Paleontologists and anthropologists face a fundamental challenge in their search for remains of the distant past. The substances and environments best suited to preserve fossils, such as rock or the tree resin amber, are often impossible to open up and look inside. The very toughness and durability that made such materials perfect for preserving fossils often make it impossible for scientists to access the desired remains without also destroying them. And if the rock is solid or the amber is dark, then whatever is inside must remaining tantalizingly out of reach.

CT scanning gets around this thorny problem by showering the artifacts with highly focused X-rays in quantities that would kill a human. The most cutting edge version of the technology uses synchrotron scanners that can produce beams a trillion times the brightness of normal X-ray machines. The resultant images are incredibly high resolution, and when mapped together can be used to create full 3D models of the encased specimen.

Another advantage of CT scanning over standard X-ray technology is its ability to detect different densities. The X-ray machines found in hospitals can differentiate between only four densities, CT scanners can discern over a hundred separate densities. This not only makes the task of peering through solid rock surprisingly easy, but also it helps scientists learn even more details about the fossil itself. Such precision has allowed researchers to study such highly focused topics as the inner ear canals of a 35 million-year-old primate, which in turn makes it possible for anthropologists to deduce how the animal would have moved.

Although CT scanning is hugely promising, it does have its limitations. It is still only possible to analyze fairly small samples, and there are only about fifty machines in the world that can perform the task. The hardware requirements are also enormous - a 100 million-year-old wasp was imaged using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, a particle accelerator almost a fifth of a mile wide. Even so, the images thus far have been so promising that there remains much cause for optimism, as a whole world of previously invisible specimens wait to be digitally uncovered.

[Discover]

The fibers were made from woven flax, which the paleolithic humans gathered in the wild outside their cave. You can see a few examples of the fibers, above, under the microscope. Some are twisted together, indicating they might have been used in ropes or string. Whatever woven items they were part of have long ago disintegrated, but they left behind distinct impressions in the cave's clay floor - and these impressions were what scientists saw when they examined the clay. Scientists could even discern the dyes used to color the fibers, which would have been created with colors derived from plants.

Says Harvard archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef, who worked on the excavation of the cave:

This was a critical invention for early humans. They might have used this fiber to create parts of clothing, ropes, or baskets-for items that were mainly used for domestic activities. We know that this is wild flax that grew in the vicinity of the cave and was exploited intensively or extensively by modern humans.

He added that the ability to weave cloth and ropes would have given the people who inhabited this cave many advantages. They could have sewn animal hides into shoes, or knitted cloth sacks to carry their belongings in. Either way, cloth would have aided them in staying warm and remaining mobile.

The people who lived in the Georgian cave, pictured here, occupied it for thousands of years over many generations. Along with the 34-thousand-year-old twine, researchers also discovered flax fibers in the cave dating back to 21 thousand and 13 thousand years ago. Bar-Yosef and his colleagues' research is published in Science this week.

via Science

Destroyed by Attila about 1500 years ago, Altinum was said to have been a gorgeous coastal city that bloomed with commerce and culture for centuries. Relics found in the area date the city's rise to roughly the 5th century BC. Inhabitants fled after its destruction, and the city has the odd honor of being the only ancient Roman city in Italy that was not buried by medieval or modern cities.

For that reason, the city was a perfect spot to conduct an experiment in discerning the outlines of ancient structures using ordinary and near-infrared aerial photography. The results, revealing the city's topography for the first time in over a millennium, are published today in Science.

According to Science:

The photos were taken during a severe drought in 2007, which made it possible to pick up the presence of stones, bricks or compacted solids beneath the surface. The results show that the city was surrounded by rivers and canals, including a large canal that cut through the city center, connecting it to the lagoon. Two gates or bridges were built into the walls encircling the city, providing further evidence of how the city's residents adapted to their amphibious surroundings.

In these images, you can see how the photographs of the farmlands show distinct outlines of roads and walls. Two other images show what those faint lines really were, according to the researchers; and where Altinum is relative to modern Venice.

via Science

With no written record to describe the rise of the largest pre-Columbian empire, paleoecologists have investigated the climate that existed in the centuries proceeding the Incas' apex. Pollen and seeds found in the sediment in the Cuzco region of the Peruvian Andes reveal a period of climate warming that began around 1100 CE and continued past the Spanish conquest of the Incas in 1533 CE. Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, noted such climate change can have a positive effect on civilizations:

"Climate warming does not always have to be a negative issue. Our research shows that it can favor societal development."

In the case of the Incas, four centuries of warm weather melted the glaciers, pumping water into the formerly arid region. Trees were moved up mountains to combat soil erosion, allowing for agriculture in the newly cleared lands. The result was a lengthy period of plenty, with maize and potato crops feeding a growing population and allowing the Incas to turn their attention to assembling a military, building roads and buildings, and creating an infrastructure.

