More stories

  • in

    Homo naledi infant skull discovery suggests they buried their dead

    By Michael Marshall

    [embedded content]
    The skull of a small child belonging to a different human species has been found deep in a cave system in South Africa. The team that made the discovery has named the child Leti and believes the skull shows that the Homo naledi species buried their dead.
    Leti’s skull was found in a narrow fissure that is almost impossible to access. For that reason, the team argues that the skull was placed there deliberately, as a form of funerary practice. Presenting their findings at a virtual press conference, the researchers said it is evidence that hominins have been performing funerary rights for hundreds of thousands of years – even hominins with brains much smaller than ours.
    “We can see no other reason for this small child’s skull being in the extraordinarily difficult position,” said Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
    Berger and his colleagues have been exploring the Rising Star cave system in South Africa for several years. In 2015, they described Homo naledi, a new species of hominin, found in the caves. More than a thousand bones were found strewn over the floor of the system’s Dinaledi Chamber, which could only be reached by expert cavers able to fit through small spaces. H. naledi had some features that resembled modern humans, but in other respects it looked like an older species: in particular, its brain was small.Advertisement
    Two years later, the researchers found a remarkably complete H. naledi skeleton in another part of the cave, the Lesedi Chamber. They called the individual Neo. Crucially, the team also managed to narrow down how long ago H. naledi lived. The remains are only about 250,000 years old, meaning H. naledi existed at the same time as our species and other big-brained hominins like the Neanderthals – yet they retained features from species that lived millions of years earlier.
    Meet Leti
    In September 2017, the team was exploring deeper parts of the cave, beyond the Dinaledi and Lesedi Chambers.
    Marina Elliott of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, was one of the researchers who went in. The distance isn’t great – “It’s about 12 metres from where the Dinaledi material was originally recovered in 2013-14,” she said – but the journey is claustrophobically challenging.
    Elliott had to first go through a room dubbed the Chaos Chamber. “There’s boulders that have fallen from the ceiling,” she said. “Then there’s a little bit of a drop into a crawlspace that just literally leads into a couple of small narrow passages.” These passages are only tens of centimetres across, so the researchers had to turn sideways and even partly upside-down to get inside.
    In one such passage, about 20 centimetres across and 80 centimetres tall, the researchers found a small ledge. Sitting on the ledge were 28 fragments of skull and six teeth.
    When the researchers brought the remains back to the surface, they realised they probably belonged to one individual. They named the individual Leti, from the Setswana word letimela, meaning “the lost one”.
    Named Leti, the Homo naledi child’s skull fragments were found in an extremely hard to access chamber.Brett Eloff Photography/Wits University
    The team has now described Leti, and the surrounding caves, in two papers. Two of the teeth were milk teeth and four were adult. The adult teeth weren’t worn, suggesting they had only recently emerged from the gums. Based on this evidence, “Leti was probably somewhere between 4 and 6 years of age,” said team member Juliet Brophy of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
    Leti probably dates back to the same time as the other H. naledi remains, said Tebogo Makhubela at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who was also involved in the work. “We are assigning the age based on the similarity of the geology in all these chambers,” he said.
    Primitive funeral?
    Right from the start, Berger has suggested that the H. naledi bones were placed in the Rising Star cave system deliberately, by other H. naledi, after they died. “I think it’s fair to say it was controversial in 2015 to say a small-brained, primitive-looking hominin might have been deliberately disposing of its dead,” he said. But, he argued, “there’s been no credible evidence against that original hypothesis”.
    The discovery of Leti, even deeper into the cave system, adds to the evidence, Berger argued. On this reading, Rising Star is a H. naledi grave.
    Other potential explanations seem unlikely, said team member Darryl de Ruiter of Texas A&M University in College Station. “There’s no indication of any carnivore activity: no tooth marks, no gnawing, nothing like that,” he said. That means it is unlikely other animals carried the bones into the caves. “There’s no indication that there’s a large-scale water movement depositing these things,” he added.
    There is evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead as early as 70,000 years ago. They had larger brains than H. naledi, though. There is also evidence that other animals grieve – from apes and monkeys to orcas and elephants – but no evidence of them carefully placing bodies in caves or other burial sites.
    [embedded content]
    How might H. naledi have carried the remains of their dead so deep? “Our geologists are fairly certain that these deep areas of the the cave have always been in the complete dark zone,” said team member Steven Churchill of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He said cavers sometimes come across living baboons in the cave, seemingly feeling their way around. “Which is probably a terrifying experience,” he says. Conceivably H. naledi did the same.
    Alternatively, they may have used fire to light their way. “There are bits of charcoal in the cave, but nothing we’ve been able to firmly associate with the hominins,” said Churchill. But controlled fire use goes back 400,000 years, at least in Europe. Churchill said “it wouldn’t be surprising” if H. naledi could make flaming torches to light their way.
    Journal reference: PaleoAnthropology, DOI: 10.48738/2021.iss1.64; DOI: 10.48738/2021.iss1.68
    Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution.

