Anthropologist in the Attic

Are religious people better adjusted psychologically?

2012-01-31T08:15:00.011-07:00

Psychological research has found that religious people feel great about themselves, with a tendency toward higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than non-believers. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is only true in countries that put a high value on religion.

The researchers got their data from eDarling, a European dating site that is affiliated with eHarmony. Like eHarmony, eDarling uses a long questionnaire to match clients with potential dates. It includes a question about how important your personal religious beliefs are and questions that get at social self-esteem and how psychologically well-adjusted people are. Jochen Gebauer of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Constantine Sedikides of the University of Southampton, and Wiebke Neberich of Affinitas GmbH in Berlin, the company behind eDarling, used 187,957 people's answers to do their analyses.

As in other studies, the researchers found that more religious people had higher social self-esteem and where psychologically better adjusted. But they suspected that the reason for this was that religious people are better in living up to their societal values in religious societies, which in turn should lead to higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment. The people in the study lived in 11 different European countries, ranging from Sweden, the least religious country on the planet, to devoutly Catholic Poland. They used people's answers to figure out how religious the different countries were and then compared the countries.

On average, believers only got the psychological benefits of being religious if they lived in a country that values religiosity. In countries where most people aren't religious, religious people didn't have higher self-esteem. "We think you only pat yourself on the back for being religious if you live in a social system that values religiosity," Gebauer says. So a very religious person might have high social self esteem in religious Poland, but not in non-religious Sweden.

In this study, the researchers made comparisons between different countries, but another study found a similar effect within one country, between students at religious and non-religious universities. "The same might be true when you compare different states in the U.S. or different cities," Gebauer says. "Probably you could mimic the same result in Germany, if you compare Bavaria where many people are religious and Berlin where very few people are religious."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Are religious people better adjusted psychologically?". EurekAlert. Posted: January 19, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/afps-arp011912.php

Museums and national identities

2012-01-30T08:15:00.001-07:00

How museums are used and can be used to create a sense of community and identity is the theme for an event as part of the EuNaMus project. The event takes place in Brussels on 25 January.

Creating new national museums is a growing trend, both globally and within Europe. The challenge is to create unity and a common understanding of the history in evolving multi-ethnic and multicultural countries. However the challenge is not new, says Peter Aronsson, professor in Cultural Heritage and the Uses of History at Linköping University and coordinator of the European research project EuNaMus on Europe's national museums.

EuNaMus is a three-year project funded by the EU's Seventh Framework Programme. Eight European universities are involved and the project is coordinated from Sweden.

"The issue of assembling many different ethnic groups within one nation is not a new concept, just think about the great multicultural states Germany's and Italy's unification during the 1800s. National museums have long been used to create a binding element, a sense that "we belong together" in a national community, this despite their differences."

Aronsson claims that the current challenge for multicultural Europe can be addressed in two ways: either that diversity is affirmed, rendered harmless and culturally useful, or that it is seen as a threat that must be encountered by stronger integration.

Parallel to the issue of a national community is the one what Europeans actually have in common. Several other initiatives are also underway to create European museums.

These initiatives and trends will be discussed at an outreach event of the EuNaMus project in Brussels on 25 January. This will be followed by a more scientific conference on 26 and 27 January that will address how a conflict-ridden history is to be handled at national museums. One example that will be brought to the fore is Europe's dark colonial history.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Museums and national identities". EurekAlert. Posted: January 18, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/lu-man011812.php

Gossip can have social and psychological benefits

2012-01-29T08:15:00.008-07:00

UC Berkeley researchers find rumor-mongering has some positive outcomes

For centuries, gossip has been dismissed as salacious, idle chatter that can damage reputations and erode trust. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress.

"Gossip gets a bad rap, but we're finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a coauthor of the study published in this month's online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study also found that gossip can be therapeutic. Volunteers' heart rates increased when they witnessed someone behaving badly, but this increase was tempered when they were able to pass on the information to alert others.

"Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip," Willer said.

So strong is the urge to warn others about unsavory characters that participants in the UC Berkeley study sacrificed money to send a "gossip note" to warn those about to play against cheaters in economic trust games. Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said.

"We shouldn't feel guilty for gossiping if the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of," said Matthew Feinberg, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and lead author of the paper.

The study focused on "prosocial" gossip that "has the function of warning others about untrustworthy or dishonest people," said Willer, as opposed to the voyeuristic rumor-mongering about the ups and downs of such tabloid celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen.

In a series of four experiments, researchers used games in which the players' generosity toward each other was measured by how many dollars or points they shared. In the first experiment, 51 volunteers were hooked up to heart rate monitors as they observed the scores of two people playing the game. After a couple of rounds, the observers could see that one player was not playing by the rules and was hoarding all the points.

Observers' heart rates increased as they witnessed the cheating, and most seized the opportunity to slip a "gossip note" to warn a new player that his or her contender was unlikely to play fair. The experience of passing on the information calmed this rise in heart rate.

"Passing on the gossip note ameliorated their negative feelings and tempered their frustration," Willer said. "Gossiping made them feel better."

In the second experiment, 111 participants filled out questionnaires about their level of altruism and cooperativeness. They then observed monitors showing the scores from three rounds of the economic trust game, and saw that one player was cheating.

The more prosocial observers reported feeling frustrated by the betrayal and then relieved to be given a chance to pass a gossip note to the next player to prevent exploitation.

"A central reason for engaging in gossip was to help others out – more so than just to talk trash about the selfish individual," Feinberg said. "Also, the higher participants scored on being altruistic, the more likely they were to experience negative emotions after witnessing the selfish behavior and the more likely they were to engage in the gossip."

To raise the stakes, participants in the third experiment were asked to go so far as to sacrifice the pay they received to be in the study if they wanted to send a gossip note. Moreover, their sacrifice would not negatively impact the selfish player's score. Still, a large majority of observers agreed to take the financial hit just to send the gossip note.

"People paid money to gossip even when they couldn't affect the selfish person's outcome," Feinberg said.

In the final study, 300 participants from around the country were recruited via Craigslist to play several rounds of the economic trust game online. They played using raffle tickets that would be entered in a drawing for a $50 cash prize –-an extra incentive to hold on to as many raffle tickets as possible.

Some players were told that the observers during a break could pass a gossip note to players in the next round to alert them to individuals not playing fairly. The threat of being the subject of negative gossip spurred virtually all the players to act more generously, especially those who had scored low on an altruism questionnaire taken prior to the game.

Together, the results from all four experiments show that "when we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated," Willer said. "But being able to communicate this information to others who could be helped makes us feel better."

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References:

EurekAlert. "Gossip can have social and psychological benefits". EurekAlert. Posted: January 17, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uoc--gch011712.php

Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World

2012-01-28T08:15:00.012-07:00

As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.

“These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. “The only explanation I had was that they must have been trenches for the war against the Bolivians.”

But these were no foxholes, at least not for any conflict waged here at the dawn of the 20th century. According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.

Instead of being pristine forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands and living in dozens of towns connected by road networks, explains the American writer Charles C. Mann. In fact, according to Mr. Mann, the British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished on his 1925 quest to find the lost “City of Z” in the Xingu, one area with such urban settlements.

In addition to parts of the Amazon being “much more thickly populated than previously thought,” Mr. Mann, the author of “1491,” a groundbreaking book about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, said, “these people purposefully modified their environment in long-lasting ways.”

As a result of long stretches of such human habitation, South America’s colossal forests may have been a lot smaller at times, with big areas resembling relatively empty savannas.

Such revelations do not fit comfortably into today’s politically charged debate over razing parts of the forests, with some environmentalists opposed to allowing any large-scale agriculture, like cattle ranching and soybean cultivation, to advance further into Amazonia.

Scientists here say they, too, oppose wholesale burning of the forests, even if research suggests that the Amazon supported intensive agriculture in the past. Indeed, they say other swaths of the tropics, notably in Africa, could potentially benefit from strategies once used in the Amazon to overcome soil constraints.

“If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it,” said William Woods, a geographer at the University of Kansas who is part of a team studying the Acre geoglyphs.

“I know that this will not sit well with ardent environmentalists,” Mr. Woods said, “but what else can one say?”

While researchers piece together the Amazon’s ecological history, mystery still shrouds the origins of the geoglyphs and the people who made them. So far, 290 such earthworks have been found in Acre, along with about 70 others in Bolivia and 30 in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Rondônia.

Researchers first viewed the geoglyphs in the 1970s, after Brazil’s military dictatorship encouraged settlers to move to Acre and other parts of the Amazon, using the nationalist slogan “occupy to avoid surrendering” to justify the settlement that resulted in deforestation.

But little scientific attention was paid to the discovery until Mr. Ranzi, the Brazilian scientist, began his surveys in the late 1990s, and Brazilian, Finnish and American researchers began finding more geoglyphs by using high-resolution satellite imagery and small planes to fly over the Amazon.

Denise Schaan, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil who now leads research on the geoglyphs, said radiocarbon testing indicated that they were built 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, and might have been rebuilt several times during that period.

Initially, Ms. Schaan said, researchers, pondering the 20-foot depth of some of the trenches, thought they were used to defend against attacks. But a lack of signs of human settlement within and around the earthworks, like vestiges of housing and trash piles, as well as soil modification for farming, discounted that theory.

Researchers now believe that the geoglyphs may have held ceremonial importance, similar, perhaps, to the medieval cathedrals in Europe. This spiritual role, said William Balée, an anthropologist at Tulane University, could have been one that involved “geometry and gigantism.”

Still, the geoglyphs, located at a crossroads between Andean and Amazonian cultures, remain an enigma.

They are far from pre-Columbian settlements discovered elsewhere in the Amazon. Big gaps also remain in what is known about indigenous people in this part of the Amazon, after thousands were enslaved, killed or forced from their lands during the rubber boom that began in the late 19th century.

For Brazil’s scientists and researchers, Ms. Schaan said, the earthworks are “one of the most important discoveries of our time.” But the repopulation of this part of the Amazon threatens the survival of the geoglyphs, after being hidden for centuries.

Forests still cover most of Acre, but in cleared areas where the geoglyphs are found, dirt roads already cut through some of the earthworks. People live in wooden shacks inside others. Electricity poles dot the geoglyphs. Some ranchers use their trenches as watering holes for cattle.

“It’s a disgrace that our patrimony is treated this way,” said Tiago Juruá, the author of a new book here about protecting archaeological sites including the earthworks.

Mr. Juruá, a biologist, and other researchers say the geoglyphs found so far are probably just a sampling of what Acre’s forests still guard under their canopies. After all, they contend that outside of modern cities, fewer people live today in the Amazon than did before the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago.

“This is a new frontier for exploration and science,” Mr. Juruá said. “The challenge now is to make more discoveries in forests that are still standing, with the hope that they won’t soon be destroyed.”
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References:

Romero, Simon. 2012. "Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World". New York Times. Posted: January 14, 2012. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/americas/land-carvings-attest-to-amazons-lost-world.html

Outer-Hebrides survey builds a new picture of the past

2012-01-27T08:15:00.015-07:00

A recent call to local people to report anything unusual that they have spotted at the shoreline or under the sea has already resulted in several promising sites for a new archaeological project.

Tip-offs from islanders led to a possible medieval fishing village and finds of 5,000-year-old pottery submerged in a loch.

A local man – JJ McDonald – told the team that he knew of a “medieval fishing station”. Photographed from above, the landscape shows high potential for new site discovery of all periods of history. Notably, this area near North Loch Euport is called ‘Havn’ (the Norse word for harbour) on Ordnance Survey maps. A previously unknown complex of fish traps and evidence of coastal occupation south of Lochboisdale on South Uist was discovered during flight surveys.

At Loch Duna – a freshwater loch – a local diver has discovered ceramics which date to the early Neolithic period. He reported his discovery of the 5000-year-old pottery to the local museum just days after attending the first public lecture on underwater archaeology given by the Outer Hebrides Coastal Community Marine Archaeology Pilot Project (OHCCMAPP) team in July.

The call went out in 2011 to fishermen, beachcombers, divers and residents in the Western Isles.

The project searches for previously unidentified prehistoric and historic remains in the coastal and marine areas of the Isles, all the way from Berneray to the Butt of Lewis and all islands in between.

Many of these places are only accessible for short periods each day due to the tides – or are now fully submerged because of rising sea levels – and have not always been looked at in detail by archaeologists. As a result, it is hoped that this project could lead to a number of significant new discoveries.

Speaking on behalf of the project, Dr Jonathan Benjamin of WA Coastal & Marine said:
“As full time archaeologists, we don’t have the benefit of observing the shoreline between the low and high tides, day in and day out, year after year. That’s why we’re relying on the knowledge of people who live and work on or near the sea, and who might have noticed something out of the ordinary, either in a fishing net, or at an especially low tide. Their tip-offs can lead to significant discoveries. We’re also explaining to people the sorts of things that we’re interested in, because they may have seen or noticed things in the past, but disregarded them as not important.

“Until now, there’s been no major study focused on the marine archaeology of the Outer Hebrides, and by beginning with the intertidal and shallow waters, aerial survey and community engagement, we hope to be able to demonstrate that there is a vast amount of knowledge, literally waiting to be discovered by archaeologists working with local residents on land, in the air and underwater.”

Now members of the project team have had a chance to fly over some of the remote sites they’ve been told about, with a Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) aerial survey team.

Aerial photographs have been taken with the advantage of low winter sunshine which tends to highlight archaeological features in the landscape.

Already they have identified several sites as warranting further investigation – possibly even full ground and underwater archaeological surveys – in the future.

The project – a partnership between RCAHMS, WA Coastal & Marine, Historic Scotland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (CNE-Siar) – aims to get local people involved in sharing their knowledge about features in the landscape in order to build up a picture of how people lived and worked on the islands over the last 9,000 years.

Remains found on the coastline, or even now fully underwater, can then be recorded, cared for and preserved. With rising sea-levels and the power of the tides, many of these sites are at risk of being lost.

Speaking about one of the most promising tip-offs received to date, Dr Alex Hale, archaeological investigator at RCAHMS, said:
“Meeting JJ MacDonald was one of those fortuitous moments that can only happen when you are in the field. We bumped into JJ at his boat shed, by chance, and the amount of knowledge he has of the local environment is incredible. He’s obviously very knowledgeable about the area of South Uist where he lives and was able to help us identify sites that we’ll now be able to investigate further, such as the fishing station.”
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. "Outer-Hebrides survey builds a new picture of the past". Past Horizons. Posted: Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2012/outer-hebrides-survey-builds-a-new-picture-of-the-past

Deaf sign language users pick up faster on body language

2012-01-26T08:15:00.008-07:00

Deaf people who use sign language are quicker at recognizing and interpreting body language than hearing non-signers, according to new research from investigators at UC Davis and UC Irvine.

The work suggests that deaf people may be especially adept at picking up on subtle visual traits in the actions of others, an ability that could be useful for some sensitive jobs, such as airport screening.

"There are a lot of anecdotes about deaf people being better able to pick up on body language, but this is the first evidence of that," said David Corina, professor in the UC Davis Department of Linguistics and Center for Mind and Brain.

Corina and graduate student Michael Grosvald, now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Irvine, measured the response times of both deaf and hearing people to a series of video clips showing people making American Sign Language signs or "non-language" gestures, such as stroking the chin. Their work was published online Dec. 6 in the journal Cognition.

"We expected that deaf people would recognize sign language faster than hearing people, as the deaf people know and use sign language daily, but the real surprise was that deaf people also were about 100 milliseconds faster at recognizing non-language gestures than were hearing people," Corina said.

This work is important because it suggests that the human ability for communication is modifiable and is not limited to speech, Corina said. Deaf people show us that language can be expressed by the hands and be perceived through the visual system. When this happens, deaf signers get the added benefit of being able to recognize non-language actions better than hearing people who do not know a sign language, Corina said.

The study supports the idea that sign language is based on a modification of the system that all humans use to recognize gestures and body language, rather than working through a completely different system, Corina said.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Deaf sign language users pick up faster on body language". EurekAlert. Posted: January 12, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uoc--dsl011212.php

We may be less happy, but our language isn't

2012-01-25T08:15:00.012-07:00

"If it bleeds, it leads," goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page.

So one might expect the New York Times to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words — like "war," " funeral," "cancer," "murder" — than positive, happy ones — like "love," "peace" and "hero."

Or take Twitter. A popular image of what people tweet about may contain a lot of complaints about bad days, worse coffee, busted relationships and lousy sitcoms. Again, it might be reasonable to guess that a giant bag containing all the words from the world's tweets — on average — would be more negative and unhappy than positive and happy.

But new research shows just the opposite.

"English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont.

The UVM team's study "Positivity of the English Language," is presented in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

This new study complements another study the same Vermont scientists presented in the Dec. 7 issue of PLoS ONE, "Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network."

That work attracted wide media attention showing that average global happiness, based on Twitter data, has been dropping for the past two years.

Combined, the two studies show that short-term average happiness has dropped — against the backdrop of the long-term fundamental positivity of the English language.

In the new study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics.

"The big surprise is that in each of these four sources it's the same," says Dodds. "We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words."

Or, as they write in their study, "a positivity bias is universal," both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature.

Why is this? "It's not to say that everything is fine and happy," Dodds says. "It's just that language is social."

In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.

"If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a…," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print — which makes the point.

This new work adds depth to the Twitter study that the Vermont scientists published in December that attracted attention from NPR, Time magazine and other media outlets.

"After that mild downer story, we can say, 'But wait — there's still happiness in the bank," Dodds notes. "On average, there's always a net happiness to language."

Both studies drew on a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk. On this website, the UVM researchers paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the "happiness" — the emotional temperature — of the 10,222 most common words gathered from the four sources. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, "laughter" at 8.50, "food" 7.44, "truck" 5.48, "greed" 3.06 and "terrorist" 1.30.

The Vermont team — including Dodds, Isabel Kloumann, Chris Danforth, Kameron Harris, and Catherine Bliss — then took these scores and applied them to the huge pools of words they collected. Unlike some other studies — with smaller samples or that elicited strong emotional words from volunteers — the new UVM study, based solely on frequency of use, found that "positive words strongly outnumber negative words overall."

