On a visit to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, one of the researchers had been intrigued by a nameplate on the remains of Pharaoh Merenptah, who died in 1,203BC. The plate said the pharaoh died at the age of 60 and suffered diseased arteries, arthritis and tooth decay [The Guardian]. So the scientists obtained permission to scan that mummy and others in the museum collection.

The common people of ancient Egypt weren’t mummified; only elites like royal families, their nursemaids, and priests got such a treatment. The elites ate salted fish, bread, and cheese like everyone else, but they also dined on rich foods such as cow, sheep, and goat meat, as well as honey and cakes with butter, says Abdel Nureldin, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University, who worked on the investigation. At the same time, virtually no one in ancient times was sedentary, and that may have helped counteract their fatty diets [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Still, the researchers found, 16 of the 20 x-rayed mummies showed signs of heart disease. Men and women were affected equally. The most ancient of the mummies afflicted with atherosclerosis was Lady Rai, who had been a nursemaid to Queen Ahmose Nefertiti. She died at the age of 30 or 40 around 1530 BC, about 300 years prior to the time of Moses and 200 years before King Tut [Los Angeles Times].

Because only elite Egyptians were preserved so well after death, researchers can’t say how widespread cardiovascular disease might have been in the ancient society, or the ancient world at large. But what the finding does tell them is that while heart disease is exacerbated by the overindulgent and sedentary style of modern life, there’s more to it than that.

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Image: Michael I. Miyamoto

Quoted in Michiko Katutani’s review of Sarah Palin’s new memoir.

The study included diagnoses of both cancer and multiple sclerosis and found an overall divorce rate of nearly 12 percent, which is similar to that found in the normal population. But when the researchers looked at gender differences, they found the rate was nearly 21 percent when women were the patients compared with about 3 percent when men got the life-threatening diagnosis. The researchers suggest men are less able to commit, on the spot, to being caregivers to a sick partner, while women are better at assuming such home and family responsibilities [LiveScience]. However, the study did find that the divorce rate was lower in longer marriages.

Chamberlain notes that the study, which will be published in the journal Cancer, didn’t have any information about how happy the marriages were to begin with. “All these patients were couples when we met them, but we don’t know about pre-diagnosis marital conflicts that had been festering,” Dr. Chamberlain said. “But the striking part is with life threatening illness, how often women are abandoned compared to men. That does not speak very well of my gender” [The New York Times].

The researchers say that doctors may want to advise couples to seek family therapy after the woman receives a serious diagnoses, and note that the medical benefits of having a committed spouse are real and measurable. Researchers also looked at the quality of life among the patients who separated or divorced. They found these patients used more anti-depressants, took part less in clinical trials, had more frequent hospitalizations, were less likely to complete radiation therapy and more likely not to die at home [Reuters].

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According to Reuters:

Hundreds of poor Hindu villagers in eastern India have refused to hand over a rare turtle to authorities, saying it is an incarnation of God, officials said on Tuesday. Villagers chanting hymns and carrying garlands, bowls of rice and fruits are pouring in from remote villages to a temple in Kendrapara, a coastal district in eastern Orissa state.

Police have been trying to take the animal from the villagers since it’s actually illegal to harbor this rare turtle. (Note: That’s not a picture of the turtle to the left. The exact species isn’t clear from news reports.) The villagers are saying the turtle has holy symbols on its shell and is really an incarnation of Lord Jagannath, a popular Hindu deity.

Let us all pray to Jagannath that this doesn’t devolve into an Elian Gonzalez-type situation, with Indian authorities barging in to grab a confused reptile…

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Details here.

If you said to yourself, “Hold on, is that bird singing with its wings?” the answer is yes.

As I wrote in this 2005 article in the New York Times, ornithologists have long known that a few species of manakins can make sounds with their wings. The sounds are produced by the males, as part of their courtship displays. Some make firecracker pops, and some make whooshing sounds. Darwin pointed to the sounds of manakin wings as evidence of just how much sexual selection could transform male animals as females were attracted to some mates over others.

But no one had any idea how manakins could make noises with feathers until Kimberly Bostwick of Cornell and her colleagues tackled the question. Bostwick took a high-speed camera into the jungle to film club-winged manakins. It turns out the birds flap their wings 100 times a second, far faster than typical birds. Later, she closely examined museum specimens. Club-winged manakins have one peculiar wing feather with a stiff, curved tip, right next to one with a series of ridges. Bostwick and her colleagues proposed that curved tips raked across the ridges on the neighboring feather like a spoon pulled across a washboard, producing the bird’s 1500-cycle-per-second sound.

