You know the “out of Africa” story: how our ancestors left the savannas where humanity grew up and trekked outward to other continents. Today in Nature, however, a new study of 40 million-year-old fossils argues that an “into Africa” story predates the other narrative: that the animals that would eventually evolve into apes like us and monkeys came from Asia into Africa.
These fossil teeth found in Libya belong to early anthropoids, according to the scientists. The team found several different species in this location.
The new fossils are about 38 to 39 million years old, and none of the animals would have weighed more than 500 grams [just more than 1 pound], conclude a team led by Jean-Jacques Jaeger, a palaeontologist at the University of Poiters, France. Their diminutive size fits in with previous research suggesting that early anthropoids started small and eventually evolved ever bigger bodies. [Nature]
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In August, Conservation International launched its globe-spanning search for amphibians that haven’t been seen in decades, but still could exist. This month, they’ve tracked down their first three slippery specimens. Scientists turned up two long-lost African frogs and a salamander from Mexico.
“It’s pretty extraordinary to think about just how long it has been since these animals were last seen,” observed project co-ordinator Robin Moore of Conservation International (CI). “The last time that the Mexican salamander was seen, Glenn Miller was one of the world’s biggest stars. The Omaniundu reed frog disappeared the year that Sony sold its first ever Walkman.” [BBC News]
The three rediscovered animals are:
The Mount Nimba reed frog (right). Last seen in 1967, it lives in the Ivory Coast. A local scientist spotted it.
The find was made “in a swampy field in Danipleu, an Ivorian village near the Liberia border.” [MSNBC]
Omaniundu Reed Frog (top). The most recently seen of the three, Omaniundu was last noted in 1979. It lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to Conservation International’s account of the rediscovery:
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Cooking all your meals on an old-fashioned stove indoors is bad for you and bad for the Earth: The smoke from those fires causes heart and lung problems for millions of people, the soot contributes to global warming and glacier melt, and the need for so much wood drives deforestation. Yet, out of necessity, nearly half the people in the world cook this way.
This week, a United States and United Nations-backed effort took the first tiny steps to try to turn that around. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that the U.S. will give $50 million in seed money to the new Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, an organization with the intention of providing cleaning-burning cooking stoves to families around the world. Other partners will each provide $10 million.
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HIV became an epidemic in the human population just in the 20th century. Its precursor found in primates, called simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV, could be not just hundreds of years old, but tens of thousands of years old, according to a study out in Science.
Preston Marx and colleagues studied the monkeys of Bioko, an island off West Africa that has been cut off from the mainland for 10,000 years. By studying the way SIV evolved in that isolated population, the team calculated that the virus is at least 32,000 years old, and possibly much, much older. Says Marx:
“The biology and geography of SIV is such that it goes from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean all the way to the tip of Africa. … It would take many, many thousands of years to spread that far and couldn’t have happened in a couple of hundred years.” [AFP]
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Two weeks ago we covered the dust-up between eco-groups and the government of Tanzania over the latter’s proposal to build a road through the heart of Serengeti National Park, home to the world-famous annual migrations of wildebeests, zebras, and more. Today in Nature, a group of 27 scientists chimed in on the project. Their verdict: It would be a biodiversity disaster.
Conservationists led by Princeton’s Andrew Dobson … argue the planned 2012 road would stop the yearly migration of 1.3 million wildebeests, the cornerstone species of the park, and harm other animals such as the 1.5 million zebras that yearly migrate as well. [USA Today]
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“This is probably going to wind up being the first salvo in a pretty significant debate.” That’s what political scientist Cullen Hendrix told New Scientist in November of last year, when a study came out proclaiming the climate change would spur an uptick in civil wars in Africa. He was correct. This week, another study that will be published (in press) in the same journal—Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—says there is no proof to back up such a connection.
The argument for a link between global warming and war came from UC-Berkeley economist Marshall Burke, who said that food shortages and drought brought on by climate change could cause 50 percent more armed conflict by 2030 under the scenarios that climate models predict. However, Norwegian political scientist Halvard Buhaug looked at sub-Saharan civil war over the last half century for this week’s study. When he compared the records of military conflict with the records of temperature and rainfall, did not see a correlation between the two.
