Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Skull shows man survived surgery to ease brain pressure 2700 years ago

    This ancient skull shows signs of healing within the walls of fracture lines inflicted by a blunt force injuryQian Wang
    A man who lived in what is now China 2700 years ago had a hole cut in his skull to treat a head injury and survived. This suggests that shamanic doctors in that era could do advanced brain surgery.
    The Yanghai cemetery in Xinjiang, China, is a large, ancient burial ground containing the graves of a clan that practised shamanism, generally defined as a belief system using trance to communicate with the … More

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    in Humans

    Earliest known war in Europe was a Stone Age conflict 5000 years ago

    Human remains from 5000 years ago buried at San Juan ante Portam Latinam in SpainJ. I. Vegas
    Stone Age people were fighting small-scale wars in Europe over 5000 years ago, earlier than thought. The conflicts took place long before powerful states formed in the region.
    The evidence comes from a re-analysis of hundreds of human remains found at a burial site in northern Spain. The bones are predominantly male and many have evidence of injuries from stabbing and blunt-force trauma – suggesting they belonged to a warrior class.
    “It’s too large to be conflict within a community,” says Rick Schulting at the University of Oxford. The sheer scale of the conflict points to early warfare, rather than just interpersonal conflicts or skirmishes, he says.Advertisement
    The site in question is San Juan ante Portam Latinam, a rock shelter in a valley in northern Spain. It was found by accident in 1985 when a bulldozer uncovered human remains while widening a track. Radiocarbon dating of the bones suggests they were laid down between 3380 and 3000 BC, during the European Neolithic period.
    San Juan ante Portam Latinam is about 20 square metres in area. In that small space, researchers found densely packed human bones. They include 90 complete skeletons, over 200 partial skeletons and thousands of seemingly isolated bones.. There were also many stone weapons, including blades, arrowheads and axes. Many of the bones showed signs of injuries, and because they were all dumped together, the site was initially interpreted as the remains of a massacre.
    Schulting and his colleagues have systematically re-analysed the remains. They say San Juan ante Portam Latinam probably doesn’t represent a single massacre, but rather evidence of sustained conflict that was mostly conducted by young males – in other words, warfare.
    The team concludes there are at least 338 people interred at San Juan ante Portam Latinam. Of those, at least 23 per cent have visible injuries: one of the highest rates of violent injury found in prehistory. The wounds include 65 unhealed injuries and 89 healed, indicating prolonged conflict. The largest proportion of the injuries were attributable to blunt-force trauma, as might be caused by axes, clubs or thrown stones.
    “This is a very careful and meticulous study,” says Martin Smith at Bournemouth University in the UK.
    The remains contain more males – especially young males – than would be expected in an indiscriminate massacre. Of 153 individuals whose sex could be estimated, 70 per cent were male. Nearly 45 per cent of these males had visible injuries, compared with almost 24 per cent of the females. Furthermore, among remains that could be classified, 97.6 per cent of unhealed injuries were found on males.
    Schulting and his colleagues argue that this points to the existence of a male-biased warrior class, something found in many societies.

    “The word ‘war’ is such a loaded term,” says Linda Fibiger at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. But the conflicts observed meet many of the criteria. “There’s no doubt that it’s something that happens at large scale, and it’s probably intergroup rather than intragroup,” she says.
    We can’t know for sure why the conflicts were happening, but Schulting says there are some hints. People living in the bottom of the valley and those living in nearby foothills seem to have had subtly different diets and to have practised different funerary rites. “That gives us this sense that there are different political communities, different social communities, living quite close to each other,” he says.
    The researchers also found evidence of malnourishment and other poor health indicators. “This might have been a stressful period,” says Fibiger.
    “This article adds to the emerging picture we have of the early Neolithic as a time of significant stress, likely linked to growing inequality and changes in the structure of society,” says Smith.
    Smith and Fibiger are both co-authors of a review published in January that concluded violence was endemic in Neolithic Europe, probably due to competition over arable land, and that it sometimes wiped out entire communities.

    Topics:war/archaeology More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    A rare glimpse at a relatively nearby supernova offers clues to how stars die

    In May, a star in the Pinwheel galaxy exploded in just the right place at nearly the right time for astronomers to unravel details of its death. It was the closest supernova to go off in the last five years.

