80beats » Human Origins

Cracking Open the Neanderthal Personality

Valerie Ross — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:05:22 +0000

Over the past few years, several studies have illuminated some of what happened during the brief period when modern humans and Neanderthals overlapped in Europe, with genetic analyses showing that the two groups interbred tens of thousands of years ago (though not frequently) and ancient remains suggesting that modern humans fought and—more controversially—ate their prominent-browed contemporaries.

It seems that humans and Neanderthals made occasional love and intermittent war, but what were those interludes of interaction actually like? What was going on inside those distinctive crania? It’s a tricky question to answer—behavior doesn’t fossilize—but anthropologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge combine genetic and anthropological evidence with a healthy dose of well-informed speculation to offer an intriguing picture of how Neanderthals may have lived, thought, felt, and acted.

Wynn & Coolidge have a new book out on the subject, and they share a condensed version of their theory at New Scientist, offering answers to such questions as whether Neanderthals had a sense of humor (slapstick yes, subtleties no) and how their cognitive abilities compared to ours (less creativity and short-term memory, more learning by observation). And as for whether ...

Preserving the Moon Landings for Posterity

Valerie Ross — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:13:11 +0000

Archaeologists, historians, and governments take great care to preserve human history across the globe, protecting monuments of our civilizations and traces of our origins. Even what may seem, at first, like the detritus of existence—footprints left millions of years ago, the contents of well-preserved wastebins—can serve as tangible, informative links to the past.

Now, scientists and officials are working preserve some of humanity’s best-known footprints, left by a giant leap for mankind, by extending those same sorts of historical protections to the Apollo missions’ lunar landing sites. The tricky part is, many such protections require that a site be on the territory of a state or nation—and the US government can’t claim sovereignty over any part of the moon, and doesn’t want to appear as though it’s trying to. But NASA and the New Mexico and California state governments have gotten onboard with the effort to safeguard the sites, spearheaded by New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary. A NASA panel recently issued recommendations for protecting the sites that suggest future explorers give a wide berth to the astronautical artifacts left behind, Kenneth Chang reports at the ...

The Linguistic Phenomenon Du Jour: Vocal Fry

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:26:04 +0000

What’s the News: Rarely has a humble little sound aroused such interest as in the last few days, as a paper about a phenomenon called vocal fry, a creak in someone’s voice as they speak, has been propelled to web prominence. Though many outlets got some basic facts wrong—the new study doesn’t actually show that fry has become more common among young women, just that it was common in the small group surveyed—all recognized the opportunity to launch into something we wish we knew more about: why we make funny sounds when we talk.

How the Heck:

Vocal fry is a low, rumbling creak that, in English speakers, seems to appear mostly at the ends of sentences and has been captured in voice recordings going back to the early part of last century. Below is a clip (start watching at 34 seconds) with Mae West showing vocal fry on the “me” in “Why don’t you come up sometime, see me,” identified by the linguistics wonks at Language Log. Basically, it’s the opposite end of the spectrum from falsetto.

The researchers at Long Island University, Brookville, have been wondering how widespread the vocal ...

Scientists Find the Oldest Known Sleeping Mats, Laced With Insect-Repelling Leaves

Valerie Ross — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:59:26 +0000

Remnants of a Cryptocarya woodii leaf, which researchers
say was part of the oldest bedding ever found

In a South African cave, researchers have uncovered traces of the oldest known human bedding, 77,000-year-old mats made of grasses, leaves, and other plant material. While it’s not especially surprising that early humans would have found a way to improve the cold, generally unpleasant experience of sleeping on a cave floor, archaeologists know little about our ancestors’ sleeping habits and habitats.

Using scanning electron microscopy, the researchers identified several species of local rushes and grasses that made up the bulk of the mattress, as well as leaves of the Cryptocarya woodii tree. These leaves contain chemical compounds that repel mosquitoes, lice, and other insects, suggesting that the cave’s ancient residents protected their bedding with natural insecticide.

What Did Australopithecines Sound Like? More “Duh” Than “Ugg”

Valerie Ross — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:31:10 +0000

Artist’s rendering of an Australopithecus afarensis

When archaeologists hear whispers of humanity’s past, it’s through the painstaking work of piecing together a story from artifacts and fossilized remains: The actual calls, grunts, and other sounds made by our evolutionary ancestors didn’t fossilize. But working backward from clues in ancient skeletons, Dutch researcher Bart de Boer has built plastic models of an early hominin‘s vocal tract—and, by running air through the models, recreated the sounds our ancestors may have made millions of years ago.

Non-human primates have an organ called an air sac, a large cavity that connects to the vocal tract. The air sac links onto an extension on the hyoid bone known as the hyoid bulla. Modern humans have neither an air sac nor an extension on the hyoid bone. But Australopithecus afarensis—a hominin species that roamed Africa approximately 3.9 million to 2.9 million years ago—had a hyoid bulla, the fossil record shows, meaning it’s highly likely it had an air sac, too.