Biologists are quite familiar with this way of making sound–but in crickets and other insects. Typically, they draw their legs across ridges on their exoskeleton, making their bodies resonate in a process called stridulation. Bostwick and her colleagues were proposing, for the first time, that a vertebrate could stridulate, too.

Since Bostwick published her first paper on the birds, she’s continued to study them to test her hypothesis. In a paper just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, she and her colleagues report a new experiment in which they looked at the physics of the manakin feathers. They clamped the feathers in a device known as a vibration mini-shaker, and then–well, as you can guess–shook them. The scientists bounded lasers off the feathers to track their wiggles as the mini-shaker vibrated faster and faster. They used the device first to measure the special spoon-and-washboard pair of feathers. Then they measured how other feathers responded, and then, finally, they studied a set of ordinary and spoon-and-washboard feathers joined together on a ligament.

The scientists found that the spoon-and-washboard feathers resonated at about 1500 cycles, just as Bostwick had predicted back in 2005. The unmodified feathers on other parts of the wing, however, showed no such response when the scientists shook them one by one. But when they shook the spoon-and-washboard feathers together with seven neighboring wing feathers, the entire set resonated strongly at 1500 cycles.

As you can see in this video, the club-winged manakin moves its entire wings upward before flapping. Bostwick proposes that the spoon-and-washboard feathers create a 1500-cycle sound, which the entire wing amplifies. This special kind of stridulation is not totally unique–the Australian whistling moth whistles by clicking castanet-like organs together, causing its entire wings to resonate. What is unique, however, is the evolution of feathers into such a sophisticated sound system.

The whole enterprise of handing out awards for science journalism is fraught with gloomy undertones these days, of course. Last year’s newspaper winners actually lost their jobs by the time the awards were announced. But even as we struggle on, it’s reassuring that there are chances to get some recognition for striving to do our best, to make as much sense of the world as we can manage in plain English. And I’m particularly grateful that the folks at the New York Times indulges me in my curiosity about basic questions about the nature of life–like why fireflies flash.

Much of what we know about Homo erectus comes from “Turkana Boy,” the famous skeleton found by the Leakey team in Kenya in the early 1980’s. An important part of what we know, though, comes from the genetic study of lice. And not just head lice.

Using “paleoartists,” digital filmmaking and the work done with Turkana Boy over the past two decades, the NOVA producers are able to paint a vivid portrait of  Homo erectus’s role in key innovations – like using fire and developing social bonds – that make us human.

The real action in the documentary starts about halfway through, when scientists tackle the question of how Homo erectus was able to obtain the protein necessary to support brain growth. Of course, stone tools played a huge role in making sure that the humans “went home for dinner and weren’t the meal.”

Per NOVA, “most predators rely on strength or speed to kill their prey, and our ancestors had neither.” Instead, according to Harvard’s Dan Lieberman, Homo erectus relied on the combination of “endurance running and high activity in the middle of the day.” Unlike animal predators, early humans were mostly hairless, giving them the ability to sweat and keep cool while running and tracking their prey over long distances.

The evidence for Turkana Boy’s hairlessness comes in part from the study of louse DNA. Hair is “rarely present in the fossil record” so researchers have turned to the study of parasites associated with hair, i.e. head and pubic lice. It turns out that the human head louse is very different from the human pubic louse. On top of that the pubic louse is closely related to lice found on gorillas. Viewers are left to draw their own opinions about how humans contracted pubic lice from gorillas. When humans lost their hair, the lice were forced to navigate “the hairless geographic barrier” between the head and pubic regions.

By studying the genetic code of the two louse species, geneticists like Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute can tell when the two species diverged from their common ancestor. Their research suggests that humans lost their thick coat of body hair almost three million years ago, paving the way for Turkana Boy to outrun and kill the meat he needed to feed his growing brain.

The Nazca people are famous for the enormous earthworks they carved into an arid plateau, in designs that range from simple geometrical forms to representations of animals like hummingbirds, lizards, and monkeys. They were previously known to have disappeared around A.D. 500, when massive floods powered by El Niño ravaged the valley where they made their home. Now, a new study that examined the pollen in buried layers of soil in order to trace the horticultural history of the land may have revealed why those floods were so devastating.