    Astronomers have long been fascinated with these stellar explosions, which signal the end of life for the universe’s biggest stars. Not only are they dramatic — a supernova can shine 5 billion times as bright as our sun — but the explosions seed the universe with gold, silver, zinc and other elements forged only in a dying star’s last moments.

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    in Humans

    People around Europe have eaten seaweed for thousands of years

    Sea lettuce is an edible alga found on coastlines around EuropeSeaphotoart / Alamy
    People in coastal areas across Europe have been eating seaweed for thousands of years, traces of algae on their teeth have revealed.
    There are over 10,000 species of seaweeds that grow close to coastlines around the world. Today, many of these organisms are considered a health food, particularly in Asia, with around 145 regularly eaten species.
    “Seaweed is great. It’s available, it’s nutritious, it’s local, it’s renewable,” says Karen Hardy at the University of Glasgow in the UK.Advertisement
    There is little evidence for seaweed being a part of ancient diets, apart from at one site in Chile from about 14,000 years ago.
    Hardy and her colleagues first discovered traces of seaweed in the calcified plaque on human teeth found at a Neolithic burial site in Orkney, Scotland, dating back around 5000 years.
    “We were absolutely astonished,” says Hardy. “This is the first time anyone’s ever detected specific evidence for the consumption of seaweed [in dental plaque].”
    After these initial findings, the team decided to expand their study to the rest of Europe. In total, they collected dental plaque samples from 74 individuals from 28 ancient sites in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Estonia and Lithuania.
    Of these, 33 individuals had the chemical traces of seaweed or freshwater aquatic plants in their plaque. Those who were buried nearer to the coast were more likely to have evidence of seaweed consumption, while those inland tended to eat freshwater aquatic plants.
    The results show that people ate seaweed and marine plants from the Mesolithic, around 8000 years ago, right through to the start of the Middle Ages, around 1500 years ago. This suggests that these foods may well have been a staple part of ancient Europeans’ diet for several millennia.

    Since then, seaweed seems to have fallen out of fashion in Europe, says Hardy. “But it would be nice if this study could help to encourage a wider consumption of seaweed in Europe today.”
    “This study is important for documenting the early consumption of this abundant maritime food source,” says Tom Dillehay at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “The presence of seaweeds in early European sites does not surprise me. I think that in many previous archaeological studies around the world, it was not a dietary element many people expected and thus [they] likely gave little [notice] to it.”

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    in Humans

    Student uses AI to decipher word in ancient scroll from Herculaneum

    The Greek word for “purple” has been extracted from a Herculaneum scrollVesuvius Challenge
    Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: “porphyras”, meaning “purple”.
    The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans.
    “Seeing Luke’s first word was a shock,” says Michael McOsker at the University of Cologne in Germany, who was not involved in the discovery. “It was immediately convincing, like ‘Good lord, that’s Greek.’”Advertisement

    Farritor analysed the 3D scans as a competitor in the open-source Vesuvius Challenge, which is awarding a series of prizes for deciphering the scrolls. He submitted his discovery in August.
    At almost the same time, Youssef Nader, a data science graduate student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, independently discovered the same word using a different AI technique to detect possible letter shapes within the scroll image segments. This provided an even clearer picture of the scroll segment, and is already yielding new, clear images of others. McOsker described Nader’s first word snapshot as “even more impressive” than Farritor’s.
    The discovery builds on the work of previous Vesuvius Challenge contributors, who designed computational tools for mapping out segments of scroll. It was also made possible because of the 3D X-ray scans produced by a team led by Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky.
    In the past, papyrologists could only study the Herculaneum scrolls by physically unrolling them – a process that inevitably damaged the ancient papyri that had been carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them, says McOsker. And even once researchers started using 3D imaging and computational techniques to digitally reveal the hidden contents of the scrolls, “attempts to read the still rolled-up papyri were mirages”, he says.
    This latest breakthrough may pave the way for someone to claim the Vesuvius Challenge’s grand prize, worth $700,000, by reading four passages of text from inside two intact scrolls before 31 December 2023.
    “I’m confident that Luke, Youssef, and the other competitors can solve a whole roll,” says McOsker. “Up until now, all the unrolled papyri that we study are missing their beginnings and are in bad condition, so the prospect of a reading a complete text, from beginning to end, is really quite something.”

