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Rewriting human history through our DNA

Tom Garlinghouse
Princeton University
Wed, 18 Dec 2019 17:45 UTC
For most of our evolutionary history — for most of the time anatomically modern humans have been on Earth — we've shared the planet with other species of humans. It's only been in the last 30,000 years, the mere blink of an evolutionary eye, that modern humans have occupied the planet as the sole representative of the hominin lineage.

But we carry evidence of these other species with us. Lurking within our genome are traces of genetic material from a variety of ancient humans that no longer exist. These traces reveal a long history of intermingling, as our direct ancestors encountered — and mated with — archaic humans. As we use increasingly complex technologies to study these genetic connections, we are learning not only about these extinct humans but also about the larger picture of how we evolved as a species.

Joshua Akey, a professor in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, is spearheading efforts to understand this larger picture. He calls his research method genetic archaeology, and it's transforming how we're learning about our past. "We can excavate different types of humans not from dirt and fossils but directly from DNA," he said.
Ancient Map
© Illustration by Michael Francis Reagan
Joshua Akey, a professor in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, uses a research method he calls genetic archaeology to transform how we’re learning about our past. Fossil evidence illustrates the spread of two long-extinct hominin species, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Modern humans carry genes from these species, indicating that our direct ancestors encountered and mated with archaic humans.
Combining his expertise in biology and Darwinian evolution with computational and statistical methods, Akey studies the genetic connections between modern humans and two species of extinct hominins: Neanderthals, the classical "cave men" of paleoanthropology; and Denisovans, a recently discovered archaic human. Akey's research divulges a complex history of the intermixing of early humans, indicative of several millennia of population movements across the globe.
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Christmas Tree

World's oldest known fossil forest found in New York quarry


The Guardian
Fri, 20 Dec 2019 16:21 UTC
Trees would have been home to primitive insects about 150m years before dinosaurs evolved
new york oldest forest
© William Stein/Christopher Berry/PA
The find dates to about 2-3m years older than the previously oldest known fossil forest.
The world's oldest known fossil forest has been discovered in a sandstone quarry in New York state, offering new insights into how trees transformed the planet.

The forest, found in the town of Cairo, would have spanned from New York to Pennsylvania and beyond, and has been dated to about 386m years old. It is one of only three known fossil forests dating to this period and about 2-3m years older than the previously oldest known fossil forest at Gilboa, also in New York state.

"These fossil forests are extremely rare," said Chris Berry from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences. "To really understand how trees began to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we need to understand the ecology and habitats of the very earliest forests."

The forest would have been quite open and its ancient trees would appear alien to the modern eye. A walker would have encountered clusters of Cladoxylopsid, a 10m-tall leafless tree with a swollen base, short branches resembling sticks of celery and shallow, ribbon-like roots. The fossils also revealed a tree called Archaeopteris, something like a pine, but instead of needles the branches and trunk were adorned with fern-like fronds, giving it an almost hairy appearance. "It's not something we can immediately recognise as a modern tree," said Berry.
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2 + 2 = 4

Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker: The life and death of a bogus legend

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
Paul Volcker with Jimmy Carter

Paul Volcker with President Jimmy Carter
Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve during the 1980's, has died at age 92. Major media are writing words of praise for the banker who "killed inflation" in the wake of the 1970's oil crises and food price crisis. Volcker's true legacy is far less positive. No one person did more to bring about the dysfunctional debt-bloated financial system we have today than the former Chase Manhattan Bank economist who spent most of his life in the employ of America's most powerful oligarch family.

Two major events define the true Volcker legacy. First was in August 1971 when he was a senior official in the US Treasury under Nixon. The second was as Jimmy Carter's Fed chairman beginning in October 1979. These define the events that led to the deindustrialization of the United States and the economic collapse of most of the once-developing world beginning four decades ago.

