History

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In search of the oldest animal

Sponge-like fossil found in ancient reef might be the earliest evidence of animal life.

In the latest instalment in the quest to find our oldest animal ancestor, a Canadian geologist has unearthed a sponge-like fossil on an ancient reef – from a mind-bending 890 million years ago. If confirmed to actually originate from a sponge, this will become the oldest known physical evidence of animal life on Earth.

If we trace our origins back through the tree of life, we will eventually arrive at the last common ancestor of all animals. But exactly when that oldest animal lived and what it looked like are a matter of fierce debate in the scientific community.

FULL REPORT

 

[Azeem]

In relation to the 666 post in the pandemic thread.

666 according to many scholars refers to the Roman Emperor Nero. 666 is an alphanumeric code by assigning numbers to Hebrew letters, called Gematria. Under Nero the persecution of Christians formally started in the empire. They referred to Nero as 666 in their letters. If you add all the Hebrew letters of Nero's full name as per their Gematria value you get 666.

Gematria and other numerology methods devised from it are widely used in religious, esoteric and astrological texts and practices

https://www.dcode.fr/gematria-numerology My full name adds up to 123, perfect

 

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Neanderthals painted stalagmites red

Ochre pigments reveal 65,000-year-old Spanish cave paintings.

Deep in Cueva de Ardales (Cave of Ardales) in Spain, stalagmites have been painted red by artistic Neanderthals, according to a study published in PNAS.

Stalagmites, or flowstones, are long, hanging spikes made from calcite and other carbonate materials that form where water flows down cave walls and floors. The stalagmites in Cueva de Ardales, near Málaga on Spain’s south coast, are stained red in places, but it had previously been unclear whether the colouring was natural or painted.

Now, an international team of researchers, led by Africa Pitarch Martí from the University of Barcelona, Spain, has used different forms of microscopy and spectroscopy – studying how light is absorbed – to determine that the red pigment is made of ochre and not the iron-oxide-rich deposits of the cave.

This means they couldn’t have been stained naturally as the stalagmites formed, and so must have been painted.

The team found that the ochre-based pigment was applied twice – once more than 65,000 years ago and again between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago. This is when Neanderthals occupied the area, before early humans came to Europe.

The researchers suggest the pigment was brought from outside the cave, and may have been used to highlight the location of the stalagmites as an archaic form of occupational health and safety.

The two separate applications of ochre also suggest that the stalagmites were marked by different generations that returned to the cave, so may also have had symbolic value.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/neanderthals-painted-stalagmites-with-ochre/

 

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Middle-Eastern genomes fill historical gaps

137 full genomes from eight Middle-Eastern populations reveals links to agriculture

Despite being the cradle of agriculture, the birthplace of urbanisation and the land bridge that brought early hominins out of Africa, the Middle East as a region has flown relatively under the radar when it comes to genetic research. Now, a new study from the University of Birmingham and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK, has sequenced 137 full genomes from eight Middle-Eastern populations to reveal fascinating insights about human history.

“The Middle East is an important region to understand human history, migrations and evolution: it is where modern humans first expanded out of Africa, where hunter-gatherers first settled and transitioned into farmers, where the first writing systems developed, and where the first major known civilisations emerged,” says co-author Mohamed Almarri of the Wellcome Sanger Institute. With this in mind, many of our modern languages, cultures and behaviours can trace their roots to the region.

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Read more: East Asians descended from Stone Age residents

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The team, led by Almarri and Marc Haber of the University of Birmingham, were able to reconstruct the genomic history of the region with unprecedented precision, noting that many of their findings vindicate theories in the fields of archaeology and linguistics.

The key findings included the identification of 4.8 million new gene variants that are specific to the Middle East, and that were not identified in the Human Genome Diversity Project. The authors say these genes could provide clues about population health specific to the region.

“These are variants that were not previously discovered in other populations,” Haber says. “Hundreds of thousands of these are common in the region, and any of them could hold medical relevance.”

Bastien Llamas, an expert in population genomics and ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide (who was not involved in the study), says expanding our knowledge of the human genome to cover these blind spots will confer many potential benefits.

“Downstream benefits include addressing health issues specific to these populations that are under-represented in global reference databases, but also improving our understanding of disease molecular mechanisms – and this could be relevant for all humans.”

Another finding was evidence of a population bloom coterminous with the development of agriculture in the Levant region during the transition to the Neolithic some 8,000-10,000 years ago, supporting the long-held belief among archaeologists that farming – and the sedentary lifestyle it afforded – would’ve boosted the region’s population. Meanwhile, the genomes showed evidence some 6,000 years ago of a massive population crash in Arabia, around the time the once-verdant region experienced a dramatic drying event.