The Ica Valley, about 120 miles south of Lima, is barren today but was once a riverine oasis — a fertile landscape capable of supporting many people. The key to that fertility was a tree called the huarango [Los Angeles Times]. The huarango tree provided wood for building and fuel, and seed pods that can be ground up and used in flour or beer. Its branches caught the water in morning mists, and its roots stabilized the topsoil. Says lead researcher David Beresford-Jones: “These were very special forests…. It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone enhancing soil fertility and moisture and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known” [BBC News].

The new study, published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, found that the pollen in the older layers of soil came almost entirely from huarango trees. But by A.D. 400, pollen from corn and cotton plants had replaced the tree pollen, suggesting that the Nazca people had chopped down the forests to make room for agricultural fields. About AD 500, a major El Niño built up in the Pacific, deluging the nearby Andes with rain. Walls of water and mud washed down the valley and over the denuded landscape, sweeping away food crops, buildings and artifacts. Beresford-Jones compared it with the 1997-98 El Niño, which left the city of Ica 6 feet underwater [Los Angeles Times]. The floods of A.D. 500 were many times worse, the researchers say.

In the soil layers that came directly after the flood, the only pollen came from salt-tolerant plants that could survive in the arid conditions left behind in the aftermath of the natural disaster. The land was clearly no longer able to support agriculture, and the Nazca people vanished. But although the El Niño floods were dramatic, they didn’t have to mark the end of a civilization, the researchers say. “The landscape only became exposed to the catastrophic effects of that El Nino flood, once people had inadvertently crossed an ecological threshold,” explains Dr Beresford-Jones. “Such thresholds or ‘tipping-points’ are sharply defined in these desert environments” [BBC News]. The study refutes the notion that pre-Columbian people always lived in perfect harmony with nature, the researchers say–and also serves as a reminder that medding with the ecosystem can have devastating consequences.

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Image: Alex Chepstow-Lusty

But Ida, who was the subject of both a book and a TV special that were released at the same time as the scientific paper describing the fossil, failed to wow many evolutionary biologists. Says Erik Seiffert, lead researcher of the new study: ”The suggestion that Ida [was]… specifically related to the higher primates, namely monkeys, apes and humans, was actually a minority view from the start. So it came as a surprise to many of us who are studying primate palaeontology” [BBC News].

Seiffert’s new analysis began with his attempt to identify another fossil primate, Afradapis longicristatus, which he found to be a close relation to Darwinius. The researchers then compared 360 specific anatomical features of 117 living and extinct primate species to draw up a family tree [AP]. The analysis showed that both primates are located on an early twig of the branch that produced lemurs, and far from the lineage that spawned monkeys and great apes [Wired.com]. What’s more, the researchers say that both species have no modern descendants.

The new study, published in Nature, challenges the previous notion that Darwinius was an important part of our lineage. The previous researchers had singled out features in Ida’s face, teeth, and feet that were similar to those seen in higher apes, but the new research team argues that these features may be a result of “convergent evolution.” This involves features arising independently in separate lineages, possibly as a response to similar evolutionary pressures [BBC News].

The researchers involved in the Darwinius work stand by their findings, and still maintain that Ida is a find of spectacular proportions. They also note that the Darwinius skeleton is much more complete than Afradapis and shows additional higher primate characteristics not available for analysis on Seiffert’s fossils, such as bones in the foot [The Scientist].

But Seiffert says that Darwinius played no role in the origins of man, and is much more closely related to lemurs and lorises. Says Seiffert: “The last common ancestor that Darwinius shared with us was the same common ancestor that gave rise to all primates” [The Scientist].

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Image: E.R.Seiffert, Stony Brook University

A

The new report explains that archaeologists have examined sediments at seven Clovis-age sites across the United States, and found that the concentration of magnetic debris was insufficient to confirm an extraterrestrial impact at that time [Nature News]. The original theory’s evidence came from magnetic microspherules, or cosmic debris, discovered in sediments at 25 locations. However, one of the new study’s authors, Todd Surovell, said that even after 18 months of sedimentary analysis and hundreds of hours peering into a microscope, he could find no evidence of microspherules to support the the exploding comet theory. Snap.