Using plastic tubing, de Boer built models of the human vocal tract both without an air sac, like modern humans, and with one, like A. afarensis would have had. ...

Study: Switch to Farming Shortened Jaws, Giving Us Crowded & Crooked Teeth

Douglas Main — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:15:30 +0000

What’s the News: Parents going broke to pay for their offspring’s braces and orthodontistry can finally blame somebody besides their mildly malformed children: our farmer ancestors. A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people living in subsistence farming communities around the world have shorter, wider jaws than those in hunting and gathering societies. This leaves less room for teeth, which have changed little in size or abundance over human history—and may help explain why crooked choppers and a need for orthodontia are so common, study author Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel tells the BBC. ”I have had four of my pre-molars pulled and that is the only reason that my teeth fit in my mouth,” she says.

How the Heck:

von Cramon-Taubadel, a University of Kent anthropologist, made 3-D images of 322 craniums and 295 mandibles from 11 groups of subsistence tribes around the world. Six of the groups were farmers; five were hunter-gatherers. She found no link between cranium size and the type of subsistence economy the person came from. The jawbone was a different story. After controlling for genetic, geographic, and climatic factors, she found a ...

Satellite Photos Show Ancient Saharan Fortresses of a Lost Empire

Valerie Ross — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:05:25 +0000

New satellite images have revealed more than a hundred ancient fortified settlements still standing in the Sahara. The settlements, located in what today is southern Libya, were built by the Garamantes, a people who ruled much of the area for nearly a thousand years until their empire fragmented around 700 AD. Information about the Garamantes is relatively scarce: Other than the accounts of classical historians (who aren’t known for careful accuracy) and excavations of the Garamantian capital city in the 1960s, archaeologists haven’t had a lot to go on. During the decades-long reign of Muammar Gadhafi, antiquities and archaeology weren’t exactly a national priority; the fortresses were largely ignored. As David Mattingly, the British archaeologist who led the project, said to OurAmazingPlanet of the discoveries: ”It is like someone coming to England and suddenly discovering all the medieval castles.”

Through previous archaeological excavations—including a dig earlier this year that was cut short by the start of Libya’s civil war—Mattingly and others have “built up a picture of [the Garamantes] as being a very sophisticated, high-level civilization,” he told National Geographic. The Garamantes had a writing system, practiced metallurgy, ...

Did Parasites Drive Human Evolution?

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:37:00 +0000

Hookworms are longer-lived than viruses and bacteria;
they could have had a more significant effect on human evolution.

Humans live in all sorts of places—high deserts, tropical lowlands, frigid tundra. Over the millennia, you’d expect each population’s assortment of genes to evolve to reflect the demands and dangers of its home environment: those who live in the deserts would possess genes for extra skin pigments to help keep their tender integument from burning (like African peoples), and those who live in sub-zero climes much of the year would have genes that keep them well-insulated in fat (like the Inuit). But what if factors other than climate, like the food available nearby or the viruses, bacteria, and parasites native to the area, also had an effect on various human populations’ genetic toolkits?

It’s a fascinating question, but, given that we have to reconstruct all this supposed evolution from the current state of modern genomes, finding an answer isn’t easy. A recent paper takes an important first step by looking for correlations between 500,000 different genetic markers and certain environmental characteristics, like humidity, temperature, the local diet, and the prevalence of parasites and other pathogens.

The researchers started out ...

100,000-Year-Old Paint Factory Suggests Early Humans Knew Chemistry

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:22:53 +0000

The ochre paint found in the abalone shells
seems to have been made from a specific recipe.

As archaeologists unearth scattered artifacts from the early years of our species, one of the questions they ask themselves is, when did early humans start thinking and behaving like modern humans? The recent discovery of 100,000-year-old site where paint was manufactured—equipped with mixing containers and tools—suggests that even very distant ancestors had something of our ability to plan, as well as a basic sense of chemistry.

The paint makers, who lived in South Africa 20,000-30,000 years before archaeologists had previously thought such complex thought processes possible, used a specific recipe and brought in ochre, the red mineral, from a whopping 20 kilometers away before mixing it in abalone shells with melted fat from bone marrow and a fluid that might be urine. Bringing ochre all that way indicates forethought and planning, the researchers believe, and the mixture in the different shells they found is the same, suggesting that the paint makers followed a standard recipe. As the lead researcher told Nature News:

“This isn’t just a chance mixture, it is early chemistry. It suggests conceptual and probably ...

Junk DNA Gave Us the Modern Uterus, in a Giant Genetic Cut-and-Paste Operation

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:00:31 +0000

What’s the News: A new analysis finds that many of the genes behind the development of modern mammalian pregnancy are controlled by mysterious genetic elements called transposons, long referred to as “junk DNA.” The results suggest that the placental uterus did not evolve gradually but instead arose from a massive, transposon-driven genetic rewiring.