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The black hole–powered jet in galaxy M87 is making stars explode

    High-speed gas shooting from the galaxy M87 is causing stars to go nova, a study suggests, and no one knows how.

    A nova occurs after a dense star known as a white dwarf receives gas from an orbiting star (SN: 2/12/21). As the white dwarf’s intense gravity squeezes the gas, it heats up and explodes, but both stars survive the violence. In fact, over millions of years, the same star goes nova again and again. Recent observations indicate that these eruptions forged much, and perhaps most, of the universe’s supply of the valuable metal lithium (SN: 5/7/19).

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    Nova explosions erupt in our galaxy as well as others, including the giant elliptical M87, whose jet of fast-moving gas is powered by the black hole at the galaxy’s center (SN: 4/10/19). Now Hubble Space Telescope data show that there’s an excess of these explosions along M87’s jet, researchers report in a study submitted September 28 to arXiv.org.

    Alec Lessing, an undergraduate student at Stanford University, Michael Shara, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and their colleagues used the telescope to locate 135 nova outbursts in M87, whose jet is many thousands of light-years long. The galaxy itself is 54 million light-years from Earth, at the heart of the nearest galaxy cluster, named Virgo.

    The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this composite picture of the galaxy M87 and its jet of fast-moving gas, which is many thousands of light-years long.NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA

    After identifying the nova explosions, the team plotted their positions in the galaxy. “It was striking to the eye,” Shara says of the plot. “The novae appeared to be preferentially aligned with the jet.”

    By dividing the galaxy into 10 equal sectors, the astronomers found that 25 blasts occurred along the jet — versus only 10 to 16 in each of the galaxy’s other sectors. The chance that this is just a statistical fluke is only about 0.3 percent, the researchers say.

    “I was really surprised,” says Massimo Della Valle, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Naples, who was not involved with the new study. “If these objects are novae, the jet has to be responsible for this somehow.”

    Perhaps, he says, the jet pushes interstellar gas onto white dwarf stars in nova systems, increasing the amount of material that accumulates on the stars’ surfaces. As a result, the white dwarfs explode more frequently than they otherwise would, accounting for the surplus of nova outbursts along the jet.

    The jet itself, Shara says, doesn’t seem to supply enough gas or radiation to explain the explosions. “The jet is to blame, but we just don’t know why or how,” he says. “It is somehow causing the novae to be more prevalent in that sector, but whether it’s because it’s triggering the novae somehow or birthing the novae — making more of them there — or some other process … we don’t know.”

    For additional clues, Shara hopes to use Hubble to examine other galaxies that resemble M87, to see whether their jets are also accompanied by such eruptions. More

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    Early humans lived in Ethiopian highlands 2 million years ago

    Illustration of a Homo erectus child with her mother in the Ethiopian highlandsDiego Rodriguez Robredo
    Ancient humans were living in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia as early as 2 million years ago. A reanalysis of a fossilised jawbone from the region confirms that it belonged to a Homo erectus, and represents the earliest evidence of hominins living in such high-altitude areas.
    The highlands represent “a third pole for human evolution in Africa”, says Margherita Mussi of the Italo-Spanish Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture and Balchit, based in Rome. Hominins have been found in large numbers in eastern and southern Africa, but not to date in upland areas.
    Mussi and her colleagues re-examined the lower jawbone of an infant, which was discovered in 1981 at a site called Garba IV in the Ethiopian highlands. Garba IV is one of a cluster of sites known collectively as Melka Kunture. Mussi has nicknamed the jawbone “Little Garba”.Advertisement
    The jawbone had previously been identified as an early member of the genus Homo, which includes our own species Homo sapiens and several now-extinct groups. However, it wasn’t possible to confidently identify the species.
    Mussi and her team used synchrotron imaging to study Little Garba’s teeth, which hadn’t yet erupted from the jawbone. They compared the shape of the teeth to those of multiple hominin species. “The teeth are a very good marker, so we can say for sure this is indeed an early Homo erectus,” says Mussi.
    In a previous study published in 2021, Mussi’s team also re-dated the Garba IV site. It consists of layers of sediment laid down over time. In the sediments, the researchers found traces of past shifts in Earth’s magnetic field, which could be matched to similar records elsewhere. Based on this, they conclude that Little Garba is 2 million years old. This makes it one of the oldest H. erectus ever found.
    It may even be that the species evolved in the highlands. “We don’t know if Homo erectus evolved at lower altitudes and came up, or if it evolved locally,” says Mussi.
    Furthermore, the researchers re-examined the stone tools found in the sediments at Garba IV. They say there is a transition from older and simpler Oldowan tools to more sophisticated Acheulean tools between 2 and 1.95 million years ago. The Acheulean tools were harder to make because they required careful planning, but they opened up a wider range of foods.
    Putting these lines of evidence together, Mussi argues that the H. erectus population had to adapt to conditions in the highlands, and developed new styles of stone tools to do so.
    The identification of Little Garba as H. erectus looks solid, says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France. He is less convinced by the transition from Oldowan to Acheulean, because there aren’t many Oldowan tools in the older layers.