This seems to lend support to the so-called Pollyanna Principle, put forth in 1969, that argues for a universal human tendency to use positive words more often, easily and in more ways than negative words.

Of course, most people would rank some words, like "the," with the same score: a neutral 5. Other words, like "pregnancy," have a wide spread, with some people ranking it high and others low. At the top of this list of words that elicited strongly divergent feelings: "profanities, alcohol and tobacco, religion, both capitalism and socialism, sex, marriage, fast foods, climate, and cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, the iPhone, and zombies," the researchers write.

"A lot of these words — the neutral words or ones that have big standard deviations — get washed out when we use them as a measure," Dodds notes. Instead, the trends he and his team have observed are driven by the bulk of English words tending to be happy.

If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, "we're looking at atoms," says Dodds. "A lot of news is bad," he says, and short-term happiness may rise and and fall like the cycles of the economy, "but the atoms of the story — of language — are, overall, on the positive side."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "We may be less happy, but our language isn't". EurekAlert. Posted: January 12, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uov-wmb011212.php

Siberia was a wildlife refuge in the last ice age

2012-01-24T08:15:00.010-07:00

SIBERIA, a name that conjures up images of snow and ice, may have been an unlikely refuge from the bitter cold of the last ice age. Ancient DNA from the region paints a picture of remarkably stable animal and plant life in the teeth of plunging temperatures. The findings could help predict how ecosystems will adapt to future climate change.

The permanently frozen soil of Siberia, Canada and Alaska preserves the DNA of prehistoric plants, fungi and animals. "It's a giant molecular freezer," says James Haile at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia.

Glacial ice can also contain ancient DNA but permafrost is much more abundant than ice and so should provide a more complete picture of the effects of prehistoric climate change, says Haile. Last month, at the International Barcode of Life Conference in Adelaide, South Australia, his colleague Eva Bellemain of the University of Oslo in Norway revealed the first fruits of their analysis of Siberian permafrost DNA.

The samples were extracted from 15,000 to 25,000-year-old frozen sediment in southern Chukotka in north-eastern Siberia. Their age is significant: around 20,000 years ago temperatures plummeted and ice sheets blanketed much of the northern hemisphere - but parts of Siberia, Canada and Alaska apparently stayed ice-free (Quaternary Science Reviews, DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.07.020).

Fossils and pollen found in these regions suggest they may have acted as a refuge for plants and animals during this time, but Bellemain turned to fungal DNA to get a complete picture of the environment. Many fungi consume plants, and so indicate the plant life around at the time.

Using 23 permafrost cores, Bellemain identified around 40 fungal taxa that thrived during the last ice age. "We didn't expect to find so much," she says.

The diversity of fungi found suggests that a brimming plant community thrived in northern Siberia to support them. This range of plants should also have sustained a diverse assembly of mammals - and the samples indeed contain DNA from woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) and moose (Alces alces) dating back to between 15,000 and 25,000 years ago (Molecular Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294x.2011.05306.x).

Meanwhile, Haile and Tina Jørgensen at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have used ancient DNA together with pollen and fossil evidence to reconstruct the plant life surrounding Lake Taymyr, on the Taymyr peninsula in northern Siberia. Using 18 cores from five sites around the lake, the team identified 66 plant taxa that stuck around from 46,000 to 12,000 years ago, even though temperatures in the region fluctuated by some 20 °C during this period. "I was surprised that the [living] environment remained stable for so long," says Jørgensen (Molecular Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294x.2011.05287.x).

The result does not surprise Gregory Retallack at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who studies plant remains in ancient soils that have been fossilised. "A part of this stability is down to the inertia of ecosystems," he says.

Haile and colleagues are now keen to analyse other samples to uncover how the prehistoric flora and fauna in Canada and Alaska were affected by climate change.

Andrew Lowe at the University of Adelaide thinks the results could be used in climate models "to tell us how future communities will change". But Retallack thinks such predictions will not be possible until we know, for example, how the flora and fauna were affected by large pulses of warming 70,000 and 125,000 years ago.
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References:

Zukerman, Wendy. 2012. "Siberia was a wildlife refuge in the last ice age ". New Scientist. Posted: January 10, 2012. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328464.900-siberia-was-a-wildlife-refuge-in-the-last-ice-age.html

Using Modern Tools to Reconstruct Ancient Life

2012-01-23T08:15:00.010-07:00

To the naked eye, the white, powdery substance appeared to be plaster. That’s what the professional and volunteer archaeologists at a dig in Israel concluded.

To be certain, though, they subjected the chalky dust to spectroscopy and a petrographic microscope, only to discover that it was not a manufactured substance, but decayed plant life and fecal matter.

What that meant to the archaeologists from the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon — a former seaport south of Tel Aviv that was home to successive civilizations over thousands of years — was that structures thought to have been inhabited by people were more likely occupied by animals. That revelation upended their view of what they were excavating.

“For archaeologists,” said the expedition’s co-director, Daniel M. Master, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, “it was the difference between a palace and a stable.”

This marriage of social and natural sciences is an emerging discipline that has been called microarchaeology by Steve Weiner, director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science in the Weizmann Institute in Israel, which is collaborating with the expedition.

“The unique approach at Weizmann is not about instruments nor about methodologies,” Dr. Weiner said. “It is all about solving archaeological problems with the help of instrumentation — both in the field and in the lab.”

Weizmann archaeology researchers have a laboratory on the site here, along with equipment to study archaeometallurgy, ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and micromorphology, the microscopic structures found in organisms and soil. A $2 million accelerator mass spectrometer is on order.

“We have developed a whole new integrative approach to archaeology that starts with the team identifying a good problem in the field and then continues interactively between field and lab,” Dr. Weiner said.

Dr. Master said: “Steve’s team demonstrated that the white lamina that archaeologists have routinely called ‘bits of plaster’ were actually degraded plant remains. Further, his team showed ways of analyzing these plants that could detect the difference between sheaves of grain and plant bits mixed into animal dung.”

Dr. Master and Lawrence E. Stager, director of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University, who has overseen the dig for 25 years, embarked on a mutually beneficial collaboration with the Kimmel Center after Dr. Master was invited to lecture there. Suddenly, new windows opened.

Sifting sediment through flotation turned up lint near mysterious clay cylinders. That discovery, Dr. Master recalled, demonstrated that the clay cylinders were actually loom weights, and “this observation has led to a revolution in the studies of the weaving industry across the eastern Mediterranean in the early Iron Age.”

Soil chemistry analysis found that a four-horned altar thought to be a traditional Levantine device for burning incense was not used for burning at all. Archaeologists identified it instead as a Mycenaean and Minoan libation altar on which liquids were poured.

“Our work with the Weizmann team has been a leap forward,” Dr. Master said.

Sharing workers and a mobile laboratory allows the expedition to analyze samples rapidly and adjust its excavating techniques accordingly. The application of pure science to practical challenges enables Kimmel Center experts to hone their research skills. The collaboration is not unique, but it is unusual for a discipline that falls between the humanities and natural science.

“In Israel, archaeology is taught in the faculties of the humanities, making it very difficult for archaeologists to fully exploit the powerful new scientific tools,” Dr. Weiner said.

“Although there is much good will both on the side of natural scientists intrigued by the exciting archaeological questions to be addressed and the archaeologists who are eager to obtain the information provided by scientific tools, a chasm of miscommunication exists between the two camps,” he said. “The frequent result is that minimal benefit is obtained from maximal effort.”

The collaboration with the Leon Levy Expedition, he said, means “we excavate, analyze samples in minutes, get results, change excavation strategy, sample as well as we can and then continue in the base camp lab and, between seasons, in the home lab.”

Last summer, Michael Toffolo, a 27-year-old doctoral student at Tel Aviv University who conducts his lab work as a visiting student at the Kimmel Center, was lent to the Leon Levy Expedition, which was unearthing an ash layer dating from 604 B.C., when the Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar sacked the walled seaport.

“Among all the pieces of information that I managed to gather so far with my lab work, the most important is probably the presence of phytolith floors” composed of microscopic plant remains, he said.

Mr. Toffolo was able to determine whether the floors were made of wild grasses used as bedding, or agricultural byproducts like straw, or ash from wood used as fuel. As a result, what originally looked like plaster turned out to be cereal husks on which an iron plow point was lying; a grain storage pit from the Egyptian period; and a floor composed of woven palm leaves.

“This type of information can change the archaeological interpretation of an entire structure or building, according to the human activities identified,” Mr. Toffolo said.

The discovery that the white powder was not plaster led scientists to the conclusion that a rural economy existed in an Iron Age town center.

“Floors also define a stratigraphic layer — everything below is older and above younger,” Dr. Weiner said.

Each June and July, the six-week Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon draws college students and other volunteers. Sponsored since 1985 by the Leon Levy Foundation, the expedition is administered by the Harvard Semitic Museum and a consortium that includes Wheaton and Boston Colleges and is conducted under the auspices of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Dr. Weiner said, “We try to solve archaeological problems using the macroscopic record — what you see — and the microscopic record — revealed by instruments.” Weizmann is working with several other Israeli excavations.

“We do not always have success answering our questions in archaeology, and sometimes microarchaeology is frustrating,” Dr. Master said, “but together we are using all the tools at our disposal to uncover the clues that will help us to reconstruct ancient life at Ashkelon.”

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References:

Roberts, Sam. 2012. "Using Modern Tools to Reconstruct Ancient Life". New York Times. Posted: January 9, 2012. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/science/archaeologists-use-modern-tools-to-reconstruct-ancient-life.html

Forty new rock art sites recorded in Mexico

2012-01-22T08:15:00.014-07:00

Rock-art has been discovered and recorded in forty sites in northeastern Guanajuato, Mexico, as part of an ongoing project carried out by researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

The majority of the images were created by hunter-gatherers who occupied the area during the 1-5 centuries AD, but religious iconography and inscriptions were also discovered dating to the colonial era, as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries

The findings were announced by lead archaeologist Carlos Viramontes after four seasons of research in the area of Queretaro and Guanajuato semi-desert.

“We have found more than three thousand pictorial motifs in 40 locations, distributed in the municipalities of Tierra Blanca, San Luis de la Paz, San Diego Union, Xichú and Victoria, in Guanajuato.

Altogether, since the late eighties over 70 rock-art sites have been recorded, with those falling into the two thousand year old hunter-gatherer category being preliminarily classified into two groups:

* public – involving large numbers of people creating iconography as part of a ritual in easy to access sites located near the foothills and in the valleys.
* private – where it is believed that a small select group attended ceremonies in hard to access ravines and canyons.

Public and private ritual spaces

The sites known as Manitas, in the community of Tierra Blanca and Cerro Redondo represent good examples of the two classifications explains Viramontes. Tierra Blanca feels like a private ritual space, located near a 3,400 m high mountain peak in a difficult to access ravine. Depicted here are human figures, plants and animals – some of them fantastical creatures – as well as some geometric lines along with red and black painted hands.

On the other hand, Cerro Redondo appears to be a place where public rituals have taken place, involving large numbers of people. It is located on an easily accessible hillock in the middle of a plain.

Characteristic paint colours favoured by the hunter gatherers were yellow, red and black and used to paint human figures adorned with headdresses, skirts and cloaks, sometimes depicted carrying as yet unidentified objects and sometimes carrying bows and arrows in scenes of hunting and war.

“There is a great diversity of animals represented – mainly deer, but also dogs and insects resembling centipedes and spiders and many birds ” explained Viramontes.

The archaeologist theorises that for these hunter gatherers, the act of creating images on rock surfaces went beyond just recording daily life events and rituals; he contends that the rock face itself was a point of contact between the material and the spiritual worlds.

Religious iconography

Apart from the two thousand year old rock-art recorded during the project, other types discovered relate to the colonial era and comprise crosses, shrines, altars and dated inscriptions. These were drawn with white pigmentation, typical of the Otomi people who settled in Guanajuato and Queretaro semi-desert, from the sixteenth century.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. "Forty new rock art sites recorded in Mexico". Past Horizons. Posted: January 8, 2012. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2012/forty-new-rock-art-sites-recorded-in-mexico

Learn language faster with gestures

2012-01-21T08:15:00.008-07:00

LANGUAGE classes of the future might come with a physical workout. People learn a new language more easily when words are accompanied by movement.

Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knösche at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, enrolled 20 volunteers on a six-day course to learn "Vimmi", an artificial language designed to make study results easier to interpret. Half of the material was taught using spoken and written instructions and exercises, while the other half was taught with body movements to accompany each word, which the students were asked to act out.

Students remembered significantly more of the words taught with movement, and used them more readily when creating new sentences (Mind, Brain and Education, DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01129.x).

Whilst this may seem intuitive for words that have a physical counterpart, like "cut", the pair were surprised to find the trick also worked for abstract words like "rather" that have no obvious gestural equivalent.

Based on fMRI scans, the pair argue that enactment helps memory by creating a more complex representation of the word that makes it more easily retrieved. Unpublished results from tests in real language classes suggest that the method "could really speed up foreign language learning in schools", says Macedonia.
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References:

2012. "Learn language faster with gestures". New Scientist. Posted: January 3, 2012. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228442.800-learn-language-faster-with-gestures.html

Scientists crack medieval bone code

2012-01-20T08:15:00.009-07:00

Two teams of Michigan State University researchers – one working at a medieval burial site in Albania, the other at a DNA lab in East Lansing – have shown how modern science can unlock the mysteries of the past.

The scientists are the first to confirm the existence of brucellosis, an infectious disease still prevalent today, in ancient skeletal remains.

The findings, which appear in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggest brucellosis has been endemic to Albania since at least the Middle Ages.

Although rare in the United States, brucellosis remains a major problem in the Mediterranean region and other parts of the world. Characterized by chronic respiratory illness and fever, brucellosis is acquired by eating infected meat or unpasteurized dairy products or by coming into contact with animals carrying the brucella bacteria.

Todd Fenton, associate professor of anthropology, said advanced DNA testing at MSU allowed the researchers to confirm the existence of the disease in skeletons that were about 1,000 years old.

"For years, we had to hypothesize the cause of pathological conditions like this," Fenton said. "So the era of DNA testing and the contributions that DNA can make to my work are really exciting."

Here's how the discovery came about.

Fenton and a group of MSU graduate students were serving as the bioarcheologists, or bone specialists, for a multinational team of archaeologists excavating sites in the ancient Albanian city of Butrint. Once a large Roman colony, Butrint in its final centuries served as an outpost of the Byzantine Empire until it was abandoned in the Middle Ages due to flooding.

Fenton and his team developed biological profiles of the human remains, which included determining sex, age and skeletal pathologies, or health histories. Vertebrae from two of the Byzantine-era skeletons – both adolescent males from the 10th century to the 13th century – had significant lesions, leading the researchers to theorize the boys had suffered from tuberculosis.

Samples of the ancient bone were sent to the forensic DNA lab in East Lansing, which is headed by David Foran, director of MSU's Forensic Science Program. Foran and his team of graduate students took tiny portions of the bone, extracted DNA and tested it for any residual DNA that might still exist from the expected pathogen.

But the results came back negative for tuberculosis.

Fenton's team re-examined the bones that tested negative for tuberculosis and concluded the disease might instead be brucellosis. The infection from brucellosis and tuberculosis causes similar damage – basically eating away the bone – although no one had ever confirmed brucellosis in human bone recovered from an archaeological site.

Foran's team then developed a different set of tests for detecting the brucella bacteria and undertook a new round of testing on the diseased vertebrae.

This time the results came back positive for brucellosis.

Foran said the collaboration on the project highlights the benefits of modern science and interdisciplinary research, even when the respective research teams are some 5,000 miles apart.

"In this case it was a combination of inquisitiveness, persistence and of course collaboration," Foran said. "It is amazing to find something brand new in something that is a thousand years old."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Scientists crack medieval bone code ". EurekAlert. Posted: January 3, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/msu-scm010312.php

Khmer, Like Mayans, Fell Under the Weather

2012-01-19T08:15:00.009-07:00

On different sides of the planet, two civilizations shared many similarities, including a vulnerability to regional climate changes.

The classical period Mayans in Central America and the Khmer in Southeast Asia both hacked a space for their people out of tropical forests and constructed impressive stone cities with sophisticated water storage systems. But their Achilles heel was a dependence on seasonal rains for their crops and drinking water. When regional climate changes caused erratic rainfall, their cities and fields may have dried out and left them vulnerable to collapse.

Between the 9th and 15th centuries, the Khmer Empire dominated much of what is now Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Burma (Myanmar). The empire's famous capital, Angkor, may have been one of the largest pre-industrial city complexes in the world. The empire was supported by an extensive water management system, including lake-sized reservoirs called barays.

But reservoirs only work if there is rainwater to fill them. Research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that a series of erratic monsoons may have destabilized the once-mighty Khmer.

Researchers led by Mary Beth Day, an earth scientist with the University of Cambridge, found evidence of a series of failed monsoons in 14th and 15th century that coincided with the Khmer's collapse. Sediments in the largest Khmer resevoir, the West Baray, showed that extremely heavy downpours were followed by drought. The heavy rains may have washed away crops, and those that survived shriveled in the drought. During the dry spells, drinking water may have run low as well.

Although many other factors came into play, such as the threat of Mongol invasion and social upheaval brought on by the spread of Theravada Buddhism, the researchers note that an inability to feed their people could have weakened the Khmer to the point of collapse.

The Mayans of the classical period (c. 250 – 900 AD) could have warned the Khmer. While the Khmer were rising, the classical Mayans were falling, possible because the rains weren't.

The Mayans too seem to have been dependent on seasonal rains. They often built their cities near natural reservoirs called cenotes or near rivers, then augmented nature with their own water management systems, such as the dam at Kinal and reservoirs at Uxul. Mayans even had pressurized water.

But when the rains failed, so did some of the Mayan city states, suggest some researchers including Jared Diamond in the book Collapse.

Hacking a home out of the forest may have had an effect on rainfall, as well. Forests help to create rainfall when they respire moisture and help keep the ground moist. When large amounts of forest were cleared for agriculture, it may have reduced rainfall. When the rains do come, they wash away the soil which is no longer protected by the trees.