How the Heck:

The research team looked at the DNA of uterine cells from the possum, a marsupial that gives birth two weeks after conception and shelters its developing young in a pouch, and compared them with cells from armadillos and humans, which both carry their children to term in a womb lined with a nutrient-rich placenta. The uterine cells of armadillos and humans shared more than 1,500 active genes that possums lacked. Looking closer, the team saw that a number of these genes—about 13%—were very near on the genome to a particular kind of transposon specific to placental mammals. The origins of transposons, jumping genetic elements that copy and insert themselves in their host genomes seemingly at random, are still unclear, and their purpose has long been so opaque that they were called “junk DNA” until relatively recently. We now know that they play an important ...

Overestimating Your Own Abilities May Be an Evolutionary Boost

Valerie Ross — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:16:25 +0000

What’s the News: We may strive for humility, but we benefit from a little hubris, too, according to a study published last week in Nature. Overconfidence in your abilities can help you triumph in competitions you might not have won otherwise, the study found, and can impart an evolutionary advantage when the potential payoff is high compared to the cost of conflict.

How the Heck:

To investigate the effects of overconfidence, the researchers set up a game theory-based computer model. In this model, two individuals could each “decide” (through computer algorithms) whether or not to lay claim to a desired resource. If they both claimed it, the stronger individual won the resource, but both individuals incurred a small cost, the toll of competition. If only one individual decided to go after the resource, that individual got the prize without incurring a cost from conflict; if neither did, neither got it. Each competitor decided whether or not to claim the resource based on what they knew of their abilities compared to their opponents’. But, as is usually the case in real life, the individuals didn’t have a complete, unbiased view of the ...

Rats, Not Recklessness, May Have Done Easter Islanders In

Valerie Ross — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:45:42 +0000

Enormous stone statues, called moai, on Easter Island

What’s the News: Easter Island is often held up as an example of what can happen when human profligacy and population outpace ecology: Wanton deforestation led to soil erosion and famine, the story goes, and the islanders’ society declined into chaos and cannibalism. But through their research on Easter Island, paleoecologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo have unearthed evidence that contradicts this version of events. The Polynesian settlers of Easter Island prospered through careful use of the scant available resources, they argue in their new book The Statues That Walked; the island’s forests were done in not by greedy humans, but by hungry rats.

What’s the Context:

The usual tale of Easter Island’s demise, originated by scientists in the 1990s and popularized in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, suggests that the island’s residents cut down trees to clear farmland and to use in the transport of the enormous stone statues for which the island is famous. This deforestation threw the island’s ecological systems out of whack—which led the populace to make more statues in an effort to placate the gods, leading to more deforestation, and ...

Experimental Archaeologists: Investigating the Past by Recreating It

Valerie Ross — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:56:32 +0000

Most archaeologists dig up the past, examining artifacts for clues—but experimental archaeologists build the past from the ground up, testing out what they can make and do using the same tools and techniques ancient peoples did. Brandon Keim at Wired Science has compiled a fascinating collection of these studies, following scientists as they sail the South Pacific on rafts of balsa wood, hunt deer with flint-tipped spears, and build smoky fires to keep warm through the Scandinavian winter (above).

[See the rest at Wired Science.]

Image: Liedgren & Östlund, Journal of Archaeological Science, 2011

Yeast Can Evolve into Multicellular Organisms in a Few Short Months

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:55:04 +0000

What’s the News: We walking, talking agglomerations of cells have always thought of multicellular life as a profound jump in evolution. The first organisms were just single cells, but at some point, they began to work together for the good of the whole, divvying up tasks like nutrient transport and cellular messaging. Eventually, these colonies became the complex multicellular life that we know and love.

But maybe being multicellular isn’t as difficult to achieve as we thought. Scientists presenting at the Society for the Study of Evolution conference have, over just a couple months, gotten single-celled yeast to grow into colonies that function as multicellular organisms.

How the Heck:

First, to get populations of yeast that would be naturally inclined to stick together, the biologists made it hard for lone cells to survive. They suspended cells in tubes of liquid and then spun them in centrifuges, which caused clumped cells to sink to the bottom, while lighter, singleton cells stayed afloat. While floating cells were discarded, the sticky cells underwent the selection process again and again. The team developed 10 separate strains of sticky cells this way, which they spread on Petri dishes and watched grow. Within 60 days, the ...

Interbreeding With Other Human Species Helped Our Ancestors Spread Worldwide

Joseph Castro — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:24:39 +0000

Could Neanderthal DNA have protected our ancestors from diseases?

What’s the News: While we humans have certainly outlasted our hominin cousins, new research shows that Neanderthal and Denisovan genes may have helped us spread far and wide. By mating with the two species, our ancestors acquired genes that allowed them to adapt to diseases outside of Africa far quicker than would have been otherwise possible, according to Peter Parham, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University.