But the research team that proposed the comet theory isn’t backing down. “Their study doesn’t negate our hypothesis,” says James Kennett, a palaeoceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara… Another co-author, geophysicist Allen West of Prescott, Arizona, says that Surovell’s group didn’t use the correct techniques to extract, identify and quantify the microspherules [Nature News]. Burn.

This isn’t the first challenge to the North American comet theory. A study in February found no evidence of burning biomass that a comet explosion, and the resulting continent-wide fire, would have produced. Kennett, one of the researchers who originally proposed the theory, responded by saying the contradictory studies are “flawed” and published a study in August on his team’s finding of nanometer-sized diamonds, supposedly created during the comet’s impact.

Scientists on both sides of the scuffle have new research scheduled for publication soon, so stay tuned!

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Image: NASA

Historians believe they’re settled a long-running debate over ancient Rome’s population at the turn of the 1st century B.C.E. thanks to stashes of ancient Roman coins. This was the period marked by

But some historians argue that the population didn’t really increase, and that in fact it declined during this period because of the wars. To back up their idea they are turning to buried treasure. In times of instability in the ancient world, people stashed their cash and if they got killed or displaced, they didn’t come back for their Geld. Thus, large numbers of coin hoards are a good quantitative indicator of population decline, two researchers argue in in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday [Wired.com].

Over the years, archaeologists armed with metal detectors have found hundreds of clay pots filled with Roman coins. So a research team combined numbers of coin hoards from 250 B.C.E. to 100 B.C.E. with data from the Roman Republic censuses to understand how spikes in stashes reflected population changes. For example, population dropped by about 50,000 during the Second Punic War from 218 B.C.E. to 201 B.C.E., and that coincides with a jump in coin hoards dated to that time. Then, from data on coins hoarded from 100 B.C.E. to 50 C.E., the researchers inferred population during that era. The range predicted by the coin hoard model…[indicate] that civil wars culled about 100,000 people from the Roman populace [ScienceNOW Daily News].

So the data supports the idea that Rome’s population actually declined during the second century B.C.E. The researchers suggest that the large census numbers can be explained if the census was expanded to include women and children during this time, thus accounting for the large population increase in Rome during times of war. By these estimates the entire population of the Roman Empire—and not just its male population—was somewhere around 4 million to 5 million people by the end of the first century B.C. [LiveScience].

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Study coauthor Tim White says that Ardi provides clues to what the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps might have looked like before their lineages diverged about 7 million years ago…. But despite being “so close to the split,” says White, the surprising thing is that she bears little resemblance to chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives [Time].

Ardi’s pelvis, leg, and feet bones indicated that she walked upright on two feet, but her opposable big toes suggest that she was also comfortable climbing trees. Her hand, arm, and shoulder bones indicate that she didn’t often swing through the trees, though; instead she probably walked on her palms along tree branches like some extinct apes. Based on Ardi’s anatomy, it appears that chimpanzees may actually have evolved more than humans — in the scientific sense of having changed more over the past 7 million years or so [Time].

In a special issue of the journal Science that will be published later today, researchers present 11 papers covering many aspects of Ardipithecus ramidus, and drawing information from the bone fragments of 35 individuals. The researchers also examined the remains of animals, seeds and pollen uncovered at the excavation site [that] reveal it to have been a woodland where colobus monkeys swung in trees full of swifts, doves and lovebirds, and spiral-horned antelope, elephants, shrews and early forms of peacock roamed the forest floor below [The Guardian].

That woodland habitat contrasts with the savanna where Lucy was thought to dwell, and it has big implications for our understanding of what caused hominids to rise to their feet. If the researchers are correct in thinking that Ardi walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the “savanna hypothesis”—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment [National Geographic News].

So how did bipedalism take off? One provocative idea rests on Ardi’s dental records. Researchers say her species lacks many typical features of chimpanzees, including large male canine teeth — a sign, say the researchers, that the ultra-aggressive social behaviors seen in chimpanzees were lost early in the human lineage. If so, male A. ramidus may have competed for female attention by bringing them food, rather than fighting each other. That could have contributed to the evolution of pair-bonding behavior [Wired.com]. Some anthropologists believe that early hominids may have switched from a four-limbed gait to a two-legged stride so that the males could more easily bring home the bacon.

