Tag Archives: LiveScience

January 14, 2014 · 6:52 pm

Ancient nursery of bizarre spoon-billed sharks discovered

Ancient nursery of bizarre spoon-billed sharks discovered

By Tia Ghose

Published January 10, 2014

LiveScience
  • bandringa-painting

    An artist’s rendering of Bandringa, a 310 million-year-old shark originally found in fossil deposits from Mazon Creek, Illinois. (Painting by John Megahan, University of Michigan.)

Stunningly preserved baby sharks with bizarre, long snouts as well as egg cases from the same species may be the oldest convincing evidence of an ancient shark nursery.

The fossils date to about 310 million years ago.

In unpublished work on egg casings found in Germany, paleontologists have inferred the presence of another ancient shark nursery that is 330 million years old, but “this is the first time we have eggs and fossilized hatchlings in the same place, proving it’s a shark nursery,” said study co-author Lauren Sallan, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

‘It has these giant, needle-like spines on the top of its head and cheeks.’

– study co-author Lauren Sallan

The new research, detailed Tuesday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, also revealed that even back then, the sharks, known as Bandringas, migrated to spawn. [8 Weird Facts About Sharks]

The study also revealed new details about the oddball creature’s anatomy, including a long snout studded with electrical receptors and spines on its head and cheeks.

Known entity The Bandringa fossils were discovered in a coal mine in Mazon Creek, Ill., in 1969. The primitive sharks which had long, spoon-shaped snouts started out as babies measuring just 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) long and eventually grew to be about 10 feet long.

Over time, researchers discovered many other fossils that looked somewhat different from the Mazon Creek specimens, and concluded they were two separate species of Bandringa.

But Sallan and co-author Michael Coates, a biologist at the University of Chicago, went back to museum collections to take a second look at 24 of these fossils. They found that all of the shark fossils were the same species, but the marine samples had preserved the bone, whereas the freshwater samples had preserved soft tissue and cartilage, making them look somewhat different.

Migratory behavior The eggs and hatchlings were found only in the Mazon Creek site, whereas fossils of teenage sharks were found upstream in a river in Ohio, and full-grown sharks were found in Pennsylvania.

The new information suggests the sharks spent different phases of their lives in distinct locations, Sallan said.

About 300 million years ago, much of the area that makes up the present-day midwestern United States was covered by a vast inland sea. The sharks probably laid their eggs along the shoreline of that sea, in present-day Illinois, and when the hatchlings matured, they made their way through a network of rivers to a giant freshwater basin farther east, she said.

New anatomy Some of the specimens’ scaly skin was preserved, as was pigment from the iris of the eye, Sallan said.

By combining the detail found in both the soft tissue and the bone, the team was also able to learn new details about the strange creature’s anatomy.

“It has these giant, needle-like spines on the top of its head and cheeks,” probably to defend against other predators living above it, Sallan told LiveScience.

The new study also revealed that the Bandringas’ snouts were studded with tiny receptors. The bottom-feeders used these receptors to sense the electrical activity of prey in the murky shoreline waters, and then used their vacuum-like mouths to suction up those prey, the studied showed.

Not proven yet Except for examples such as mating insects frozen in time, it’s very difficult to infer the behavior of long-dead species.

But the careful work provides “convincing evidence to support the hypothesis that these rocks preserve a shark nursery from 300 million years ago,” Mark Purnell, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester in England, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

But not everyone is fully convinced that the findings are evidence of nurseries and shark migration.

“The arguments are cogently presented, but they should be treated cautiously,” said John Maisey, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was not involved in the study.

For instance, sharks of all ages may have lived in all of these environments, but certain environments may simply have preserved the soft tissue of baby animals better, whereas others could have made whole-body preservation of adults more likely, Maisey said.

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January 14, 2014 · 6:45 pm

‘Lost’ remains of martyred queen unearthed

‘Lost’ remains of martyred queen unearthed

By Tia Ghose

Published January 13, 2014

LiveScience
  • queen-ketevan

    New DNA analysis of a bone fragment found in an Indian Church suggest that the relic belongs to Queen Ketevan, who was martyred in the 1600s. (Wikimedia Commons)

The remains of a woman kept in an Indian church likely belong to an ancient queen executed about 400 years ago, a new DNA analysis suggests.

The DNA analysis suggests the remains are those of Queen Ketevan, an ancient Georgian queen who was executed for refusing to become a member of a powerful Persian ruler’s harem. The findings are detailed in the January issue of the journal Mitochondrion.