The causes of a civilizations' failure are complex, and the verdict is still out on what ultimately toppled the Mayans and Khmer. But evidence suggests decades long changes in rainfall patterns may have had a serious effect.

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References:

Wall, Tim. 2012. "Khmer, Like Mayans, Fell Under the Weather". . Posted: January 5, 2012. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/earth/khmer-collapsed-under-climate-pressure-120105.html

Model unlocks human impact on Africa's fire regimes

2012-01-18T08:15:00.002-07:00

A model has helped shed light on how human-started fires shaped Africa's landscape, researchers report.

Before human activity became widespread, most fires were caused by lightning strikes during the continent's wet seasons, they said.

As the human population expanded, more fires occurred during the dry season, triggering a shift in the impact of fires on Africa's ecology, they added.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"People have always been aware that there have been a lot of wildfires in Africa," said co-author Sally Archibald, senior researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa.

"When we started getting satellite data, it became even more apparent that there is a lot of burning that happens.

"This made people concerned; they were worried that there was too much fire in Africa."

Human impact

Dr Archibald explained that the team decided to develop the model in order to understand current conditions, and whether there was now too much burning compared with the time when humans were not so prevalent and influencing landscapes' "fire regimes".

It has been estimated that early humans could have had the ability to start fires about 300,000 years ago, but the real impact was from about 70,000 years ago as human populations became more widespread.

"We really cannot make good (conservation) decisions unless we can understand how humans have manipulated fire," added Dr Archibald.

"It is really interesting that we are the only organism in the world to have harnessed fire, and we need to understand how that may have changed the systems in which we live."

The theoretical model, which focuses on Africa's grassland habitats, took data on how people have used fire and linked it to archaeological knowledge of how human populations in the region evolved.

Dr Archibald told BBC News that one of the paper's key insights was that, according to the model, wildfires were currently at their "lowest level for the past 40,000 years or so".

"There is less wildfire in Africa now, even though it looks like there is such a lot when you look at the satellite data, because of the way that people have been using the landscape."

She explained that the model could be used to help national parks develop fire management policies.

"They are trying to develop fire management policies and they want to burn their landscapes in a way that will maintain biodiversity," she said.

"That becomes quite a tricky question in Africa because you cannot just say 'well, I will not light fires at all, only natural fires will be allowed'.

"People have been in Africa for over a million years, so you cannot try to suppress all human fires. You have to include humans as part of your system, and fire managers still need some guidance on what is the best way to burn these systems and yet maintain biodiversity."
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References:

Kinver, Mark. 2012. "Model unlocks human impact on Africa's fire regimes". BBC News. Posted: December 30, 2011. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16247844

Prehistoric bones a cottage industry in Siberia

2012-01-17T08:15:00.017-07:00

One of Zimov's prized mammoth tusks.
Source: Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

It’s hard to imagine, looking out at the frozen expanses of Yakutia, in North Eastern Siberia, that 30,000 or so years ago, so many animal species, now extinct, roamed the Pleistocene grasslands. From 12-foot tall, five-ton wooly mammoth bulls to tiny rodents, an Ice Age hunter would have found as many as 100 animals in each square mile he tracked, at least according to Sergei Zimov, our Ice Age expert, geo-physicist and guide during our recent visit.

Today, Siberia’s thick icy crust, or permafrost, which has held the remains of predators and herbivores alike in an epochal deep freeze, is beginning to melt. And the bones of prehistoric rhinos, bison, reindeer, horses – and yes, mammoths – are rising to Yakutia’s surface at an amazing rate. One literally trips over bones on a short stroll along the banks of the Kolyma River. The downside, of course, is the attendant release of so much CO2 – a greenhouse gas - as this melting permafrost exposes a 150-foot thick layer of plant and animal remains. But there is an upside: a burgeoning cottage industry in the finding and selling of prehistoric bones.

Zimov says that 30 years ago, only a handful of Russian "bone" men – serious businessmen - were attracted to the adventurous lifestyle, spending their summers combing Pleistocene beaches and valleys. Today, at least 1,000 bone hunters work throughout Russia, with several dozen focusing on Siberia’s permafrost zone, where the best prizes are to be found.

Professional hunters like Feodor Shidlovsky and Alexander Votagin are at the top of the bone chain. Shidlovsky has arguably the biggest mammoth bone collection in Russia, displaying them in his own natural history museum in Moscow. The money he makes from the sale of mammoth bones goes into his exhibitions, the funding of artists who fashion jewelry from the ancient bone, and scientific expeditions.

Every summer, Votagin leads his team to Dvarii Yar – or Windy Cliffs – a remote stretch of Kolyma riverbank that has given up the richest finds of prehistoric bones over the past decade. Located about 400 miles north of Zimov’s isolated science station in Cherskiy - Yakutia’s main airport and hub - the so-called New Siberian Islands (all underwater in Pleistocene times) are now a treasure trove of bones. Local hunters collect more than 20 tons of mammoth, rhino and bison bones a year, selling most of them to local dealers in Cherskiy – presumably to sell them to tourists like us, though the Russian government bans the export abroad.

And here’s why: prehistoric bones can be a very lucrative catch. While fishermen and hunters now augment their meager incomes with up to $10 per mammoth tooth or ivory shard, the more professional - and lucky – hunters can fetch more than $80,000 for a pair of mammoth tusks in good condition. Zimov keeps such a pair in the living room of his science station cum abode – but isn’t tempted to sell them.

"These are like my family," he told us. "Would you sell your brothers for $80,000?" In fact, Zimov has never sold any bones he’s collected over his decades of combing Yakutia for clues to global warming. On one such outing, he and his son Nikita collected some 1,200 bones – which he thinks is a world record - all which remained of a pack of mammoths and all within a few hundred yards of beach. For amusement, they arranged their bone hoard into the shapes of mammoths, horses and bison.

Until the mass, mysterious extinction of so many Ice Age animals took place - triggered, probably, by extreme change of climate and habitat - the so-called "Mammoth Steppe Eco-system" chugged along like a glacier, both efficient and self-sustaining. Mammoths knocked over heat-absorbing trees, grasses grew, and dozens of herbivore species not only grazed on those grasses, but fertilized them too.

Though that eco-system died some 15,000 years ago, mammoths and other Pleistocene throwbacks are helping to maintain today’s human population, with a $5 prehistoric bison jaw here, a $10 wooly rhino knee bone there or $1,000 piece of wooly mammoth tusk, buried right under your feet.
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References:

Maceda, Jim. 2012. "Prehistoric bones a cottage industry in Siberia". MSNBC: The Daily Nightly. Posted: Available online: http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/30/9834873-prehistoric-bones-a-cottage-industry-in-siberia

Top 10 Hominid Discoveries of 2011

2012-01-16T08:15:00.008-07:00

10. Earliest Modern Humans in Europe: Paleoanthropologists believe modern humans (Homo sapiens) came to Europe about 43,000 years ago. This date is based on the age of sophisticated stone tools, not human fossils. This year two teams dated European fossils that are in line with the age of the tools: A human upper jaw discovered in southern England in 1927 was dated to 44,000 years ago, and two molars unearthed in Italy were dated to 45,000 years ago. These fossils are the oldest known human remains on the continent.

9. The Arches of Australopithecus afarensis: There’s no doubt that Lucy and her species, Australopithecus afarensis, walked upright. But the degree to which these hominids walked on the ground has been debated. The discovery of a 3.2-million-year-old foot bone confirmed that Lucy and her kind had arched feet and therefore probably walked much like modern people. The researchers who studied the fossil say it indicates Australopithecus afarensis no longer needed to spend much time in the treetops; however, other researchers disagree, saying hominids at this time were still good tree climbers.

8. World’s Earliest Mattress: In a rock shelter in South Africa, archaeologists uncovered a 77,000-year-old mattress composed of thin layers of sedges and grasses, predating all other known mattresses by 50,000 years. Early humans knew how to keep the bed bugs out; the bedding was stuffed with leaves from the Cape Laurel tree (Cryptocarya woodii), which release chemicals known to kill mosquitos and other bugs.

7. Neanderthal Mountaineers: Neanderthals evolved many traits to deal with the cold; for example, their short limbs helped them conserve heat. A mathematical analysis revealed that short limbs may have also helped Neanderthals walk more efficiently in mountainous terrains. Specifically, the fact that Neanderthals had shorter shins relative to their thighs meant they didn’t need to lift their legs as high while walking uphill, compared to modern people with longer legs. “For a given step length, they [needed] to put in less effort,” said lead research Ryan Higgins of Johns Hopkins University.

6. The First Art Studio: Archaeologists working in South Africa’s Blombos Cave discovered early humans had a knack for chemistry. In a 100,000-year-old workshop, they found all of the raw materials needed to make paint, as well as abalone shells used as storage containers—evidence that our ancestors were capable of long-term planning at this time.

5. Australopithecine Females Strayed, Males Stayed Close to Home: In many monkey species, when males reach adolescence, they leave their home to search for a new group, probably as a way to avoid breeding with their female relatives. In chimpanzees and some humans, the opposite occurs: Females move away. Now it appears that australopithecines followed the chimp/human pattern. Researchers studied the composition of strontium isotopes found in the teeth of members of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. An individual consumes strontium through food and it is taken up by the teeth during childhood. Because the isotopes (different forms of the element) in plants and animals vary by geology and location, strontium can be used as a proxy for an individual’s location before adulthood. In the study, the researchers discovered that large individuals, presumably males, tended to have strontium isotope ratios typical of the area where the fossils were found; smaller individuals, or females, had non-local strontium isotope ratios, indicating they had moved into the area as adults.

4. Confirmation of Pre-Clovis People in North America: Since the 1930s, archaeologists have thought the Clovis people, known for their fluted projectile points, were the first people to arrive in the New World, about 13,000 years ago. But in recent years there have been hints that someone else got to North America first. The discovery of more than 15,000 stone artifacts in central Texas, dating to between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago, confirmed those suspicions. Corroborating evidence came from Washington State, where a mastodon rib containing a projectile point was dated this year to 13,800 years ago.

3. Denisovans Left A Mark in Modern DNA: The Denisovans lived in Eurasia sometime between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Scientists don’t know what they looked like; the only evidence of this extinct hominid group is DNA extracted from a bone fragment retrieved from a cave in Siberia. But this year, several studies revealed the mysterious population bred with several lineages of modern humans; people native to Southeast Asia, Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia and elsewhere in Oceania carry Denisovan DNA.

2. Out of Africa and Into Arabia: Traditionally, paleoanthropologists have thought modern humans left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and into the Levant. But some researchers suggest our ancestors took a more southerly route, across the Red Sea and into southern Arabia. This year, several studies provided evidence pointing to this exit strategy. First, a team reported the discovery of 125,000-year-old stone tools in the United Arab Emirates. The researchers suggested humans ventured into Arabia when sea level was lower, making a trip across the Red Sea easier. (Geologists later verified the climate would have been just right at this time.) No fossils were found with the tools, but the scientists concluded they belonged to modern humans rather than Neanderthals or some other contemporaneous hominid. Another study this year complemented the finding: Paleoanthropologists also found stone tools, dating to 106,000 years ago, in Oman. The researchers say the artifacts match tools of the Nubian Complex, which are found only in the Horn of Africa. This connection implies the makers of those African tools, most likely modern humans, made the migration into Oman.

1. Australopithecus sediba, Candidate for Homo Ancestor: Last year, scientists announced the discovery of a new hominid species from South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind—Australopithecus sediba. This year, the researchers announced the results of an in-depth analysis of the 1.97-million-year-old species. They say a mix of australopithecine and Homo-like traits make Australopithecus sediba, or a species very similar to it, a possible direct ancestor of our own genus, Homo.

Erin Wayman writes the blog "Hominid Hunting" at the Smithsonian website. Visit the blog here to read more fascinating Hominid stories.
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References:

Wayman, Erin. 2012. "Top 10 Hominid Discoveries of 2011". Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: December 28, 2011. Available online: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2011/12/top-10-hominid-discoveries-of-2011/

Ancient Texts Part of Earliest Known Documents

2012-01-15T08:15:00.020-07:00

Image: Detail of the Tower of Babel stele, with the engraving of King Nebuchadnezzar II. (Copyright The Schøyen Collection, MS 2063).

A team of scholars has discovered what might be the oldest representation of the Tower of Babel of Biblical fame, they report in a newly published book.

Carved on a black stone, which has already been dubbed the Tower of Babel stele, the inscription dates to 604-562 BCE.

It was found in the collection of Martin Schøyen, a businessman from Norway who owns the largest private manuscript assemblage formed in the 20th century.

Consisting of 13,717 manuscript items spanning over‭ ‬5,000‭ ‬years, the collection includes parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Buddhist manuscript rescued from the Taliban, and even cylcon symbols by Australia's Aborigines which can be up to 20,000 years old.

The collection also includes a large number of pictographic and cuneiform tablets -- which are some of the earliest known written documents -- seals and royal inscription spanning most of the written history of Mesopotamia, an area near modern Iraq.

A total of 107 cuneiform texts dating from the Uruk period about 5,000 years ago to the Persian period about 2,400 years ago, have been now translated by an international group of scholars and published in the book Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection.

The Tower of Babel stele stands out as one of "the stars in the firmament of the book," wrote Andrew George, a professor of Babylonian at the University of London and editor of the book.

The spectacular stone monument clearly shows the Tower and King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon some 2,500 years ago.

Credited with the destruction of the temple of Solomon in 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II was also responsible for sending the Jews into exile, according to the Bible.

The first Babylonian king to rule Egypt, he is also famous for building the legendary Hanging Gardens, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, and many temples all over Babylonia.

Calling himself the "great restorer and builder of holy places," he also reconstructed Etemenanki, a 7-story, almost 300-foot-high temple (also known as a ziggurat) dedicated to the god Marduk.

Biblical scholars believe that this temple may be the Tower of Babel mentioned in the Bible.

In the inscription, the standing figure of Nebuchadnezzar II is portrayed with his royal conical hat, holding a staff in his left hand and a scroll with the rebuilding plans of the Tower (or a foundation nail) in his outstretched right hand.

According to George, the relief yields only the fourth certain representation of Nebuchadnezzar II.

"The others are carved on cliff-faces in Lebanon at Wadi Brisa (which has two reliefs) and at Shir es-Sanam. All these outdoor monuments are in very poor condition," he wrote.

The inscription also depicts the Tower of Babel from a front view, "clearly showing the relative proportions of the 7 steps including the temple on the top," the Schøyen Collection stated.

The stele even features a line drawing of the ground plan of the temple, revealing both the outer walls and the inner arrangement of rooms (click here for a drawing reconstruction).

Moreover, captions clearly identify the tower as the "great ziggurat of Babylon."

King Nebuchadnezzar himself talks about the amazing construction:

"I made it the wonder of the people of the world, I raised its top to the heaven, made doors for the gates, and I covered it with bitumen and bricks," the inscription reads in the translation by professor George.

Depicted in a long series of fanciful paintings, including artworks by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Gustave Doré, and M. C. Escher, the Tower of Babel is mentioned in the Bible, which says the people of Babylon were trying to build a tower to heaven.

God concluded that they were simply trying to gain power and caused the workers to speak many different languages. Unable to communicate with each other, the workers gave up the project.

"Here we have for the first time an illustration contemporary with Nebuchadnezzar II's restoring and enlargement of the Tower of Babel, and with a caption making the identity absolutely sure," the Schøyen Collection stated on its website.
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2012. "Ancient Texts Part of Earliest Known Documents". Discovery News. Posted: December 27, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/tower-of-babel-111227.html

Irikaitz archaeological site -- host to a 25,000-year-old pendant

2012-01-14T08:15:00.010-07:00

In the open air, full of volcanic rocks, difficult to date ... the excavations here are unique, according to Alvaro Arrizabalaga and his team at the University of the Basque Country

The recent discovery of a pendant at the Irikaitz archaeological site in Zestoa (in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa) has given rise to intense debate: it may be as old as 25,000 years, which would make it the oldest found to date at open-air excavations throughout the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. This stone is nine centimetres long and has a hole for hanging it from the neck although it would seem that, apart from being adornment, it was used to sharpen tools. The discovery has had great repercussion, but it is not by any means the only one uncovered here by the team led by Álvaro Arrizabalaga: "Almost every year some archaeological artefact of great value is discovered; at times, even 8 or 10. It is a highly fruitful location".

Irikaitz lies behind the bath spa in Zestoa, on the other side of the river Urola, 14 metres from the river bank. The archaeologist from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has been carrying out excavations here summer after summer, together with students and researchers from this and other universities and in cooperation with Aranzadi Science Society. Since 1998 they have uncovered 32 square metres; nothing compared to the eight hectares (at least) that this "gigantic" open-air site covers. This is archaeology, demanding a lot of patience, but the results are worth it: "You feel as if you have found something that has been waiting to fall into your hands for 200,000 years".

It is like a lottery

The tasks pertaining to an archaeological site are complex and lengthy in any case, but particularly so at Irikaiz. To start with, because it is in the open air. In the case of caves, it is known that they served as refuges for our ancestors and, once their location is identified, it is highly possible that archaeological treasures are found there. Open air archaeological sites, on the other hand, are discovered when some civil engineering infrastructure has to be built, and it is difficult to predict what will be found. Moreover, in Zestoa there are remains from the Lower Paleolithic, when there are hardly any references from this period in the Basque Country. According to Mr Arrizabalaga, when they started, "it was like a lottery. We did not know what to expect – either about its chronology or about the kinds of remains likely to be uncovered".

Precisely because of this lack of references, they were fascinated when they came across "totally exotic" raw material: volcanic stones. "In the first dig, we thought at first that someone may have brought the rocks there when they were building the Urola railway, to use them as ballast. It was all so surprising and incredible", said the archaeologist. But no; this phenomenon had another logical explanation: "It is a geological rarity. In the Urola River valley there is a layer of volcanic stones; the river cut through these, took them to the surface and brought them to this place. This is why humans from prehistory came here – there was no other place in the Basque Country with stones like these".