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Image: J.H. Matternes

Hand axes have sometimes been called the Swiss Army knives of the Stone Age world. They vary in shape and size, but most are at least roughly symmetrical, with one pointed and one rounded edge. Hand axes were very handy for butchering animals and cutting the stalks of tough plants [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Previously, archaeologists believed that the first Europeans lagged behind people living in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in their tool-making capabilities. Axes dating back to 1.5 million years ago have been found in Africa, while the earliest axes found in Europe were thought to be no more than 500,000 years old.

The new study, published in Nature, suggests that vital information about tool-making traveled relatively quickly through the ancient world. The new time frame was determined through a process called paleomagnetic dating, which takes advantage of the fact that the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed itself often on geological timescales. By analyzing the polarity of magnetic minerals in rock, scientists can determine when the rock formed…. At each site, the researchers took samples at regular intervals above and below the level where hand axes were found. The last complete magnetic reversal was 780,000 years ago, and both sites dated back to about this time [The New York Times]. At the two sites, the analyses indicated that the tools were at least 760,000 and 900,000 years old, respectively.

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Image: Michael Walker

BBC News reports:

[Researchers] looked at thousands of genes in the Y chromosomes of two Chinese men. They knew the men were distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805.

By looking at the number of differences between the two men, and the size of the human genome, they were able to come up with an estimate of between 100 and 200 new mutations per person.

This number of mutations is small compared to the size of the full human genome, so finding them was apparently quite a feat. Such a feat, in fact, that one of the scientists reportedly said that “finding this tiny number of mutations was more difficult than finding an ant’s egg in an emperor’s rice store.”

Some mutations can give rise to health conditions like cancer, so being able to identify new genetic variations not only could teach us about our own evolution, but could even help prevent disease-causing alterations in our DNA.

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The BBC reports:

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively….

[The researchers] say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.

Although zombies may be a slightly-less-than-serious topic, there’s a serious side to the study, which was published in a book called Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress. A zombie attack could be similar to a plague of infectious disease, the researchers say.

Still, there’s one big difference: Once completely wiped out, diseases don’t come oozing and groaning back from the dead.

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Brown buried silcrete stones in a fire pit and kept a roaring fire going for up to 10 hours at a time. When the blaze eventually died down and the rocks had cooled, they looked different, with a new reddish sheen. They also had different physical properties. “The stone becomes harder and stiffer,” Brown says. “It basically becomes more brittle, which is great if you are breaking something [and] you want it to break more easily” [NPR News]. The flakes from the treated stones were also sharper than those created from untreated silcrete.

The study, published in Science, pushes back the onset of “pyro-engineering.” Previously, scientists had believed the first fire-hardened tools were created 25,000 years ago in Europe, but the treated blades found in South Africa date from about 70,000 years ago. Researchers say the technique illuminates the transition between using fire to cook food (which early humans probably figured out about 800,000 years ago), and its more sophisticated use in pottery making and metal working. Brown says that by “72,000 years ago, people are doing more than just using fires for cooking, heat, light or protection…. I think heating stones is the dawn of human engineering” [BBC News].

Heat treatment of stones for toolmaking occurred in several steps that required complex thinking abilities, the researchers assert. Toolmakers buried selected pieces of stone beneath a fire at a campsite or workshop, probably for a day or more, they suspect. Stones were then removed and worked into shape as cutting tools [Science News]. The complicated process shows that the toolmakers had mastered advance planning, and Brown goes so far as to suggest that they must have had language as well, so that instructions could be passed down from generation to generation.

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Image: Science / AAAS. A replicated tool with blades made from heated silcrete.

Analyzing ancient pigments is difficult because often not very much pigment remains on a relic, while at the same time, removing a large chunk of the dye for analysis would destroy the object. In this study, however, the researcher was able to analyze the dye without damaging the relic by refining a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which relies on the scattering of light to study materials. That process is not generally suitable for studying madder or some other dyes, but Leona enhanced the result using tiny metal particles that could amplify the findings and detect even very low levels of chemicals [AP]. The quiver dates back to 2124 to 1981 B.C. and is about 700 years older than any previous madder remnants.

Knowing which dyes were used, and when, can provide clues as to the trade and other practices of the era. For example, this pigment required knowledge of the complex chemistry necessary to extract a plant pigment and convert it into a dye. In addition, chemical profiles of colored material can tell a detailed story about when, where, how, and sometimes even by whom a piece of art was made…. “They correspond to major industries, commerce and technology,” [author Marco Leona] says of the dye advances. The organic pigments can also be studied to identify forgeries and match similar works of art [Scientific American].