Tumultuous life Ketevan was the Queen of Kakheti, a kingdom in Georgia, in the 1600s. After her husband the king was killed, the Persian Ruler, Shah Abbas I, besieged the kingdom.

“Shah Abbas I led an army to conquer the Georgian kingdom and took Queen Ketevan as prisoner,” said study co-author Niraj Rai, a researcher at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India.

‘[It’s] the first genetic evidence for the sample being a relic of Saint Queen Ketevan.’

– Niraj Rai, a researcher at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India

Queen Ketevan languished in Shiraz, Iran, for about a decade. But in 1624, Shah Abbas asked the queen to convert to Islam from Christianity and join his harem. She refused, and he had her tortured, then executed on Sept. 22, 1624. Ketevan the Martyr was canonized as a saint by the Georgian Orthodox Church shortly after. [Saintly? The 10 Most Controversial Miracles]

Missing relics Before her death, Queen Ketevan had befriended two Augustinian friars who became devoted to her. Legend had it that, in 1627, the two friars secretly dug up her remains and smuggled them out of the country. An ancient Portuguese document suggested her bones were held in a black sarcophagus kept in the window of the St. Augustinian Convent in Goa, India.

But the centuries had not been kind to the church: Part of the convent had collapsed and many valuables had been sold off in the intervening centuries. Early attempts to find her remains failed.

But starting in 2004, Rai and colleagues excavated an area they believed contained the remains and found a broken arm bone and two other bone fragments, as well as pieces of black boxes.

Rare lineage To find out if the bones belonged to the martyred queen, the researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA, or DNA found only in the cytoplasm of an egg that is passed on through the maternal line.

The arm bone once belonged to a female with a genetic lineage, or haplogroup, known as U1b, the analysis showed. In a survey of 22,000 people from the Indian subcontinent, the researchers found none with U1b lineage. By contrast, the lineage was fairly common in a sample of 30 people from Georgia.

The other two bones showed evidence they were part of genetic lineages common in India, which supported documents suggesting the queen’s relics were stored in a room with the bones of two local friars.

“The complete absence of haplogroup U1b in the Indian subcontinent and its presence in high-to-moderate frequency in the Georgia and adjoining regions, provide the first genetic evidence for the [arm bone] sample being a relic of Saint Queen Ketevan of Georgia,” Rai told LiveScience.

The study is well done and honest, Jean-Jacques Cassiman, a geneticist at the University of Leuven in Belgium who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

“It is a bone presumed to be of the queen and will remain so until its DNA can be compared to that of preferably living relatives and if not available dead relatives,” Cassiman said, referring to nuclear DNA that is in all the body’s cells.

But until that point, the conclusion is based on statistics. Those statistics strengthen the idea that the bone belongs to St. Ketevan, but aren’t strong enough to positively identify the remnant, Cassiman said.

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December 30, 2013 · 1:00 pm

What we learned about human origins in 2013

What we learned about human origins in 2013

By Charles Q. Choi

Published December 30, 2013

LiveScience
  • dmanisi-human-skull-1

    The 1.8-million-year-old skull unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia, suggests the earliest members of the Homo genus belonged to the same species, say scientists in a paper published Oct. 18, 2013 in the journal Science. (PHOTO COURTESY OF GEORGIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM)

The existence of a mysterious ancient human lineage and the possibility that the earliest humans were actually all one species were among the human-evolution-related discoveries of 2013. Other breakthroughs include the sequencing of the oldest human DNA yet.

Here’s a look at what scientists learned about humanity and human origins this year:

Mystery lineage
Recent analyses of fossil DNA have revealed that modern humans occasionally had sex and produced offspring not only with Neanderthals but also with Denisovans, a relatively newfound lineage whose genetic signature apparently extended from Siberia to the Pacific islands of Oceania.

This year, hints began emerging that another mystery human lineage was part of this genetic mix as well. Now, the first high-quality genome sequence from a Neanderthal has confirmed those suspicions.

These findings come from Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, where the first evidence of Denisovans was discovered in 2008. To learn more about the Denisovans, scientists examined DNA from a toe bone unearthed there in 2010.

The researchers found that the fossil belonged to a Neanderthal woman. Her DNA helped refine the human family tree, as it revealed that about 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of modern people outside Africa is Neanderthal in origin, whereas about 0.2 percent of DNA of mainland Asians and Native Americans is Denisovan in origin. [Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans]

The scientists also discovered that the Denisovans interbred with an unknown human lineage, getting as much as 2.7 to 5.8 percent of their genomes from it. This newfound relative apparently split from the ancestors of all modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans between 4 million and 900,000 years ago, before these latter groups started diverging from each other. It’s possible that this mysterious lineage could even be Homo erectus, the earliest known undisputed predecessor of modern humans. However, there are no signs that this unknown group interbred with modern humans or Neanderthals.