    More on these topics: More

  • in

    Whirlwind romance: What a tornado can do for your relationship

    Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

    Humans

    3 November 2021

    Josie Ford
    Gone with the wind
    How do natural disasters affect intimate relationships? Feedback maintains a long list of questions we had never thought of asking, a fact that will surprise no one who knows of our predilection for impossible logic. So we are pleased to see this query now comprehensively answered in the paper “Experiencing a natural disaster temporarily boosts relationship satisfaction in newlywed couples” by Hannah Williamson at the University of Texas at Austin and her colleagues.
    The study involved 231 couples in Harris county, Texas, around the time of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and is the “first to use longitudinal data collected before and after a natural disaster to examine its effect on relationship outcomes”. This rather raises the question in our mind of how long the researchers were waiting, patiently observing, for disaster to strike – or perhaps it is merely a case of when, rather than if, in that part of Texas. Or maybe they have a button they can press, in which case we think we and the ethics board should be told.
    No matter: for anyone wondering whether a fortuitously timed tornado might put the whirlwind back into their romance, whether a wildfire can relight their fire or whether Earth moving makes the earth move, the answer is yes – but make hay while the sun’s not shining. Couples soon “revert to their prehurricane levels of functioning as the recovery period continues”. For a longer-term boost, you will just have to move to somewhere more dangerous.Advertisement
    Block head
    Feedback is excited to learn that an article in New Scientist has been cited in the defence of Mike Graham, the presenter at talkRADIO – a UK radio station where the opinions can be as suddenly shouty as the name – who claimed while interviewing environmental activist Cameron Ford that you can grow concrete.
    We fear the clues may be in the quotes in the headline, “Living ‘concrete’ made from bacteria used to create replicating bricks”, and in the first line of the article, “A type of living concrete made from bacteria could one day help to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry”.
    No, Mike and all: to the best of our knowledge, we cannot grow concrete. Mind you, with all the wonderful things we are learning you can do with cellulose, grasping at straws may prove to be a viable alternative.
    Taking the low road
    “They got you covered, either way”, is Quentin Macilray’s comment as he writes from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic with a picture of a van advertising Camino Eterno, a combined ambulance and undertaking service. We can’t better Quentin’s description of it as a quantum business governed by the collapse – or not – of the customer’s wave function. We are left wondering about the quality of the driving.
    Menage au fromage
    This week’s prize for research that made us involuntarily choke on our cocoa is “Sex in cheese: evidence for sexuality in the fungus Penicillium roqueforti”.
    Our late-night stilton eating may never be as innocent again with the revelation that, far from living a life of monastic asceticism and reproducing purely asexually, the little blue-cheese-making blighters are – we know of no way to put this delicately – at it all the time. “The screening of a large sample of strains isolated from diverse substrates throughout the world revealed the existence of individuals of both mating types, even in the very same cheese,” the researchers write, with what sounds like glee.
    Investigating the sexual capabilities of cheese mould isn’t something we had considered as a calling before. The affiliation of the team involved – the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France – causes us to narrow our eyes ever so slightly, while giving the faintest of wise nods.
    Where’s my elephant?
    Nick Parlow writes taking exception to a suggestion made in our thread on finding an elephant in the room (4 September and 2 October). “I’m sure that others have pointed out how ludicrous it is to paint an elephant’s toenails red and hide it in a cherry tree,” he writes. “That amount of red nail varnish would be prohibitively expensive. Happily there is a far more practical method: paint the soles of its feet yellow, and hide it upside down in the custard.”
    We are pleased to make this plain, Nick, given also that you reference the source “Cunningham and Blake (1974), The Puffin Joke Book“, leaving us in no doubt that this is settled science and that the old ones are the best.
    Elementary errors
    While in the vein of nostra culpa, opprobrium – an alkaline earth metal, we believe – has rained down on the Feedback inbox following an ad for New Scientist subscriptions in our 23 October issue. With the tagline “That’s elementary”, it promised the gift of some rather surprising chemistry this Christmas. The non-metal selenium became a lanthanide, while both the transition metal rhenium and the excitingly short-lived halogen tennessine were Nobel gases.
    No prizes there. Apologies to all who felt pH-imbalanced, and for all those asking what we intend to do with those responsible: barium.
    Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
    You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

