A child who lived on the Indonesian island of Borneo around 31,000 years ago underwent the oldest known surgical operation, an amputation of the lower left leg, researchers say. One or more hunter-gatherers who performed the operation possessed detailed knowledge of human anatomy and considerable technical skill, enabling the youngster to avoid fatal blood loss and infection, say archaeologist Tim Maloney of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, and colleagues.

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Neanderthals and Homo sapiens Co-Existed in France and Spain for at least 1,400 Years

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Neanderthals and Homo sapiens Co-Existed in France and Spain for at least 1,400 Years

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William Secrest (The picture didn't work)

Researchers from Cambridge University and Leiden University were able to discovers an overlap in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens living in the same regions of France and Spain tens of thousands of years ago by studying the not only the regions, but artificially creating the appearance of the people living in them at the time.

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Our Ancestors Ate a Paleo Diet, With Carbs

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A modern hunter-gatherer group known as the Hadza has taught researchers surprising things about the highly variable menu consumed by humans past

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Mercenaries Were More Common in Greek Warfare Than Ancient Historians Let on 

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Mercenaries Were More Common in Greek Warfare Than Ancient Historians Let on 

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The article "Mercenaries were more Common in Greek Warfare Than Ancient Historians Let On" is about how Greek armies mainly relied on mercenaries from other places. One piece of evidence that has supported researchers' theory is that DNA testing was done on 54 skeletons who were found in mass graves. The next step the researchers' took was to do a chemical analysis on the teeth that were found. This came back to show that roughly two thirds of the soldiers found in the grave were not Greek. Greeks did not reveal that they paid foreigners to fight in their armies. This perhaps could be due to their culture's high opinion of themselves and they did not want to admit that they needed help. After the Battle of Himera, the Greeks took more care of the Greek born warriors and had fewer people per grave. In contrast, foreigners were cramped into graves and had no burial objects with them.

Katlyn Fernandez

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In 480 B.C.E., Greek and Carthaginian soldiers clashed outside of Himera, an ancient Greek city in Sicily. According to Greek historians and authors, including Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus, Greek citizens traveled from nearby cities to help successfully defend against the Carthaginian attackers. Then, in 409 B.C.E., the Carthaginian invaders came back to Himera. This time, they left the colony in ruins.

But were the battles truly between just Greeks and Carthaginians? Not likely. New research adds to the growing body of evidence that Greek armies relied more heavily on foreign mercenaries than ancient historians let on.

After analyzing DNA from 54 skeletons unearthed in mass graves near Himera, researchers found that many of the soldiers were born far away, in places like the eastern Baltic, Central Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains. The researchers shared their findings in a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new study supports the results of an earlier chemical analysis of the soldiers' teeth. Published last year in the journal , the paper found that roughly two-thirds of soldiers who died during the 480 battle were not of Greek origin and that one-fourth of troops who died in 409 were not local to the area.

As Andrew Curry writes for magazine, the Greeks apparently "weren't above paying for help in a pinch," though Greek authors failed to mention this aspect of the battles in their writings.

That's likely because paying soldiers to fight did not fit the prevailing narrative of "heroic Greek armies of citizens and the armored spearmen known as hoplites" rising up to defend Himera that Greek writers wanted to portray, study co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, tells the New York Times' Franz Lidz.

The Greeks were also "obsessed with being Greek" and considered anyone who did not speak the language to be a "barbarian," as Katherine Reinberger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Georgia who was involved in the 2021 study, told Live Science's Laura Geggel last year.

As such, the researchers say it's unsurprising that ancient writers were reluctant to admit Greek troops had to pay for help.

"The Greeks were probably not keen to give any credit for their military success to a bunch of mercenaries," Gillian Shepherd, an archaeologist at La Trobe University in Australia who was not involved in the study, tells Science.

Researchers have been studying the necropolises near Himera since the early 1990s. Most Himerans were buried in individual graves, so when archaeologists came upon mass graves, they had a hunch that some of the people buried in them were soldiers for hire. Along with the remains of otherwise healthy men between the ages of 18 and 50, researchers also discovered swords, arrowheads and other weapons in the graves.