Shining light on the field of linguistics, the study also found that population movement in the Bronze Age may have spread the Semitic languages (these form the basis for today’s Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic) out from the Levant into Arabia and East Asia.

Another key finding sheds light on the development of disease susceptibility, with the research showing an increase in the frequency of variants associated with type 2 diabetes in some Middle-Eastern populations over the past 2,000 years, showing that variants that may once have been evolutionarily beneficial can end up coding for disease.

“In this case, it looks like some genetic variants that are associated with diabetes in present-day Emirati populations were at high frequency in the population 2,000 years ago,” says Llamas. “It is entirely possible that these variants were positively selected to survive the arid environment and the nomadic herder lifestyle of the ancestors of Emirati people.”

The research opens a valuable window into the genomics of a population whose history is inextricably linked to much of the rest of the world.

“Our study fills a major gap in international genomic projects by cataloguing genetic variation in the Middle East,” says Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Sanger Institute. “The millions of new variants we found in our study will improve future medical association studies in the region. Our results explain how the genetics of Middle Easterners formed over time, providing new insights, which complement knowledge from archaeology, anthropology and linguistics.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/civilisations/middle-eastern-genomes-fill-historical-gaps/

 

 

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Prehistoric dragons flew over Australia

Savage pterosaur with seven-metre wingspan named.

 

Australia’s largest flying pterosaur, which was as fearsome as a dragon and swooped like a magpie, has been named.

“The new pterosaur, which we named Thapunngaka shawi, would have been a fearsome beast, with a spear-like mouth and a wingspan around seven metres,” says Tim Richards of the University of Queensland (UQ), who led the study.

The UQ researchers analysed a fossilised pterosaur jaw, originally discovered in Wanamara country in northwest Queensland in 2011.

“It’s the closest thing we have to a real-life dragon,” says Richards.

“It was essentially just a skull with a long neck, bolted on a pair of long wings.

“This thing would have been quite savage. It would have cast a great shadow over some quivering little dinosaur that wouldn’t have heard it until it was too late.”

The skull alone would have been a little over a metre long and was filled with 40 teeth that were perfectly adapted to the pterosaur dropping out of the air to skewer multiple fish from the long-gone Eromanga Sea that once covered much of northern Queensland.

“It’s tempting to think it may have swooped like a magpie during mating season, making your local magpie swoop look pretty trivial – no amount of zip ties would have saved you,” says Richards.

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See more: Anatomical secrets of ‘ridiculously long’ pterosaur necks

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“Though, to be clear, it was nothing like a bird, or even a bat. Pterosaurs were a successful and diverse group of reptiles – the very first backboned animals to take a stab at powered flight.”

Only the third Aussie pterosaur identified, it was part of a group called anhanguerians, which inhabited every continent on Earth during the latter part of the age of dinosaurs. The pterosaur had thin-walled and hollow bones, which made it light enough to fly, but also meant fossils are rare.

“It’s quite amazing fossils of these animals exist at all,” says Richards.

“By world standards, the Australian pterosaur record is poor, but the discovery of Thapunngaka contributes greatly to our understanding of Australian pterosaur diversity.”

The thing that set Thapunngaka apart from other anhanguerians was a massive bony crest on its lower jaw, which was probably part of a pair on the upper and lower jaw bones.

“These crests probably played a role in the flight dynamics of these creatures, and hopefully future research will deliver more definitive answers,” says Steve Salisbury, who supervised Richards.

The fossil was named to honour the First Nations peoples who lived in Wanamara country and the person who discovered the fossil.

“The genus name, Thapunngaka, incorporates thapun [ta-boon] and ngaka [nga-ga], the Wanamara words for ‘spear’ and ‘mouth’, respectively,” says Salisbury.

“The species name, shawi, honours the fossil’s discoverer, Len Shaw, so the name means ‘Shaw’s spear mouth’.”

The research was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/huge-australian-pterosaur-named-thapunngakashawi/

 

 

[Azeem]

During the siege of Weinsberg in Germany 1140 the King of Welfs dynasty, gave a condition that women can leave unharmed carrying whatever they can. 

The women choose to carry their husbands on their backs. The King kept to his word. The incident is famously known as ' The loyal wives of Weinsberg '

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Tusk reveals woolly mammoth's massive lifetime mileage

Scientists have analysed the chemistry locked inside the tusk of a woolly mammoth to work out how far it travelled in a lifetime.

The research shows that the Ice Age animal travelled a distance equivalent to circling the Earth twice.

Woolly mammoths were the hairy cousins of today's elephants, roaming northern latitudes during a prehistoric cold period known as the Pleistocene.