[Buhaug] found that that there was a strong correlation between civil wars and traditional factors, such as economic disparity, ethnic tensions, and historic political and economic instability. [BBC News]
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Beer: Some people think it’s proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Others value it as a great source of antibiotics—of course, those people lived nearly 1,700 years ago.
For much of the last three decades, anthropologist George Armelagos has been trying to explain how mummies that date from an ancient kingdom in Nubia—the area south of Egypt that’s located in present-day Sudan—got so much of the antibiotic tetracycline in their bones. Since scientists didn’t synthesize antibiotics like that one until the 20th century (and these bones date back to between 350 to 550 A.D.), finding a buildup in ancient bones screams out “contamination.”
Armelagos and his colleagues longed to prove that it wasn’t, and in a study out in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the team argues that the find is no fluke. Nubians got antibiotics into their systems by drinking beer, and lots of it, and from an early age.
How? Thanks to the help of a kind of bacteria called Streptomyces.
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From Ed Yong:
It’s a classic David and Goliath story, except there are 90,000 Davids and they all have stings. On the African plains, the whistling-thorn acacia tree protects itself against the mightiest of savannah animals – elephants – by recruiting some of the tiniest – ants.
Elephants are strong enough to bulldoze entire trees and you might think that there can be no defence against such brute strength. But an elephant’s large size and tough hide afford little protection from a mass attack by tiny ants. These defenders can bite and sting the thinnest layers of skin, the eyes, and even the inside of the sensitive trunk. Jacob Goheen and Todd Palmer from Kenya’s Mpala Research Centre have found that ants are such a potent deterrent that their presence on a tree is enough to put off an elephant.
Read the rest of this post (with video!) at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Related content:
80beats: Parasite-Infested Zombie Ants Walked the Earth 48 Million Years Ago
80beats: Is an Ant Colony’s Caste System Determined by Epigenetics?
80beats: Finally, a Predator to Control the Notorious Cane Toad: Meat Ants?
80beats: Tricky Caterpillars Impersonate Queen Ants to Get Worker Ant Protection
Image: flickr / ebrelsford
Government and big business try to build a massive industrial project in a protected space. Wildlife defenders rise up to save the threatened reserve. This starkly drawn plot line sounds like the simplistic basis of a hundred Disney films, but in this case the drama is playing out for real in Tanzania.
The government of Tanzania would like to build a highway that connects the commercial activity on the country’s coastal eastern side to the inland and more remote west. That highway, however, would cut right through the plains of Serengeti National Park, and right through the annual migratory path of the millions of gazelles, zebras, and wildebeests that head from Tanzania to Kenya and provide a gorgeous visual staple for nature films.
Groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Zoological Society of London have raised their voices to oppose the project.
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From Ed Yong:
In 8 May 1980, the World Health Organisation declared that “the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” Through decades of intense vaccination, this once fatal disease had been wiped out. It was a singular victory and having won it, countries around the world discontinued the vaccination programmes. After all, why protect against a disease that no longer exists (save in a few isolated stocks)?
Unfortunately, this is not a rhetorical question. The smallpox vaccine did more than protect against smallpox. It also reduced the risk of contracting a related illness called monkeypox, which produces the same combination of scabby bumps and fever. It’s milder than smallpox but it’s still a serious affliction. In Africa, where monkeypox originates from, it kills anywhere from 1-10% of those who are infected. And more and more people are becoming infected.
Read the rest of this post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: A Killer Pox in the Congo
DISCOVER: Whatever Happened To… Smallpox?
80beats: Did the Eradication of Smallpox Accidentally Help the Spread of HIV?
Image: U.S. Air Force
Is mulitcellular life like us just the new kid on the biological block, a latecomer to a world dominated by single-celled organisms like bacteria? Perhaps not—multicellular life could be nearly half as old as the Earth itself.