The Himerans gave the mercenaries "respectful but impersonal" burials in mass graves in their cemetery, per Science. They appear to have taken greater care with the bodies of Greek soldiers, placing them in smaller group graves along with burial objects, according to the researchers. The surviving Carthaginians, meanwhile, would've likely retrieved the bodies of their fallen comrades and taken them elsewhere for burial. So, while the research reveals new information about the genetic backgrounds of soldiers who fought at Himera, it also offers a window into how ancient Greeks saw themselves and others.

"Too many studies of ancient DNA focus only on genetic results without fully exploring the biocultural background to contextualize their findings," study co-author Britney Kyle, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Colorado, tells the New York Times. "We've made a concerted effort to bring together information from historical accounts, archaeology, bioarchaeology and isotopic analyses to contextualize the genetic data. It's amazing what we can learn when we weave diverse lines of evidence."

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Mercenaries Were More Common in Greek Warfare Than Ancient Historians Let on

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In 480 B.C.E., Greek and Carthaginian soldiers clashed outside of Himera, an ancient Greek city in Sicily. According to Greek historians and authors, including Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus, Greek citizens traveled from nearby cities to help successfully defend against the Carthaginian attackers. Then, in 409 B.C.E., the Carthaginian invaders came back to Himera.

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This video discusses and highlights the long-debated and difficult questioning of the piece of cloth that has been around for decades/centuries if it belonged to Jesus Christ when he was buried. Scientists and anthropologists have been stunned and have uncovered extreme amounts of evidence that has been shocking but it has led many to really grapple with the certainty of the origin of the Shroud of Turin - and also the Sudarium of Oviedo.

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Is this the image of Jesus Christ? The Shroud of Turin brought to life | EWTN News In Depth

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While filming for Lost Treasures of Egypt, a documentary series, cameras for National Geographic were filming while this discovery was made on October 2, 2022. In  burial chamber underground Saqqara (about 20 miles south of Cairo), archaeologists found the coffin of Ptah-em-wia. Ptah-em-wia worked for Egyptian pharaoh King Ramses II, heading his treasury. After finding a shaft that was eight meters deep, the team worked for an entire week just taking out the sand before making it to the sarcophagus.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/02/egypt-saqqara-ptah-em-wia-archaeologists-discover-sarcophagus-cairo
Posted by Bailey Reilly

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The article I found talks about how there was a discovery of a tomb that was found in Lima, Peru. In the tomb, they had uncovered the remains of 21 people, 8 of whom were children. The graves were a reminder of "Peru's ubiquitous pre-Colombian cultural legacy." This discovery is very impressive because it is always an important thing to be able to learn more about cultures all over the world. Specifically, objects found in the graves correspond to the Chancay culture. The terms do seem to have been used correctly throughout this article.

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In Lima, home to 10 million Peruvians and more than 1,000 archaeological sites, the discovery of an ancient tomb is just the latest encounter with an omnipresent past.

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Roberto Quispe, one of 30 archaeologists with the natural gas company Cálidda, cleaning human remains from an ancient tomb discovered beneath a street in a residential district north of Lima.

LIMA, Peru - On Sept. 22, Carlos Lalangui was digging a trench to make way for a natural gas pipeline on the city's outskirts when he spotted fragments of a human skull a dozen inches down in the loosened soil.

"It was the first time I'd seen something like that," said Mr. Lalangui, a worker with the natural gas company Cálidda. "But I knew it was a possibility."

He stopped digging and notified his supervisor, who called in archaeologists. In a little over a week, they had uncovered the remains of 21 people, eight of them children, who lived 600 to 800 years ago, said Cecilia Camargo, an archaeologist with the company.

Most had been buried in a classic pre-Columbian style in Peru: their bodies bound in a sitting fetal position and bundled in layers of textiles, surrounded by ceramic vessels, plates, pots and figurines. One of the adults, thought to be a warrior, was found lain horizontally on reeds with a star-shaped mace of stone; the remains of a 2-year-old were found close by.