The work sheds light on how incredibly mobile these ancient creatures were.

"It's not clear-cut if it was a seasonal migrator, but it covered some serious ground," said co-lead author of the study Dr Matthew Wooller, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"It visited many parts of Alaska at some point during its lifetime, which is pretty amazing when you think about how big that area is."

• Last mammoths 'died of thirst'

Mammoth tusks were a bit like tree rings, insomuch that they recorded information about the animal's life history.

Furthermore, some chemical elements incorporated into the tusks while the animal was alive can serve as pins on a map, broadly showing where the animal went.

By combining these two things, researchers worked out the travel history of a male mammoth that lived 17,000 years ago in Alaska. Its remains were found near the northern state's Brooks Range of mountains.

"From the moment they're born until the day they die, they've got a diary and it's written in their tusks," said co-author Dr Pat Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

"Mother Nature doesn't usually offer up such convenient and life-long records of an individual's life."

Mammoths steadily added new layers to their tusks throughout their lives. When the ivory was split length-wise, these growth bands looked like stacked ice cream cones, offering a chronological record of its existence.

The researchers pieced together the animal's journey by studying the different types, or isotopes, of the chemical elements strontium and oxygen contained in the 1.5m-long tusk. These were matched with maps predicting isotope variations across Alaska.

They found that the mammoth had covered 70,000km of Alaskan landscape during its 28 years on the planet. For comparison, the circumference of the Earth is 40,000km.

The study offers clues to the extinction of these magnificent creatures. For animals that ranged so widely, the encroachment of forests into the mammoths' preferred grassland habitat towards the end of the last Ice Age would have placed pressure on herds. It limited how far they could roam for food and placed them at greater risk of predation.

The work, by an international team, has been published in Science journal.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58191123

 

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Unicorns did exist – but they were probably rhinos, not horses

Monstrous rhino “unicorn” species survived for longer than previously thought.

What’s four metres long, 2.5 metres high, weighs 3.5 tonnes and has a preposterously large horn in the middle of its face? A really massive unicorn, that’s what.

So unicorns really existed?

Dubbed the “Siberian unicorn”, details of the life, history and extinction of a spectacular species of an extinct member of the rhinoceros family, Elasmotherium sibiricum,  were uncovered in 2018 by Adrian Lister of London’s Natural History Museum, Pavel Kosintsev of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a team of researchers.

E. sibiricum is known as the Siberian unicorn because of its unusually large horn. It was the largest rhinoceros of the Quaternary period – which ran from roughly 2.5 million to 12 thousand years ago.

Despite its huge size it was lithe and seemed adapted to running across its homelands of central Asia: Kazakhstan, western and central Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, and possible areas of Mongolia and China.

Read more: Cryptozoology: the study of mystical creatures

When did the Siberian unicorn live?

DNA analyses of collagen extracted from the bones of a fossil showed that the Siberian Unicorn belonged to a sister taxon to Rhinocerotinae, the group to which all modern rhinoceros belong. The two were thought to have split about thirty-five million years ago, but may even have been as late as forty-seven million years ago.

The unicorn might not be very old at all, and might have still been kicking until 39,000 years ago. This places its extinction “firmly within the late Quaternary extinction event”, between 50,000 and four thousand years ago, in which nearly half of Eurasian mammalian megafauna died out. Interestingly, this adds to the evidence of the decline of megafauna just before the ice sheets of the last ice age reached their maximum extension.

And this might help us to understand the reasons for the unicorn’s demise.

The shape of, and the isotopes within, the remains of E. sibiricum suggest that it found its home in herb- and grass-covered steppes, with an extreme adaptation for feeding close to the ground. Perhaps it dug up vegetation up to consume it roots and all.

However, starting about 35 thousand years ago, as the deep cold extended further south, the steppe became more like tundra, denying the unicorn its primary food source, and this was perhaps a decisive factor in its extinction.

The researchers also speculated that humans might have had something to do with it, although they acknowledge a dearth of supporting evidence.

“The extinction of E. sibiricum,” they write, “could in theory have been exacerbated by human hunting pressure, given the replacement of H. neanderthalensis by H. sapiens in Eurasia around 45–40 [thousand years ago]”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/unicorns-did-exist-until-they-didnt/

 

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New prehistoric “Hobbit” from the dawn of the Age of Mammals

Proof that mammals thrived once dinosaurs were out of the way.

 Left to right, artist depictions of Conacodon hettingeri, Miniconus jeanninae, Beornus honeyi. Image credit: Banana Art Studio

Researchers from the University of Colorado have described three previously unknown mammal species that lived not long after the extinction of the dinosaurs – and one is named after a hobbit.