How the Heck:

Parham began by taking a close look at a family of genes called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), which play a central role in our body’s immune responses. We are able to react to a wide array of diseases because our HLA genes are highly variable, each containing dozens of alleles (forms of genes). Our ancestors in Africa, however, would have had a small number of HLA alleles because they likely traveled in small bands and had little contact with other groups. ...

Early Farmers Were Sicker and Shorter Than Their Forager Ancestors

Valerie Ross — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 18:30:33 +0000

What’s the News: As human societies adopted agriculture, their people became shorter and less healthy, according to a new review of studies focused on the health impacts of early farming. Societies around the world—in Britain and Bahrain, Thailand and Tennessee—experienced this trend regardless of when they started farming or what stapled crops they farmed, the researchers found.

This finding runs contrary to the idea that a stable source of food makes people grow bigger and healthier. The data suggest, in fact, that poor nutrition, increased disease, and other problems that plagued early farming peoples more than their hunter-gatherer predecessors outweighed any benefits from stability.

How the Heck:

The researchers dug through data from more than 20 studies that collected clues to stature and overall health—everything from dental cavities to bone strength—from ancient skeletons. These studies focused on a wide range of cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas as they transitioned from foragers to farmers. The team saw that across the board, people’s height decreased and health worsened as they traded hunting and gathering for the garden and the herd. What accounts for the decline? While we tend to think that growing our food rather than ...

Study: Stephen Jay Gould, Crusader Against Scientific Bias, Was Guilty of It

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:59:35 +0000

Early anthropologist Samuel George Morton, accused by
Gould of bias in his measurements of skulls, may finally
be exonerated.

What’s the News: Harvard biologist and popular author Stephen Jay Gould was a well-known advocate for evolution and denouncer of scientific bias. But a new study shows that one of his most famous claims—that an early researcher unconsciously manipulated his measurements of skulls to make Caucasians seem smarter—is baseless.

The researcher actually made few errors, and it looks like Gould never bothered to measure the skulls himself, as the study’s authors did, before crying bias. “Ironically,” the authors write, “Gould’s own analysis…is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results.”

How the Heck:

Gould’s influential 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, asserts that Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century anthropologist, fudged his measurements and analysis of 100 human skulls to support his hypothesis that brain volume would be larger in Caucasians. It’s now a textbook example of how unconscious bias can sway the results of a study. The team went back and measure Morton’s skulls themselves. What they found was that very few of his measurements were off, and the errors he had made actually contradicted his hypothesis that Caucasian brains ...

Ancient Greek Knew Geology Thousands of Years Before His Time

Valerie Ross — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:00:53 +0000

The city of Piraeus, in 2008

What’s the News: Chalk up another win for the ancient Greeks. The Greek historian and geographer Strabo wrote nearly 2,000 years ago that Piraeus, a small peninsula near Athens, had once been an island—and a new study in this month’s issue of Geology shows he was right.

How Do We Know:

To test out whether Strabo’s claim was true, researchers took sediment samples from the area. Using radiocarbon dating to determine how old different layers of the soil were and analyzing the remains of ancient microorganisms trapped in the soil, the researchers reconstructed the ancient environment of the strip connecting Piraeus to the mainland. While Piraeus was a peninsula 8,000 years ago, the researchers found, rising sea levels had flooded the land linking it to Athens. Sure enough, by about 6,000 years ago, Piraeus was an island. Sediment deposits turned the water between Piraeus and the mainland into a wide lagoon by 4,000 years ago, the study showed. Further deposits over the next 1,500 years turned the area into a freshwater marsh, solid enough for the Athenians to build long walls connecting their city to its harbor at Piraeus during the ...

Climate Change Froze the Vikings Out of Greenland, Say Scientists

Valerie Ross — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:19:19 +0000

What’s the News: Climate change may have sparked the demise of early Viking settlements in Greenland, according to a new study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, when temperatures cooled rapidly over several decades. Around the time the Vikings disappear from the island’s archaeological record, temperature appears to have plunged. Nor were the Vikings the only people in Greenland whose fortunes rose and fell with the average temperature, the study suggests. Earlier cold spells may have played a role in the collapse of two previous groups on the island.

How the Heck:

To reconstruct the area’s climate, the researchers took mud cores from two lakes in western Greenland. Then, they measured the levels of alkenones, fats made by algae, left behind in the mud. Since how much algae blooms depends on the water temperature, and the water temperature varies with the air temperature, this measurement lets scientists work backward to figure out what the past climate was like. Over the past 5,600 years, the researchers found, the arrivals and departures of three groups coincided with major, rapid temperature changes. The Saqqaq people, who first came to Greenland about 4,500 ...

Hi-Tech Archaeology Spots Lost Pyramids From Space, Explores Great Pyramid From Inside

Valerie Ross — Fri, 27 May 2011 18:43:08 +0000

Since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was enumerated as a wonder of the world two millennia ago, people have pored over the mysteries of these vast tombs. Now, modern technology is helping researchers glean new insight into the pyramids, revealing them from far above and exploring them from deep within.