The Break with Gold

During the 1960's the US economy began a serious crisis of under-investment. The world-class industries built up during and just after World War II, from steel to aluminum to Detroit cars were all badly in need of modernization and investment. Europe had rebuilt its industry after the devastation of the war and especially Germany and France were competing with US on the world market with often more advanced state-of-the-art industry. Their economies were earning dollar surpluses for their exports. The problem was that those US dollars were no longer backed by the world's strongest economy.
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Christmas Lights

"The great god Kronos": Dazzling 1,600 year old "Mithraeum of colored marbles" discovered in Italy

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Fri, 13 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC
Mithraeum
© G. Albertini
In this reconstruction of the "Mithraeum of Colored Marbles" the spelaeum, the most important room in the mithraeum, is shown on the bottom level.
Some 1,600 years ago, ancient Romans would have worshipped the god Mithras, possibly in an altered state of consciousness, within the "Mithraeum of Colored Marbles," said archaeologists who found the remains of this temple in Ostia, Italy.

Artifacts and inscriptions found in the mithraeum suggest that the worshippers venerated both Mithras, a popular god in the Roman Empire, and other gods.

The mithraeum's "spelaeum," its most important room, has a stone marble floor decorated with a dazzling array of colors. Also in this room, archaeologists found a bench, a ritual well and a flower bed for some sort of sacred plant, wrote the research team leader Max Victor David, a professor of history and cultures at the University of Bologna in Italy, in a paper published in the journal Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae.
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Boat

30-metre 16th-century shipwreck found amidst Stockholm


Sputnik
Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:37 UTC
The find has been described as an important link between older and newer methods of shipbuilding, as well as a crossover between a transport ship and a warship.
stockholm shipwreck
© Arkeologikonsult/facebook
A shipwreck from the late 16th century discovered in a Stockholm yard has turned out to be a naval cargo vessel capable of bearing up to 20 guns.

The large 30-metre shipwreck was first discovered during the summer by Arkeologikonsult, Sweden's oldest archaeological company. Based on the analysis of the annual rings in the timer, it was dated back to the 1590s, immediately after the Spanish Armada failed to conquer England. Based on the provenance and dates of the timber as well as the size and construction of the ship, it was concluded that it is one of the crown's ships built in Hälsingland. The Samson is the only known alternative.

Large swaths of Stockholm were underwater long into the modern era and were not drained until the middle of the 18th century. The ship was likely abandoned on the shore, only to be filled with debris and garbage from the local area.

"We have found everything from coins and pipes to ceramics and glass, but also a small ball of clay, possibly dropped by a child who played in the wreck during the early 1600s," archaeologist Philip Tonemar said in a statement.
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Pharoah

Artifacts in gold-lined tombs hint at ancient Greek trade relationships

Katherine J. Wu
Smithsonian.com
Wed, 18 Dec 2019 08:38 UTC
The gilded graves, built some 3,500 years ago, likely housed high-status individuals who displayed their wealth with objects from abroad
pylos gold pendant
© Vanessa Muros/University of Cincinnati Classics
Recent excavations in the ancient Greek city of Pylos revealed a gold pendant featuring the likeness of Hathor, an Egyptian goddess who was a protector of the dead
Archaeologists have uncovered two 3,500-year-old gold-lined, beehive-shaped tombs in the ancient city of Pylos in southern Greece. Though the tombs, dubbed Tholos VI and Tholos VII, were looted in antiquity, they are still strewn with thousands of pieces of gold leaf that had once adorned their walls and floors, reports Nicholas Wade for the New York Times.

But the tombs' true treasures may actually be the foreign-looking ornaments and jewelry found within. These artifacts suggest that the ancient residents of Pylos were more interconnected with other parts of the world, including Egypt and the Near East, than previously thought.

"What is emerging ... is that Pylos was a real powerhouse in the early Mycenaean period," Jeremy B. Rutter, a Mycenaean archaeologist at Dartmouth College who wasn't involved in the excavation, tells Wade.

Comment: As more and more artifacts come to light through new excavations and discoveries, we get a better perspective and a clearer picture of the relations of the people of those times. The ancient world appears to have been way more connected than previously thought:

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Heart

The 3,000-year-old social and moral code of The Odyssey

John Beasley
The Duran
Tue, 17 Dec 2019 20:25 UTC
homer
European culture formally began with the books of Homer. These European cultural stories were popularized in Europe approximately 3,000 years ago and then written down by the poet Homer about 2,700 years ago. One of the major themes in Homer is the concept of Xenia. Xenia defines the behavior expected from local European residents toward travelers, strangers, and even immigrants. Xenia also defines the behavior that is expected in return from these guests, these strangers in a strange land. The concepts presented in the Iliad and the Odyssey are considered the foundation of the European cultural tradition termed the code of hospitality or the code of courtesy.