  • in

    Is it true that use of synthetic fertiliser is increasing everywhere?

    By James Wong

    Fotokostic/Shutterstock
    THE interconnectivity of our world never fails to amaze me. Even as a plant scientist fascinated by food production, I am often astonished by the extent to which changes in a seemingly unrelated industry on a distant part of the planet can affect our dinner plates – and the reaction of pundits to these impacts.
    Recently, news broke that soaring global fertiliser costs, created by factors such as rising energy prices in China, would be likely to have a devastating knock-on effect on the food security of some of the poorest people on Earth.
    Surprisingly, some activists and thought leaders saw … More

  • in

    River's End review: Inside the battle for California's water

    By Katie Smith-Wong

    HOME to more than 39 million people, California is the most populous US state. It is also among the driest. Together, these factors make demand for water a long-standing challenge. River’s End, a new documentary by Jacob Morrison, dives deep into the water crisis and asks difficult questions about who gets the water and why.
    At the centre of the film is the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, an estuary in the north of the state. Connecting the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta is a key source of fresh water and the battleground for the latest California water war.
    In 2015, then-governor Jerry Brown and the California Department of Water Resources proposed a $15 billion plan now known as California WaterFix & EcoRestore that would see two large tunnels built from the Sacramento river under the delta to provide water for California. Inevitably, not everyone agrees with the plan: the tunnels would redirect water towards southern California, reducing freshwater supplies to farmers around the delta.
    Narrated by DeLanna Studi, River’s End combines stock footage of landscapes around the delta and other parts of California, which highlights the fluctuating water supply levels, with simple animation to bring an educational slant and explain the extent and significance of the issue. With interviewees including politicians, corporate officials and local farmers, Morrison delivers a bleak yet brutally honest insight into the battle for water.
    The documentary touches briefly on supply disputes in the early 20th century in the Owens valley and its role in the California water wars, which comprised a number of political conflicts between local farmers and the City of Los Angeles over water rights. But its main thrust examines how current supply issues are causing conflict between regional corporations and local farmers.
    Both sides say they need water to run their businesses, but it soon becomes clear that the local communities don’t have nearly as much government support as the corporations. There is testimony from frustrated local farmers who rely on water from the delta to grow their produce and say their livelihoods have been affected, not only by a lack of supply, but also by pumping facilities, which take water away from the area.
    The situation in the Westlands Water District in central California proves particularly enlightening. Its connections with ex-President Donald Trump (via former Westlands lobbyist David Bernhardt), a focus on lucrative yet thirsty almond farming and the substantial difference in living conditions between farm owners and workers in the field paint a stark picture of the power and influence of large corporations.
    Although the corporation-versus-the-little-person narrative is all too recognisable, the documentary also zooms out further to highlight the consequences on the wider environment and the wildlife that also relies on it for survival. Among the locally endangered species mentioned is the delta smelt, a fish species that is close to extinction due to the ongoing damage to the delta’s ecosystem.
    River’s End provides a thorough overview of California’s water issues and the need to achieve a sustainable water supply. It ends with a solemn message. As the state’s population continues to grow, it remains unclear whether there will be enough water to meet the requirements of all those who need it. In the end, it may come down to who needs, or perhaps who wants, it more.