A margin of 350,000 years

The fact that the remains are so old or the features of the materials thereof so unusual make dating in Irikaitz very difficult, as most of the methods commonly used to this end are of little use here. A clear example of this is that any kind of dating with bone remains has had to be totally discarded; unlike in other sites; here there are hardly any such remains, the earth here being so acidic that it has consumed almost everything in this respect, leaving only stone tools and plant fossils.

There are, thus, few means for dating certain remains. There were two periods of human occupation in Irikaitz, the most recent being 25,000 years ago, the pendant discovered this summer being from that time. But, it is the older occupation that gives headaches in trying to date it. Yes, it dates from the early Stone Age (Lower Palaeolithic), but when exactly? There hardly exist archaeological sites similar to this one, to act as a reference. As this archaeologist explained, "there is no other case of the Lower Palaeolithic under these conditions along the strip of land bordered by the Bay of Biscay, and only a few like it in the whole of the Iberian Peninsula". It is impossible to narrow the dating to less than an interval of 350,000 years: "We know it cannot date from later than 150,000 years ago (when that period ended), and neither can it be prior to 500,000 years ago, because the sea covered the area during that period".

Therefore, of the 18-20 dating methods currently available, there are no more than two applicable to Irikaitz. Both involve luminescence, and with which Arrizabalaga's team are attempting to get results. The first method acts to specify when the sun illuminated a piece of quartz for the last time; without the wished-for results, however. The second is based on thermo-luminescence, a method with which they are working currently: this is applied to certain types of stones which have undergone heating from fires, and the measurement is based on the amount of radiation accumulated.

Since 1998, more than 500 people have carried out field work at this prehistoric archaeological site of Irikaitz; without counting those who have contributed from the laboratory. This has included a considerable group of researchers who have worked tenaciously in the search for any result, no matter how small. Many of these research workers belong to the UPV/EHU, like Mr Arrizabalaga. And, although the fruit of their work is harvested little by little, they feel they are rewarded. "If you Google Irikaitz, some 7,000 entries appear. We started digging in 1998 and, by 2001, the site was mentioned as a reference not written by us, in relation to the history of this geographical area".
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Irikaitz archaeological site -- host to a 25,000-year-old pendant". EurekAlert. Posted: December 27, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/ef-ias122711.php

Humans on many roads to Asia

2012-01-13T08:15:00.031-07:00

The discovery by Russian archaeologists of the remains of an extinct prehistoric human during the excavation of Denisova Cave in Southern Siberia in 2008 was nothing short of a scientific sensation. The sequencing of the nuclear genome taken from a circa. 30,000-year-old finger bone revealed that Denisova man was neither a Neanderthal nor modern human, but a new form of hominin. Minute traces of the Denisova genome are still found in some individuals living today. The comparisons of the DNA of modern humans and prehistoric human species provide new indications of how human populations settled in Asia over 44,000 years ago.

Tracking Denisovan DNA

As scientists from Harvard Medical School in Boston (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have discovered, the Denisova hominin passed on genetic material not only to populations that live in New Guinea today, but also to Australian aborigines and population groups in the Philippines. David Reich, professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, says: “The Denisovan DNA is comparable to a medical contrast agent that can be used to make a person’s blood vessels visible. It has such a high recognition value that even small volumes can be detected in individuals. Therefore, we were able to track down Denisovan DNA in human dispersals. The sequencing of prehistoric DNA is an important tool for researching human evolution.”

The scientists have discovered that, contrary to the information available up to now, modern humans possibly populated Asia in at least two migration waves. According to David Reich, the original inhabitants who still populate Southeast Asia and Oceania today came from the first migration wave. Later migrations formed populations in East Asia that are related to the population found in Southeast Asia today.

Accordingly, Denisova hominins were spread across an extraordinarily large ecological and geographical area extending from Siberia to tropical Southeast Asia. “The fact that Denisovan DNA can be detected in some but not other original inhabitant populations living in Southeast Asia today shows that numerous populations with and without Denisovan DNA existed over 44,000 years ago,” says Mark Stoneking, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and leading author of the study. “The simplest explanation for the presence of Denisovan genetic material in some but not all groups is that Denisova people themselves lived in Southeast Asia.”

In December 2010, Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reported in the journal Nature that Denisova hominins contributed genes to human populations living in New Guinea today.

Genetic footprint

The new study, which was initiated by Mark Stoneking – an expert in the field of human genetic variation in Southeast Asia and Oceania – is now researching the genetic footprint that the Denisova hominin has left behind in us modern humans. The scientists analysed the genomes of 33 populations living in Southeast Asia and Oceania today, including people from Borneo, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Polynesia. Some of this data were already available and others were recorded in the context of the current study.

The analysis carried out by the researchers shows that the Denisova hominin contributed genetic material not only to the people living in New Guinea today but also to Australian aborigines, the Mamanwa, a Philippine “Negrito” group, and some other populations in eastern Southeast Asia and Oceania. In contrast, western and northwestern groups, including other “Negrito” groups, such as the Onge people who inhabit the Andaman Islands and the Jehai of Malaysia, and the mainland East Asians did not mix with the Denisova people.

The researchers conclude from this that Denisova hominins interbred with modern humans at least 44,000 years ago, before the Australians and inhabitants of New Guinea separated from each other. As opposed to this, Southeast Asia was first colonised by modern humans who were not related to today’s Chinese and Indonesian populations. The latter arrived in the course of subsequent migratory movements. This hypothesis on the settlement of Southeast Asia and Oceania, which is referred to as the “South Route” has already been substantiated by archaeological finds. However, strong support in the form of genetic evidence has yet to be found.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. "Humans on many roads to Asia". Past Horizons. Posted: December 22, 2011. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/12/2011/humans-on-many-roads-to-asia

Deciphered Ancient Tablet Reveals Curse of Greengrocer

2012-01-12T08:15:00.011-07:00

A fiery ancient curse inscribed on two sides of a thin lead tablet was meant to afflict, not a king or pharaoh, but a simple greengrocer selling fruits and vegetables some 1,700 years ago in the city of Antioch, researchers find.

Written in Greek, the tablet holding the curse was dropped into a well in Antioch, then one of the Roman Empire's biggest cities in the East, today part of southeast Turkey, near the border with Syria.

The curse calls upon Iao, the Greek name for Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, to afflict a man named Babylas who is identified as being a greengrocer. The tablet lists his mother's name as Dionysia, "also known as Hesykhia" it reads. The text was translated by Alexander Hollmann of the University of Washington.

The artifact, which is now in the Princeton University Art Museum, was discovered in the 1930s by an archaeological team but had not previously been fully translated. The translation is detailed in the most recent edition of the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.

"O thunder-and-lightning-hurling Iao, strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer," reads the beginning of one side of the curse tablet. "As you struck the chariot of Pharaoh, so strike his [Babylas'] offensiveness."

Hollmann told LiveScience that he has seen curses directed against gladiators and charioteers, among other occupations, but never a greengrocer. "There are other people who are named by occupation in some of the curse tablets, but I haven't come across a greengrocer before," he said.

The person giving the curse isn't named, so scientists can only speculate as to what his motives were. "There are curses that relate to love affairs," Hollmann said. However, "this one doesn't have that kind of language."

It's possible the curse was the result of a business rivalry or dealing of some sort. "It's not a bad suggestion that it could be business related or trade related," said Hollmann, adding that the person doing the cursing could have been a greengrocer himself. If that's the case it would suggest that vegetable selling in the ancient world could be deeply competitive. "With any kind of tradesman they have their turf, they have their territory, they're susceptible to business rivalry.”

The name Babylas, used by a third-century Bishop of Antioch who was killed for his Christian beliefs, suggests the greengrocer may have been a Christian. "There is a very important Bishop of Antioch called Babylas who was one of the early martyrs," Hollmann said.

Biblical metaphors

The use of Old Testament biblical metaphors initially suggested to Hollmann the curse-writer was Jewish. After studying other ancient magical spells that use the metaphors, he realized that this may not be the case.

"I don't think there's necessarily any connection with the Jewish community," he said. "Greek and Roman magic did incorporate Jewish texts sometimes without understanding them very well."

In addition to the use of Iao (Yahweh), and reference to the story of the Exodus, the curse tablet also mentions the story of Egypt's firstborn.

"O thunder—and-lightning-hurling Iao, as you cut down the firstborn of Egypt, cut down his [livestock?] as much as..." (The next part is lost.)

"It could simply be that this [the Old Testament] is a powerful text, and magic likes to deal with powerful texts and powerful names," Hollmann said. "That's what makes magic work or make[s] people think it works."
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2012. "Deciphered Ancient Tablet Reveals Curse of Greengrocer". Live Science. Posted: December 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17589-ancient-curse-translated-greengrocer.html

Towards a radical new approach to development aid

2012-01-11T08:15:00.011-07:00

Development aid is in need of a major overhaul. This must include a better assessment of the priorities in specific developing countries: governance reforms designed to achieve a fairer distribution of income or economic reforms to increase growth. This is one of the important research conclusions reached by Rutger van den Noort, who will be awarded a PhD for his work on this subject on Thursday, 22 December at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, the Netherlands).

Third World

Since 1952, developing countries have been classified as Third World countries. According to Rutger van den Noort, this classification has now become outdated because the differences between developing countries have increased significantly in the intervening years. 'As a result of this, there are now five clusters of countries, rather than three. The new classification takes account of differences between developing countries in terms of factors that are relevant today, such as the proportion of poor people in the population, the gross domestic product per head of population, energy consumption and labour productivity. Half a century ago, these factors did not seem important in the fight against poverty, but they are now essential in order to gain an effective understanding of what is and is not possible in developing countries.'

GPC

This new perspective clearly demonstrates that a 'one-size-fits-all' approach cannot be applied to development aid and highlights the necessity to first make an assessment, from a global perspective, in terms of what are known as the five Global Poverty Clusters (GPCs). Only then should there be a focus on a specific country in order to set priorities, argues Van den Noort.

Radical

In his thesis, Towards the end of global poverty, the TU Delft PhD student proposes a radical innovation of the development aid sector, based on this classification into GPCs, combined with what is known as the Cyclical Innovation Model. According to this model, it is necessary to coordinate three complimentary leadership tasks at the highest level: formulating a future vision (what do we want to achieve with the development aid sector?), developing a roadmap to achieve it (what approach will we adopt?) and applying a cyclic process model (how will we actually achieve these changes?).

Competitive

The cyclic process model provides an outline of the related activities on which the development aid sector will need to focus. These are: conducting academic research into the technical and economic possibilities of the specific developing country; applying technologies that are appropriate for what may be limited infrastructure in that country; developing new products that are not only needed by the developing country itself, but will also enhance its competitive position and, finally, establishing trading relations in order to bring new products to the world market under fair and competitive conditions.

Game-changer

Van den Noort: 'This will make it possible for countries to develop their own knowledge economies, which can compete effectively in the global economy. Clearly, this new approach will call for a completely new skill set from the development aid sector. In this, the Cyclical Innovation Model will serve as a game-changer for the sector.'
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Towards a radical new approach to development aid". EurekAlert. Posted: December 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/duot-tar122011.php

Human skull study causes evolutionary headache

2012-01-10T08:15:00.009-07:00

Scientists studying a unique collection of human skulls have shown that changes to the skull shape thought to have occurred independently through separate evolutionary events may have actually precipitated each other.

Researchers at the Universities of Manchester and Barcelona examined 390 skulls from the Austrian town of Hallstatt and found evidence that the human skull is highly integrated, meaning variation in one part of the skull is linked to changes throughout the skull.

The Austrian skulls are part of a famous collection kept in the Hallstatt Catholic Church ossuary; local tradition dictates that the remains of the town's dead are buried but later exhumed to make space for future burials. The skulls are also decorated with paintings and, crucially, bear the name of the deceased. The Barcelona team made measurements of the skulls and collected genealogical data from the church's records of births, marriages and deaths, allowing them to investigate the inheritance of skull shape.

The team tested whether certain parts of the skull – the face, the cranial base and the skull vault or brain case – changed independently, as anthropologists have always believed, or were in some way linked. The scientists simulated the shift of the foramen magnum (where the spinal cord enters the skull) associated with upright walking; the retraction of the face, thought to be linked to language development and perhaps chewing; and the expansion and rounding of the top of the skull, associated with brain expansion. They found that, rather than being separate evolutionary events, changes in one part of the brain would facilitate and even drive changes in the other parts.

"We found that genetic variation in the skull is highly integrated, so if selection were to favour a shape change in a particular part of the skull, there would be a response involving changes throughout the skull," said Dr Chris Klingenberg, in Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences

"We were able to use the genetic information to simulate what would happen if selection were to favour particular shape changes in the skull. As those changes, we used the key features that are derived in humans, by comparison with our ancestors: the shift of the foramen magnum associated with the transition to bipedal posture, the retraction of the face, the flexion of the cranial base, and, finally, the expansion of the braincase.

"As much as possible, we simulated each of these changes as a localised shape change limited to a small region of the skull. For each of the simulations, we obtained a predicted response that included not only the change we selected for, but also all the others. All those features of the skull tended to change as a whole package. This means that, in evolutionary history, any of the changes may have facilitated the evolution of the others."

Lead author Dr Neus Martínez-Abadías, from the University of Barcelona's, added: "This study has important implications for inferences on human evolution and suggests the need for a reinterpretation of the evolutionary scenarios of the skull in modern humans."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Human skull study causes evolutionary headache". EurekAlert. Posted: December 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/uom-hss122011.php

Paper Reference:

Martínez-Abadías, N.; Esparza, M.; Sjövold, T.; González-José, R.; Santos, M.; Hernàndez, M.; Klingenberg, C.P. "Pervasive genetic integration directs the evolution of human skull shape". Evolution, November 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01496.x

Mystery Of Amazonian Tribe's Head Shapes Solved

2012-01-09T08:15:00.013-07:00

Culture may trigger rapid evolution of various human features, suggests new research into the marital practices of a tribe from the Brazilian rainforest.

Evolution is often thought to be driven by environmental factors, including climate, or geographical obstacles such as rivers and mountains. Still, cultural factors — that is, groups of traditions and behaviors passed down from one generation to another — can have profound effects on behavior and also possibly lead to evolutionary changes.

To learn more, scientists analyzed genetic, climatic, geographic and physical traits of 1,203 members of six South American tribes living in the regions of the Brazilian Amazon and highlands. Their research found that one group, the Xavánte, had significantly diverged from the others in terms of their morphology or shape, possessing larger heads, taller and narrower faces and broader noses. These characteristics evolved in the approximately 1,500 years after they split from a sister group called the Kayapó, a rate that was about 3.8-times faster than comparable rates of change seen in the other tribes.

The major changes the investigators saw apparently occurred independently of the effects of climate or geography on the Xavánte. Instead, cultural factors appear responsible. For instance, in the Xavánte village of São Domingo, a quarter of the population was made up of sons of a single chief, Apoena, who had five wives. The tribe's sexual practices allow successful men in that group to father many offspring, which in turn means that any traits of theirs can quickly dominate their population.

"We have been working with the Xavante for about half a century, and from the beginning their morphology showed differences from the classical Amerindian pattern," researcher Francisco Salzano, a geneticist at Brazil's Federal University of the Rio Grande do Sul, told LiveScience. "We verified that the Xavante experienced a remarkable pace of morphological evolution."

The researchers suggest that assembling databases of cultural and biological data could help uncover other examples of how culture might influence human evolution.

"This specific piece of research is related to a long-term project of investigation involving not only the group responsible for this paper, but many others internationally," Salzano said.

Salzano and his colleagues detailed their findings online Dec. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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References:

Choi, Charles. 2012. "Mystery Of Amazonian Tribe's Head Shapes Solved". Live Science. Posted: December 19, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17544-culture-human-evolution-amazon-tribe.html

Ancient Texts Tell Tales of War, Bar Tabs

2012-01-08T08:15:00.013-07:00

A trove of newly translated texts from the ancient Middle East are revealing accounts of war, the building of pyramid like structures called ziggurats and even the people's use of beer tabs at local taverns.

The 107 cuneiform texts, most of them previously unpublished, are from the collection of Martin Schøyen, a businessman from Norway who has a collection of antiquities.

The texts date from the dawn of written history, about 5,000 years ago, to a time about 2,400 years ago when the Achaemenid Empire (based in Persia) ruled much of the Middle East.

The team's work appears in the newly published book "Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection"

Nebuchadnezzar's tower

Among the finds is a haunting, albeit partly lost, inscription in the words of King Nebuchadnezzar II, a ruler of Babylon who built a great ziggurat — massive pyramidlike towers built in ancient Mesopotamia — dedicated to the god Marduk about 2,500 years ago.

The inscription was carved onto a stele, a stone slab used for engraving. It includes a drawing of the ziggurat and King Nebuchadnezzar II himself.

Some scholars have argued that the structure inspired the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In the inscription, Nebuchadnezzar talks about how he got people from all over the world to build the Marduk tower and a second ziggurat at Borsippa.

"I mobilized [all] countries everywhere, [each and] every ruler [who] had been raised to prominence over all the people of the world [as one] loved by Marduk..." he wrote on the stele.

"I built their structures with bitumen and [baked brick throughout]. I completed them, making [them gleam] bright as the [sun]..." (Translations by Professor Andrew George)

It wasn't the only time Nebuchadnezzar made this boast. In addition to this stele, similar writings were previously discovered on a cylinder-shaped tablet noted Andrew George, a professor at the University of London and editor of the book.

George points out that the image of Nebuchadnezzar II found on the newly translated stele is one of only four known representations of the biblical king.

"The relief thus yields only the fourth certain representation of Nebuchadnezzar to be discovered; the others are carved on cliff-faces in Lebanon at Wadi Brisa (which has two reliefs) and at Shir es-Sanam," George writes in the book. "All these outdoor monuments are in very poor condition and their depictions of the king are much less impressive than that on the stele."

On the stele, a bearded Nebuchadnezzar wears a cone-shaped royal crown with a bracelet or bangle on his right wrist. In his left hand, he carries a staff as tall as he is and in his right he holds an as-yet-unidentified object. He also wears a robe and what appear to be sandals, common footwear in the ancient world.