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Image courtesy of PNAS

That’s why, for $880, parents in China can send their three-to-12-year-old children to a special five-day camp where they will undergo DNA testing in an effort to predict their area of success. From a sample of saliva, scientists say, they can examine 11 genes that gauge a child’s future IQ, height, memory, and other traits. They will then recommend to the parents the best course of action to hone the kid’s innate capabilities.

CNN reports:

“Nowadays, competition in the world is about who has the most talent,” said [program director Zhao Mingyou]. “We can give Chinese children an effective, scientific plan at an early age”….

[P]arents are convinced it will help their child. It is no secret that China’s one-child policy often produces anxious and ambitious parents with high expectations for their only child.

“China is different from Western countries,” said Yang Yangqing, the lab’s technical director. “There is only one child in our families so more and more parents focus on their children’s education and they want to give them the best education.”

You can also watch CNN’s video about China’s DNA testing here.

There’s just one problem: Can DNA tests really reliably predict whether a child will be the next Stephen Hawking or Michael Jordan? After all, success is often the product not of a gene or two, but rather a complex combination, along with a properly nurturing (or incentivizing) environment—not to mention a hefty dose of hard work and luck.

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A physics professor is joining forces with members of the Philadelphia 76ers cheerleading squad to dole out 18 online lessons on the basics of science. The project is the brainchild of former DISCOVER staffer (and 76ers dance team member) Darlene Cavalier. You can see a slideshow here, and read more about the project here.

FOX News reports:

“Why not cheerleaders?” asked [professor James] Trefil, the Robinson Professor of Science at George Mason University. “My own philosophy is, any way you can get the scientific message across, that’s a good thing.”

Guess when it comes to raising interest and awareness about science, it pays to be…aggressive! Be, be aggressive! And miniskirts don’t hurt, either.

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The earlier findings may have been thrown off because the large-scale study included both purebred dogs, whose evolution has been closely guided by human hands, and street dogs, who have bred more autonomously and randomly, and who therefore show more genetic diversity. But the 2002 researchers drew DNA from different types of dogs in different regions. Says Adam Boyko, lead researcher of the new study: “I think it means that the conclusion that was drawn before might have been premature. It’s a consequence of having a lot of street dogs from East Asia that were sampled, compared to elsewhere” [BBC News].

The new findings don’t cast doubt on the main premise of dog domestication: that dogs evolved from the gray wolves that were once common across Europe and Asia. Boyko notes that the study also does not mean domestic dogs might have originated in Africa. “We know Africa cannot be where dogs were domesticated, because there are no gray wolves there,” Boyko said. But the findings call into question the previous proof that dogs were first domesticated in East Asia [National Geographic News]. While the domestication could have occurred anywhere in Eurasia where wolves and humans coexisted, the researchers suggest the Middle East as one likely spot.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on the genetic diversity of African village dogs … because Adam Boyko’s co-authors, his brother and sister-in-law, were travelling in Africa on honeymoon. They collected all the blood samples from the African dogs [BBC News]. To find the ultimate point of origin for domesticated dogs, the researchers hope to conduct genome-wide scans of stray dogs across the world.

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Image: flickr / Casey J.

Many of the city’s ancient buildings were dismantled and the stones were carted away in the Middle Ages. The remaining foundations sunk back into the marsh, which was drained and turned into agricultural land in the 19th century. The new study, published in Science, is a result of aerial images taken in unusually dry summer of 2007, when the crops were suffering from drought. When the visible light and near-infrared images were processed to tease out subtle variations in plant water stress, a buried metropolis emerged. The researchers discovered that the crops planted on the land were in different stages of ripening, thanks to differences in the amount of water in the soil [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Lighter crops traced the outlines of buildings–including a basilica, an amphitheater, a forum, and what may have been temples–buried at least 40 centimeters below the surface. To the south of the city center runs a wide strip of riper crops. They were growing above what clearly used to be a canal, an indication that Venice’s Roman forebears were already incorporating waterways into their urban fabric [ScienceNOW Daily News]. The canal connects to the lagoon and cuts through the city, and was probably used to transport foreign goods from the harbor to the inland cities of Verona and Milan.