Their findings, described in a new study in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, suggest that mammal evolution was far more rapid in the wake of the extinction than once thought.

The mass extinction event that wiped out the bulk of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is often seen as the genesis of the “Age of Mammals”, because the opportunistic little creatures were able to thrive, dominate and diversify in the ecological vacuum the dinosaurs left behind. This cataclysmic event was bad for the dinosaurs but serendipitous for us: without the mammalian bloom it precipitated, humans would likely never have evolved.

“When the dinosaurs went extinct, access to different foods and environments enabled mammals to flourish and diversify rapidly in their tooth anatomy, and evolve larger body size,” says lead author Madelaine Attebury, from the University of Colorado’s Geological Sciences Department. “They clearly took advantage of this opportunity, as we can see from the radiation of new mammal species that took place in a relatively short amount of time following the mass extinction.”

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Read more: When mammals were like lounge lizards

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The three newly described species roamed North America during the earliest Palaeocene Epoch, within just a few hundred thousand years of the mass extinction. They were found in the Great Divide Basin in the Red Desert of Wyoming, an arid and rugged region today populated by sand dunes, shrubs and feral horses.

The new creatures are known respectively as Miniconus jeanninae, Conacodon hettingeri, and Beornus honeyi. They belonged to a diverse collection of mammals known as archaic ungulates (or condylarths), and they are the ancestors of today’s hoofed animals, including horses, elephants, cows and hippopotami. They are all part of the family Periptychidae, distinguished from other archaic ungulates by their swollen premolars and vertical enamel ridges.

The largest of the three, Beornus honeyi, would have rivalled the modern house cat in size, which is significantly larger than the rat-sized mammals that lived alongside the dinosaurs. B. honeyi in particular also shows unique dental features, including the inflated molars that gave rise to its name, an homage to The Hobbit character Beorn.

“Previous studies suggest that in the first few hundred thousand years after the dinosaur extinction (what is known in North America as the early Puercan) there was relatively low mammal species diversity across the Western Interior of North America, but the discovery of three new species in the Great Divide Basin suggests rapid diversification following the extinction,” says Atteberry.

“These new periptychid ‘condylarths’ make up just a small percentage of the more than 420 mammalian fossils uncovered at this site. We haven’t yet fully captured the extent of mammalian diversity in the earliest Paleocene, and predict that several more new species will be described.”

“Instead of an initial recovery of perhaps hundreds of thousands of years after the dinosaur extinction, the mammals appear to be quite diverse soon after the extinction,” says Thomas Rich, senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Museums Victoria, who was not involved in the study. “[That’s] a most thought provoking difference implying that further study of the topic of the recovery rate of the mammalian fauna after the extinction of the dinosaurs is a topic far from settled.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/hobbit-mammal/

 

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Fossil found in Brazilian police raid is best preserved of its kind

Illegal trade bust reveals a remarkable specimen of a ground-dwelling pterosaur.

An extraordinarily well-preserved pterosaur fossil, fondly referred to as one of the “crown jewels of the Museum of Geological Sciences in São Paolo” by the palaeontologist who has spent five years unlocking its secrets, could well have been lost to science were it not for a lucky police raid in the harbour of São Paolo eight years ago.

The specimen, whose anatomy has been unveiled today for the first time in a new study in the journal PLOS ONE, was uncovered in 2013 among a trove of fossils bound for private sales around the world as part of Brazil’s infamous illegal fossil trade.

In Brazil, fossils are federal assets that can’t be traded or exported, but they’re also a lucrative money-maker on the black market. The massive police bust that saved the specimen resulted in arrests across São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais and resulted in the seizure of around 1,000 fossils bound for museums in Europe.

This was particularly fortuitous for Victor Beccari, the lead author of the paper, from the University of São Paolo, Brazil.

Beccari and his team have made a number of important discoveries about this mysterious pterosaur, Tupandactylus navigans. Namely, despite pterosaurs being most commonly known for flying on prodigiously large wings, they found that T. navigans likely lived a terrestrial, foraging lifestyle.

“We usually think they [pterosaurs] must be good flyers,” says Beccari, “however, this animal has this head crest that is over 40 centimetres tall, and with only a two and a half metre long wingspan and a very long neck.”

This means T. navigans would likely have found it impossible to fly long distances, thanks to its abnormally heavy load. Beccari likens the creature to the peacock: “The peacock can fly – it will flee predators – but it’s not a very good flyer. It can’t go from one country to another or use flight to acquire food.”

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More reading: Anatomical secrets of ‘ridiculously long’ pterosaur necks

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The team also found that the skeleton had very long legs, suggesting T. navigans spent long hours on the ground foraging for food.