George goes on to say that the stele was likely originally placed in a cavity of the Babylon ziggurat before being removed sometime in antiquity. (He declined an interview request due to time constraints.)

Conquest of Babylon

Another intriguing inscription, which discusses violence, looting and revenge, dates back about 3,000 years. It was written in the name of Tiglath-pileser I, a king of Assyria. In it, he brags about how he conquered portions of Mesopotamia and rebuilt a palace at a city named Pakute.

One section deals with his conquest of the city of Babylon, defeating a king named Marduk-nadin-ahhe.

"I demolished the palaces of the city of Babylon that belonged to Marduk-nadin-ahhe, the king of the land of Kardunias (and) carried off a great deal of property from his palaces," Tiglath-pileser writes.

"Marduk-nadin-ahhe, king of the land of Kardunias, relied on the strength of his troops and his chariots, and he marched after me. He fought with me at the city of Situla, which is upstream of the city of Akkad on the River Tigris, and I dispersed his numerous chariots. I brought about the defeat of his warriors (and) his fighters in that battle. He retreated and went back to his land."

Grant Frame, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who translated the boastful inscription, writes in the book that the Babylonians may have provoked the Assyrians under the rule of Tiglath-pileser I into attacking them.

When a female tavern keeper gives you a beer ...

Another newly translated document is the oldest known copy of the law code of Ur-Nammu, a Mesopotamian king who ruled at Ur about 4,000 years ago. He developed a set of laws centuries before Hammurabi's more famous code from 1780 B.C., which includes the "an eye for an eye" rule.

In some ways, Ur Nammu's code is more advanced. For instance, it prescribes a fine for someone who takes out another person's vision, rather than an eye for an eye. Scholars are already aware of much of the code from later versions.

However, the fact that this is the earliest known edition allows researchers to compare it with later copies and see how it evolved. For instance, the copy sheds light on one of the oddest rules governing what you should pay a "female tavern-keeper" who gives you a jar of beer. [10 Intoxicating Beer Facts]

Apparently, if you have the female keeper put the beer on your tab during the summer, she will have the right to extract a tax from you, of unknown amount, in winter.

"If a female tavern-keeper gives [in] summer one beer-jar to someone on credit its nigdiri-tax will be [...] in win[ter]..." (Translation by Miguel Civil)

The lesson? If you live in ancient Mesopotamia don't put the beer on your tab.
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2012. "Ancient Texts Tell Tales of War, Bar Tabs". Live Science. Posted: December 16, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17522-ancient-texts-tales-war-bar-tabs.html

Emmett L. Bennett Jr., Expert on Ancient Script, Dies at 93

2012-01-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

Emmett L. Bennett Jr., a classicist who played a vital role in deciphering Linear B, the Bronze Age Aegean script that defied solution for more than 50 years after it was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900, died on Dec. 15 in Madison, Wis. He was 93.

His daughter Cynthia Bennett confirmed the death.

Professor Bennett was considered the father of Mycenaean epigraphy — that is, the intricate art of reading inscriptions from the Mycenaean period, as the slice of the Greek Bronze Age from about 1600 to 1200 B.C. is known. His work, which entailed analysis so minute that he could eventually distinguish the handwritings of many different Bronze Age scribes, helped open a window onto the Mycenaean world.

This was the world of which Homer would sing in his “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” a world that until Linear B was deciphered had languished in the murk of prehistory.

Deciphering an ancient script is like cracking a secret code from the past, and the unraveling of Linear B is widely considered one of the most challenging archaeological decipherments of all time, if not the most challenging.

“Anyone who’s looked at a piece of indecipherable handwriting realizes how difficult it is as opposed to looking at a piece of text with the same message in printed form,” Andrew Robinson, the author of many books about archaeological decipherment, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

With an unknown language in an unknown script, the difficulty is multiplied a thousandfold.

Linear B recorded the administrative workings of Mycenaean palatial centers on Crete and the Greek mainland 3,000 years ago: accounts of crops harvested, flocks tended, goods manufactured (including furniture, chariots and perfume), preparations for religious feasts and preparations for war.

It was deciphered at last in 1952, not by a scholar but by an obsessed amateur, a young English architect named Michael Ventris. The decipherment made him world famous before his death in an automobile accident in 1956.

As Mr. Ventris had acknowledged, he was deeply guided by Professor Bennett’s work, which helped impose much-needed order on the roiling mass of strange, ancient symbols.

In his seminal monograph “The Pylos Tablets” (1951), Professor Bennett published the first definitive list of the signs of Linear B. Compiling such a list is the essential first step in deciphering any unknown script, and it is no mean feat.

A Martian confronting the Roman alphabet, for instance, would need years of painstaking study just to be certain that dissimilar-looking characters like “A” and “a” are mere variations of the same letter, while similar-looking ones like “O” and “Q” are different letters altogether.

Analysts of Linear B spent years in similar straits. Working with Alice Kober, a classicist at Brooklyn College who before her death in 1950 was one of the world’s foremost experts on the script, Professor Bennett spent much of the 1940s hammering out a list of about 80 characters.

Each character stood for a syllable of the still-unknown language. (Linear B also contained a set of pictographic signs, standing for whole concepts like “man,” “woman,” “horse,” “goat” and “chariot”; many of these could be interpreted readily.)

Thanks to the combined efforts of Professor Bennett, Professor Kober and Mr. Ventris, Linear B is now the earliest readable writing in Europe, and the Mycenaean Age is part of the canon of history.

Emmett Leslie Bennett Jr. was born in Minneapolis on July 12, 1918. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in classics from the University of Cincinnati, where he studied with the eminent archaeologist Carl W. Blegen.

During World War II, the young Mr. Bennett worked as a cryptanalyst, helping decipher Japanese messages.

“He didn’t know Japanese,” said Thomas G. Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas who was a graduate student of Professor Bennett’s. “They gave him the encoded texts, and what he did was look for patterns in them. And of course this is all pre-computer, so you needed to have human beings searching for strings and all that.”

Those skills would prove invaluable for his analysis of Linear B.

The tablets were first unearthed in the spring of 1900 at Knossos, Crete, by the English archaeologist Arthur Evans, who dated them to about 1450 B.C. (He also uncovered an older Cretan script, which he named Linear A; it remains undeciphered.)

From the start, Linear B was a black box. The script, whose characters to modern eyes resemble tepees and telegraph poles, shirt buttons and philodendron leaves, was unlike anything ever seen. The language it recorded was equally unknown: many ethnic groups had peopled the Bronze Age Aegean, and there was no way to tell which had produced the tablets.

Mr. Evans tried for decades to crack Linear B but was unable to do so before his death in 1941. About the only thing of which he, and most later investigators, felt confident was that the script did not record Greek: Greek speakers were not thought to have existed that long ago.

Even if they had, they would seemingly have had no way to write their language down: the Greek alphabet was not adopted until the eighth century B.C. (The Homeric epics were composed and transmitted orally starting in the ninth or eighth century B.C.)

But as Mr. Ventris discovered, Linear B did write Greek — a very early dialect spoken 500 years before Homer and a millennium before the Classical Age.

Professor Bennett’s investigations centered on a cache of Linear B tablets from Pylos, on the Greek mainland; they had been unearthed by his mentor, Professor Blegen, in 1939. After the war, Professor Blegen entrusted his disciple to transcribe, analyze and publish their contents.

The result was “The Pylos Tablets.” Though the book did not try to decipher Linear B, its careful transcriptions, comprehensive list of signs and analysis of characteristic patterns in the script gave Mr. Ventris essential grist.

“We know how much Ventris admired Bennett, because he immediately adopted Bennett’s sign list of Linear B for his own work before the decipherment,” said Mr. Robinson, whose book “The Man Who Deciphered Linear B” (2002) is a biography of Mr. Ventris. “He openly said, ‘This is a wonderful piece of work.’ ”

Professor Bennett taught at Yale and the University of Texas but was most closely associated with the University of Wisconsin, where he taught from 1959 until his retirement in 1988.

Besides his daughter Cynthia, he is survived by another daughter, Kathleen Bennett; three sons, Patrick, John and Chris; a sister, Shirley Denman; a brother, Clarence; and four grandchildren. His wife, the former Marja Dorothy Adams, whom he married in 1941, died in 2005.

As meticulous as Professor Bennett’s work was, it once engendered great confusion. In 1951, after he sent Mr. Ventris a copy of his monograph, a grateful Ventris went to the post office to pick it up. As Mr. Robinson’s biography recounts, a suspicious official, eyeing the package, asked him: “I see the contents are listed as Pylos Tablets. Now, just what ailments are pylos tablets supposed to alleviate?”
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References:

Fox, Margalit. 2012. "Emmett L. Bennett Jr., Expert on Ancient Script, Dies at 93". New York Times Science. Posted: December 31, 2011. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/science/emmett-l-bennett-jr-dies-at-93-helped-decipher-linear-b.html?_r=1

Scientists discover second-oldest gene mutation

2012-01-07T08:15:00.008-07:00

A new study has identified a gene mutation that researchers estimate dates back to 11,600 B.C., making it the second oldest human disease mutation yet discovered.

Researchers with the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute led the study and estimate that the mutation arose in the Middle East some 13,600 years ago. Only a mutation seen in cystic fibrosis that arose between 11,000 and 52,000 years ago is believed to be older.

The investigators described the mutation in people of Arabic, Turkish and Jewish ancestry. It causes a rare, inherited vitamin B12 deficiency called Imerslund-Gräsbeck Syndrome (IGS).

The researchers say that although the mutation is found in vastly different ethnic populations, it originated in a single, prehistoric individual and was passed down to that individual's descendents. This is unusual because such "founder mutations" usually are restricted to specific ethnic groups or relatively isolated populations.

The findings were published recently in the Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases.

"Diagnosing IGS is often time-consuming and inconclusive mainly because vitamin B12 deficiencies have many causes, so identifying this condition usually involves excluding other possibilities," says principal investigator Stephan M. Tanner, research assistant professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics.

"Our findings permit reliable genetic diagnostics in suspected cases of IGS in that this mutation should be considered first when genetically screening patients from these populations."

Even in rare disorders, founder mutations can cause a significant fraction of all cases, he says. This mutation accounts for more than half of the cases in these populations and for about 15 percent of cases worldwide. "It is also often seen in expatriates living abroad," Tanner says.

IGS was identified just over 50 years ago. It occurs in children born with two mutated copies of either the amnionless (AMN) or the cubilin (CUBN) gene. When a genetic mistake is present in both copies of either of these two genes, a person cannot absorb vitamin B12 in the small intestine, resulting in the deficiency.

Children with IGS experience a high risk of infections, fatigue, attention deficit, paralysis and, ultimately, a form of anemia that can be fatal if left untreated. An estimated 400 to 500 cases of IGS have been described worldwide thus far. The incidence rate remains unknown. The syndrome is treatable with life-long injections of vitamin B12.

For this study, the researchers examined a total of 20 patients, 24 parents, 8 unaffected siblings, and 4 grandparents from 16 IGS families. Because the researchers found the mutation in such diverse populations, they were unsure whether it was a true founder mutation that first arose in one individual and was passed down through many generations, or whether it was simply a mutation that recurred frequently over time in different populations.

Careful analysis of the gene sequences on either side of the mutation (i.e., the haplotype in both the Muslim and Jewish families), however, pointed to a single mutational event rather than repeated events.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Scientists discover second-oldest gene mutation". EurekAlert. Posted: December 15, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/osum-sds121511.php

Prehistoric Wood Hints at Life Before Lake Huron

2012-01-06T08:15:00.015-07:00

An ancient piece of wood found at the bottom of Lake Huron hints at time, about 8,900 years ago, when this area was dry land where ancient hunters may have lived.

The piece of wood measures about 5-feet, 6-inches (1.7 meters) and seems to have been a tool of some kind.

"The first thing you notice is that it appears to have been shaped with a rounded base and a pointed tip," said John O'Shea, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "There's also a bevel on one side that looks unnatural, like it had to have been created. It looks like it might have been used as a tent pole or a pole to hang meat."

A more-detailed analysis is under way to determine if this is indeed the case. Using carbon dating —which looks at a radioactive form of carbon in a sample to determine its age — the wood was estimated to be about 8,900 years old.

An ancient piece of wood found at the bottom of Lake Huron hints at time, about 8,900 years ago, when this area was dry land where ancient hunters may have lived.

The piece of wood measures about 5-feet, 6-inches (1.7 meters) and seems to have been a tool of some kind.

"The first thing you notice is that it appears to have been shaped with a rounded base and a pointed tip," said John O'Shea, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "There's also a bevel on one side that looks unnatural, like it had to have been created. It looks like it might have been used as a tent pole or a pole to hang meat."

A more-detailed analysis is under way to determine if this is indeed the case. Using carbon dating —which looks at a radioactive form of carbon in a sample to determine its age — the wood was estimated to be about 8,900 years old.

O'Shea and colleague Guy Meadows, also of the University of Michigan, previously found evidence of lanes used by ancient hunters to drive caribou to slaughter on Alpena-Amberley Ridge, similarly now underwater. During ancient periods when water was low, this ridge formed a land connection linking northern Michigan with central Ontario.

"One of the enduring questions is the way the land went underwater. Many people think it must have been a violent event, but finding this large wood object just sitting on the bottom wedged between a few boulders suggests that the inundation happened quickly but rather gently. And this in turn suggests that we'll find more intact evidence of human activity in the area," O'Shea said.

The researchers spotted the mysterious piece of wood about 100 feet (30.5 meters) below the lake's surface, using the camera of a remotely operated aquatic vehicle.

They also collected other articles from the bottom of the lake, which are now being analyzed.

A documentary on the Discovery Channel Canada featuring this research began airing this week.
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References:

Parry, Wynne. 2012. "Prehistoric Wood Hints at Life Before Lake Huron". Live Science. Posted: December 14, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17475-prehistoric-wood-artifact-lake-huron.html

Vowels Control Your Brain

2012-01-05T08:15:00.023-07:00

Here's something you should know about yourself. Vowels control your brain.

"I"s make you see things differently than "O"s. Here's how. Say these words out loud:

* Bean
* Mint
* Slim

These "I" and "E" vowels are formed by putting your tongue forward in the mouth.

That's why they're called "front" vowels.

Now, say:

* Large
* Pod
* Or
* Ought

With these words, your tongue depresses and folds back a bit. So "O", "A" and "U" are called "back" of the throat vowels.

OK, here's the weird part.

When comparing words across language groups, says Stanford linguistics professor Dan Jurafsky, a curious pattern shows up: Words with front vowels ("I" and "E") tend to represent small, thin, light things.

Back vowels ("O" "U" and some "A"s ) show up in fat, heavy things.

It's not always true, but it's a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little, teeny or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels) versus humongous or gargantuan (back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish chico (front vowel meaning small) versus gordo (back vowel meaning fat). Or French petit (front vowel) versus grand (back vowel).

Try this yourself.

If I make up two words, "Frish" and "Frosh" and tell you each is about to become a new ice cream, which of the two seems richer, heavier?

For me, "Frosh," (with the back vowel "o") seems creamier. I don't know why. Just feels that way. And not just to me. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found most people imagined Frosh creamier than Frish.

Here's another example. Richard Klink, a marketing professor at Loyola College in Maryland created a test using two sets of names. They were nonsense names, chosen at random:

Nidax vs. Nodax and Detal vs. Dutal

And then, slapping these names on various imaginary products, he asked a group of people:

* Which brand of laptop seems bigger; Detal or Dutal?
* Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?
* Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?
* Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab?

"In each case," reports Professor Jurasky, "the participants in the study tended to choose the product named by back vowels (dutal, nodax) as the larger, heavier, thicker, darker product. Similar studies have been conducted in various other languages."

Jurasky then wondered, Do businesses know this about vowels?

For example, would an ice cream company (looking to create a rich, creamy and satisfying product,) and a cracker manufacturer, (looking to make something, thin, light and crackily) use different vowels?

He thought they might, so, on his blog, he writes:

To test the hypothesis I downloaded two lists of food names from the web. One was a list of 81 ice cream flavors that I constructed by including every flavor sold by either Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry's. The second was a list of 592 cracker brands from a dieting website. For each list, I counted the total number of front vowels and the total number of back vowels (details of the study are here). The result, shown in the table [below], is that ice creams names indeed have more back vowels and cracker names have more front vowels.

Ice cream vs. Crackers
Language of Food

Ice cream companies mix in lots of "O"s and "A"s, says Jurasky, like...

Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut

But the cracker people stick pretty much to "E"s and "I"s.

Cheese Nips, Cheez It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel thins, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Thin Crisps, Cheese Crisps, Chicken in a Biskit, Snack sticks, Toasted chips, Ritz bits

But Why?

Why do we associate "front" vowels with small, thin light things and "back" vowels with big, solid, heavy things?

Cheese vs. Boo.

Two linguists, John Ohala and Eugene Morton proposed that over evolutionary time, humans instinctively associate pitch with size. Lions, bears, seals make low sounds, canaries, mice, rabbits higher sounds. Not always, but enough of the time that when we hear a low frequency (even in an "O" or a "U") we may think big and heavy, whereas higher frequencies (even in "I's and "E"s) suggest small and light.

The Origin Of The Smile?

Dan Jurasky goes even further. Scholars have noticed, he says, that when people say "Boo!", they form an o-shape with their lips and mouth, and look aggressive and a little dangerous.

But use the "front" vowels, like "I" and "E", your mouth and lips will widen into a kind of smile. Why do we say "cheese" when it's time to take the picture? Why does the word smile contain an "I"? These front vowels, he says, are the "smile" vowels. One day they may even explain why we smile, but in the meantime, the big news is that it's old fashioned to think of vowels as just sounds.

They are more than that: they are little strings that pull on our brains and it turns out, "I"s pull us to different places than "O"s.

Who knew?
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References:

Krulwich, Robert.2012. "Vowels Control Your Brain". NPR. Posted: Available online: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/12/07/143265882/vowels-control-your-brain

Experts stumped by ancient Jerusalem markings

2012-01-04T08:15:00.030-07:00

V-shaped floor carvings discovered at politically sensitive archaeological dig

Credit: Sebastian Scheiner / AP

One hypothesis suggests that the carvings were meant to hold wooden panels or other structures in place on the room's floor.