Satellite images have revealed 17 “lost” pyramids and thousands of ancient tombs and settlements in Egypt, according to a BBC News report. Using a new imaging technique, researchers could pick out the outlines of ancient buildings buried under the surface.

Pyramids From Space—How the Heck:

The researchers examined hi-res infrared images taken by satellites orbiting at about 435 miles up. Ancient Egyptian building materials, mostly mud bricks, are denser than the soil surrounding them. This density difference shows up on infrared images, exposing the location of shallowly buried structures. The team’s test digs have backed up their imaging findings. So far, they’ve excavated a 3,000-year-old house from the ancient city of Tanis, near today’s San el Hagar in the Nile Delta.

What’s the Context:

Archaeologists have used a variety of remote sensing techniques to get a new view of hidden history, from t hermal ...

Humans are Lean, Mean, Seeing Machines

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 10 May 2011 12:58:57 +0000

What’s the News: Humans are eerily good at sifting the visual wheat from the chaff—just think of our penchant for word searches, Easter egg hunts, and lushly animated first-person shooters.

But how good are we really? To test the limits of these abilities, in a recent study neuroscientists gave subjects extremely difficult, high-speed Where’s Waldo-type search tasks studded with red herrings. But again and again, subjects found what they were looking for, leading the team to report that humans operate at a near-optimal level when it comes to visual searches—a skill that likely came in handy in our evolutionary history.

How the Heck:

For a fraction of a second, a cluster of short lines randomly colored gray or black and set at various angles, called “distracters,” flashed before subjects’ eyes. Half of the time, a single line whose orientation didn’t change across images was hidden among them, and subjects indicated whether this target had appeared. Even with the images whipping by at high speed and the complicating effect of color, humans still detected the target at a level that’s near the best possible success rate, a number that’s defined by probability and takes in account how much an observer ...

Our Ancient Cousin “Nutcracker Man” Actually Ate Like a Cow: Lots of Grass

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 03 May 2011 17:21:27 +0000

What’s the News: It turns out that the strong-jawed, big-toothed human relative colloquially known as “Nutcracker man” may never have tasted a nut. In a finding that questions traditional ideas of early hominid diet, researchers discovered that Paranthropus boisei, a hominid living in east Africa between 2.3 and 1.2 million years ago, mostly fed on grasses and sedges. “Frankly, we didn’t expect to find the primate equivalent of a cow dangling from a remote twig of our family tree,” researcher Matt Sponheimer told MSNBC.

How the Heck:

The researchers studied the early hominid’s diet by drilling off the enamel of 24 teeth from 22 different P. boisei specimens found in Kenya, ages ranging from 1.4 to 1.9 million years old. The carbon isotopes in the pulverized enamel allowed them to look at diet because grasses and nuts have different carbon signatures: Nuts, as well as shrubs, herbs, and cool-season grasses, undergo a kind of photosynthesis known as C3 photosynthesis, which stores carbon-12, whereas sedges and tropical grasses undergo C4 photosynthesis, which stores carbon-13 in addition to carbon-12. The carbon isotopes in these 24 P. boisei teeth revealed ...

Ancient Stone Structures Herded Gazelles to Mass Slaughter

Valerie Ross — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:44:52 +0000

What’s the News: Large, corral-like stone stone structures found in the Middle East, called desert kites, were used to capture entire herds of gazelle for slaughter 6,000 years ago, suggests a study published online yesterday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While historians and archaeologists have long suspected the structures may have been used to round up and kill gazelles, this study, which found and dated thousands of gazelle bones in close proximity to several desert kites, provides physical evidence to corroborate the idea and an estimate of when the kites were used. (A labeled aerial photo of a desert kite can be found here.)

How the Heck:

The researchers analyzed gazelle bones excavated from an archaeological site known as Tell Kuran, a settlement dating back around 5,500 to 5,100 years in what is now northeastern Syria. Tell Kuran is within about six miles of several desert kites. The 2,600 gazelle bones, found in a thin archaeological layer—suggesting they may have all been deposited there within a short span of time—were about 6,000 years old. The bones came from around 100 gazelles, including both male and female animals ...

Clever Study Uses Genetics Trick to Trace Language Back to Its Very Beginning, in Africa

Valerie Ross — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:47:02 +0000

Likely area of language origin, in white, based on:
A) phonemes found in individual languages and
B) phoneme diversity averaged across language families

What’s the News: Southern Africa may be the birthplace of human language, according a new study published yesterday in Science. The study further suggests that language may have arisen only once, with one ancestral language giving rise to all modern tongues, an idea linguists have long debated. This finding parallels the human migrations out of Africa supported by genetic and fossil evidence.