The graves, discovered in a residential neighborhood in Carabayllo, a district in northern Lima Province, were a reminder of Peru's seemingly ubiquitous pre-Columbian cultural legacy, which continues to surface long after the Spanish conquest decimated the Indigenous population.

In Lima, huacas, pyramidlike mounds of adobe brick that were once used as sacred and administrative centers, are the most visible reminder of the city's ancient inhabitants. Dozens of ruins of huacas remain nestled among skyscrapers, middle-class neighborhoods and shantytowns.

In recent years, ancient tombs and ceramics have been found during the expansion of the city's airport and during the construction of a courthouse and a hydroelectric dam in towns nearby. Earlier this year, a resident of Lima called culture authorities to report funeral bundles he found while doing construction work on his house, said Yuri Castro, the culture ministry's director of archaeological heritage.

Ceramics and a skeleton recovered from the burial site, which belonged to the Chancay and Huara cultures and is 600 to 800 years old.

Peru's culture ministry has registered some 26,000 archaeological sites across the country. But budget constraints mean that only a fraction can be properly protected, Mr. Castro said. More than 1,100 sites are in Lima, a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people that has been occupied for more than 3,000 years.

"Those are only the sites that remain," Mr. Castro said. "With the city's expansion they've gradually disappeared."

The gas company Cálidda alone has made more than 1,500 archaeological findings in the nine years it has been laying natural gas pipelines across the city's metropolitan area, said Ms. Camargo, and it employs a team of 30 archaeologists. "In Lima, 3,000 years of history are literally just beneath our feet," she said. "We've made findings in nearly every district."

Before the Incan empire arose in the Andes in the 15th century, complex societies learned to thrive along Peru's desert coast by irrigating fertile valleys and harvesting abundant fish stocks from the Pacific. Archaeologists hope that the new discovery can help shed light on those early cultures.

Today the coastal region is home to most of Peru's population, and countless sites have already been lost to looting and development.

"It's a victory every time archaeologists can recover something responsibly and put it into the record," said Daniel Sandweiss, the president of the Society for American Archaeology, who studies how pre-Columbian coastal societies in Peru adapted to climate change caused by El Niño. "Peru has the most fascinating pre-European records of any place in the Americas."

Clockwise from top left, Carlos Lalangui, right, dug around the remains of a funerary bundle; textile fragments; the pre-Columbian archaeological site of Huantinamarca, in nearby San Miguel District; and a stone mace found in that bundle.

John Villareal, another laborer at the site, said that when he was a boy, he used to dig up graves at a pre-Columbian burial ground in his village in northern Peru near the city of Chiclayo, working in 10-man teams with other laborers.

"Buyers would come from Chiclayo and we'd sell the pieces for a pittance because we didn't know what they were worth," Mr. Villareal said. He recalled finding and trading masks, shell necklaces, gold pectorals and ceramic sculptures with erotic themes.

At the new site, he helped to carefully pack a skull to transport to a Cálidda lab for further investigation. "We would have discarded all of this," Mr. Villareal said.

The newly uncovered graves were most likely part of a cemetery used for hundreds of years by different groups that farmed along the Chillón River, said Roberto Quispe, an archaeologist with Cálidda. Archaeologists first became aware of it after seeing aerial photos, taken in the 1940s, that showed the telltale signs of tomb raiding.

"You see some plots of farmland and next to them an empty lot that's completely full of holes," Mr. Quispe said. "The cemetery had been completely looted and people started to settle on top of it."

As Mr. Quispe worked inside a tomb, a restaurant nearby blasted cumbia music and passers-by stopped to watch and take pictures.

"I came to show my kids and nephews," said Rolando Torres, a local resident, as children in school uniforms peered into one of the graves. A neighbor had sent Mr. Torres a video of the discovery, so he came right away to see the site. "We who live here, this is part of our ancestry," he said.