Mysterious stone carvings made thousands of years ago and recently uncovered in an excavation underneath Jerusalem have archaeologists stumped.

Israeli diggers who uncovered a complex of rooms that were carved into the bedrock in the oldest section of the city recently found the markings: Three "V" shapes cut next to each other into the limestone floor of one of the rooms, about 2 inches (5 centimeters) deep and 20 inches (50 centimeters) long. There were no finds to offer any clues pointing to the identity of who made them, or what purpose they served.

The archaeologists in charge of the dig know so little that they have been unable even to posit a theory about their nature, said Eli Shukron, one of the two directors of the dig.

"The markings are very strange, and very intriguing. I've never seen anything like them," Shukron said.

The shapes were found in a dig known as the City of David, a politically sensitive excavation conducted by Israeli government archaeologists and funded by a nationalist Jewish group under the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem. The rooms were unearthed as part of the excavation of fortifications around the ancient city's only natural water source, the Gihon spring.

It is possible, the dig's archaeologists say, that when the markings were made at least 2,800 years ago the shapes might have accommodated some kind of wooden structure that stood inside them, or they might have served some other purpose on their own. They might have had a ritual function or one that was entirely mundane.

Historical precedent

Archaeologists faced by a curious artifact can usually at least venture a guess about its nature, but in this case no one, including outside experts consulted by Shukron and the dig's co-director, archaeologists with decades of experience between them, has any idea.

There appears to be at least one other ancient marking of the same type at the site. A century-old map of an expedition led by the British explorer Montague Parker, who searched for the lost treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem between 1909 and 1911, includes the shape of a "V" drawn in an underground channel not far away. Modern archaeologists haven't excavated that area yet.

Ceramic shards found in the rooms indicate they were last used around 800 B.C., with Jerusalem under the rule of Judean kings, the dig's archaeologists say. At around that time, the rooms appear to have been filled with rubble to support the construction of a defensive wall.

It is unclear, however, whether they were built in the time of those kings or centuries earlier by the Canaanite residents who predated them.

Was it a temple?

The purpose of the complex is part of the riddle. The straight lines of its walls and level floors are evidence of careful engineering, and it was located close to the most important site in the city, the spring, suggesting it might have had an important function.

A unique find in a room beside the one with the markings — a stone like a modern grave marker, which was left upright when the room was filled in — might offer a clue. Such stones were used in the ancient Middle East as a focal point for ritual or a memorial for dead ancestors, the archaeologists say, and it is likely a remnant of the pagan religions which the city's Israelite prophets tried to eradicate. It is the first such stone to be found intact in Jerusalem excavations.

But the ritual stone does not necessarily mean the whole complex was a temple. It might simply have marked a corner devoted to religious practice in a building whose purpose was commonplace.

With the experts unable to come up with a theory about the markings, the City of David dig posted a photo on its Facebook page and solicited suggestions. The results ranged from the thought-provoking — "a system for wood panels that held some other item," or molds into which molten metal would could have been poured — to the fanciful: ancient Hebrew or Egyptian characters, or a "symbol for water, particularly as it was near a spring."

Contentious excavation

The City of David dig, where the carvings were found, is the most high-profile and politically contentious excavation in the Holy Land. Named for the biblical monarch thought to have ruled from the spot 3,000 years ago, the dig is located in what today is east Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel in 1967. Palestinians claim that part of the city as the capital of a future state.

The dig is funded by Elad, an organization affiliated with the Israeli settlement movement. The group also moves Jewish families into the neighborhood and elsewhere in east Jerusalem in an attempt to render impossible any division of the city in a future peace deal.

Palestinians and some Israeli archaeologists have criticized the dig for what they say is an excessive focus on Jewish remains. The dig's archaeologists, who work under the auspices of the government's Israel Antiquities Authority, deny that charge.
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References:

Friedman, Matti. 2012. "Experts stumped by ancient Jerusalem markings". MSNBC. Posted: December 7, 2011. Available online: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45582941/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TuIsplauPPo

Inside India's surrogacy industry

2012-01-03T08:15:00.013-07:00

Poverty makes Indian women happy to bear children for infertile western couples who find the costs lower and the legislation less stringent

Dr Nayana Patel says, "Human beings have two main instincts; the instinct of self-protection and the instinct to reproduce." And she should know – she has carved out a career matching infertile couples with women willing to "rent their wombs". Beginning with a couple of surrogacies a year in 2003, Patel's Akanksha clinic in the west Indian state of Gujarat now delivers about 110 surrogate babies a year.

Commercial surrogacy remains controversial and is banned in many countries. But in India, a socially conservative society, surrogacy has thrived since the supreme high court legalised the practice in 2002. A report by the Confederation of Indian Industry estimates the practice will generate $2.3bn a year by 2012.

Women's rights advocates claim that the lack of a clear law on surrogacy and the commercialisation of an unregulated sector have left room for unethical medical practices and the exploitation of both surrogates and infertile couples.

Partly due to pressure from campaigners, the government set out a draft bill last year to limit the age of surrogate mothers to 35, set a maximum of five pregnancies – including their own children – and to make medical insurance mandatory. A further proposal would make it compulsory for prospective parents to show that a child born to a surrogate mother will have automatic citizenship in their home country. The bill also aims to stop clinics sourcing, supplying and taking care of the surrogate mothers themselves.

For now, however, it's business as usual at the Akanksha clinic. When Patel arrives one Wednesday morning, the lobby is full of women. Some wear brightly coloured saris; others are in western dress. They are either desperately seeking a baby or hoping to lift themselves out of poverty and offer their own children a better life.

One of the main attractions of surrogacy in India is the price. Most of Patel's clients are from the US, Canada and Europe. Where it is legal, surrogacy in western countries can cost more than $90,000. At the Akanksha clinic, tucked down a lane behind a chaotic market in Anand, it costs around a third of that. The surrogates are paid between $6,500 and $7,500, the equivalent of several years' income.

When an accident left 32-year-old Ranju Rajubhai's husband severely burned and unable to work, surrogacy seemed the answer to the couple's problems. "I thought I'll be doing a good deed, my work will also get done and [the couple] will also get a baby," says Rajubhai who is due in a month. Like all the women signed on by Akanksha, Rajubhai will receive $6,225, the equivalent of seven years wages for her husband. "I will get my husband's surgery done [for his burns]," she says. "I also want to buy a house. It costs [$14,500 -$18,500] these days. One pregnancy won't be enough, so I am thinking of coming back."

Rajubhai's is a familiar story in the "surrogate house" where she lives with 39 other pregnant women. Owned by Patel, the house is located 10 minutes away from the clinic. With two to three iron-framed beds in each room, the house has the look of a hospital ward. The surrogates, clad in loose, colourful gowns, are sitting, lying, stretching, watching TV or chatting with each other. In one room, hangs a picture of a crawling toddler with the words: "The time to be happy is now."

The majority of the women are second-time surrogates and will have caesarean sections. "We have to cut our stomachs for money," says Anjuman Pathan, a blunt, 30-year-old. "It's not a bad thing, is it?"

Life at the surrogate house creates a sense of sisterhood. The women enjoy the rest and care they may not have had during their own pregnancies but are confined to the house for the whole pregnancy. Their families can visit on Sundays but the surrogates only leave the premises for medical check-ups or if there is a family emergency.

"When I used to go, I would just see the surrogates lying around all day," says Kantibhai Motibhai, the husband of two-time surrogate Shardaben. "They count the days to go back home. [But] I guess it works well. Our main interest was in the money. Their main interest is in the baby." Sharda's two surrogacies have allowed the couple to lease some land, buy buffaloes and a motorbike, have money for their children's education and start saving. As second-time surrogate from Nepal, Diksha Gurunga, puts it, "You have to lose something to gain something and what we gain is a lot more than what we lose."

The experiences of the expectant parents are very different. "I would go and pick up a baby on the street," says 38-year-old Jennifer, a tall American who has had five failed pregnancies. "That's the kind of desperation that comes with infertility."

Slender-framed with green eyes and cropped blonde hair, 38-year-old Robyn Wright runs a beauty salon in Wilson, Wyoming. She has a 14-year-old daughter from her first marriage, but a haemorrhage following the birth led to a hysterectomy. When she met Jason, a guide at Yellowstone National Park, the couple wanted their own biological child. The Wrights admit they "weren't born rich" and don't "live on credit". Realising surrogacy in the US was financially impossible, the couple took their savings and travelled to Gujarat to fulfil their dream.

Patel says laws governing surrogacy in the US, for example, are weighted too much in favour of the surrogate mother. "There are so many cases where you are the genetic parent and [the surrogate mother] is blackmailing you. She will not give you the baby ... If you don't pay, you're not allowed to see the baby. Couples from abroad write to us saying that the legal liabilities are so much in the US, that after paying so much money also, I don't know if I'm going to hold my baby or not and that is what India has taken care of."

She is in favour of regulation in India but sees ethics as more important. "See sex determination. It's rampant in India but it's illegal. So whatever you do, there's going to be unethical behaviour. It's the ethics of the couple, surrogate and doctor, which counts."

Back at Patel's clinic, three women who come from North America to find a surrogate mother are gushing over a newborn European baby recently born to one of the surrogates at the clinic – proof that their dreams could also come true. "There's no perfect system, but given what we have and under the circumstances, Dr Patel's clinic definitely helps create miracles," says Fatima, a Canadian of Indian and Chinese heritage.
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References:

Gupta, Davya. 2012. "Inside India's surrogacy industry". The Guardian. Posted: December 6, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/06/surrogate-mothers-india

New study of Western Isles' sand dune-buried artefacts

2012-01-02T08:15:00.003-07:00

New research is being carried out on artefacts recovered from a site where evidence was found for every age from the Neolithic to the 20th Century.

Archaeology at Udal provides an "unbroken timeline" of occupation from the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Viking, Medieval through to the 1900s.

Some of the evidence at the site on North Uist was preserved by wind-blown sand dunes.

Archaeologist Ian Crawford excavated Udal between 1963 and 1995.

The earliest Neolithic layers he revealed consisted of a line of stones with a large upright stone nicknamed the great auk stone because of its resemblance to the extinct seabird.

A deep shaft containing quartz pebbles which had been covered over with a whale's vertebrae was also uncovered.

From the Bronze Age, finds included a skeleton and from the Iron Age evidence of metal work.

Also from the Iron Age were the remains of homes dubbed Jelly Baby houses because the shape of them looked like the sweets.

Evidence of a Viking longhouse and later occupation during the 1600s through to the 18th and 19th centuries were also found.

From the early 20th Century was a saw pit for cutting up wrecked boats.

Crawford's collection is in the care of Western Isles local authority, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.

The comhairle believes the site on the Grenitote peninsula to be one of the most important of its kind in the world.

It said the preservation of relics by being buried under sand was rare outside of the Middle East.

The comhairle has received £85,000 from the Museum Association's Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund to carry out the most complete post-excavation research to be done so far on the site and its finds.

Historic Scotland is assisting with the study.

Money from the grant will also be used to investigate the potential for an archaeological resource centre on North Uist.

Councillor Archie Campbell said the £85,000 grant would help islanders and the comhairle achieve a vision.

He said: "The local community has been waiting nearly 50 years to learn about what was discovered beneath the sand dunes and to see the finds for themselves.

"Long before the material was released by Ian Crawford the community made it clear that their wish was for the collections to be returned to the islands on a permanent basis.

"This grant will go towards achieving that vision by funding a feasibility study into the potential of the Udal collections as the basis for an archaeological resource centre and the impact it would have on the islands' economy."

Deborah Anderson, regional archaeologist with the comhairle, welcomed the funding towards better understanding the collection.

She said: "This is an assemblage which is not just important to the Outer Hebrides but which is essential to help date other collections from the west coast of Scotland and Ireland.

"The local community will no doubt be thrilled that we have received this grant, and we are one step closer to understanding what was discovered beneath the sand dunes."
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References:

BBC News. 2012. "New study of Western Isles' sand dune-buried artefacts". BBC News. Posted: December 6 2011. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-16056541

Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Speak Again

2012-01-01T08:15:00.003-07:00

Debra Meyerson was hiking near Lake Tahoe 15 months ago when a stroke destroyed part of the left side of her brain, leaving her literally speechless. It happens to more than 150,000 Americans a year.

But now Meyerson is learning to talk again through an approach that trains the undamaged right side of her brain to "speak." Specifically, it's a region that controls singing.

For more than 100 years, it's been known that people who can't speak after injury to the speech centers on the left side of the brain can sing.

In the 1970s, Boston researchers started to use a sort of "singing therapy" to help stroke survivors speak again.

However, it never caught on much – perhaps because a lot of therapists, not to mention patients, weren't comfortable singing what they wanted to say. And back then, the science wasn't advanced enough to show the actual changes in the brain that result from the therapy.

That's changing fast.

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who has had a version of "singing therapy," astounded everyone by her ability to speak again – albeit so far in single words and short phrases. Nearly a year ago, a would-be assassin's bullet tore through the speech center in Giffords' left brain.

Singing Sessions

Less visibly, an NIH-funded study at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston may be the first rigorous trial of singing therapy. They call it melodic intonation therapy. Post-stroke patients are assigned to a form of conventional speech therapy or to singing therapy. They undergo 90 minutes of treatment a day for 15 weeks.

Debra Meyerson, 54, is a volunteer in that study. Her aphasia is a cruel twist of fate. Meyerson is an expert in gender and race relations who was a dynamic and popular speaker before her stroke. After a year of conventional speech therapy, she couldn't speak more than a word or two.

When NPR sat in on one of her therapy sessions recently, Meyerson still struggled to speak even the simplest phrases. But she's beginning to talk again.

"If you go to a restaurant and the server asks if you'd like something before your main dish, you might choose something like this," therapist Andrea Norton says, showing Meyerson a picture of a salad. Then Norton sings the word "salad," intoning the syllables on a minor third – the tune every child knows from the taunt "nyah-nyah! nyah-nyah!"

Norton slows everything down. That's critical because the right side of Meyerson's brain – the singing part that's being retrained to "speak" – is good at melody and pitch, but it's not as fast as the left-sided language center, called Broca's area.

It's also not as good at the rhythmic components of speech. That's why Norton taps Meyerson's left hand (controlled by the right brain). The tapping entrains the rhythms of speech and engages the motor nerves needed to produce speech in Meyerson's mouth and throat.

Then she shifts to a different phase – bridging the gap between singing and speaking. First Norton has Meyerson sing the phrase "Would you pour me a glass, please?" Next the therapist says it with exaggerated diction that's in between singing and normal speech.

Then, gratifyingly, Norton speaks the sentence. "Would you pour me a glass, please?" she says. "Nice!" Norton says.

Watching this laborious process, you might not appreciate the remarkable thing that's going on inside the brains of patients like Meyerson. The Harvard team has evidence that melodic intonation therapy actually remolds the brain.

Growing Nerves

One of the clearest examples is Laurel Fontaine, a 16-year-old sophomore at North Attleborough High School in southeastern Massachusetts. A little more than four years ago, when Laurel was 11, she suffered a devastating stroke – unusual in a child, but not as rare as you might think.

Laurel's stroke destroyed 80 percent of the right side of her brain. One of her doctors says it's the biggest stroke he's ever seen.

"My doctor told me I'm not going to talk, I'm not going to walk, I'm not going to, like, do anything...press buttons...ever," she says.

After a year of conventional speech therapy, Laurel could speak only a word or two at a time. Then her mother persuaded the Beth Israel Deaconess researchers to let Laurel enroll in their research project.

The singing therapy lasted only about four months, but it's had permanent effects. Though Laurel still struggles sometimes to find the words she wants, she doesn't have to sing them out loud.

"I'm singing in my head and talking out loud without singing," she says between classes. "I do it, like, really quick."

Laurel offered the researchers a big bonus – an identical twin sister named Heather. So the researchers could use MRI scans to compare the girls' brains. They focused on a structure on the right side that's important for singing.

Before Laurel began melodic intonation therapy, that structure was smaller in her brain compared to Heather's. That's probably because she hadn't been doing anything with her voice for a whole year.

But during therapy, scans showed that nerve fibers in Laurel's right-sided singing center actually grew – they clearly multiplied and thickened. With therapy, those nerve bundled got bigger than the corresponding region in Heather's brain.

Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, who heads the study, says that's exactly what he was looking for.

"It is the perfect confirmation," he says. "Basically, the hardware of the system really changed to support this increased vocal output."

And Laurel continues to improve. It's possible, Schlaug says, that when Laurel is in her 20s, someone who didn't know any better would never suspect she ever had a massive stroke that left her unable to speak.

The Age Factor

But how much of her remarkable recovery is because Laurel was so young when her brain was injured? Schlaug says her youth was definitely a factor.

"However, we know that patients even in their 80s can show plastic changes to their brain, can show adaptations," he says. It just may take longer. And, as with learning a foreign language at a later age, an older brain may never get to the same level.

From his work with older patients Schlaug says a surprising amount of recovery is possible. He also reports good results working with autistic children and people with Parkinson's disease who have trouble speaking.

Schlaug thinks singing therapy can be enhanced by simultaneously stimulating the brain with painless, low-voltage electricity – and one day, possibly, by drugs.

For now, it takes an incredible amount of willpower. Meyerson can testify to that.

"Recovery is long and hard," Meyerson told Laurel Fontaine recently when therapist Andrea Norton brought them together.

"Well, it's hard at first," Laurel told the older woman. "But you can get used to it. I'm getting better all the time. Don't get frustrated."

"Yes...yes...thank you!" Meyerson replied, clearly moved by Laurel's example.

Clearly Laurel's a star and Deb Meyerson has a long way to go. But she's determined to get there. By next Labor Day – the second anniversary of her stroke – Meyerson wants to start public speaking again, this time as an advocate for better stroke care.

Listen to the broadcast.