    More on these topics: More

  • in

    Heart rates synchronise if two people get on well during first date

    A study of young heterosexual people on blind dates found that those who instantly felt sparks developed synchronised patterns of heart rates and palm sweating

    Humans

    1 November 2021

    By Alice Klein

    During a successful date, people’s heart rates synchroniseShutterstock/Dragon Images
    When people feel instant chemistry with each other on a first date, their hearts start to beat in tune, a new study shows.
    We often think we know what we are looking for in a partner, but research shows that the people we actually end up falling for often don’t match our ideal preferences.
    “While someone may seem a perfect match on Tinder, we may feel nothing when we meet the person in real life,” says Eliska Prochazkova at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This may be because attraction isn’t simply based on what someone “looks like on paper”, but also on a gut feeling we get when we are with them, she says.Advertisement
    To study what happens at a physiological level when people instantly spark on a first date, Prochazkova and her colleagues set up “dating cabins” at three festivals – one for music, one for arts and one for science – in the Netherlands.
    They invited 142 single heterosexual males and females aged 18 to 38 to go on 4-minute blind dates in these cabins. The participants wore eye-tracking glasses, heart rate monitors and devices for monitoring the sweatiness of their palms.
    Some pairs reported becoming more attracted to each other as their dates progressed, while others failed to click. Of all the pairs that were matched up, 17 per cent expressed a mutual wish to go on another date.

    The pairs that wanted to see each other again and rated each other as attractive tended to be those who developed physiological synchrony. Their heart rates began to speed up and slow down at the same time and their palm sweatiness increased and decreased in tandem.
    It was common for pairs to also mirror each other’s smiles, laughs, head nods and hand gestures, but this type of synchrony didn’t predict mutual attraction.
    The results largely replicate those that the team found in an earlier version of the study, which they posted to a preprint server in 2019.
    The mechanism underlying physiological synchrony is still unclear, but it is possible that when you meet someone you really like, you unconsciously pay attention to their micro-expressions, such as pupil dilation, eye blinking or blushing, says Prochazkova. “Although you do not consciously register these subtle changes, your brain and body unconsciously process these micro-expressions, which causes your heart rate and skin conductance to sync with the partner.”
    Physiological synchrony has also been observed between mothers and their babies while they are playing together, suggesting it may help to strengthen social bonds more generally, says Prochazkova.
    Although the new study shows what happens at a deeper biological level when two people feel mutual attraction, we still need more research to answer why we fall for the people we do, says Prochazkova. “What sparks this feeling between people remains one of the unsolved mysteries of science.”
    Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01197-3

    More on these topics: More

  • in

    Ancient Roman statues discovered during HS2 high-speed railway dig

    Two complete statues of a man and a woman, along with other Roman objects, were uncovered by archaeologists working on the planned route of the UK’s HS2 high-speed railway

    Humans

    28 October 2021

    By New Scientist
    and Press Association

    One of the Roman statues unearthed at the site of St Mary’s Church in Stoke Mandeville, UKPA Media
    Archaeologists digging on the planned route of the UK’s HS2 high-speed railway have uncovered an “astounding” set of Roman statues. The discovery was made at the site where St. Mary’s, a medieval church in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire, once stood.
    Two complete statues of what appear to be a man and a woman were found, plus the head of a child. A hexagonal glass Roman jug was also uncovered with large pieces still intact, despite having been in the ground for what is thought to be more than 1000 years. A vessel on display in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is the only known comparable item.
    Rachel Wood, lead archaeologist for HS2 contractor Fusion JV, told the Press Association news agency: “They’re hugely significant because they’re really rare finds in the UK. To find one stone head or one set of shoulders would be really astonishing, but we have two complete heads and shoulders as well as a third head as well.”Advertisement

    “They’re even more significant to us archaeologically because they’ve actually helped change our understanding of the site here before the medieval church was built,” she said.
    The discoveries at old St Mary’s Church have been sent to a laboratory for specialist cleaning and analysis. “They are so significant and so remarkable that we would certainly hope that they will end up on display for the local community to see,” said Wood.
    Experts believe the location was used as a Roman mausoleum before the Norman church was built. Around 3000 bodies have been removed from the church and will be reburied at a new site.
    Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