The European tradition of Xenia was incorporated into the emerging Christian traditions in the 1st through 4th centuries. The tradition of Xenia has lasted far better in Eastern Orthodox European cultures than in Western Europe and the English speaking colonial nations. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the countries of Eastern Europe have struggled against many invasions by strangers for over a thousand years. There was the Tartar invasions, Muslim invasions, Roman Catholic inspired invasions and even Communist invasions inspired by the western banking cartels.

Comment: The moral code described by Homer are not empty mythological tales with cursory meaning. They have provided a foundational structure for how a harmonious society is to function, and this code has acted as a stabilizing force for much of history. It's little surprise to witness the current degradation of so many countries because the roles of guest and host have been turned on their heads. This includes everything from war and unregulated immigration to activists demanding priority of the few (outliers) over the many.

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Blue Planet

Ancient human species made 'last stand' 100,000 years ago on Indonesian island

Michael Price
Science Mag
Wed, 18 Dec 2019 14:05 UTC
Homo erectus
© Sylvain Entressangle & Elisabeth Daynes/Science
Fossil evidence reveals that members of Homo erectus on Java, pictured here in an artist’s reconstruction of a specimen who lived approximately 1 million years ago, may have persisted on the island until about 100,000 years ago.
When seafaring modern humans ventured onto the island of Java some 40,000 years ago, they found a rainforest-covered land teeming with life — but they weren't the first humans to call the island home. Their distant ancestor, Homo erectus, had traveled to Java when it was connected to the mainland via land bridges and lived there for approximately 1.5 million years. These people made their last stand on the island about 100,000 years ago, long after they had gone extinct elsewhere in the world, according a new study assigning reliable dates to previously found H. erectus fossils. The finding suggests a trace of H. erectus DNA could live on in modern Southeast Asian populations, thanks to complex intermingling among the diverse humans who have lived in the region.

The newly dated fossils also bookend the existence of a remarkably long-lived human species, says Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who wasn't involved with the study. "With this date, the duration of Homo erectus occupation in Southeast Asia is nearly three times as long as our [own] species has been on the planet," he says. "There is no doubt it was successful."

Comment: See also: Earliest known cave art by modern humans found in Indonesia

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Candy Cane

Neolithic birch bark chewing gum helps recreate image of 5,600 year old Dane

Ian Sample
The Guardian
Tue, 17 Dec 2019 16:00 UTC
Lola
© Tom Bjorklund/PA
Artistic reconstruction of ‘Lola’, whose DNA was found in the birch tar.
At the dawn of the Neolithic era, a young woman discarded a lump of ancient chewing gum made from birch tar into a shallow, brackish lagoon that drew fishers to the coast of southern Denmark.

Nearly 6,000 years later, researchers excavating the site spotted the gum amid pieces of wood and wild animal bone and from it have reassembled her complete DNA and so painted the broadest strokes of her portrait.

The strands of DNA preserved in the gum point to a hunter-gatherer from continental Europe who had dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes. She lived near the lagoon, itself protected from the open sea by shifting sand barriers, about 5,600 years ago, according to carbon dating of the birch tar.

Comment: See also:

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Butterfly

Ancient monkey painting suggests Bronze Age Greeks travelled widely

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Wed, 11 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC
Akrotiri
© Milan Gonda/Alamy
Wall painting of grey langur monkeys at Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini)
A Bronze Age painting on a Greek island shows a monkey from thousands of kilometres away in Asia. The finding suggests that ancient cultures separated by great distances were trading and exchanging ideas.

The artwork is one of several wall paintings in a building at Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. Akrotiri was a settlement of the Minoan civilisation in Bronze Age Greece that was buried by ash from a volcanic eruption in around 1600 BC.

Many of the paintings show monkeys, yet there were no monkeys in Greece at the time. Most of the monkeys have been identified as Egyptian species like olive baboons. This makes sense because Egypt was in contact with the Minoan civilisation, which was spread across several Aegean islands. However, others were harder to identify.

Comment: Indeed there is mounting evidence that ancient civilizations likely had contact over vast distances:

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