Genetic analysis also revealed that the parents of this Neanderthal woman were closely related possibly half-siblings, or another close relative. (Inbreeding may have been common among early humans it remains uncertain as to whether it was some kind of cultural practice or whether it was unavoidable due to small community populations at the time.)

Were earliest humans all one species?
Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only living member of the human lineage, Homo, which is thought to have arisen in Africa about 2 million years ago at the beginning of the Ice Age. Many now-extinct human species were thought to once roam the planet, such as Homo habilis, which is suspected to be among the first stone-tool makers; the relatively larger-brained Homo rudolfensis; the relatively slenderHomo ergaster; and Homo erectus, the first to regularly keep the tools it made.

The level of variation seen in Homo fossils is typically used to define separate species. However, analysis of 1.8-million-year-old skulls excavated from the Republic of Georgia revealed the level of variation seen among those skulls was about the same as that seen among ancient African Homo fossils. As such, researchers suggest the earliest Homo fossils may not be multiple human species, but rather variants of a single lineage that emerged from Africa. In other words, instead of Africa once being home to multiple human species such asHomo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster and Homo rudolfensis, all of these specimens may actually simply be Homo erectus.

Oldest human DNA
The testing of the oldest known human DNA added more evidence that human evolution was complex.

The genetic material, some 400,000 years old, came from a human thighbone unearthed in the Sima de los Huesos, or “Pit of Bones,” an underground cave in northern Spain. Until now, the previous oldest known human DNA had come from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal from a Belgian cave.

The fossils unearthed at the site resembled those of Neanderthals, so researchers expected the ancient DNA they analyzed to be Neanderthal as well. Surprisingly, the DNA revealed that this fossil’s closest known relatives were not Neanderthals but Denisovans. This finding is strange, scientists said, because studies to date currently suggest the Denisovans lived in eastern Asia, not in western Europe, where this fossil was uncovered. One possible explanation is that a currently unknown human lineage brought Denisovan-like DNA into the Pit of Bones region, and possibly also to the Denisovans in Asia.

Evolution of tool use
The capability to make and use complex tools is a critical trait distinguishing modern humans from all other species alive today. Now, scientists have found an ancient hand-bone fossil that reveals that the modern human ability to make and use complex tools may have originated far earlier than previously thought.

A key anatomical feature of the modern human hand is the third metacarpal, a bone in the palm that connects the middle finger to the wrist. A little projection of bone known as a styloid process in this bone helps the thumb and fingers apply greater amounts of pressure to the wrist and palm. Researchers had thought the styloid process was a relatively recent feature, perhaps evolving close to the origin of modern humans. However, scientists have discovered a 1.4-million-year-old fossil that possesses this vital anatomical feature, meaning it existed more than 500,000 years earlier than it was previously known to have existed and was perhaps fundamental to the evolution of the whole genus Homo, not just modern humans.

This hand bone may not be the only key trait for tool use that evolved near the origin of the human lineage. Humans are the only species that can throw with great speed and precision, and scientists found this ability first evolved nearly 2 million years ago with anatomical changes to the shoulder, arm and torso. This advance likely boosted the hunting prowess of now-extinct human ancestors, helping them effectively and safely kill big game.

Neanderthal discoveries
In 2013, researchers also made important discoveries about Neanderthals, modern humans’ closest extinct relatives. For instance, analysis of a Neanderthal tomb in France suggests that, like modern humans, Neanderthals may have intentionally buried their dead. The new findings are further evidence that Neanderthals might have possessed complex forms of thought, enough for special treatment of the dead.

In addition, a cache of Neanderthal fossils discovered in a cave in Greece suggests the area may have been a key crossroad for ancient humans. The age of these fossils suggests Neanderthals and other humans may have had the opportunity to cross paths there, and even interact, the researchers added.

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December 30, 2013 · 10:15 am

Ancient kingdom discovered beneath mound in Iraq

Ancient kingdom discovered beneath mound in Iraq

By Owen Jarus

Published October 01, 2013

LiveScience
  • 1-ancienct-city

    A domestic structure, with at least two rooms, that may date to relatively late in the life of the newfound ancient city, perhaps around 2,000 years ago when the Parthian Empire controlled the area in Iraq. (COURTESY CINZIA PAPPI.)