The fossil is the first complete skeleton of its kind: previous specimens of the creature amounted to two skulls, lacking lower jaws, housed in Germany.

“We don’t know how they got to Germany, but probably in these illegal trades,” Beccari says.

He says the illegal fossil and mineral trade that could have vanished T. navigans from Brazil altogether is a major problem for the country’s palaeontologists: “Unfortunately, these things happen because we have places where fossils are very abundant and the wages are not very good.”

Beccari says that, in the northern part of Brazil, many people are faced with pay packets below the minimum wage, so fossils can be their best chance of making an extra buck.

The specimen in question was traced back to a quarry in the north-east of Brazil, based on the type of limestone. But where exactly in the ground the creature was plucked from remains a mystery thanks to its hazy provenance.

Despite the damaging effects of the illegal fossil trade on Brazilian science, Beccari says the specimen’s chequered history has actually turned out to be a boon for his research: its traffickers cut the fossil into six slabs for transportation (something the scientists would never have been able to do), which allowed them to insert each slab into a CT machine and study the creature’s anatomy in precise detail.

This also means they were able to publish three-dimensional models of the creature, which can be accessed and studied by anyone around the world.

The success of the police raid is a win for Brazilian palaeontology, Beccari says.

“A fossil like this would usually be in a private collection so inaccessible to science, or it would be in European institutions,” he says, “so Brazilians would not have access to the fossil – but now we do. “It’s a way to keep the heritage in Brazil.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/evolution/remarkable-pterosaur-fossil-found-in-police-raid-in-brazil/

 

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Battered skulls of ancient farmers reveal violent conflicts

Skeletons discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert suggest farmers brutalised each other.

Three thousand years ago, in one of the driest deserts in the world, farmers came to blows and fought to the death, often smashing each other’s skulls in, according to a new discovery in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Graves reveal grave violence

Researchers, led by Vivien Standen of the University of Tarapacá, Chile, found scores of skeletons with grotesque head wounds buried in cemeteries in the Azapa Valley. This suggests that ancient horticulturalists lived during a time of great social tension and engaged in violent conflict.

“The emergence of elites and social inequality fostered interpersonal and inter- and intra-group violence associated with the defence of resources, socio-economic investments, and other cultural concerns,” the authors say in their paper, published in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

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Read more: Getting a drink in the Atacama Desert

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Found: 194 skeletons

The 194 skeletons found dated back to the Neolithic transition between 1000 BCE and 600 CE, and around 21% of them showed signs of violent conflict from weapons like maces, sticks or arrows. This included skull holes and fractures that would have caused extreme pain.

Half of the head traumas appeared to be fatal.

“Some individuals exhibited severe high-impact fractures of the cranium that caused massive destruction of the face – and outflow of brain mass,” the authors say.

The violence was local

Interestingly, the farmers’ conflicts were internal, as strontium isotopes showed that foreign people didn’t increase the levels of violence, suggesting that the conflicts were kept local. These may have been fights over water, land or other resources that were shared locally.

The ancient skeletons were extremely well preserved – some even still had hair – because of the dry conditions of the area, where there are less microbes to decompose soft tissue.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/civilisations/battered-skulls-of-ancient-farmers-reveal-violent-conflicts/

 

[Azeem]

Sher Shah Suri who briefly interrupted the Mughal Empire after ousting Mughal King Hamayun. He chased Hamayun and camped near a place where I live, build a cottage that is still known by his name.

When Hamayun was escaping to Iran to seek help from his maternal uncles he almost drowned to death but was saved by a man. He promised to make him King for a day if he regains his rule. After 15 years he did so and fulfilled his promise. That guy according to legend minted a coin in his name the only thing he did as a King. 

He is famously known as Nizam e Sikka (Nizam a title for ruler and Sikka means coin) and no one knows who he actually was.

[CaaC (John)+]

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Wondrous wooden carvings re-emerge after 1,000 years entombed in bird droppings

The carvings, depicting rope-bound captives, are shrouded in mystery.

Ceramic evidence found on the Peruvian mainland depicts a warrior from the Moche civilisation being taken on a reed boat to Macabi, a small rocky outcrop off the coast of northern Peru, but the island itself has never had proper archaeological work done on it.

The Moche culture existed in northern Peru from around 100AD to 800AD.

The wooden carvings were discovered in caves on the uninhabited island in the 19th century by a British company mining for guano, the solidified excrement produced by seabird colonies, which is an exceptionally effective fertiliser.

Its chemical properties are believed to have helped preserve the figurines, which date to between around 400 and 800AD.