But climate experts warn that future climate change could have disastrous effects:

"Peru is considered the third most threatened country in the world by climate change, with most of its glaciers predicted to disappear by 2050. The country should be focusing on restoring and protecting its ecosystems," Chepstow-Lusty said.

Incan Empire Aided by Global Warming [Discovery News]

In the new study published today in Science, a group of European researchers sequenced five mitochondrial DNA taken from Neanderthal bones, some of which were 70,000 years old. They used a special technique to extract Neanderthal DNA from other kinds of materials that get mixed into fossils over time. What they discovered was that this DNA, taken from various regions around Europe, had many features in common.

According to Science:

[The researchers Jeffrey Good and Adrian Briggs] found 55 places out of the 16,565 bases where the mitochondrial genomes varied across the six ancient samples. On average, they found 20 differences between any two samples. In modern humans, about 60 differences exist between any two samples, making Neandertals about one-third as diverse.

Based on this lack of variation, the researchers were able to extrapolate roughly how large the population of Neanderthals might have been between 70,000 and 38,000 years ago. It appears that there were probably only about 7,000 Neandertals in Europe when homo sapiens arrived. The researchers speculate that this low population number may also have contributed to this species' eventual extinction.

The number also helps to explain other archaeological evidence, or rather the lack thereof. Scientists have found very few remains of Neanderthal cultures, and very few fossils of them as well. What this new research suggests, however, is that this tiny band spread very far across Europe. There may not have been a lot of them, they were good travelers.

Some scientists speculate that it might not be appropriate to categorize Neanderthals as a separate species at all. One might view them as an extreme variation on homo sapiens, which evolved squat bodies and thick brows to cope with the extreme cold of the European winter. Homo sapiens, which evolved in Africa, would have looked dramatically different from their pale, squat Neanderthal cousins. For now, however, Neanderthals are classified as their own species. And now it looks as if they were always a very tiny, marginal group.

via Science and Science News

The tiny remains - which revealed a hominid who stood a little over 3 feet when fully grown - was brought in to Stony Brook University on Long Island during a conference on evolution which focused partly on the discovery of Homo floresiensis. While some anthropologists say the Hobbit is just a deformed homo sapiens, others suggest it is just another extinct branch on the hominid tree like the Neanderthals. Remains of the Homo floresiensis were discovered near caves with tools, and some scientists say it probably used fire and hunted.

It's possible that Homo floresiensis was an evolutionary throwback, too. According to Live Science:

Its anatomy seems to be primitive. Many Homo floresiensis features, such as the shoulder, wrist, jaw and teeth, more closely resemble earlier hominin species such as Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy") than modern humans.

Most of the researchers at the conference believe that the Hobbits represent a new species:

Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk described a study in which she compared the size and shape of the Homo floresiensis brain (based on scans of the skull) to that of modern humans, chimpanzees, the early hominin species Homo erectus, and humans with a disorder called microcephaly, which has been suggested as an explanation for the Hobbit's small stature. She found the Hobbit brain most closely resembles Homo erectus, and is least like the brain with microcephaly.

"In our view we dispensed at that point with the microcelpahy hypothesis," she said. "It's not just that their brains are small; they're differently shaped. It's its own species."

There are no known pathologies that can account for all the anatomy features seen in Homo floresiensis, Washington University anthropologist Charles Hildebolt said.

I just hope we find some living in some remote area of the forest, or in caves deep under Jakarta.

via Live Science

Image via Stony Brook.

Between 1630 and 1631, the plague killed one third of Venice's population, wiping out 50,000 people out of a population of 150,000 in just one year. The panicked population, trying to stop the disease from spreading, often blamed female "vampires" for infecting the living. It was believed that people who chewed or bit their shrouds might be vampires (a dead body might appear to be chewing its shroud if it had post-mortem motor movements, which is fairly common; or bloody fluid released from the mouth after death might make it seem as if the shroud had been soiled by vampire nastiness).

To stop these "vampires," grave diggers would sort through bodies in mass graves and try to find ones who had bitten their shrouds and then shove a brick in their mouths to stop the threat. Yesterday researchers on an island near Venice announced they'd excavated a mass grave and found possibly the earliest example on record of a "vampire" who'd been buried with a brick in her mouth.

via The Hindu

Photo via Matteo Borrini and National Geographic

Nature's Erica Check Hayden sums up Hawks' position:

[C]urrent human populations are much more genetically diverse than this hypothesis predicts, so Moyzis and Hawks have concluded that evolution must have ramped up over the past 40,000 years. They chalk some of this acceleration up to human population growth, which exposed the species to more new mutations and created more raw material for selection. But the other reason, Hawks thinks, is culture - because although the physiology of humans has not changed much in the past 40,000 years, their expansion and migration means that lifestyles, languages and technologies certainly have.