The objects found in the graves correspond to the Chancay culture, which occupied an area north of Lima from 1,200 to 1,450 A.D., and to an earlier cultural development known as Huaura. The unearthed items include a ceramic flute, a figurine perhaps representing a goddess and an early version of a cuchimilco, a ceramic figurine with an expression of awe or surprise that was placed in Chancay tombs to accompany the dead.

Little is known about Chancay occupations this far south, Ms. Camargo said. Detailed studies of other skeletal remains in the area suggest that some populations may have been suffering from anemia and health problems; large numbers of children have been found at some burial sites. "What was going on at that time?" Ms. Camargo asked. "Maybe those people were migrating."

Most of the findings made by Cálidda during pipe laying are of pre-Columbian ceramics. But the company's archaeologists have also found dozens of pre-Columbian graves, including 40 in a half-block in the heart of the city, and the remains of three Chinese indentured laborers who came to Peru in the 19th century and were buried near former agricultural plantations.

Also in the city's center, the archaeologists have discovered abundant examples of a 2,000-year-old ceramic style known only as "white on red." "It's been studied so little that researchers still don't refer to it as a culture," Ms. Camargo said.

The gas company has opened community museums and exhibits in the districts where findings have been made, so that residents can view them. "You can see how they connect it with their history," Ms. Camargo said. "That connection, and that interest, is immediate."

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'3,000 Years of History Are Literally Just Beneath Our Feet'

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In Lima, home to 10 million Peruvians and more than 1,000 archaeological sites, the discovery of an ancient tomb is just the latest encounter with an omnipresent past. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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Ancient DNA Reveals the First Known Neanderthal Family | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

This article discusses the discovery of a Neanderthal family and an insight into how they lived through the artifacts discovered around them and their DNA.

Lohesh Penikalapati

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For the first time, researchers have identified a Neanderthal family: a father and his teenage daughter, as well as several others who were close relatives. They lived in Siberian caves around 54,000 years ago. A team of scientists, which included Svante Pääbo, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, published the findings in this week.

The researchers extracted ancient DNA from bones and teeth that once belonged to 11 Neanderthals living together at the Chagyrskaya Cave, as well as 2 others from a second cave nearby. Of the 13, eight were adults and five were children. Alongside these remains, the team also found stone tools and animal bones.

The researchers say that the individuals found at Chagyrskaya likely lived at the same time-an unusual finding at sites this old, where discoveries often span vast timelines.

"The fact that they were living at the same time is very exciting. This means that they likely came from the same social community," says study coauthor Laurits Skov, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, in a statement. "So, for the first time, we can use genetics to study the social organization of a Neandertal community."

Neanderthals inhabited what is now Europe and Asia for more than 350,000 years until they disappeared, somewhat suddenly, around 40,000 years ago. This occurred at around the same time as the emergence of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Studying Neanderthals is like "putting together a puzzle where we have many, many missing pieces," John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin not involved in the study, tells the Associated Press ' Maddie Burakoff. And now, the new study means "somebody's dumped a bunch more pieces on the table."

The DNA found at the site gives researchers new insights into how Neanderthals lived: namely, who was migrating and how communities interacted with each other. The researchers found very little genetic diversity within the clan, suggesting that Neanderthals in this area lived in small groups of 10 or 20. "This is much lower than those recorded for any ancient or present-day human community, and is more similar to the group sizes of endangered species at the verge of extinction," writes the team.

Looking more closely, the scientists were able to examine mitochondrial DNA, which mothers pass down to their children, and compare it to Y chromosomes, which is passed down by fathers. They found more genetic diversity in the mitochondrial DNA, suggesting that women may have moved from community to community more than the men, perhaps when they chose a mate.

These Neanderthals lived in small communities in caves, traveling through the river valleys to hunt-bison, horses, ibex-and using stone to create tools, according to the researchers. The tools found in both caves studied are made with the same raw materials, meaning the communities likely interacted with each other.

"Our study provides a concrete picture of what a Neanderthal community may have looked like", says Benjamin Peter, a co-author of the study, in the statement. "It makes Neanderthals seem much more human to me."