    More on these topics: More

  • in

    New human species has been named Homo bodoensis – but it may not stick

    By Michael Marshall

    Artist’s rendition of Homo bodoensis, a new species of human ancestor that lived in AfricaEttore Mazza
    A new species of extinct human has been named: Homo bodoensis. The species hasn’t been identified based on new fossils, but on re-examination of old ones. Why do researchers think there is another species of human? Here’s what you need to know.
    Who was Homo bodoensis?
    Homo bodoensis is the proposed name for fossils of a group of hominins that lived in Africa during a period commonly known as the Middle Pleistocene, but now technically called the Chibanian, between 770,000 and 126,000 years ago. The species has been described by Mirjana Roksandic at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and her colleagues. It is named for the Bodo cranium, which was found in 1976 at Bodo D’ar in the Awash river valley of Ethiopia. The cranium is about 600,000 years old.Advertisement
    The researchers argue that H. bodoensis lived widely throughout Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. They suggest that other specimens of this species include Kabwe 1 from Zambia, the Ndutu and Ngaloba skulls from Tanzania and the Saldanha cranium from Elandsfontein in South Africa. H. bodoensis may also have wandered into the eastern Mediterranean, they say.
    What were all these fossils classified as before?
    They were given various species designations, which were often used in contradictory ways. For example, depending on which studies you read, the Bodo cranium is variously called Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. Both species are hard to pin down.
    H. heidelbergensis is named for a 609,000-year-old jawbone found in Mauer, Germany. A number of similar bones are known from Europe and Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. But researchers differ on whether they are all H. heidelbergensis.
    Meanwhile, H. rhodesiensis was first named to describe the Kabwe 1 skull. This bone was found in 1921 in what is now Zambia, but was then called Northern Rhodesia. At the time the area was controlled by the British Empire. The name Rhodesia originates with Cecil Rhodes, a British mining magnate and politician. Partly because of this association, Roksandic says, the name is rarely used.
    What other hominins lived during the Middle Pleistocene?
    In a word, lots. In Europe, the Neanderthals emerged during this period, while further east in Asia their sister group the Denisovans also evolved. In southern Africa there was Homo naledi. Finally, modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago – about halfway through the Middle Pleistocene.
    This tangle of species has been dubbed “the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene”. The problem is sorting out which fossils belong to which species and thus how widespread and long-lived each species was. There is also the issue of figuring out which species gave rise to which.
    For example, it used to be thought that H. heidelbergensis was the ancestor of Neanderthals. However, this cannot be true because genetics tells us that Neanderthals emerged early in the Middle Pleistocene, possibly even before the time of the oldest H. heidelbergensis fossils. There were Neanderthals living in northern Spain 430,000 years ago. In the past five years, many European specimens previously described as H. heidelbergensis have been reclassified as early Neanderthals.

    Where does H. bodoensis fit into all of this?
    Roksandic and her colleagues want to make sense of the muddle. They argue that all the African fossils previously called H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis should be thought of as one species, H. bodoensis. This species, they argue, eventually gave rise to ours.
    Meanwhile, they say H. heidelbergensis fossils found in Europe can all be reclassified as early Neanderthals, and that fossils from the eastern Mediterranean that don’t quite fit any of the species could represent interbreeding.
    The team chose H. bodoensis so that these African hominins would “finally” have an African name, says Roksandic.
    Does everyone agree we need a new species name?
    It’s not necessary, says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
    Stringer does agree that H. heidelbergensis has been used too loosely. “I’m partly to blame for this wide usage of heidelbergensis,” he says apologetically. He thinks it should now be confined to the original Mauer jawbone and some other European fossils, such as the BH-1 jawbone from Mala Balanica cave in Serbia.
    As for the African remains, Stringer is happy to use H. rhodesiensis. He argues it was named for the country in which it was found, not for Cecil Rhodes himself, and therefore doesn’t honour him. Furthermore, the rules set out by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature state that established names have priority – so because H. rhodesiensis has already been formally named, it should be used unless the original description was wrong.
    Alternatively, if H. rhodesiensis is deemed unsuitable because of its imperial connotations, Stringer says there are pre-existing alternatives. For example, the Saldanha cranium – one of the specimens Roksandic’s team placed in H. bodoensis – was dubbed Homo saldanensis by Matthew Drennan in the 1950s. “Even if you got rid of rhodesiensis, there are other names that would apply rather than creating a new one,” says Stringer.
    Stringer is also sceptical of the claim that the Bodo cranium is our direct ancestor. In 2019, his team published a study of the evolution of the human face, which found that the species the Bodo cranium belonged to had gone down a different evolutionary path to our species.
    Journal reference: Evolutionary Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/EVAN.21929
    Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