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References:

Knox, Richard. 2011. "Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Speak Again". NPR. Posted: December 26, 2011. Available online: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/12/26/144152193/singing-therapy-helps-stroke-patients-speak-again?sc=fb&cc=fp

Ancient Offering Discovered Beneath Pyramid of the Sun

2011-12-31T08:15:00.013-07:00

A detailed green stone mask unearthed beneath Mexico's Pyramid of the Sun may be a portrait of a specific individual.
CREDIT: INAH

Archaeologists in Mexico have uncovered a small treasure trove of items that may have been placed as offerings to mark the start of construction on the Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Sun almost 2,000 years ago.

The offerings include pieces of obsidian and pottery as well as animal remains. Perhaps most striking are three human figurines made out of a green stone, one of which is a serpentine mask that researchers think may have been a portrait.

The Pyramid of the Sun is the largest structure in Teotihuacan, an archaeological site northeast of Mexico City that dates back to about 100 B.C. The city remained populated for hundreds of years, and the residents likely started to build the Pyramid of the Sun around A.D. 100.

Beheaded human remains, possibly sacrifices, were found nearby in the Pyramid of the Moon in 2004.

Archaeologists with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have been excavating within the pyramid for the last several years, digging 59 holes and three short tunnels in search of offerings and burials. They've uncovered seven human burials, some of them infants, that even predate the Pyramid of the Sun structure.

The researchers also found two offerings — one containing the green mask and another offering — in the base of the pyramid, "so we know that was deposited as part of a dedication ceremony," Perez Cortez, an investigator with the Zacatecas INAH Center, said in a statement.
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References:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2011. "Ancient Offering Discovered Beneath Pyramid of the Sun". Live Science. Posted: December 14, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17474-ancient-offering-discovered-pyramid.html

Found Coins May Unveil a Lost Viking

2011-12-30T08:15:00.010-07:00

A hoard of silver found by a metal detector has provided intriguing new clues to a previously unknown Viking king, the British Museum announced on Wednesday.

Found some 16 inches beneath the surface of a field in Silverdale, a village in North Lancashire, U.K., the hoard materialized as Darren Webster, a 39-year-old stonemason, lifted a lead box signaled by his metal detector.

A shower of 201 pieces of silver revealed an abundance of arm-rings, brooch fragments, ingots and coins.

"I had a very good idea what it was. The coins, the bracelets, I knew it was possibly Viking, more than likely Viking," Webster told the Lancashire Evening Post.

Indeed, the treasure, possibly buried by a Viking warrior before he went into battle, includes coins evoking Viking kings such as Alfred the Great, who reigned from 871 to 899. At that time, the Vikings were fighting the Anglo-Saxons to keep control of the north of England.

"Among the many stand-out objects is a coin type none of us had seen before," said Ian Richardson, treasure registrar at the British Museum's Portable Antiquities and Treasure department.

On one side, the coin bears an inscription in the shape of a cross that reads DNS (Dominus) REX (many Vikings had converted to Christianity within a generation of settling in Britain).

More intriguingly, the inscription on the other side reads AIRDECONUT -- "an attempt to represent the Scandinavian name Harthacnut," said Richardson.

"There was indeed a Viking ruler in both Scandinavia and England with the name Harthacnut. But the finds at Silverdale are dated earlier than this well-known ruler –- around 900-910 -– and therefore it’s thought that the Harthacnut recorded on this coin is possibly a previously unknown ruler of the Viking kingdom of Northumbria," Richardson explained.

The find will go through a treasure inquest to determine its value, with the reward shared between Webster and the landowner.

Meanwhile, a selection of objects and coins from the hoard are on display at the British Museum through the New Year.
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2011. "Found Coins May Unveil a Lost Viking". Discovery News. Posted: Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/silver-viking-king-111215.html

Was Darwin wrong about emotions?

2011-12-29T08:15:00.005-07:00

Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically "basic" emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. This means a recent move to train security workers to recognize "basic" emotions from expressions might be misguided.

"What I decided to do in this paper is remind readers of the evidence that runs contrary to the view that certain emotions are biologically basic, so that people scowl only when they're angry or pout only when they're sad," says Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, the author of the new paper.

The commonly-held belief is that certain facial muscle movements (called expressions) evolved to express certain mental states and prepare the body to react in stereotyped ways to certain situations. For example, widening the eyes when you're scared might help you take in more information about the scene, while also signaling to the people around you that something dangerous is happening.

But Barrett (along with a minority of other scientists) thinks that expressions are not inborn emotional signals that are automatically expressed on the face. "When do you ever see somebody pout in sadness? When it's a symbol," she says. "Like in cartoons or very bad movies." People pout when they want to look sad, not necessarily when they actually feel sad, she says.

Some scientists have proposed that emotions regulate your physical response to a situation, but there's no evidence, for example, that a certain emotion usually produces the same physical changes each time it is experienced, Barrett says. "There's tremendous variety in what people do and what their bodies and faces do in anger or sadness or in fear," she says. People do a lot of things when they're angry. Sometimes they yell; sometimes they smile.

"Textbooks in introductory psychology says that there are about seven, plus or minus two, biologically basic emotions that have a designated expression that can be recognized by everybody in the world, and the evidence I review in this paper just doesn't support that view," she says. Instead of stating that all emotions fall into a few categories, and everyone expresses them the same way, Barrett says, psychologists should work on understanding how people vary in expressing their emotions.

This debate isn't purely academic. It has consequences for how clinicians are trained and also for the security industry. In recent years there's been an explosion of training programs that are meant to help security officers of all kinds identify people who are up to something nefarious. But this training might be misguided, Barrett says. "There's a lot of evidence that there is no signature for fear or anger or sadness that you could detect in another person. If you want to improve your accuracy in reading emotion in another person, you have to also take the context into account."

Incidentally, the theory that emotional expressions evolved for specific functions is normally attributed to Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. But Darwin didn't write that emotional expressions are functional. "If you're going to cite Darwin as evidence that you're right, you'd better cite him correctly," Barrett says. Darwin thought that emotional expressions – smiles, frowns, and so on –were akin to the vestigial tailbone – and occurred even though they are of no use.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Was Darwin wrong about emotions?". EurekAlert. Posted: December 13, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/afps-wdw121311.php

Do the Math! Sex Divide Is Cultural, Not Biological

2011-12-28T08:15:00.010-07:00

Many explanations for the gender gap in math skills don't hold up, suggests new research on math skills and gender in 86 countries.

Math has traditionally been seen as a man's game, and the statistics often indicate that there are differences between males and females in their math skills, participation in math activities and performance on tests — called the gender gap in math. Some researchers have proposed this gap is natural — that men are just better at math than women — while others say it's a cultural difference, whereby society somehow keeps girls from pursuing or excelling in math.

The new research points to culture as the culprit, finding that certain countries showed less of a gap between males and females in math. Specifically, these female-math friendly countries have more gender equality, better teachers and fewer students living in poverty. In many countries, there isn't a gender gap in mathematics performance, the researchers said.

As for the United States, they say the gap has greatly narrowed in recent decades as more females are considered "highly gifted mathematicians" (3 to 1 now, instead of 13 to 1 in the 1970s) and more women are getting graduate degrees in math, though 70 percent are still men.

"This is not a matter of biology: None of our findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance," study researcher Janet Mertz, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. The study suggests that "the math-gender gap, where it occurs, is due to sociocultural factors that differ among countries, and that these factors can be changed."

Greater variability

Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, proposed in 2005 that men are overrepresented in math-based fields (like engineering and physics) because they have more natural variability in their math abilities.

This hypothesis suggests that there are more women who are "average" at math and more men who are really good or really bad at math, and these men who are high-ranking outliers would be the ones who end up in these math-based fields. [6 Gender Myths Busted]

The study analyzed data from two international surveys of school mathematics performance, one from 2007, which included fourth- and eighth-graders, and the other from 2009, which included 15-year-olds. The data from 86 countries, including the U.S., Belgium, England, Hong Kong and New Zealand, shows greater variability in male math talent only in some cultures, for example, Taiwan. In others, like Tunisia, girls showed more variability. This suggests that culture, not biology, drives women out of math fields.

International data

It has been suggested that cultural influences on math skills may be nullified by single-sex education. Single-sex schooling systems are seen in some Muslim countries, so to see if this theory was true the researchers took a close look at the data from Middle Eastern countries.

"The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms," study researcher Jonathan Kane, of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, said in a statement.

This gender divide may be due to the type of schooling the boys get. Some of the schools are religious in nature, and contain few mathematics lessons. Many low-performing girls also drop out of school, so the datasets in these countries may be skewed, the researchers say.

Equality is key

The researchers found specifically that math achievement is highly related to gender equality. When the genders are more equal in income, education, health and politics, the math gender gap was smaller and students did better in math, the researchers found.

"We found that boys — as well as girls — tend to do better in math when raised in countries where females have better equality," Kane said. "It makes sense that when women are well-educated and earn a good income, the math scores of their children of both genders benefit."

Actions can be taken to improve the gender gap in math studies, the researchers say: Increasing the number of math-certified teachers in middle- and high schools, decreasing the number of children living in poverty and balancing the gender-equality gap could help improve female math skills, student assessment scores and participation in math-based careers.

The study was published in the January 2012 issue of the journal Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

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References:

Welsh, Jennifer. 2011. "Do the Math! Sex Divide Is Cultural, Not Biological". Live Science. Posted: December 12, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17429-math-gender-differences-myths.html

CSIC analyzes gold composition of pre-Columbian treasure

2011-12-27T08:15:00.004-07:00

An international project including CSIC, in collaboration with the Museo de America in Madrid, is studying a set of pre-Columbian metallurgic pieces with the latest advances in observational and non-destructive analysis techniques. The initiative aims to have an in-depth knowledge of the processes of making, assembly and usage of nearly 200 pieces from Costa Rica and the archeological complex known as "Quimbaya Treasure," from Colombia.

For this purpose, the objects have been moved from the museum, to two laboratories, where they will be examined with the aid of ion beams generated in a particle accelerator, among other techniques.

CSIC researcher Alicia Perea, explains: "The project's objective is the study of gold, silver and copper alloys, known as tombacs, and their connection to the socio-economic processes of transmission, innovation and technological change in this historical period. In some parts of America, metallurgy of gold had reached levels of technical and artistic excellence, but there is still much research to do on the procedures used".

Archaeometric study

The study of the metallurgic complex will focus on the characterization of objects by means of several observational and non-destructive analysis techniques, such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM-EDS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) or ion beams techniques (IBA) generated in a particle accelerator. Thus, the experts' team will try to determine the processes of making, assembly and usage of the pieces, as well as the deterioration that may had suffered at the site. Perea adds: "The idea is to make the latest technology available to the service of historical heritage study".

The treasure analysis is being conducted in two research centers. The first, in the Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis Laboratory of CSIC Human and Social Sciences Center, provided with specific technology for energy dispersive microanalysis. The second, in the Center for Microanalysis of Materials of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, since it has a particle accelerator specifically designed for archeological or artistic objects.

The Central Bank Museums Foundation of Costa Rica and the Physics Institute of UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) have also participated in the study, which will last three years.

The Quimbaya civilization

The term "Quimbaya" refers to the tribes that occupied the middle Cauca river basin, at the current Colombian Coffee-Growers Axis, around the 16th century, when the Spanish Conquest took place. The same term is used to define the two historical periods of metallurgic production in this region: the Early Quimbaya (between 500 BC and 600 AD) and the Late Quimbaya (until around 1600). CSIC researcher states: "We use the same term despite not being able to establish a line of ethnic continuity between the Quimbaya people of the conquest period and the historical settlement that made gold work their most refined and complex artistic expression".

Perea adds: "These tribes, whose economy was based on agriculture, were organized into small groups of about 200 people. They were led by a chief or cacique, responsible for the redistribution of wealth. The cacique accumulated treasures, expressing his range, and exhibited them to his people. Metallurgy, especially metallurgy of gold, was a technology associated with power".

The most charismatic objects of their metallurgic production are anthropomorphic recipients, where they mixed coca leaf and lime for ceremonial use. The figures depict the images of men and women in ecstatic trance. The researcher concludes: "These same recipients were also used as funerary urns to store the ashes of dead people in burial grounds. Throughout history, these sites have been systematically looted by looters and the pieces have been scattered through antique market".

The set of objects to analyze in this study was found in 1891 and makes up part of two grave goods from Quindio Department, in Colombia. The president of the Republic of Colombia, Carlos Holguín, bought this set in order to present it in the 4th Centenary of the Discovery of America Exhibition in 1892, in Madrid. Eventually, it was donated to the Queen Regent of Spain, María Cristina de Habsburgo y Lorena, in appreciation of her mediation in a border dispute with Venezuela. Currently, the collection belongs to the Museo de América, located in Madrid.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "CSIC analyzes gold composition of pre-Columbian treasure". EurekAlert. Posted: December 12, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/ccsd-cag121211.php

Ireland's earliest surviving example of a timber-framed house

2011-12-26T08:15:00.008-07:00

Dendrochronological analysis is expected to conclude that the timber structure at Chapel Lane, Parnell Street, Ennis, dates back to the late 16th century.

The house was first inspected in 2008 by Clare County Council’s Conservation Officer, who recommended that the property undergo structural repair work. Following detailed technical analyses by the National Monuments Service, officials from Ennis Town Council and Consulting Conservation Engineers, it was concluded that the structure was unstable and represented a danger to the general public.

Ennis Town Council, using its statutory powers to deal with dangerous buildings, commenced a €170,000 project to make the building safe and to protect and restore the historic fabric of the structure. A grant of €85,000 was procured under the “Structures at Risk Scheme” from the Department of the Environment towards the restoration project.

During October 2011, the gable and chimney were carefully recorded, taken down and stored. At present the historic gable is being re-built using the original stones bedded in an authentic hydraulic-lime mortar, the floor of the house having been archaeologically excavated prior to this.

In recent weeks, archaeologists have discovered an oak frame structure which they have described as “potentially one of the most exciting urban archaeological discoveries in Ireland in recent years”.

Frank Coyne, Consultant Archaeologist from Aegis Archaeology Ltd. explained that the limited archaeological excavation has revealed a wealth of information.

“The existence of a foundation cut in the interior of the house, indicates an earlier structure on the site, which is also borne out by the presence of large oak beams in the walls of the house. It is hugely significant that these beams are oak, which will enable us to use tree ring dating. If these prove to be of medieval date, which we believe is the case, then this means that this house is the only structure of its type in the country”, explained Mr. Coyne.

Commenting on the restoration project, Mayor of Ennis Councillor Michael Guilfoyle stated: “The works to McParland’s, when completed, will yield invaluable information on the traditional skills and construction techniques of Late Medieval Ennis. This work makes the building safe and protects a major piece of the history and character of Ennis. I have no doubt that the building will continue to be of tremendous interest to all those who have an appreciation of the importance of our heritage and the very fine examples of medieval architecture in the town.”

According to David Humphreys of ACP Consultant Conservation Engineers: “Although built originally using crude rubble stone and weak mortar, the fact that this building has stayed intact up to the present is a tribute to the skills of the medieval masons, who possessed a great knowledge of their materials and confidence in their designs”.

Conservation Officer Dick Cronin noted that the present discoveries at McParland’s further enhance Ennis’ status as the most intact medieval town in Ireland.

He continued: “Evidence appears to come to light regularly showing that the whole town centre from The Abbey, to the Old Ground, to Lower Parnell Street contains a large amount of Late Medieval masonry, most of which is hidden behind Georgian and Victorian facades.”

“This has been a very important project and is a tribute to the foresight and pride of place, of the officials and members of Ennis Town Council, who were prepared to invest in the past to ensure the future of this historic town”, Mr. Cronin concluded.

Restoration work at McParland’s, Parnell Street, Ennis, Co Clare, is scheduled for completion in February 2012.
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References:

Past Horizons. "Ireland's earliest surviving example of a timber-framed house". Past Horizons. Posted: December 7, 2011. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/12/2011/irelands-earliest-surviving-example-of-a-timber-framed-house

Another Cognitive Benefit for Musicians, Athletes

2011-12-25T08:15:00.003-07:00

New research from Germany finds honing one’s music or sports skills enhances at least one important mental ability.

Can you mentally rotate a three-dimensional object, getting a clear sense of how it looks it from a variety of angles? It’s a specific cognitive skill that has been the subject of much study in recent years, since it’s a key component of processing spatial information. Professionals ranging from auto mechanics to brain surgeons rely on this ability.

A newly published study suggests there may be a way to enhance this important skill, and it does not involve spending hours in front of a computer screen. Rather, it suggests students might want to put down their laptops and pick up a musical instrument, or suit up and take to the sports field.

Two German researchers report student musicians and athletes performed better at a standard mental-rotation task than a group of their peers. Moreover, for musicians, the much-discussed gender gap in this important arena disappeared, with women catching up to men.

Stefanie Pietsch and Petra Jansen of the University of Regensburg Institute of Sport Science report their findings in the journal Learning and Individual Differences.

Their study featured 120 students (60 men and 60 women) enrolled at a German university. One-third of the participants were musicians, one-third athletes, and the final third education students who did not participate in either sports or music. The athletes and musicians reported how many years they have been practicing and how many hours they practiced per week.

The participants then took two tests: one to measure their cognitive processing speed, and a standard mental rotation test, in which they compared configurations of blocks. They were given a “target” image of a three-dimensional structure, and then asked which of four additional images depicted that same structure as seen from a different perspective.

The results were intriguing. For the education students, men gave correct answers at twice the rate of women (a finding that confirms those of previous studies). For athletes, the gap was narrowed; the number of correct answers increased for women but shot up even higher among men, to the point where male athletes had the highest score overall.

Among musicians, men scored just a bit higher than the education students, but women’s scores rocketed up, to the point where they did slightly better than their male counterparts.

“Because the female musicians in this study show a higher speed of cognitive processing,” the researchers write, “it is possible that their ability to process information quickly, combined with their long-term motor training, may explain their enhanced mental rotation ability.”

The researchers speculate that musicians learn to think in terms of spatial relationships “because notes are coded in terms of their spatial positions.” This makes intuitive sense. A musician, like an athlete, instinctively learns to navigate through space: one reads notes on a staff, while another masters the parameters of a tennis court or football field.