In the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq archaeologists have discovered an ancient city called Idu, hidden beneath a mound.

Cuneiform inscriptions and works of art reveal the palaces that flourished in the city throughout its history thousands of years ago.

Located in a valley on the northern bank of the lower Zab River, the city’s remains are now part of a mound created by human occupation called a tell, which rises about 32 feet above the surrounding plain. The earliest remains date back to Neolithic times, when farming first appeared in the Middle East, and a modern-day village called Satu Qala now lies on top of the tell.

The city thrived between 3,300 and 2,900 years ago, said Cinzia Pappi, an archaeologist at the Universitt Leipzig in Germany. At the start of this period, the city was under the control of the Assyrian Empire and was used to administer the surrounding territory. Later on, as the empire declined, the city gained its independence and became the center of a kingdom that lasted for about 140 years, until the Assyrians reconquered it. [See Photos of Discoveries at the Ancient City of Idu]

The researchers were able to determine the site’s ancient name when, during a survey of the area in 2008, a villager brought them an inscription with the city’s ancient name engraved on it. Excavations were conducted in 2010 and 2011, and the team reported its findings in the most recent edition of the journal Anatolica.

“Very few archaeological excavations had been conducted in Iraqi Kurdistan before 2008,” Pappi wrote in an email to LiveScience. Conflicts in Iraq over the past three decades have made it difficult to work there. Additionally archaeologists before that time tended to favor excavations in the south of Iraq at places like Uruk and Ur.

The effects of recent history are evident on the mound. In 1987, Saddam Hussein’s forces attacked and partly burnt the modern-day village as part of a larger campaign against the Kurds, and “traces of this attack are still visible,” Pappi said.

Ancient palaces
The art and cuneiform inscriptions the team uncovered provide glimpses of the ancient city’s extravagant palaces.

When Idu was an independent city, one of its rulers, Ba’ilanu, went so far as to boast that his palace was better than any of his predecessors’. “The palace which he built he made greater than that of his fathers,” he claimed in the translated inscription. (His father, Abbi-zeri, made no such boast.)

Two works of art hint at the decorations adorning the palaces at the time Idu was independent. One piece of artwork, a bearded sphinx with the head of a human male and the body of a winged lion, was drawn onto a glazed brick that the researchers found in four fragments. Above and below the sphinx, a surviving inscription reads, “Palace of Ba’auri, king of the land of Idu, son of Edima, also king of the land of Idu.”

Another work that was created for the same ruler, and bearing the same inscription as that on the sphinx, shows a “striding horse crowned with a semicircular headstall and led by a halter by a bearded man wearing a fringed short robe,” Pappi and colleague Arne Wossink wrote in the journal article.

Even during Assyrian rule, when Idu was used to administer the surrounding territory, finely decorated palaces were still built. For instance, the team discovered part of a glazed plaque whose colored decorations include a palmette, pomegranates and zigzag patterns. Only part of the inscription survives, but it reads, “Palace of Assurnasirpal, (king of the land of Assur).” Assurnasirpal refers to Assurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.), the researchers said, adding that he, or one of his governors, must have built or rebuilt a palace at Idu after the Assyrians reconquered the city. [The 10 Biggest Battles for the Control of Iraq]

A hero facing a griffon
Another intriguing artifact, which may be from a palace, is a cylinder seal dating back about 2,600 years. When it was rolled on a piece of clay, it would have revealed a vivid mythical scene.

The scene would have shown a bow-wielding man crouching down before a griffon, as well as a morning star (a symbol of the goddess Ishtar), a lunar crescent (a symbol of the moon god) and a solar disc symbolizing the sun god. A symbol called a rhomb, which represented fertility, was also shown.

“The image of the crouching hero with the bow is typical for warrior gods,” Pappi wrote in the email. “The most common of these was the god Ninurta, who also played an important role in the [Assyrian] state religion, and it is possible that the figure on the seal is meant to represent him.”

Future work
Before conducting more digs, the researchers will need approval from both the local government and the people of the village.

“For wide-scale excavations to continue, at least some of these houses will have to be removed,” Pappi said. “Unfortunately, until a settlement is reached between the villagers and the Kurdistan regional government, further work is currently not possible.”

Although digging is not currently possible, the artifacts already excavated were recently analyzed further and more publications of the team’s work will be appearing in the future. The archaeologists also plan to survey the surrounding area to get a sense of the size of the kingdom of Idu.