“The toxic environment stops oxygen from getting in”, explained Dr Jago Cooper, the head of the Americas at the British Museum.

The sculptures were donated to the British Museum in 1871 and while curators knew of their existence, they had lain largely undisturbed and unstudied for 150 years until preparations began on the exhibition, entitled Peru: A Journey in Time.

As part of those preparations, five figures were selected to be displayed and had conservation work and basic analysis performed on them.

It is common for large museums, whose collections can total millions of items, to have many unstudied objects.

© Provided by The Telegraph A wooden figure depicting a bound prisoner with a headdress and rope around his neck, Moche, AD 100-800 - Yui Mok/PA

Dr Cecilia Pardo, who moved to London from Peru to co-curate the exhibition, said finding the unexhibited items were “ a kind of rediscovery”  

Despite the lack of archaeological research, the existence of the wooden figures suggests that special trips were being made to Macabi for ritual sacrifices.

Confirming such practices is not always easy, said Dr Pardo because effigies often had both human and supernatural features and “ the myth and the rituals were combined ".

Dr Cooper and Dr Pardo said they hoped that by displaying the figures they might spark more research into the Moche, including archaeological work on Macabi.

While unsettling to modern sensibilities, “ human sacrifice shouldn’t be thought of as bloodthirsty,” said Dr Cooper, “ in many ways, it shows how much life was highly valued among Moche society.” Death on the battlefield was considered to be wasteful and the main objective of combat was to capture prisoners.

The exhibition, which will run from Nov 11 to Feb 20, will cover Peruvian history from 1200BC to the fall of the Inca in 1532AD and will feature 40 objects loaned from museums across Peru, most of which have never been to the UK before, as well as 80 items from the British Museum’s collections.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/wondrous-wooden-carvings-re-emerge-after-1000-years-entombed-in-bird-droppings/ar-AAOc8Dg?li=BBoPWjQ

 

Edited September 8, 2021 by CaaC (John)
Spelling check

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Saudi Arabia camel carvings dated to prehistoric era

A series of camel sculptures carved into rock faces in Saudi Arabia are likely to be the oldest large-scale animal reliefs in the world, a study says.

When the carvings were first discovered in 2018, researchers estimated they were created about 2,000 years ago.

This was based on their similarity to reliefs at Jordan's famous ancient city of Petra.

But a fresh study puts the camels at between 7,000-8,000 old.

Precisely ageing rock sculptures is a challenge for researchers. Unlike cave paintings, say, there is often no organic matter to sample. Rock art of this size is also rare in the region.

FULL REPORT & MORE PHOTOS

 

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First ancient human DNA from the gateway between Asia and Australia

Genomic clues from the grave of an ancient ‘princess’ reveal a vanished people.

When Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm heard from local villagers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi about a vast cave used to house local games of badminton, his scientific spidey-senses started to tingle.

Brumm, from Griffith’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, specialises in the archaeology of the region known as Wallacea, the cluster of islands between Borneo and New Guinea which are the seafaring gateway between Asia and Australia. He intuited that a cave of that size would have been attractive to ancient humans living on the island, and could potentially unravel the secrets of one of the region’s most mysterious peoples.

He visited the cave, known as Leang Panninge (“bat cave”) in 2013, but was unable to carry out extensive investigations. Then, in 2015, his colleagues from Indonesia’s University of Hasanuddin went back and made a startling discovery.

An unprecedented find

“Bessé” was a roughly 17-year-old hunter-gatherer woman when she died some 7,200 years ago. She was buried carefully in a grave under the overhang of Leang Panninge, her body curled into the foetal position. Someone placed stone tools and red ochre in the ground with her and then, perhaps gently, covered her body with rocks.

After her discovery and painstaking excavation, the international team of researchers decided to send a piece of her petrous bone – the bone of the inner ear – to the Max Planck Institute in Germany, in the hopes of extracting genetic material for genomic analysis. “By some miracle, there’s ancient DNA preserved in the dense inner ear bone of this woman,” Brumm says.

This was particularly amazing because ancient DNA is so difficult to find in the hot, humid tropics, where genetic material breaks down quickly. “It’s the first time we’ve really had the story told to us by the ancient DNA in this part of the world,” Brumm says.

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Read more: Denisovan DNA may have aided Pacific migration

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Genomic analysis identified Bessé, named by archaeologists from Indonesia’s University of Hasanuddin after the customary Bugis nickname for a newborn princess, as a distant relative of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans, as well as belonging to a newly discovered ancient population with no genetic links to any previously known human groups.