How the Heck:

The study’s author, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, looked at 504 modern languages from around the world. He then tallied the phonemes—the distinct sounds of consonants, vowels and tones—that make up each language. Languages vary widely in how many phonemes they have: Some of the Khoisan languages in Africa (widely known for their click sounds) have more than a hundred phonemes, while languages spoken in many Pacific islands have far ...

Is Grammar More Cultural Than Universal? Study Challenges Chomsky’s Theory

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:43:58 +0000

Researchers traced word rules across more than 3,000 languages.

What’s the News: Noam Chomsky, look out: If language has any universal grammar, it’s hiding really well, conclude the authors of a recent Nature study. The idea that all human languages share some underlying structure, regardless of where or when they evolved, an influential idea that nonetheless has drawn some controversy since Chomsky popularized it in the 1950s. One part of natural-grammar theory is the idea that certain word order rules (whether the verb or the noun goes first and whether a preposition goes before or after a noun, for example) will always associate together, regardless of which language they occur in.

But when cognitive scientists and a biologist teamed up to see whether there were shared patterns in word order across four large language families, they found almost none. A common cultural background, they found, was the best predictor for how a language orders words.

How the Heck:

Applying biology techniques to linguistics, the team built an evolutionary tree of word order. They treated word order as a trait, just as biologists might treat eye color or hair color. They looked to ...

Contagious Chimp Yawns Seem to Point to Human-Like Empathy

Valerie Ross — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:37:35 +0000

What’s the News: Chimpanzees, like people, can “catch” yawns from others. But not all yawns are created equal, it seems; chimps are more likely to catch yawns from a chimp they know than from a stranger, a new study found. (You can see a video of it here.) This supports the idea that it’s empathy—rather than just everybody needing a nap—that makes yawns contagious.

How the Heck:

Two groups of chimps at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center near Atlanta, each with about a dozen adult members, were part of the study. The two groups lived in different large enclosures, and hadn’t seen—much less gotten to know—each other. Chimpanzees are extremely territorial, and a whole lot friendlier to individuals in their own group than to strangers. The researchers took videos of spontaneous yawns from chimps in each group, as well as videos of the chimps just hanging out in the enclosure. They then played each chimp ...

New Archeology Find Buries Theory on First Americans, Re-Opening a Gaping Mystery

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:06:00 +0000

What’s the News: Archeologists have discovered thousands of stone tools in Texas that are over 15,000 years old. The find is important because it is over 2,000 years older than the so-called Clovis culture, which had previously thought to be the first human culture in North America. As Texas A&M University anthropologist Michael Waters says, “This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, ‘hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas’.”

How the Heck:

At a site on Buttermilk Creek in central Texas, Archeologists discovered 15,528 items, ranging from chert flakes to blades and chisels. The first indication that the tools were older than anything previous seen on North America came from their stratigraphic horizon: The excavated layer was underneath a layer of classic Clovis tools. (The sediments showed no indication of mixing after the tools were dropped.) The most conclusive evidence came from a dating technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ...

Study Finds Religion May Be Going “Extinct” in Some Countries

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:33:37 +0000

What’s the News: Looking at census data from nine countries, a team of scientists have made the bold assertion that religion is headed for extinction and it’s all based on a mathematical model of the complex social motives behind joining religious groups. As they note in their abstract, “People claiming no religious affiliation constitute the fastest growing ‘religious’ minority in many countries throughout the world.”

How the Heck:

The theory behind their model “posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and … that social groups have a social status or utility,” Richard Wiener from the University of Arizona told the BBC. You could call it the Facebook effect. So they looked at census data spanning the past century from Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland, and discovered that an increasing number of people identify themselves as “non-affiliated” with religion. For example, 40% of the Netherlands and 60% of the Czech Republic is unaffiliated. Using a nonlinear dynamics model, which allows researchers to track outcomes from a ...

Scientist Smackdown: When Did Europeans First Harness Fire?

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:21:47 +0000

What happens when evolutionary biology disagrees with archeology? If you’re thinking “scientific headache,” you’re right. New research suggests that Europeans first regularly used fire no earlier than 400,000 years ago—an assertion that, if true, leaves evolutionary anthropologists in a lurch because this date isn’t linked to the substantial physiological changes we’d expect with the advent of cooked food.

The Controversy

The majority of archeologists think that early humans’ control of fire is tied to their migration out of Africa. After all, how else would the first Europeans cope with the freezing winters?

Based on archeological evidence, we know that early humans first arrived in southern Europe over a million years ago, and—based on the Happisburgh site —reached England around 800,000 years ago. So the problem with the new 400,000 year-old date is that it means that hominids suffered through hundreds of thousands of years of cold winter unaided by fire. And according to evolutionary biologists, this new date clashes with the idea that cooked food aided the evolutionary enlargement of the human brain.

The 400,000-Year-Old Evidence

The new date is based more on lack of evidence than anything else: Researchers examined excavation reports from 141 European ...