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December 24, 2013 · 3:01 pm

Human hand fossil turns back clock 500,000 years on complex tool use

Human hand fossil turns back clock 500,000 years on complex tool use

By Charles Q. Choi

Published December 17, 2013

LiveScience
  • human-hand-fossil

The discovery of a 1.4-million-year-old hand-bone fossil reveals that the modern human ability to make and use complex tools may have originated far earlier than scientists previously thought, researchers say.

A critical trait that distinguishes modern humans from all other species alive today is the ability to make complex tools. It’s not just the extraordinarily powerful human brain, but also the human hand, that gives humans this unique ability. In contrast, apes humans’ closest living relatives lack a powerful and precise enough grip to create and use complex tools effectively.

A key anatomical feature of the modern human hand is the third metacarpal, a bone in the palm that connects the middle finger to the wrist.

“There’s a little projection of bone in the third metacarpal known as a “styloid process” that we need for tools,” said study lead author Carol Ward, an anatomist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Missouri.”This tiny bit of bone in the palm of the hand helps the metacarpal lock into the wrist, helping the thumb and fingers apply greater amounts of pressure to the wrist and palm. It’s part of a whole complex of features that allows us the dexterity and strength to make and use complex tools.” [In Images: The Oddities of Human Anatomy]

Until now, this styloid process was found only in modern humans, Neanderthals and other archaic humans. Scientists were unsure when this bone first appeared during the course of human evolution. (The human lineage, the genus Homo, first evolved about 2.5 million years ago in Africa.)

“We had thought the modern human hand was something relatively recent, maybe something that appeared as a recent addition near the origin of our species,” Ward told LiveScience.

Now, researchers have discovered a fossil almost 1.5 million years old that possesses this vital anatomical feature, meaning it existed more than 500,000 years earlier than it was previously known to have existed.

“This suggests this feature might be fundamental to the origin of the genus Homo,” Ward said.

The scientists discovered a third metacarpal bone in northern Kenya, west of Lake Turkana. The fossil was found near the sites where the earliest Acheulean tools named for St. Acheul in France where tools from this culture were first discovered in 1847 were unearthed. The Acheulean artifacts were the first known complex stone tools, rough hand axes and cleavers that first appeared some 1.8 million years ago.

“It’s an arid badlands desert area now,” Ward said. “There’s not much vegetation to cover up fossils there’s cobble and rock everywhere, and we try and find fossils by going out and looking under all that cobble and rock on the surface.”

The hand-bone fossil is about 1.42 million years old. The researchers suspect it belonged to the extinct human species Homo erectus, the earliest undisputed predecessor of modern humans.

“Back then, this area was an open woodland area much more lush than today, probably with some trees and some areas of grassland,” Ward said. “The fossil was found near a winding river, which often deposits things like fossils.”

By revealing the early human lineage had a modern handlike anatomy, the fossil “suggests this feature may have [been] a pre-adaptation that helped set the stage for all the technology that came later,” Ward said.

Intriguingly, “at this time, in addition to early members of Homo, there were some late-surviving members of Australopithecus still around close relatives of humans that don’t seem to have this adaptation,” Ward said. “This raises the question of how important our hands were in the success of our lineage and the extinction of their lineage (Australopithecus).”

The researchers now want to find older hand bones “to see when this feature evolved,” Ward said. “We want to get closer to 2 million years ago to find out when this transition to modern hand anatomy took place.”

Ward and her colleagues detailed their findings online Dec. 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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December 14, 2013 · 6:00 am

‘Meat mummies’ fed Egyptians after death

‘Meat mummies’ fed Egyptians after death

By Stephanie Pappas

Published November 19, 2013

LiveScience
  • meat mummies.jpg

    Beef rib meat mummy from the tomb of Yuya and Tjuiu (1386-1349 BC). (PNAS)

  • meat mummies 2.jpg

    Beef rib meat mummy from the tomb of Yuya and Tjuiu (1386-1349 BC). (PNAS)

Care for some ribs? The royal mummies of ancient Egypt apparently did, as a new study finds that “meat mummies” left in Egyptian tombs as sustenance for the afterlife were treated with elaborate balms to preserve them.

Mummified cuts of meat are common finds in ancient Egyptian burials, with the oldest dating back to at least 3300 B.C. The tradition extended into the latest periods of mummification in the fourth century A.D. The famous pharaoh King Tutankhamun went to his final resting place accompanied by 48 cases of beef and poultry.

But meat mummies have been mostly unstudied until now. University of Bristol biogeochemist Richard Evershed and his colleagues were curious about how these cuts were prepared. They also wondered if the mummification methods for meat differed from how Egyptians mummified people or pets.

