From an ancient Peruvian civilization comes this warning: Don’t chop down all your trees, or there will be hell to pay.
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].
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Surprise, surprise. An independent analysis of the primate fossil that was unveiled amid extraordinary hype last May has found significant evidence that the lemur-like creature was not a direct ancestor of humans, after all. The 47-million-year old fossil described in May, which was given the scientific name Darwinius masillae and nicknamed Ida, was announced with unrestrained razzmatazz. She was the “eighth wonder of the world”, “our Mona Lisa” and an evolutionary “Rosetta Stone”, according to the researchers who unveiled her…. She was, they said, the “link” between us and the rest of the animal kingdom [The Guardian].
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.
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According to a theory proposed in 2007, the explosion of a comet over North America killed off the Clovis people and many of the continent’s largest mammals nearly 13,000 years ago. Not so fast, says a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, fueling a WWE-style stare down between the opposing camps.
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.
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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 Julius Caesar’s assassination and the Roman empire’s collapse, but surprisingly, historical records during the war-torn era show a population explosion in Rome. Census data, thought to only account for males, gives a population increase from 400,000 in 2nd century B.C.E. to between 4 and 5 million at the 1st century B.C.E.
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].
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Humanity has a new matriarch: a hominid named Ardi who lived in Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago. Anthropologists have unveiled the results of 17 years of research on a new species named Ardipithecus ramidus, presenting a rich trove of fossils including the partial skeleton of the small-brained, 110-pound female. Ardi is 1.2 million years older than the famed “Lucy,” of the species Australopithecus afarensis, and experts say the find fundamentally changes our understanding of human evolution.
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].
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Stone Age Europeans may not have been the last to hear about those nifty gadgets called stone axes, after all. New research at two sites in southern Spain indicates that the people there were fashioning hand axes as early as 900,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed.
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
A Stone Age campsite on the coast of South Africa has revealed the earliest evidence of early humans who used fire to make better, sharper stone tools. Researchers had been surprised to find spear points and other stone implements made of silcrete, a crumbly rock that doesn’t respond well to the flaking, chipping process that early tool-makers employed. But lead researcher Kyle Brown noticed that many of the ancient blades bore the same glossy sheen as North American tools created from heat-treated stone. “It seemed like the most logical thing to do was take some of this poor quality material that we’ve been collecting and put it under a fire and see what happens,” he says [New Scientist].
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.
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By using a newly refined technique to analyze tiny bits of red pigment from an ancient Egyptian quiver, a researcher has found that a dye known as madder was used 4,000 years ago. Until now, the oldest relic containing madder dated to about 1,200 B.C., according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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.
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Scientists trying to determine where dogs were first domesticated have been sent back to the drawing board by a new study. Back in 2002, researchers sampled DNA from dogs around the world, and determined that dogs in East Asia had the most genetic diversity, suggesting that the species originated there and that dogs in that region have had the longest time to evolve. But the new study suggests that those earlier results were skewed, because DNA sampling of African street dogs has revealed equal genetic diversity.
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].
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An ancient Roman city that was the predecessor of Venice has been rediscovered beneath croplands near the Venetian lagoon using sophisticated aerial imagery and some clever analysis. Researchers say they’ve found the harbor city of Altinum, which was once one of the richest cities of the Roman empire. But terrified by the impending invasion of the fearsome Germanic Emperor Attila the Hun, its inhabitants cut their losses and fled in AD452, leaving behind a ghost town of theatres, temples and basilicas [Times Online].
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].
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The ancient civilization known as the Incan empire, which at its peak reached a population of 8 million people spread throughout South America, may owe its success at least in part to a warming climate, according to a study in the journal Climate of the Past. A rise in temperatures would have melted glaciers and allowed crops to grow further into the Andes mountains, fostering agricultural growth.
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].
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Analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton known as Shanidar 3 found in the late 1950s shows that the he likely died from injuries incurred by a thrown spear, which scientists speculate was thrown by a modern human, according to a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution.
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.
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A 35,000-year-old flute made of vulture bone found in a cave in southwestern Germany is the world’s oldest known musical instrument. The artifact suggests music may have been one advantage our ancestors had over their cousins, the now-extinct Neanderthals, according to a report published in the journal Nature.
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.
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Archaeologists have found granaries that were used to store wild cereals near the Dead Sea in Jordan more than 11,000 years ago. The structures predate agriculture in the Middle East by at least a millennium, according to a report published by the scientists in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings suggest that it took awhile to establish domesticated farming. In other words, the agricultural revolution likely spanned an appreciable period of time, during which our ancestors switched from hunting and gathering to growing their own food. The earliest definitive traces of domesticated grains, wheat, barley, and oats have been found in the Near East and date back about 10,500 years. Yet much recent research suggests that plant domestication was preceded by a long period–perhaps thousands of years–during which prehistoric peoples cultivated wild plants without visibly changing their appearance or altering their genetic makeup [ScienceNOW]. In archaeological digs of early villages in Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey researchers have found large quantities of wild barley and wild oats, now the new findings provide evidence that the gatherers carefully stored these wild cereals.
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The giant, prehistoric kangaroo that once hopped over the Australian landscape may have been wiped out by the first human settlers on that continent, a new study argues. In making this claim, the researchers are entering into a long-running debate over whether Australia’s “megafauna,” which also included marsupial lions and hippo-sized wombats, were driven extinct by the changing climate or by overzealous hunting. And while the new study, which will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes an interesting case for the latter hypothesis, some researchers are not convinced.
Researchers analyzed the teeth of the nearly seven-foot-tall kangaroo, known as Procoptodon goliah, to determine what it ate and drank. Different sources of water and food leave trace amounts of particular types, or isotopes, of hydrogen and carbon atoms, which are deposited in the teeth like a recorded diet. Additionally, tiny patterns of wear give clues about the type of food a given creature chewed. The team concluded that the giant kangaroos fed mainly on saltbush shrubs [BBC News]. These hardy bushes thrive in arid conditions, which makes it less likely that the kangaroos ran out of food as the continent’s climate got hotter and drier.
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