Found: Ancient Alaskan House—and Remains of a Child Cremated There

Andrew Moseman — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:40:36 +0000

We know the Bering land bridge that appeared between Alaska and Russia at least 14,000 years ago would have allowed ancient people to cross over into America. But what were those people like? Scant evidence has turned up to reveal their lifestyle, but in the journal Science this week archaeologists report a new find—one that’s simultaneously insightful and a portrait of sadness. Ben Potter and colleagues found an 11,500-year-old house that was apparently the scene of the loss of a child, as the fire pit shows the skeletal remains of a person about three years of age.

The bones are the oldest human remains yet discovered in northern North America, and provide a remarkable glimpse into the lives of the earliest North American settlers…. Older human remains and temporary hunting camps and work sites have been found, but longer-term habitations are rare. Yet the child’s young age – it was about 3 years old – and the type of food remains found at the new site, suggest it was the summer home for a group that comprised at least women and young children. [New Scientist]

The place ...

Found: Human Skulls Used As Drinking Goblets 15,000 Years Ago

Andrew Moseman — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:55:21 +0000

From Ed Yong:

Stock fantasy villains might like to drink from the skulls of their enemies, but the practice has its roots in historical reality. For thousands of years, humans have turned each others’ skulls into containers and drinking cups. Now, Silvia Bello from London’s Natural History Museum has found the oldest skull-cups ever recorded in a cave in Somerset, England.

…

These include three skull-cups that Bello recovered in excellent condition. Two belonged to adults and one to a 3-year-old child. All of them were made by the Magdelanian culture, a group of prehistoric people who lived in Western Europe. No one knows how they used the grisly cups, but it’s clear that they manufactured them with great control. They all bear a large series of dents and cut-marks that were precisely inflicted.

For plenty more on this gruesome find—including a step-by-step guide to crafting a skull cup of your own, if you’re so inclined—check out the rest of Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Does an Arched Foot Bone Prove That Lucy Loved to Walk?

Andrew Moseman — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:03:57 +0000

Lucy loved the land, new research suggests. A study in this week’s edition of the journal Science puts forth a foot bone from the early hominid Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s kind) as evidence that this species was built for walking—meaning human ancestors could have been striding around on ground level for most of their lives by 3.2 million years ago.

Scientists already knew that A. afarensis could walk on two feet but were unsure whether the creatures climbed and grasped tree branches as well, much like their own ancestor species and modern nonhuman apes. The fourth metatarsal … shows that A. afarensis moved around more like modern humans. “Now that we know Lucy and her relatives had arches in their feet, this affects much of what we know about them, from where they lived to what they ate and how they avoided predators,” said Carol Ward. [The Guardian]

The bone in question comes from Ethiopia, home to many significant hominid finds. And though it is just a small sample, that arched shape in the foot bone suggests Australopithecus had rigid feet, and may ...

Study: Humans Could Outrun Neanderthals

Andrew Moseman — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:59:25 +0000

Neanderthals: They weren’t really into distance running. According to research by David Raichlen in the Journal of Human Evolution, they were more the power walking type: The shape of a Homo sapiens heel compared to that of a Neanderthal would have allowed our ancestors to be much more efficient runners over long distances.

Raichlen stated with living humans, studying them as they ran on treadmills.

By looking at MRI scans of their ankles, he found that the distance between a point on the heel bone just below the ankle bone, and the back of the heel bone where the Achilles tendon attaches, was proportional to the runner’s efficiency. The shorter this distance, the greater is the force applied to stretch the tendon – and the more energy is stored in it. This means that people with shorter distances are more efficient runners, using less energy to run for longer. [New Scientist]

With this knowledge, Raichlen and colleagues looked at the remains of Neanderthals as well as humans of the same era. The difference, he says, was distinct.

In ancient Homo sapiens, as ...

After Looting in the Egyptian Museum, Archaeologists Pick up the Pieces

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:48:53 +0000

With the world focused on the uprising against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, archaeologists have raised the alarm about Egypt’s ancient treasures. Last Friday, looters destroyed some artifacts in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, home of over 120,000 priceless artifacts, including many from Tutankhamun’s tomb. Other museums have also been ransacked–but in one uplifting moment, citizens and army personnel banded together to save Egypt’s past.

Although some of the Egyptian Museum looters were reportedly apprehended, the damage was already done: the criminals beheaded two mummies thought to be pharaohs, reduced to rubble a statue of the young King Tut astride a panther, and damaged many other treasures.

The country’s top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, described the damage in a series of statements, including an update that was posted to his blog on Sunday. He said looters ransacked the museum’s gift shop and went on to vandalize authentic treasures as well. More than a dozen display cases were broken into, including one that contained the Tut statuette. “The criminals found a statue of the king on a panther, broke it, and ...

Did Humans Migrate Out of Africa Via a Shallow Red Sea?

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:26:17 +0000

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Orangutan Genome: The Orange Apes Evolved at Their Own Quirky Pace

Andrew Moseman — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:10:56 +0000

Welcome to the family of critters with sequenced genomes, orangutans. In Nature this week, scientists unveil the draft DNA sequencing of our great ape cousins—the only great apes that live exclusively in Asia.