The team analyzed four samples from meat mummies archived at the Cairo and British museums. The oldest was a rack of cattle ribs from the tomb of Tjuiu, an Egyptian noblewoman, and her courtier Yuya. The beef dates back to between 1386 B.C. and 1349 B.C. [Gallery: Scanning Mummies for Heart Disease]

The second sample dated to between 1064 B.C. and 948 B.C. and consisted of meat from a calf found in the tomb of Isetemkheb D, a sister and wife to a high priest in Thebes. The final two samples were from the tomb of a Theban priestess, Henutmehyt, who died around 1290 B.C. One of the meat mummies found in Henutmehyt’s tomb was duck, and the other was probably goat.

The researchers conducted a chemical analysis of the bandages or the meat itself in all four samples. They found that animal fat coated the bandages of the calf and goat mummies; in the case of the calf, the fat was on bandages not in contact with the meat, suggesting it had been smeared on as a preservative rather than seeping through as grease.

The most intriguing chemical profile appeared on the beef mummy, however. The bandaging around the mummy contained remnants of an elaborate balm made of fat or oil and resin from a Pistacia tree, a shrubby desert plant. This resin was a luxury item in ancient Egypt, Evershed and his colleagues report today (Nov. 18) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was used as incense and varnish on high-quality coffins, but it was not used as a human mummification resin for at least 600 years after the deaths of Tjuiu and Yuya.

Nevertheless, it makes sense to see a sophisticated embalming substance on the beef cut, the researchers wrote. Yuya and Tjuiu were an Egyptian power couple and the parents of the wife of pharaoh Amenhotep III. As the queen’s parents, they would have merited a no-expenses-spared burial.

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November 20, 2013 · 6:10 am

Deformed, pointy skull from Dark Ages unearthed in France

Deformed, pointy skull from Dark Ages unearthed in France

By Tia Ghose

Published November 18, 2013

LiveScience
  • deformed-skull

    A woman’s deformed skull was found in one of the tombs, which dates to around 1,650 years ago. (© DENIS GLIKSMAN, INRAP)

The skeleton of an ancient aristocratic woman whose head was warped into a deformed, pointy shape has been unearthed in a necropolis in France.

The necropolis, found in the Alsace region of France, contains 38 tombs that span more than 4,000 years, from the Stone Age to the Dark Ages.

Rich valley
The Obernai region where the remains were found contains a river and rich, fertile soil, which has attracted people for thousands of years, Philippe Lefranc, an archaeologist who excavated the Stone Age burials, wrote in an email.

‘These deformed skulls appear in tombs rich in objects.’

– Archaeologist Philippe Lefranc

Archaeologists first found the tombs in 2011 while doing a preliminary excavation of the area prior to the start of a big industrial building project. This year, Lefranc and his colleagues went back to do a more in-depth excavation.

They found that the tombs were well preserved by the limestone rock in which they were buried. One of the burials contained 20 tombs of men, women and children. [See Images of the Tombs & Deformed Skull]

“The corpses are lying on their backs, with outstretched legs and heads turned westwards,” Lefranc said.

The tombs, which date to between 4900 B.C. and 4750 B.C., also contained a few stone vases and tools, along with ornaments such as mother-of-pearl elbow bracelets and collars. The small group may have been a family from a Neolithic farming and animal-herding culture that lived in long houses and buried their dead in cemeteries, Lefranc said.

Eastern transplants
In the second burial, which was in a separate area, they found 18 tombs from either the late Roman period or the early Dark Ages, about 1,650 years ago. One of the tombs held a woman, likely an aristocrat, who had a deformed, flattened forehead.

“The deformation of the skull with the help of bandages (narrow strips of cloth) and small boards is a practice coming from central Asia,” Lefranc said in an email. “It was popularized by the Huns and adopted by many German people.”

In those times, the deformed, alienlike skull was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy after death.

“In France, Germany and eastern Europe, these deformed skulls appear in tombs rich in objects,” Lefranc said.

The wealthy lady’s tomb also contained gold pins, belts known as chatelaines, pearls, a comb made of a stag antler, and a bronze mirror that likely came from the Caucasus region of central Asia, he said.

The team speculates that the 1,650-year-old graves held mercenary soldiers from the East and their families, who were employed by the Roman Army during the waning days of the Roman empire.