Although not everyone agrees with Hawks's claims, the best understood example of recent human evolution does seem to fit. Genetic mutations that allow adults to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk, have emerged independently in different populations in response to the same cultural innovation - cattle domestication. "I don't see culture as an alternative to genetics, I see culture as being the explanatory factor for these genetic changes," says Hawks. "There is no explanation for change without the gene–environment interaction."

You can read the entire article from Nature.

Via John Hawks Weblog

Now a group of American researchers says they've examined one of the Hobbit skulls in minute detail, and they are certain that the creatures were not human. Said lead researcher Karen Baab:

A skull can provide researchers with a lot of important information about a fossil species, particularly regarding their evolutionary relationships to other fossil species. The overall shape of the LB1 skull, particularly the part that surrounds the brain (neurocranium) looks similar to fossils more than 1.5 million years older from Africa and Eurasia, rather than modern humans, even though Homo floresiensis is documented from 17,000 to 95,000 years ago.

That means Homo floresiensis evolved alongside Homo sapiens, perhaps out of a common ancestor like Homo erectus. So the new species may have been an evolutionary dead end. Perhaps, like Neanderthals, the Hobbits couldn't compete with the taller Homo sapiens for food and resources.

Baab and her team determined that the species was not human by minutely examining the skull. This is a widely-accepted method of determining hominid species, but it's crucial to remember it's not the only way. As of yet, nobody has tried to sequence the DNA remaining in these fossils, the way the Max Planck Institute is doing with Neanderthal DNA. So before we start jumping up and down at the idea of another hominid species that walked Earth, let's see if we can get some genetic evidence too.

SOURCES:

Hobbit Skull Study via Science Daily

Neanderthal DNA Being Sequenced via New Scientist

And yet the possibility of a Stonehenge-esque worship site wouldn't be out of place at the bottom of Lake Michigan. The region already has its share of petroglyphs from ancient tribes and other standing stone sites. These submerged stones could have been raised by local populations at a time when part of the lake bed was dry, in the late Ice Age. More research is needed to determine whether these stones were arranged by humans, or merely look that way.

SOURCES:

Mastodon? Rock Brings History to Surface [via Associated Press]

Stonehenge Beneath Lake Michigan? via BLDG BLOG (with sonar pics!)

It's long been known that the ancient Mayan ruling classes drilled holes in their teeth and put jewels in them. This was a popular practice at the height of the highly-advanced Mayan Empire, which lasted over a millennium before 900 AD, when it abruptly lost control over vast portions of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

These jawbones, which scientists have identified as being from two individuals, showed up in a small box delivered to the Honduran Embassy in the Netherlands last week. Local authorities speculated that the bones had been stolen in Honduras after researchers at Leiden University ran an analysis on them.

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune:

After the bones were received at the embassy in the Netherlands, the government of that European country requested that they be examined at Leiden University to determine their origin and to document the dental adornment, the Honduran foreign relations secretariat said.

It added that the pieces were studied using strontium isotope analysis, which showed that the ratio of strontium in the tooth enamel was consistent with that found in the water of Honduras' Copan River.

The tests determined that the individuals to whom the remains belonged were from an area of western Honduras now known as the Copan ruins, the Central American country's most important archaeological site.

The bones were delivered anonymously to the embassy, and nobody has any idea who did it. Perhaps a Dutch collector who felt they should go to their country of origin? A guilt-wracked member of an international ring of archaeologist pirates?

Regardless of who it was, the bones have now been returned to Honduras, where they will remain at a research institute.

SOURCE: Latin American Herald Tribune

Photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images.

The research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthology presented their findings last week at a human evolution conference. The researchers have compared the Neanderthal genome to that of modern humans of European and African descent. Because Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe, researchers have theorized that European genomes would have more similarities with the Neanderthal genome than would African genomes. However, European and African genomes have a similar number of differences from the Neanderthal genome, suggesting that modern humans in Europe outbred rather than assimilated the Neanderthals.

Earlier comparisons of mitochondrial similarly cast doubt on the Neanderthal interbreeding theory, but recent research has revealed that Neanderthals do not possess the very genes some researchers believed modern humans had received from Neanderthals. Neanderthals possess neither the microcephalin gene, linked to bulging brains in humans, nor humans’ increased fertility gene.