Researchers say that this archaeological find is particularly valuable because the city was never built over. “It’s extremely unusual for a town to go out of use like this and that is what makes it absolutely invaluable for achaeologists. It gives a full profile of what the town looked like without the imposition of modern infrastructure,” said Dr Neil Christie, a specialist in the Roman empire [Times Online].

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Image: Science / AAAS

The study found that between 1100 and 1533 AD, temperatures increased several degrees, making it possible for the Incas to use new mountain land for agriculture. It also expanded the swath of land the empire occupied which, at its peak, spanned from the middle of Chile to the border shared by Ecuador and Colombia. This climate information came from an analysis of deeply buried sediment samples in the region the Incans once occupied. The researchers examined pollen and seeds buried in layers of mud on the floor of Lake Marcacocha in the Cuzco region of the Peruvian Andes. Similar to the rings in the trunk of a tree, each layer of sediment represents a fixed period of time. In the case of Lake Marcacocha, the researchers were able to analyze a 1,200-year-old sediment record [Discovery News].

The scientists noted the appearance for the first time of a range of trees and crops at the lake, which is 11,000 ft above sea level, over the critical period, corresponding to a tree line edging upwards [Times Online]. The alder trees that researchers found evidence of would have prevented erosion and fertilized the soil, which would have made maize and potato cultivation more efficient. Researchers think the Incas took advantage of the more temperate climate on the mountain slopes by carving terraces into the mountainsides and develop[ing] a complex system of canals to irrigate the land [Times Online], as gradually melting glaciers provided a steady source of water for the crops. The scientists’ analysis also revealed evidence of a drought around 880 AD, which may have caused the collapse of Incas’ predecessors, an empire known as the Wari.

Today, global warming has an exaggerated effect on high-altitude plants and animals, such as the now-endangered pika, and plants that have relocated to higher altitudes in pursuit of a cooler climate. There have been other changes as well: Peru’s capital continues to get much of its water from glaciers, but they are predicted to dry up within the next two decades due to climate change. Additionally, the terraces that previously trapped water for agriculture have fallen into disuse, and the predominant tree in the region is the eucalyptus, which saps what water remains in the soil and deposits resins that poison other plant life. [Lead author Alex] Chepstow-Lusty called for removal of the eucalyptus tree and a massive reforestation effort with alder or similar trees to replenish the soil, as well as repair of the derelict irrigation systems so they can once more support agriculture [Los Angeles Times]. Other experts, however, say these measures are too drastic to take before further research is done to confirm the study’s findings.

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Image: flickr / kudumomo

Although a nicked rib on his left side provided a hint as to what killed Shanidar 3, scientists remained stumped on the details for decades. To find a probable cause of death for the Neanderthal, the researchers used a specially-designed crossbow to fire stone-age projectiles at precise velocities at pig carcasses…. At kinetic energies consistent with a thrown spear, the pig’s rib bore damage consistent with Shanidar 3’s isolated rib puncture [Time]. Higher kinetic energies that matched a knife or spear thrust produced more massive rib damage than that sustained by Shanidar. The scientists also found that the weapon entered Shanidar’s body from about 45 degrees above his body, provided the 5-foot-6-inch Neanderthal was standing at the time.

No one knows why Neanderthals disappeared, but they did so around the time modern humans began to spread from Africa across the globe. That has led some to speculate that our ancestors played a role in Neanderthals’ extinction. In the specific case of Shanidar 3, because modern humans are thought to have developed projectile hunting weapons and Neanderthals hadn’t, the researchers deduced the probable suspect — a modern human [LiveScience]. Still, this case from the files of CSI Stone Age is far from closed. Other scientists have theorized that Neanderthals and humans not only got along, but interbred.

Although evidence of a human-Neanderthal murder remains scant, another Neanderthal skeleton dating back some 36,000 years and found in France showed signs of a scalp injury likely caused by a sharp object that may have been delivered by a modern human at the time, [lead author Steven] Churchill said. “So if the Shanidar 3 case is also a case of inter-specific violence and if Shandiar 3 overlaps in time with modern humans, we’re beginning to get a little bit of a pattern here,” Churchill said [LiveScience]. More-exact carbon dating of the remains could provide stronger evidence for Neandercide, since Shanidar 3 is estimated to have lived between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago; modern humans began to spread around 50,000 years ago.