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November 19, 2013 · 10:11 am

Ancient city discovered beneath Biblical-era ruins in Israel

Ancient city discovered beneath Biblical-era ruins in Israel

By Tia Ghose

Digging History

Published November 19, 2013

LiveScience
  • tel-gezer

    Burned ruins and fired mudbrick collapse, as well as smashed pottery, reveal the late Bronze Age destruction at the city. On the left is the room where several pottery vessels, a scarab of Amenhotep III, a cache of cylinder seals, as well as s (SAMUEL WOLFF, TEL GEZER EXCAVATIONS)

Archaeologists have unearthed traces of a previously unknown, 14th-century Canaanite city buried underneath the ruins of another city in Israel.

The traces include an Egyptian amulet of Amenhotep III and several pottery vessels from the Late Bronze Age unearthed at the site of Gezer, an ancient Canaanite city.

Gezer was once a major center that sat at the crossroads of trade routes between Asia and Africa, said Steven Ortiz, a co-director of the site’s excavations and a biblical scholar at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

The remains of the ancient city suggest the site was used for even longer than previously known. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

Biblical city
The ancient city of Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age, because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

The city was ruled over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the city to King Solomon as a wedding gift after marrying his daughter.

“It’s always changed hands throughout history,” Ortiz told LiveScience.

The site has been excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the 10th through eighth centuries B.C. Gezer also holds some of the largest underground water tunnels of antiquity, which were likely used to keep the water supply safe during sieges.

But earlier this summer, Ortiz and his colleague Samuel Wolff of the Israel Antiquities Authority noticed traces of an even more ancient city from centuries before King Solomon’s time. Among the layers was a section that dated to about the 14th century B.C., containing a scarab, or beetle, amulet from King Amenhotep III, the grandfather of King Tut. They also found shards of Philistine pottery.

During that period, the ancient site was probably a Canaanite city that was under Egyptian influence.

The findings are consistent with what scholars suspected of the site, said Andrew Vaughn, a biblical scholar and executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, who was not involved in the study.

“It’s not surprising that a city that was of importance in the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah would have an older history and would have played an important political and military role prior to that time,” Vaughn told LiveScience. “If you didn’t control Gezer, you didn’t control the east-west trade route.”

But once the location of that major road moved during the Roman period, the city waned in importance. It was later conquered and destroyed, but never fully rebuilt.

“Just like today when you have a ghost town where you move the train and that city goes out of use,” Ortiz said.

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November 18, 2013 · 4:13 pm

‘Biohacker’ implants chip in arm

If you are under 20 I am pretty sure you will see full on Trans-humans in your old age, in fact, you might become one.  The world has come along ways with prosthetic devices, biofeedback, joint replacements, transplants, blue tooths, hearing aids, and brain controlled robotics.  The synthesis of what we know as machine and human will not be the androids we have viewed in science fiction movies.  Instead, it will be humans ‘upgrading’ themselves both before and after birth.  Genetic tampering will produce a new type of human while flaws can be corrected in vitro or post partem.  

Currently, roughly 50% of Americans will die of heart failure.  Why keep your current heart if you could get a cybernetic alternative that you never have to worry will skip a beat?  Why not have two hearts if we can make them small so you have a back-up?  Early pioneers in this ‘trans-human’ change have already started.  The following story may be disturbing, but I find it more predictive than anything else. – Michael Bradley

‘Biohacker’ implants chip in arm

By Marc Lallanilla

Published November 04, 2013

LiveScience
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    Biohacker Tim Cannon had a battery-powered electronic device installed in his arm. (MOTHERBOARDTV/YOUTUBE)

Kids, don’t try this at home: A self-described “biohacker” had a big electronic chip almost as large as a deck of cards inserted beneath the skin of his arm. Without a doctor’s help. And without anesthetics.

Tim Cannon is a software developer from Pittsburgh and one of the developers at Grindhouse Wetware, a firm dedicated to “augmenting humanity using safe, affordable, open source technology,” according to the group’s website. As they explain it, “Computers are hardware. Apps are software. Humans are wetware.”

The device Cannon had inserted into his arm is a Circadia 1.0, a battery-powered implant that can record data from Cannon’s body and transmit it to his Android mobile device. Because no board-certified surgeon would perform the operation, Cannon turned to a DIY team that included a piercing and tattoo specialist who used ice to quell the pain of the procedure. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Now that the device is inserted and functioning, Cannon is one step closer to achieving a childhood dream. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been telling people that I want to be a robot,” Cannon told The Verge. “These days, that doesn’t seem so impossible anymore.”