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Ancient DNA Reveals the First Known Neanderthal Family

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For the first time, researchers have identified a Neanderthal family: a father and his teenage daughter, as well as several others who were close relatives. They lived in Siberian caves around 54,000 years ago. A team of scientists, which included Svante Pääbo, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, published the findings in this week.

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This article talks about the importance of the Cacao plant in Maya society and how recent ceramic discoveries tell us the plant was found even in the common man's home, not just in the elites.

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Howdy! I am Zachary Lebsack and the article I found illustrates evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans lived together in Europe for almost 3,000 years before Neanderthals went extinct. The article goes on to explain how culturally similar Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were because of this coexistence and had the same ways of life.

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Neanderthals and modern humans may have copied each other’s tools

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Research suggests species coexisted for more than 1,000 years and uncovers possible ‘exchange of ideas’

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Student makes big discovery during anthropology dig on battle site

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Student makes big discovery during anthropology dig on battle site

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This article is about an anthropology student working on an archeological site in Kansas. While working, he discovers the long-lost city of Etzanoa.

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A Wichita State University anthropology student working on an archaeological site near Arkansas City, Kansas, has discovered an artifact dating back to the 1600s.

The find occurred at the site of the long-lost city of Etzanoa, discovered by WSU archaeology and anthropology professor Donald Blakeslee in 2015. Etzanoa is the known location of a 1601 battle between Spaniards and Native Americans.

WSU senior Mitchell Young was working in an ancient storage pit at the site Monday, June 5, when 87 centimeters below the ground he felt his tool hit a metal object.

After some further digging, Young uncovered a muddy, rust-covered nail that had clearly been there for some time.

"I didn't want to get my hopes up, but once I showed it to my professor, I got really excited," he says.

It turns out that the nail is of Spanish origin and was designed to stick out from a horseshoe (different from modern horseshoe nails).

The nail isn't bent, evidence that it hadn't been used in a horseshoe, Blakeslee says. Instead, he says, it was probably traded by one of Juan de Onate's men to a native. Juan de Onate was a conquistador and founding governor of the colony of New Mexico.

"The natives of North America had access only to iron from meteorites, which they regarded as property of the sky gods," Blakeslee says. "Hence, even a simple nail would have been valued."

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ancient civilizations; lost treasures; archaeology; anthropology; origin of life; cultures; paleontology

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Student makes big discovery during anthropology dig on battle site

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A Wichita State University anthropology student working on an archaeological site near Arkansas City, Kansas, has discovered an artifact dating back to the 1600s. The find occurred at the site of the long-lost city of Etzanoa, discovered by WSU archaeology and anthropology professor Donald Blakeslee in 2015.

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Ancient DNA Gives Rare Snapshot of Neanderthal Family Ties

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Ancient DNA Gives Rare Snapshot of Neanderthal Family Ties

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This article discusses the research that was done on bone fragments that revealed interesting information about the family dynamics of the past. It revealed that they lived in small communities that usually consisted of people sharing DNA.

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Ancient DNA gives rare snapshot of Neanderthal family ties

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A new study uses ancient DNA to offer a rare snapshot of Neanderthal family ties. Researchers pulled DNA out of tiny bone fragments found in Siberian caves.

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Shrine discovered with rituals never seen to take place before in an Egyptian temple: Excavations in Egypt under the Sikait Project reveal new findings

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Shrine discovered with rituals never seen to take place before in an Egyptian temple: Excavations in Egypt under the Sikait Project reveal new findings

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Shrine discovered with rituals never seen to take place before in an Egyptian temple: Excavations in Egypt under the Sikait Project reveal new findings

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Researchers from the Sikait Project, directed by UAB Professor Joan Oller Guzmán, recently published new findings from the excavations of the Berenike site, a Greco-Roman seaport in the Egyptian Eastern desert. The study results, published in the American Journal of Archaeology, describes the excavation of a religious complex from the Late Roman Period (between the fourth and sixth centuries) with unprecedented discoveries linked to the presence of the Blemmyes, a nomadic people.