The team is planning to publish a rough draft of the Neanderthal nuclear genome, and hopes that a closer study of the genome will reveal more about the Neanderthal history. They believe, for example, that further analysis of the available genome will reveal whether Neanderthal practiced polygyny, with fewer males breeding with proportionally more females. But the study is hampered by the poor quality and small sample of available genetic samples, and the researchers say it will be another year or two before an adequate sequencing is complete.

[New Scientist]

A paper published this week in Britain’s Journal of Experimental Botany reports the find in China’s Xinjiang region, where many modern strains of cannabis are thought to have originated. In addition to 789 grams of marijuana, the tomb contained bridles, archery equipment, and a harp, apparent provisions for the afterlife. Unlike other early examples of cannabis use, the research team believes that the marijuana was included for its psychoactive properties. Said the lead researcher, neurologist Ethan Russo:

"It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied."

Russo studies the effects of cannabis on the brain, including its use in pain management for multiple sclerosis and cancer patients. He and other researchers have been conducting a battery of tests on the ancient weed, such as attempting to measure the levels of THC and germinate the seeds found in the cache, in an attempt to better understand ancient uses of the plant.

[The Star]

A team of archaeologists from the University of Chicago will discuss their findings at a conference this weekend. The man who created the stele was named Kuttamuwa, and he describes himself as a "servant" of King Panamuwa. Kuttamuwa's stele, in pristine condition, was found in a suburb of the walled city, far from the palace - archeologists speculate it was probably the man's own house. Though the city of Sam'al was influenced by local Semitic cultures in many ways - including their language - Kuttamuwa and Panamuwa are names that show the Indo-European cultural influence. Also, Kuttamuwa was cremated, a practice shunned by Semitic tribes of that era.

Apparently Kuttamuwa had his stele made while he was still alive, and last summer the archeological team found it, translating its inscription like this (there are question marks for translations they aren't sure of yet):

I, Kuttamuwa, servant of Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber(?) and established a feast at this chamber(?): a bull for [the storm-god] Hadad, ... a ram for [the sun-god] Shamash, ... and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.

Written in an alphabet derived from Phoenician, the language is a West Semitic dialect similar to Aramaic and Hebrew. The stone depicts Kuttamuwa himself, eating at a table laden with food and drink.

What this reveals, according to research lead David Schloen, is that Kuttamuwa's people believed in a split between body and soul. This was a relatively novel belief at the time, and many neighboring peoples like the Israelites believed the body and soul were one. Kuttamuwa, however, planned for his soul to remain in the stele while his body was cremated. That's why he requested a "feast" in the chamber to feed his soul. Researchers found remains of food offerings in ancient bowls around the stele.

According to archeologist Schloen:

Kuttumuwa's inscription shows a fascinating mixture of non-Semitic and Semitic cultural elements, including a belief in the enduring human soul—which did not inhabit the bones of the deceased, as in traditional Semitic thought, but inhabited his stone monument, possibly because the remains of the deceased were cremated. Cremation was considered to be abhorrent in the Old Testament and in traditional West Semitic culture, but there is archaeological evidence for Indo-European-style cremation in neighboring Iron Age sites.

Funerary Monument Reveals Iron Age Belief [via University of Chicago]

Israeli archaeologist Nira Alperson-Afil and her team investigated an area where the lake had risen and fallen back a number of times, preserving the ancient hominid camp areas in layers of sediment. After digging down through twelve different layers, they found that camp after camp contained discarded flints that were charred by fire. This strongly suggests that they were using the flints to build fires, rather than simply finding fires in nature and keeping flames alive in little containers ala Quest for Fire.

And they were creating fire over generations, too. According to New Scientist:

Because these charred remains exist in all 12 layers of the site, every society must have had access to fire. It's unlikely that all 12 societies would have been lucky enough to find a natural source of fire, says Alperson-Afil, so they must have been able to create it themselves.

What's fascinating about this, aside from the ancient nature of fire-creation, is that somehow these hominids were teaching each other to make fires long before they had the language skills to express why they needed fire. Some anthropologists speculate that complex tool use is what led humans to start experimenting with grammar, and this discovery may help bolster that theory.

Proto-Humans Started Making Fires 790 Thousand Years Ago [via New Scientist]

Evolutionary anthropologist Gottfried Hohmann, a co-author of the study, says this discovery might change how we understand male dominance in society:

In chimpanzees, male-dominance is associated with physical violence, hunting, and meat consumption. By inference, the lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. Our observations suggest that, in contrast to previous assumptions, these behaviors may persist in societies with different social relations.

Now all that awesome feminist science fiction from the 1970s about women who fight like crazed weasels has been validated!

Photo by Emmanuelle Grundmann.

Primate hunting by bonobos at LuiKotale, Salonga National Park [Coming Oct. 14 in Current Biology]