The exciting discovery, published today in the journal Nature, marks the first time ancient human DNA has been found in Wallacea. Moreover, Brumm says the find is the first relatively complete skeleton from the Toalean culture, a people who lived and foraged in the region for thousands of years.

Who were the mysterious Toaleans?

The Toaleans are a “rather mysterious culture”, says Brumm, “who lived a secluded existence in the forests of South Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until 1,500 years ago, hunting wild pigs and collecting edible shellfish from rivers.”

Map of Southeast Asia and South Sulawesi, showing Wallacea. Image credit: Kim Newman

The Toaleans appear to have lived a private life: artefacts are only found in a tiny corner – just 6% – of Sulawesi’s vast expanse (the island is the 11^th largest on Earth). “This suggests that this past culture had limited contact with other early Sulawesi communities or people in nearby islands, existing for thousands of years in isolation,” says study co-author Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher in Indonesia’s National Research Centre for Archaeology (Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional) and a doctoral candidate in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. 

“We can call them a culture because they made very distinctive, very complex types of stone tools, including these beautiful, exquisitely shaped stone arrowheads,” Brumm says. But until now, no human Toalean remains had been found.

Brumm says that understanding who the Toaleans were has been a “century-old archaeological mystery”, and all archaeological traces of them vanish around the 5th century AD, suggesting they were supplanted by the Neolithic farmers from Taiwan – the Austronesians – that populated Sulawesi some 3,500 years ago.

Some archaeologists suspect the Toaleans may have been responsible for providing Australia with one of its most iconic species, the dingo.

“[The dingo] is embedded in Aboriginal society and culture, and it’s become an important part of the Australian ecosystem. But it’s an Asian dog and somehow it got to Australia three or four thousand years ago,” Brumm says. “It must have been brought here by prehistoric Asian voyagers, but no one has ever had any idea who the hell these people were.”

The ancient DNA they’ve extracted doesn’t tell us whether the Toaleans brought the dingo to our shores, but Brumm says it does tell us important information about who they were from a genetic perspective.

Ancient DNA in Wallacea: Tracing the ancestry of Australasia

The genomic analysis of ancient DNA from Bessé’s inner ear bone confirmed existing suspicions that Toalean foragers were related to the first modern humans to enter Wallacea some 65,000 years ago, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. 

“These seafaring hunter-gatherers were the earliest inhabitants of Sahul, the supercontinent that emerged during the Pleistocene [Ice Age] when global sea levels fell, exposing a land bridge between Australia and New Guinea,” Brumm says.

“To reach Sahul, these pioneering humans made ocean crossings through Wallacea, but little about their journeys is known.”

So, Brumm says, “this region has been host to a very ancient human story about which we know relatively little.”

Bessé shares about half her genetic makeup with present-day Indigenous Australians and people in New Guinea and the Western Pacific Islands. This includes DNA inherited from now-extinct Denisovans, an archaic hominin related to Neanderthals whose fossils have only been found in Siberia and Tibet.

“In fact, the proportion of Denisovan DNA in Bessé, relative to other ancient as well as present-day groups in the region, may indicate that the crucial meeting point between our species and Denisovans was in Sulawesi or another Wallacean island,” says Cosimo Posth of the University of Tübingen, Germany, who contributed to the genomic analysis alongside Selina Carlhoff from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

This suggests that Bessé’s ancestors may have been among the first humans to migrate to Wallacea, but instead of following their island-hopping relatives onwards to Sahul, they settled in Sulawesi. This may also mean that it was Bessé’s forebears who created the 45,000-year-old cave paintings found in South Sulawesi depicting a vibrant cosmology of animal-human hybrids.

An undiscovered human population

Surprisingly, the analysis also revealed an unexpected signature in Bessé’s genome: the genetic fingerprints of an ancient early-modern human population of Asian origin previously unknown to science. This group did not share genetic material with the predecessors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans, suggesting they may have entered the region after the peopling of Sahul.

“It is unlikely we will know much about the identity of these early ancestors of the Toaleans until more ancient human DNA samples are available from Wallacea,” says senior author Akin Duli from the University of Hasanuddin. “But it would now appear that the population history and genetic diversity of early humans in the region were more complex than previously supposed.”

What’s more, the researchers found that the modern people of Sulawesi share no DNA with Bessé, though Brumm notes that more extensive sampling of Sulawesi’s population may reveal closer genetic links to this vanished culture.

“The discovery of Bessé and the implications of her genetic ancestry show just how little we understand about the early human story in our region, and how much more there is left to uncover,” Brumm says.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/ancient-human-dna-from-gateway-between-asia-and-australia/

 

 

Edited September 19, 2021 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

1 hour ago, CaaC (John) said:

The NHS can be a fucking joke sometimes, that's the wife just received a letter from the NHS about her flu jab coming up, they only booked her a place 10.6 miles away out of town for the jab that will take her around 40 minutes to get there plus it's at 08.15 in the morning.