The researchers assembled the draft genome of the female Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) using a whole-genome “shotgun” strategy, an old-fashioned approach that cost about $20 million. In addition, the researchers gathered sequence data from five wild Sumatran orangutans and five Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) using a faster and thousandfold cheaper next-generation platform. [LiveScience]

What did scientists find in there? For one thing, orangutans share about 97 percent of the their genome with humans, compared to the 99 percent we famously share with chimpanzees. The two orangutan species—inhabiting the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra—diverged about 400,000 years ago, lead author Devin Locke says. That’s much more recently than scientists had thought.

They also discovered that over the last 15 million years, orangutan DNA changed at a different rate than either ours or chimps’. Orangutans have undergone fewer mutations of the DNA, have a lower gene ...

Documentary Tells the Tale of Nim Chimpsky, the Chimp Raised as a Human

Andrew Moseman — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:14:44 +0000

The 1970s: a time for Reggie Jackson, the first go-round of John Travolta, and adopting a chimpanzee to settle a scientific dispute.

The new film Project Nim by director James Marsh, the documentarian behind the acclaimed Man On Wire, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this week. Marsh tells the tale of a chimp that was taken from its mother and raised in a human family just like a human baby; the experimenters were attempting to show that language is not unique to our species.

In Project Nim [Marsh] looks at a project dreamed up by Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace and carried out on Nim Chimpsky, a chimp named for famed linguist Noam Chomsky, who has argued language is uniquely human. Alternating between previously unpublished footage and interviews with participants in the experiment, the film shows how Nim initially connects with his family before his animal nature gradually takes over. [AFP]

Where a previous study had taught a chimp named Washoe symbols in American Sign Language, Terrace sought to go further with ...

When Rome Was Falling, Europe’s Climate Was Changing

Andrew Moseman — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:00:03 +0000

The Earth’s climate swings have disrupted human societies and civilizations throughout our species’ history; take examples like those in Jared Diamond’s Collapse. But are they also connected to one of the most famous collapses in the history books—the fall of the Roman Empire?

There are a host of reasons for the fall of Rome, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Ulf Büntgen write today in the journal Science. However, analyzing the climate records of the past 2,500 years reveals that changes to Europe’s climate coincided with the rise and fall of the famous civilization. Such a correlation could suggest that climate played some part in building the Romans up and in tearing them down.

Büntgen and colleagues collaborated with archaeologists to amass a database of more than 9,000 pieces of wood dating back 2,500 years. Samples came from both live trees and remains of buildings and other wooden artifacts, all from France and Germany. By measuring the width of annual growth rings in the wood, the researchers were able to determine temperature and precipitation levels on a year-by-year basis. [Discovery News]

The results of this ...

World’s Oldest Known Winery, Discovered in an Armenian Cave

Andrew Moseman — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:03:50 +0000

Humans were brewing up a crude version of beer about 9,000 years ago, but wine may rival its longevity in inebriating civilization. Scientists report this week the finding evidence of a the oldest known wine-making works in the world, in Armenia. It dates back about 6,000 years, but its sophistication shows that people could have established wineries long before.

[The cave] contained everything necessary to produce wine from grapes, including a grape press, fermentation vats, storage jars, wine-soaked pottery shards and even a cup and drinking bowl. [Los Angeles Times]

Grape residue doesn’t easily preserve, but a touch of good fortune helped the team make this find. The cave’s roof collapsed and sealed its contents in an airtight environment, preserving the wine-making gear for six millennia.

The cave is near Armenia’s border with Iran, and study leader Gregory Areshian and colleagues say the evidence shows organized wine making done the old fashioned way—stomping the grapes with foot power.

Juice from the trampled grapes drained into the vat, where it was left to ferment, he explained. The wine was then stored in ...

Short-Lived? Hardly—Neanderthals Matched Early Humans’ Lifespan

Andrew Moseman — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:59:40 +0000

Diet, brains, murder at the hands of a certain species called Homo sapiens, life expectancy: These and more have been floated as reasons to explain the vexing question: Why did Neanderthals die out about 30,000 years ago while our ancestors persisted?

In a study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Erik Trinkaus argues that we should scratch the last one—life expectancy—off the list. His wide-ranging survey of Neanderthal and early human remains shows that our ancestors had no particular advantage over the Neanderthals in living into old age.

Dr. Trinkaus studied fossil records of humans from across Eurasia and of Neanderthals from the western half of Eurasia to estimate adult mortality in the two groups. He found that there was approximately the same number of adults in the 20-to-40 age range and over-40 age range in both groups. [The New York Times]

That era was no time for old men. Only about a quarter of Neanderthals and early humans that Trinkaus found lived into their 40s. He notes that it’s possible both the Homo sapiens and Neanderthals ...