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Photo credit: Les Todd / Duke University

The abundant food and water available in the area indicate that the cannibalistic practice was not one of necessity. AFP tells us:

A study of the remains revealed that they turned to cannibalism to feed themselves and not as part of a ritual, that they ate their rivals after killing them, mostly children and adolescents. “It is the first well-documented case of cannibalism in the history of humanity, which does not mean that it is the oldest,” said [project co-director Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro]. The remains discovered in the caves “appeared scattered, broken, fragmented, mixed with other animals such as horses, deer, rhinoceroses, all kinds of animals caught in hunting” and eaten by humans, he said. “This gives us an idea of cannibalism as a type [of] gastronomy, and not as a ritual”….

[Archaeologists] found water and food in abundance, could hunt wild boar, horses, [and] deer, “which means that they did not practice cannibalism through a lack of food. They killed their rivals and used the meat,” he said. “We have also discovered two levels that contain cannibalised remains, which means that it was not a one-off thing, but continued through time,” he said. “Another interesting aspect…is that most of the 11 individuals that we have identified” as victims “were children or adolescents.”

Lends a whole new meaning to “the sweet taste of victory.”

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The five-holed flute, which is fully intact and made from a griffon vulture’s radius bone, was discovered with fragments of other flutes crafted out of mammoth ivory. The bird-bone instrument was found in a region in which similar instruments have popped up lately, says lead author Nicholas Conard, but this flute is “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves.” … Until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music [The New York Times]. To make sure the newly discovered instruments were dated correctly, samples were tested independently and using different methods at facilities in England and Germany. Both found the bone to be at least 35,000 years old, during the Modern Paleolithic era.

The ancient flute give archaeologists a glimpse into a population that was apparently already beginning to form its own culture and traditions. The flutes show that the human society of the time was becoming modern, [comments functional morphologist Jeffrey Laitman]. They were not simply devoting their lives to finding food, he said. The flutes “are telling us about intricate and delicate communication, bonding, social events that are going on” [HealthDay News]. Conard admits it’s not definitively proven that the flutes were made by Homo sapiens, not Neanderthals. Still, he says that the presence of other artistic artifacts near the instruments, such as a busty ivory figurine, mean it’s highly unlikely Neanderthals crafted the flute.

Early humans’ budding culture might have helped them survive while the Neanderthals, which left no concrete evidence of music-making, mysteriously died off. The ancient flutes are evidence for an early musical tradition that likely helped modern humans communicate and form tighter social bonds…. Music may therefore have been important to maintaining and strengthening Stone Age social networks among modern humans, allowing for greater societal organization and strategizing, said Conard [National Geographic News]. The bird-bone flute probably produced a range of harmonic tones similar to modern flute, according to a specialist in ancient music, who reproduced another Stone Age flute made of ivory to see what the original might have sounded like.

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Image: H.Jensen; Copyright: University of Tubingen

While around 200 other witchcraft bottles have been found, all of them were open and eroding—until this one, that is. This bottle held, among other things, a dozen iron nails, hair, fingernail clippings, a piece of leather shaped like a heart and pierced with a nail, what could be navel fluff, and brimstone, also known as sulfur… all bathed in human urine. Scientists say the bottle shows that people of the time actually followed bizarre-sounding recipes to combat witchcraft, such as one requiring a man to “take a quart of your Wive’s urine, the paring of her Nails, some of her Hair, and such like, and boyl them well in a Pipkin.”

Lab tests revealed that the nail clippings showed little wear, so the person they once belonged to likely was well-off. And scientists know the person who produced the urine was a smoker because it contained nicotine. This discovery is both extremely cool, and a little spooky—and it makes us wonder if future archaeologists will find our daily lives bizarre, too.

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Red ochre dye once thought by archaeologists to only serve a decorative or symbolic purpose in present-day South Africa 70,000 years ago, may have actually been the magic ingredient in a Stone Age recipe for natural superglue.

The natural red pigment is rich in iron, and was added to the gum of acacia trees to create an adhesive, a blend that the new research shows was less brittle and more durable than glue made solely from acacia gum. Researcher Lyn Wadley said, “We discovered that when we used ochre, the glue is much more robust, and the stone tool doesn’t come off the shaft.”

How Stone Age humans devised the trick, however, is still a mystery—and quite an impressive one: Wadley said, “They couldn’t possibly have known about chemical pH or iron content.”

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Image: Wikimedia