    For Zanolli, “the most exciting aspect” of the study is the highland location. “It’s the oldest [hominin] we know to have reached the high plateau of Ethiopia,” he says. While it is possible that future excavations might find even older hominins in the area, “for now it’s the earliest”.
    Garba IV is about 2000 metres above sea level, which isn’t so high that low oxygen levels would be a major challenge, says Zanolli. It would have been colder than lowland areas, but the lowlands were also desert, so the highlands may have been more hospitable. “In this high-altitude environment you have more trees, more bushes, probably more animals,” he says. “So it’s very likely easier to find food and to survive there.”
    Millennia later, H. erectus became the first known hominin to expand its population beyond Africa, reaching Dmanisi in what is now Georgia by 1.8 million years ago, and Java in what became Indonesia by perhaps 1.3 million years ago. Living in the Ethiopian highlands may have been good preparation, says Mussi. If Homo erectus was able to adapt to this environment, it could also live in other cooler regions away from the equator, she says.

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    Neanderthals hunted cave lions with spears and made use of their pelts

    Illustration of Neanderthals butchering a freshly killed cave lionJulio Lacerda/NLD
    Neanderthals sometimes hunted now-extinct big cats called cave lions, which were larger than modern lions. The finding is some of the earliest evidence of ancient humans killing top predators, as opposed to plant-eaters like mammoths.
    The evidence is twofold: a cave lion (Panthera spelaea) specimen revealing evidence of hunting and the remains of a cave lion pelt with its claws still attached.
    Gabriele Russo at the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues re-examined a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton found at Siegsdorf in Germany in the 1980s.Advertisement
    Researchers already knew there were cut marks on the bones, suggesting the lion had been butchered after death. Russo has now found a puncture mark on one of its ribs, which seems to have been made by a wooden spear thrust into the animal’s chest. The injury had previously been misidentified as a wound from another carnivore.
    Modern humans (Homo sapiens) hadn’t yet established themselves in Europe 48,000 years ago. Instead, the continent was home to Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). It seems they were the hunters.
    Russo’s team also uncovered a new cave lion specimen in the Einhornhöhle cave in Germany. In a layer of sediment dated to about 190,000 years ago, they found bones from the tips of the lion’s toes.
    These had cut marks consistent with the animal having been skinned “in such a way that the claws were left in the paw of the animal”, says Russo. The team interprets this as evidence that Neanderthals took the cave lion’s skin into the cave, perhaps for a ritual purpose or simply for decoration.
    The cave lion remains from Siegsdorf displayed alongside a reproduction of a wooden spear similar to those used by NeanderthalsVolker Minkus/NLD
    By this time, hominins had been hunting a wide range of animals for a long time. There is evidence of earlier species like Homo erectus killing the likes of wildebeest in Africa up to 2 million years ago. Later, Neanderthals hunted huge animals like elephants. However, Russo says they probably didn’t target top predators like cave lions very often, partly because they are less common than herbivores, and partly because of the danger involved.
    There is also a 2010 study describing the remains of a cave lion found at Atapuerca in northern Spain, from around 350,000 years ago. At the time, the region was inhabited by the ancestors of Neanderthals. In theory, this could push back the evidence for hominins hunting lions even further. However, although the paper is called “The hunted hunter”, Russo says there is no evidence of hunting-related injuries and the animal could have been scavenged.

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