A new study out today in Nature identifies fossils from Gabon in Africa that date back 2.1 billion years. The organic material is long gone, but the scientists say these are the oldest multicellular organisms ever found. That date takes them way back before the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago that made multiple-celled life widespread on the planet.
“We have these macrofossils turning up in a world that was purely microbial,” says Stefan Bengtson, a palaeozoologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and a co-author on the report. “That’s a big deal because when you finally get big organisms, it changes the way the biosphere works, as they interact with microbes and each other” [Nature].
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The Sahara is the world largest desert, and getting larger. It threatens to creep ever further to the south and turn arable land in desert wasteland. The nations in its path have an idea, though: We’ll build a fence. Of trees.
The “Great Green Wall” would be a tree band that spans the breadth of northern Africa, 9 miles wide and nearly 5,000 miles long, from Senegal at the western edge near the Atlantic to Djibouti on the eastern edge near the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden. It may sound too dreamy or crazy to ever go forward, but this week at a meeting in Chad about desertification, the Global Environment Facility backed the belt idea with $119 million. Chad’s minister of environment, Hassan Térap, says it can be achieved:
When asked if the long-discussed but yet-to-be funded Green Wall initiative was too ambitious, Térap told IRIN: “We have to attack the problem, long ignored, through vision, ambition – and trees. What is wrong with ambition?” [IRIN Africa].
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“There are lions and cheetahs and leopards out there, my dear. You’d be better off staying here with me.”
This is how male topi antelope lie for sex.
The area of Kenya where they live, Masai Mara National Reserve, is indeed filled with large predators that find antelopes to be just delicious, and so the topi have developed warning calls that they sound when it’s time to scurry away or else be eaten. But, according to an American Naturalist study, the devious topi males have figured out how to use their calls to fake the threat of immediate danger and keep females around, according to research leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen.
From February to March, male topi hold small territories through which receptive females pass to assess each male’s mating potential. The authors noticed that, while a female in estrus was on a male’s territory, the male would sometimes emit alarm calls, even in the complete absence of a predator. These false alarms are acoustically indistinguishable from true alarm snorts [Ars Technica].
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It’s a big year for South Africa: Less than four months remain until the first matches of the World Cup, when much of the planet’s attention will turn to the country. But being under the spotlight of international sport makes it difficult to hide a country’s less glamorous bits, as China and Canada have found out trying to shield pollution and addiction problems from the glare of the last couple Olympiads. In June, the microscope will turn to South Africa and its ongoing AIDS crisis.
This month one of the country’s health leaders has renewed his call for blanket HIV testing and anti-retroviral drug dispersal to all patients, which he says can stop the AIDS epidemic once and for all–without having to find a vaccine against the virus or a cure for the disease.
Brian Williams’s idea isn’t new. The former World Health Organization figure, who is now one of South Africa’s top health officials, came out with a paper more than a year ago explaining his model for how effective universal testing and immediate therapy could be. But this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego he expounded on his proposal: “The epidemic of HIV is really one of the worst plagues of human history…. I hope we can get to the starting line in one to two years and get complete coverage of patients in five years. Maybe that’s being optimistic, but we’re facing Armageddon” [The Guardian].
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With the genetics age coming into its own, the number of people who have had their genome sequenced could soon explode. But the genetic sequencing done so far has mostly left out African people, genetics researcher Stephan Schuster says. So he led a team that sequenced the genome of five people native to southern Africa—including famed anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu—and found incredible genetic diversity compared to people in other parts of the world. The findings are in the journal Nature.
The genome of the archbishop, who is 79, was particularly important for the study because he is a Bantu descended from the Tswana and Nguni people, who account for around 80% of southern Africans [The Guardian]. The other four subjects were bushmen: One, named !Gubi, had his entire genome sequenced, while the other three were partially sequenced. (The exclamation point indicates a clicking sound in that Bushman language.) !Gubi is the first person from an African minority population to be fully sequenced, and comparing him to the other three men from the region shows as much genetic separation as you’d expect to find between European and Asian peoples. Says Schuster: “This is despite the fact that they sometimes live within walking distance of one another” [Nature News].
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