    More on these topics: More

  • in

    DNA of Native American leader Sitting Bull matched to living relative

    Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull, is famed as a 19th century leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux people – and DNA strengthens the claim that he has living descendants

    Humans

    28 October 2021

    By Alakananda Dasgupta

    Sitting BullClassic Image/Alamy
    A study that blends history with contemporary DNA technology has further strengthened the claim of a familial relationship between a living Native American and a historical figure: Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull.
    Sitting Bull was a leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux people. In 1876, he was victorious against General Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
    Today, Ernie LaPointe, a Native American author and president of the Sitting Bull Family Foundation, is widely accepted as the great-grandson of Sitting Bull. Now, LaPointe has had his claim strengthened by genetics.Advertisement
    LaPointe and his three sisters have previously used historical records, including birth and death certificates, to make a strong case of a familial relationship with Sitting Bull. In 2007, a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair that had been preserved at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC was repatriated to LaPointe and his sisters – and a small sample was sent to a team of geneticists led by Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen to allow for DNA analysis.
    The outcome of the analysis was important for LaPointe, who is named as a co-author on the new study. In order to secure the right to determine the fate of the final resting place of Sitting Bull, he needed to provide irrefutable evidence that Sitting Bull was indeed his forbear. Genetic evidence would serve this purpose.

    By comparing DNA from Sitting Bull’s hair with DNA from LaPointe’s saliva, the new study does indeed irrefutably establish that LaPointe is the great-grandson of the legendary leader, says Willerslev.
    Willerslev says the methods generally used to establish ancestry, such as analysis of the Y chromosome, weren’t possible in this case because the DNA in the hair sample was so degraded. But it was possible to use haplotype frequency to establish a relationship. A haplotype is a set of alleles inherited from one parent. Even unrelated individuals can share common haplotypes, so Willerslev’s team took saliva samples from non-related members of LaPointe’s community, to detect haplotypes that were specific to Sitting Bull’s bloodline.
    “It’s fair to say that the more material you have… the more reliable your results will be,” says Willerslev, but he is still confident that the genetic evidence is incontrovertible.
    Willerslev, who has been fascinated by Sitting Bull and his legacy since childhood, attended a traditional Lakota ceremony where Sitting Bull’s spirit was resurrected to obtain permission to use the reclaimed lock of hair for scientific scrutiny.
    Oglala Lakota Nation President Kevin Killer, a Lakota Sioux Native American leader, explains that hair has a special significance in Native American culture and is considered sacred and the seat of the spirit.

    Killer, who wasn’t involved in the study, welcomes the research, which lends support to the culture of oral history of Indigenous people. “To see [our oral history] backed up by science… is a step in proving how strong our oral history that dates back to 10,000 years [is].”
    Kimberly TallBear-Dauphine at the University of Alberta in Canada, a Dakota Native American who wasn’t involved in the study, says that LaPointe’s descent from Sitting Bull was never really contested since Lakota people’s genealogies are very well documented both through paper documentation and oral history.
    “I’m sure there are benefits for scientists in the use of this technology… [but] they are simply confirming genetically what we already knew through other kinds of evidence,” she says.
    Putting the study in perspective, she says: “It certainly doesn’t give Lakota people anything they didn’t already know in terms of Ernie’s relationship with Sitting Bull.”
    Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh2013

    More on these topics: More