The Circadia chip isn’t particularly advanced: All it does is record Cannon’s body temperature and transmit it to his cellphone over a Bluetooth connection. While this isn’t a huge improvement over an ordinary thermometer how analog! it does represent one small step forward in what will undoubtedly be a continuing march toward greater integration of electronics and biology.

Cannon is hardly the first individual to have technology implanted into his or her body just ask former vice president Dick Cheney (who had a battery-powered artificial heart implanted), or any dog with a microchip.

Some are referring to biohacking as the next wave in evolution. “I think that’s the trend, and where we’re heading,” according to futurist and sci-fi author James Rollins.

“There’s a whole ‘transhuman’ movement, which is the merging of biology and machine,” Rollins told LiveScience in an earlier interview. “Google Glass is one small step, and now there’s a Japanese scientist who’s developed the contact lens equivalent of Google Glass. And those are two things you put right on, if not in, your body. So I think we’re already moving that way, and quite rapidly.”

Cannon sees future refinements as being able to do more than just passively transmit information. “I think that our environment should listen more accurately and more intuitively to what’s happening in our body,” Cannon told Motherboard. “So if, for example, I’ve had a stressful day, the Circadia will communicate that to my house and will prepare a nice relaxing atmosphere for when I get home: dim the lights, [draw] a hot bath.”

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November 14, 2013 · 11:15 pm

China’s Forbidden City built with giant ‘sliding stones’

China’s Forbidden City built with giant ‘sliding stones’

By Charles Q. Choi

Published November 06, 2013

LiveScience
  • hall-of-supreme-harmony-2

    The heaviest of the Forbidden City’s giant boulders, named the Large Stone Carving (shown here), now weighs more than 220 tons (200 metric tons) but once weighed more than 330 tons (300 metric tons). (JIANG LI.)

The Forbidden City, the palace once home to the emperors of China, was built by workers sliding giant stones for miles on slippery paths of wet ice, researchers have found.

The emperors of China lived in the Forbidden City, located in the heart of Beijing, for nearly 500 years, during China’s final two imperial dynasties, the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. Vast numbers of huge stones were mined and transported there for its construction in the 15th and 16th centuries. The heaviest of these giant boulders, aptly named the Large Stone Carving, now weighs more than 220 tons but once weighed more than 330 tons.

Many of the largest building blocks of the Forbidden City came from a quarry about 43 miles away from the site. People in China had been using the spoked wheel since about 1500 B.C., so it was commonly thought that such colossal stones would’ve been transported on wheels, not by something like a sled. [See Photos of the Forbidden City & Building Stones]

‘It’s humbling to think about a big project like this taking place 500 to 600 years ago.’

– Howard Stone, an engineer at Princeton University

However, Jiang Li, an engineer at the University of Science and Technology Beijing, translated a 500-year-old document, which revealed that an especially large stone measuring 31 feet long and weighing about 135 tons was slid over ice to the Forbidden City on a sledge hauled by a team of men over 28 days in the winter of 1557. This finding supported previously discovered clues suggesting that sleds helped to build the imperial palace.

To discover why sleds were still used for hauling gigantic stones3,000 years after the development of the wheel, Li and her colleagues calculated how much energy it would take for sleds to accomplish this goal.

“We were never sure quite what we would learn,” said study co-author Howard Stone, an engineer at Princeton University.

The ancient document Li translated revealed that workers dug wells every 1,600 feet or so to get water to pour on the ice to lubricate it. This made the ice even more slippery and, therefore, easier upon which to slide rocks.

The researchers calculated that a workforce of fewer than 50 men could haul a 123-ton stone on a sledge over lubricated ice from the quarry to the Forbidden City. In contrast, pulling the same load over bare ground would have required more than 1,500 men.

Moreover, the researchers estimated that the average speed of a 123-ton stone hauled on a sled on wet ice would be about 3 inches per second. This would have been fast enough for the stone to slide over the wet ice before the liquid water on the ice froze.

All in all, the researchers suggested that workers preferred hauling stones on smooth, flat, slippery, wet ice rather than on a bumpy ride on a wheeled cart. The ancient document Li translated revealed there were debates over whether to rely on sledges or wheels to help build the Forbidden City sledges may have required far more workers, time and money than mule-pulled wagons, but sledges were seen as a safer and more reliable means for slowly transporting heavy objects.

“It is humbling to think about a big project like this taking place 500 to 600 years ago, and the level of planning and coordination that was needed for it to occur,” Stone told LiveScience.

Li, Stone and their colleague Haosheng Chen detailed their findings online Nov. 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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