The Sikait Project research team, directed by Professor Joan Oller Guzmán from the Department of Antiquity and Middle Age Studies at the UAB, with financial support from the Fundación PALARQ and the necessary permits from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, recently published in American Journal of Archeology the results obtained from the January 2019 excavation season at the ancient seaport of Berenike, located in Egypt's Eastern desert.

The paper describes the archaeological dig of a religious complex from the Late Roman Period (4th to 6th centuries CE) named the "Falcon Shrine" by researchers, and located within the Northern Complex, one of the most important buildings of the city of Berenike at that time.

The site, which was excavated by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology and the University of Delaware, was a Red Sea harbour founded by Ptolomy II Philadelphus (3rd century BCE) and continued to operate into the Roman and Byzantine periods, when it was turned into the main point of entrance for commerce coming from Cape Horn, Arabia and India. Within this chronological period, one of the phases yielding the most new discoveries was the one corresponding to the Late Roman Period, from the fourth to sixth centuries CE, a period in which the city seemed to be partially occupied and controlled by the Blemmyes, a nomadic group of people from the Nubian region who at that moment were expanding their domains throughout the greater part of Egypt's Eastern desert. In this sense, the Northern Complex is fundamental in providing clear evidence of a link with the Blemmyes people, thanks to the discover of inscriptions to some of their kings or the aforementioned Falcon Shrine.

Researchers were able to identify a small traditional Egyptian temple, which after the 4th century was adapted by the Blemmyes to their own belief system. "The material findings are particularly remarkable and include offerings such as harpoons, cube-shaped statues, and a stele with indications related to religious activities, which was chosen for the cover of the journal's current issue," highlights UAB researcher Joan Oller.

The most remarkable consecrated element found was the arrangement of up to 15 falcons within the shrine, most of them headless. Although burials of falcons for religious purposes had already been observed in the Nile Valley, as had the worshipping of individual birds of this species, this is the first time researchers discovered falcons buried within a temple, and accompanied by eggs, something completely unprecedented. In other sites, researchers had found mummified headless falcons, but always only individual specimens, never in group as in the case of Berenike. The stele contains a curious inscription, reading: "It is improper to boil a head in here," which far from being a dedication or sign of gratitude as normally corresponds to an inscription, is a message forbidding all those who enter from boiling the heads of the animals inside the temple, considered to be a profane activity.

According to Joan Oller, "all of these elements point to intense ritual activities combining Egyptian traditions with contributions from the Blemmyes, sustained by a theological base possibly related to the worshipping of the god Khonsu." He goes on to say, "The discoveries expand our knowledge of these semi-nomad people, the Blemmyes, living in the Eastern desert during the decline of the Roman Empire."

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new species; soil types; birds; biology; ancient civilizations; archaeology; anthropology; cultures

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Shrine discovered with rituals never seen to take place before in an Egyptian temple: Excavations in Egypt under the Sikait Project reveal new findings

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Researchers recently published new findings from the excavations of the Berenike site, a Greco-Roman seaport in the Egyptian Eastern desert. The study results describes the excavation of a religious complex from the Late Roman Period (between the fourth and sixth centuries) with unprecedented discoveries linked to the presence of the Blemmyes, a nomadic people.

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The Black Death shaped the evolution of immunity genes, setting the course for how we respond to disease today

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The Black Death shaped the evolution of immunity genes, setting the course for how we respond to disease today

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This article discusses an international team of scientists who analyzed centuries-old DNA from victims and survivors of the Black Death pandemic. They have identified important genetic differences that determined who survived and who died, and how those aspects of our immune systems have continued to evolve since that time.

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The Black Death shaped the evolution of immunity genes, setting the course for how we respond to disease today

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An international team of scientists who analyzed centuries-old DNA from victims and survivors of the Black Death pandemic has identified key genetic differences that determined who lived and who died, and how those aspects of our immune systems have continued to evolve since that time.