Surely they could check out her age on the NHS database and note she is 73 years old with medical problems and live in Leith where there is other facilities around locally that will do the job, I spent all morning and afternoon trying to ring up and get it cancelled but all we got was " Sorry, lines are busy..."

I managed to ring up our local chemist shop who will cater for us both at the end of the month, the pharmacy is a 15-minute walk away from where we live.

@nudge, just realised this is posted in the wrong thread 

I meant to post it in the Medical & Health issues, could you do the honours and move, please. 

[nudge+]

1 minute ago, CaaC (John) said:

@nudge, just realised this is posted in the wrong thread 

I meant to post it in the Medical & Health issues, could you do the honours and move, please. 

Done  

[Azeem]

My dad once took me to the place where Alexander believed to have fought King Porus when he came to subcontinent. I was a kid vaguely remember it but that place was weird. Big plain, the trees were short and their stems were awkward.

Like most ancient conflicts the local accounts of the war portray a different outcome than Greek victory, stalemate. Nevertheless all accounts agree Alexander had it tough and bcz of this war didn't decided to go further east. 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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A cosmic meteor brought desolation to an ancient city – Did it inspire Sodom?

No need to be salty: there’s a Lot more to this story if you just take a look.

The Bible story describing the destruction of Sodom is at the centre of iconic “fire and brimstone” judgement day predictions. But what if it was caused by other celestial origins – like a cosmic meteor airburst?

Now, researchers have discovered 3600-year-old evidence that the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam – an archaeological site in Jordan – was destroyed by a “cosmic airburst” that was so hot it melted brick and clay.

The researchers believe the catastrophic cosmic event may have inspired the story of the destruction of Sodom – after all, that sounds a Lot like fire and brimstone raining from the heavens.

An impact so hot it melted clay

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Footprints in New Mexico are oldest evidence of humans in the Americas

Humans reached the Americas at least 7,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new findings.

The topic of when the continent was first settled from Asia has been controversial for decades.

Many researchers are sceptical of evidence for humans in the North American interior much earlier than 16,000 years ago.

Now, a team working in New Mexico has found scores of human footprints dated to between 23,000 and 21,000 years old.

The discovery could transform views about when the continent was settled. It suggests there could have been great migrations that we know nothing about. And it raises the possibility that these earlier populations could have gone extinct.

The footprints were formed in soft mud on the margins of a shallow lake which now forms part of Alkali Flat in White Sands. The research has been published in the journal Science.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

On 10/07/2021 at 15:32, nudge said:

Thought this was cool... The oldest existing piece of literature.

 

 

 

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The epic adventures of the Gilgamesh Dream tablet

An ancient clay tablet displaying part of the story of a superhuman king has been formally handed over to Iraq by the US.

Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, the 3,600-year-old religious text shows a section of a Sumerian poem from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It is one of the world's oldest works of literature and was looted from an Iraqi museum during the Gulf War in 1991.

Over the past 30 years, it has been smuggled through many countries, accompanied by false documents. Until just two years ago, it was prominently displayed in a museum near the seat of the US government.

But on Thursday, the text began a new journey back to its homeland when it was formally handed over at a ceremony in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

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[CaaC (John)+]

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Stegosaurus: The enigmatic icon of the Jurassic

Why one of the most famous dinosaurs ever discovered is still keeping researchers guessing today.

With its huge back plates, long tail spikes and teeny tiny head, Stegosaurus is one of the most distinctive dinosaurs we know about. Comparable in size to the largest animals we share the Earth with today, this plodding herbivore has captured imaginations 150 million years after the species died out.

The remains of 80 of these animals have been unearthed around the world, from the United States to Portugal, including one acquired by the Natural History Museum in London in 2014. One of the most complete fossils of any dinosaur ever found, its discovery led to renewed study and greater understanding of this gentle giant.

FULL REPORT & PHOTOS

 

 

[nudge+]

Stegosaurus is the coolest dinosaur!

[Azeem]

The real sad thing is bureaucracy of today maintains these imperialistic traditions in their own countries. I just learned that top judges here go for holidays from July to September like fucking school kids. Another British days thing cause they couldn't handle the heat.

Bureaucracy is the elephant in the room for a lot of developing world problems. Politicians and militarily dictators get some unnecessary stick. Think about it you did a coup and power is your good but who are you going to need to run the country ? 

I'm all for adopting the CCP model on these guys. 

 

[Azeem]

Malaria add during WWII times