While this one small study is hardly conclusive, it provides more evidence of the drawbacks of a basics-only approach to education. Such an approach ignores the ways important mental processes are enhanced by learning that occurs outside the core curriculum. This research suggests, in the words of Pietsch and Jansen, that “playing an instrument or a sport for many years has an enhancing effect on a specific cognitive task” — one that confers real-world benefits.
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References:

Jacobs, Tom. 2011. "Another Cognitive Benefit for Musicians, Athletes". Miller-McCune. Posted: December 5, 2011. Available online: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/another-cognitive-benefit-for-musicians-athletes-38138/

Evidence for early 'bedding' and the use of medicinal plants at a South African rock shelter

2011-12-24T08:15:00.001-07:00

An international team of archaeologists is reporting 77,000-year-old evidence for preserved plant bedding and the use of insect-repelling plants in a rock shelter in South Africa

An international team of archaeologists is reporting 77,000-year-old evidence for preserved plant bedding and the use of insect-repelling plants in a rock shelter in South Africa. This discovery is 50,000 years older than earlier reports of preserved bedding and provides a fascinating insight into the behavioural practices of early modern humans in southern Africa.

The team, led by Professor Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in collaboration with Christopher Miller (University of Tübingen, Germany), Christine Sievers and Marion Bamford (University of the Witwatersrand), and Paul Goldberg and Francesco Berna (Boston University, USA), is reporting the discovery in the scientific journal Science, to be published on Friday, 9 December 2011.

The ancient bedding was uncovered during excavations at Sibudu rock shelter (KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa), where Lyn Wadley, honorary professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, has been digging since 1998. At least 15 different layers at the site contain plant bedding, dated between 77,000 and 38,000 years ago. The bedding consists of centimetre-thick layers of compacted stems and leaves of sedges and rushes, extending over at least one square metre and up to three square metres of the excavated area. Christine Sievers, of the University of the Witwatersrand, was able to identify nutlets from several types of sedges and rushes used in the construction of the bedding.

The oldest evidence for bedding at the site is particularly well-preserved, and consists of a layer of fossilised sedge stems and leaves, overlain by a tissue-paper-thin layer of leaves, identified by botanist Marion Bamford as belonging to Cryptocarya woodii, or River Wild-quince. The leaves of this tree contain chemicals that are insecticidal, and would be suitable for repelling mosquitoes.

"The selection of these leaves for the construction of bedding suggests that the early inhabitants of Sibudu had an intimate knowledge of the plants surrounding the shelter, and were aware of their medicinal uses. Herbal medicines would have provided advantages for human health, and the use of insect-repelling plants adds a new dimension to our understanding of behaviour 77,000 years ago," says Professor Lyn Wadley.

"The inhabitants would have collected the sedges and rushes from along the uThongathi River, located directly below the site, and laid the plants on the floor of the shelter. The bedding was not just used for sleeping, but would have provided a comfortable surface for living and working," adds Wadley.

Microscopic analysis of the bedding, conducted by Christopher Miller, junior-professor for geoarchaeology at the University of Tübingen, suggests that the inhabitants repeatedly refurbished the bedding during the course of occupation.

The microscopic analysis also demonstrated that after 73,000 years ago, the inhabitants of Sibudu regularly burned the bedding after use.

"They lit the used bedding on fire, possibly as a way to remove pests. This would have prepared the site for future occupation and represents a novel use of fire for the maintenance of an occupation site," says Miller.

The preserved bedding is also associated with the remains of numerous fireplaces and ash dumps. Beginning at 58,000 years ago, the number of hearths, bedding and ash dumps increases dramatically. The archaeologists believe that this is a result of intensified occupation of the site. In the article, the archaeologists argue that the increased occupation may correspond with changing demographics within Africa at the time. By around 50,000 years ago, modern humans began expanding out of Africa, eventually replacing archaic forms of humans in Eurasia, including the Neanderthals.

This discovery adds to a long list of important finds at Sibudu over the past decade, including perforated seashells, believed to have been used as beads, and sharpened bone points, likely used for hunting.

Wadley and others have also presented early evidence from the site for the development of bow and arrow technology, the use of snares and traps for hunting, and the production of glue for hafting stone tools.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Evidence for early 'bedding' and the use of medicinal plants at a South African rock shelter". EurekAlert. Posted: December 8, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/uotw-efe120211.php

Do thoughts have a language of their own?

2011-12-23T08:15:00.007-07:00

What is the relationship between language and thought? The quest to create artificial intelligence may have come up with some unexpected answers

THE idea of machines that think and act as intelligently as humans can generate strong emotions. This may explain why one of the most important accomplishments in the field of artificial intelligence has gone largely unnoticed: that some of the advances in AI can be used by ordinary people to improve their own natural intelligence and communication skills.

Chief among these advances is a form of logic called computational logic. This builds and improves on traditional logic, and can be used both for the original purpose of logic - to improve the way we think - and, crucially, to improve the way we communicate in natural languages, such as English. Arguably, it is the missing link that connects language and thought.

According to one school of philosophy, our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language: this is what students of language call the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. According to the LOT hypothesis, it is because human thoughts already have a linguistic structure that the emergence of common, natural languages was possible in the first place.

The LOT hypothesis contrasts with the mildly contrary view that human thinking is actually conducted in natural language, and thus we could not think intelligently without it. It also contradicts the ultra-contrary view that human thinking does not have a language-like structure at all, implying that our ability to communicate in natural language is nothing short of a miracle.

Research in AI lends little support to the first view, and some support to the second. But if we want to improve how we communicate in natural language, the AI version of the LOT hypothesis comes into its own, offering us a detailed analysis we can use as a guide.

Using this guide we can then try to express ourselves in a form of natural language that is closer to the LOT. This will make it easier for others to understand our communications because they will require less effort to translate them into thoughts of their own. But to fully exploit the guide, we need to understand the nature of the LOT and the relationship between it and natural language.

One approach is to study natural language communications that are designed to be easy to understand. If they are indeed easy to understand, then their form should be close to that of the LOT. What better place to look than at communications designed to deal with emergencies, where it can be a matter of life or death that the reader understands the communication as intended, and with as little effort as possible.

Take a sign designed for London's underground train system:

Press the alarm signal button to alert the driver.

The driver will stop if any part of the train is in a station.

If not, the train will continue to the next station, where help can more easily be given.

There is a £50 penalty for improper use.

What is most striking about the form of these sentences is that they all have the same underlying "logical conditional" form: if conditions, then conclusion, or, alternatively and equivalently, conclusion, if conditions. This conditional form is explicit in the second and third sentences, and it is implicit in the first and fourth sentences: if you press the alarm signal button then you will alert the driver; there is a £50 penalty if you press the alarm signal button improperly.

We can also find evidence for the logical form of the LOT in communications that may be hard to understand because of the complex nature of the thoughts they convey, but which are designed to minimise any additional complexity due to the inadequacies or ambiguities of natural language.

A good place to look is in well-written legal documents. Consider the very first sentence of the British Nationality Act 1981:

1.-(1) A person born in the United Kingdom after commencement shall be a British citizen if at the time of the birth his father or mother is - (a) a British citizen; or (b) settled in the United Kingdom.

Here the conditional form is explicit, but with some of the conditions, born in the United Kingdom after commencement, inserted, for succinctness, into the middle of the conclusion.

The British Nationality Act also illustrates the use of conditional form to represent rules and exceptions. Take this clause:

40.-(2) The Secretary of State may by order deprive a person of a citizenship status if the Secretary of State is satisfied that deprivation is conducive to the public good.

40.-(4) The Secretary of State may not make an order under subsection (2) if he is satisfied that the order would make a person stateless.

Reasoning with such rules and exceptions is not well catered for in traditional logic, but it is an important feature of everyday reasoning. If I tell you that if John is hungry then John will eat [And] John is hungry, what do you conclude? That John will eat, no doubt. But if I draw your attention to the exception that if John does not have food then John will not eat, then you might be tempted to withdraw your conclusion, and perhaps qualify it by concluding instead that if John has food, then John will eat. This kind of reasoning goes against the rules of traditional logic, but conforms to what AI researchers call "default reasoning", that is, drawing a conclusion in the absence of evidence to the contrary, and then gracefully withdrawing the conclusion if there is reason to believe otherwise.

But suppose that I am performing a psychological experiment, and instead of stating the exception, I state that if John has food then John will eat. Do you then conclude that I really mean that John will literally eat all the food in the house, no matter whether he is hungry or not? Or am I trying to draw your attention to the exception, without stating it explicitly? What should you do? Take me at my word or try to work out what was in my head?

As far as I know, no one has carried out this experiment, but psychologists have carried out similar experiments. Here is the most famous. Suppose I tell you that if Mary has an essay to write, then she will study late in the library [And] Mary has an essay to write, what do you conclude? That Mary will study late in the library, of course.

Now suppose I say: If the library is open, then Mary will study late in the library. What do you conclude? That Mary will literally study late in the library whenever it is open, no matter whether she has a reason to study or not? Or do you ignore what I actually said, and assume I meant to draw your attention to the obvious exception: if the library is not open, then she will not study late in the library. Taking me literally means standing by your earlier conclusion. But if you try to figure out what was in my head, you will probably want to withdraw or modify it. Not surprisingly, many - perhaps most - psychologists end up concluding that ordinary people do not use the rules of logic in everyday life.

There is an alternative way of seeing this: that there is a language of thought, and that it has a more logical form than ordinary natural language. This view has an added bonus: it tells us that, if you want to express yourself more clearly and more effectively in natural language, then you should express yourself in a form that is closer to computational logic - and therefore closer to the language of thought. Dry legalese never looked so good.
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References:

Kowalski, Robert. 2011. "Do thoughts have a language of their own? ". New Scientist. Posted: December 8, 2011. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228416.100-do-thoughts-have-a-language-of-their-own.html

DNA highlights Native American die-off

2011-12-22T08:15:00.012-07:00

Genetic evidence now backs up Spanish documents from the 16th century describing smallpox epidemics that decimated Native American populations.

Native American numbers briefly plummeted by about 50 percent around the time European explorers arrived, before rebounding within 200 to 300 years, say geneticist Brendan O’Fallon of ARUP Laboratories in Salt Lake City and anthropologist Lars Fehren-Schmitz of the University of Göttingen in Germany. Population declines occurred throughout North and South America around 500 years ago, the researchers report in a paper published online December 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

O’Fallon and Fehren-Schmitz analyzed chemical sequences in ancient and modern mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother, to calculate the number of breeding females in the Americas over time. Based on those results, O’Fallon estimates that a Native American population of several million fell to roughly half that size once European explorers entered the continent.

“If disease was the primary cause of mortality, surviving Native Americans would have been more resistant to infection after initial epidemics, helping them bounce back quickly,” O’Fallon says.

Researchers disagree about when people first reached the Americas. Whenever initial human settlers arrived, Native American numbers expanded rapidly between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, several thousand years later than previous DNA-based estimates, the scientists say. Population size then stabilized until suddenly plummeting as the era of European contact dawned, they find.

Several earlier genetic investigations uncovered no signs of mass deaths among Native Americans around the time they first encountered Europeans (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102).

“These new results confirm what’s known from historic sources, but the quality of ancient DNA data raises potential concerns,” remarks geneticist Phillip Endicott of Musée de l’Homme in Paris. An unknown number of chemical sequence changes in mitochondrial DNA preserved in Native Americans’ bones may have resulted from contamination in the ground or after being handled by excavators, Endicott says. These sequence configurations, if intact, provide crucial clues to population trends.

O’Fallon and Fehren-Schmitz analyzed partial sequences of ancient Native American DNA ranging in age from 5,000 to 800 years old. The researchers also examined mitochondrial DNA of 137 people representing five major Native American sequence patterns found in different parts of North and South America.

In the new analysis, only one, relatively rare mitochondrial DNA group repeatedly branched into new genetic lineages over the past 10,000 years. The other four groups display genetic splits bunched within the past few hundred years.

Reasons for these population differences are unclear, O’Fallon says. A closer examination of each of the five Native American genetic groups is needed to confirm that the new estimate of contact-era population losses is accurate, comments anthropological geneticist Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida in Gainesville.
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References:

Bower, Bruce. 2011. "DNA highlights Native American die-off". Science News. Posted: December 5, 2011. Available online: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336707/title/DNA_highlights_Native_American_die-off

Steven Pinker - Interview

2011-12-21T08:15:00.003-07:00

An interview with the Harvard psychologist and linguist on violence, language and Twitter.

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References:

2011. "Steven Pinker". The New York Times. Posted: November 28, 2011. Available online: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/28/science/100000001194711/steven-pinker.html

Archaeologists find new evidence of animals being introduced to prehistoric Caribbean

2011-12-20T08:15:00.007-07:00

An archaeological research team from North Carolina State University, the University of Washington and University of Florida has found one of the most diverse collections of prehistoric non-native animal remains in the Caribbean, on the tiny island of Carriacou. The find contributes to our understanding of culture in the region before the arrival of Columbus, and suggests Carriacou may have been more important than previously thought.

The researchers found evidence of five species that were introduced to Carriacou from South America between 1,000 and 1,400 years ago. Only one of these species, the opossum, can still be found on the island. The other species were pig-like peccaries, armadillos, guinea pigs and small rodents called agoutis.

Researchers think the animals were used as sources of food. The scarcity of the remains, and the few sites where they were found, indicate that the animals were not for daily consumption. "We suspect that they may have been foods eaten by people of high status, or used in ritual events," says Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of anthropology at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

"Looking for patterning in the distribution of animal remains in relation to where ritual artifacts and houses are found will help to test this idea," said Christina Giovas, lead author and a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington.

The team, which also included Ph.D. student Michelle LeFebvre of the University of Florida, found the animal remains at two different sites on the island, and used carbon dating techniques to determine their age. The opossum and agouti were the most common, with the latter remains reflecting the longest presence, running from A.D. 600 to 1400. The guinea pig remains had the shortest possible time-frame, running from A.D. 985 to 1030.

These dates are consistent with similar findings on other Caribbean islands. However, while these species have been found on other islands, it is incredibly rare for one island to have remains from all of these species. Guinea pigs, for example, were previously unknown in this part of the Caribbean. The diversity is particularly surprising, given that Carriacou is one of the smallest settled islands in the Caribbean, though the number of remains is still not that large – a pattern seen on other islands as well.

This combination of small geographical area and robust prehistoric animal diversity, along with evidence for artifact trade with other islands and South America, suggests that Carriacou may have had some significance in the pre-Columbian Caribbean as a nexus of interaction between island communities.

The animal remains are also significant because they were found in archaeological digs at well-documented prehistoric villages – and the remains themselves were dated, as opposed to just the materials (such as charcoal) found near the remains.

"The fact that the dates established by radiocarbon dating are consistent with the dates of associated materials from the villages means the chronology is well established," says Fitzpatrick, who has been doing research on Carriacou since 2003. "In the future we'd like to expand one of the lesser excavated sites to get more information on how common these species may have been, which could shed light on the ecological impact and social importance of these species prehistorically."

The paper, "New records for prehistoric introduction of Neotropical mammals to the West Indies: evidence from Carriacou, Lesser Antilles," is published online in the Journal of Biogeography and was co-authored by Fitzpatrick, Giovas and LeFebvre. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, NC State, the University of Washington and the University of Florida.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Archaeologists find new evidence of animals being introduced to prehistoric Caribbean". EurekAlert. Posted: December 1, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/ncsu-afn120111.php

Language may be dominant social marker for young children

2011-12-19T08:15:00.009-07:00

Children's reasoning about language and race can take unexpected turns, according to University of Chicago researchers, who found that for younger white children in particular, language can loom larger than race in defining a person's identity.

Researchers showed children images and voices of a child and two adults, and asked, "Which adult will the child grow up to be?" Children were presented with a challenge: One adult matched the child's race, and one matched the child's language, but neither matched both. For example, children saw a white child speaking English, a black adult speaking English and a white adult speaking French. The exercise was intended to gauge whether the children perceived language or race as more central to an individual's identity over time. As would be expected, 9- and 10-year-old children chose the adult who matched the featured child's race. By that age, they understood that skin color is relatively stable, whereas language can be learned.

Five- and six-year-old English-speaking white children's responses were a bit more surprising: Most of those children chose the language match, even though this meant that the featured child would have needed to change race.

In explaining the puzzling choices of the 5- and 6-year-old white children, Katherine Kinzler, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Psychology at UChicago, and lead author on the paper published in Developmental Science, said. "From a child's perspective, language offers many of the characteristics of a biologically determined or inherited category. Children usually speak the same language as their families, and they likely do not remember the time as infants that they spent learning a native language."

This finding builds on past research by Kinzler and colleagues, which found that children are highly attentive to others' accent and language: Indeed, language can be more important than race in guiding young children's social preferences for others.

Interestingly, when African American 5- and 6-year-old children were shown the same photos and voices, they performed like the older white children and made a match based on racial identity. "Children of different racial groups may have different experiences with race as a meaningful social category, which could contribute to their performance on this tasks," said Jocelyn Dautel, co-author of the study and a UChicago graduate student.

Other research helps explain why race may be a more salient category for young African American children than for young white children, Dautel said. Research has shown that children who are minorities are more aware of prejudice and stereotypes, and that children of different groups may have different socialization experiences and conversations about race.

In the Development Science paper, entitled "Children's Essentialist Reasoning about Language and Race," the two researchers showed the same stimuli to four groups of children. Three groups were tested in Chicago: 9- and 10-year-old white children, 5- and 6-year-old white children, and 5- and 6-year-old African American children. A final group of 5- and 6-year-old white children were tested in northern Wisconsin; these children lived in a more racially homogenous group than the Chicago children. The researchers found:

* When 9- and 10-year old-white children were asked whether an English-speaking white boy was likely to grow up to be an English-speaking black man or a French-speaking white man, they were more likely to choose the white, French-speaking adult.

* In contrast, when 5- and 6-year-old white children were shown photographs and asked who the white English-speaking white boy was likely to grow up to be, they were more likely to choose an English-speaking black man over a French-speaking white man. This was the case among the 5- and 6-year-old white children in both Chicago and Wisconsin.

* Finally, when African American 5- and 6-year-old children were presented with the same tasks, they were likely to choose the white, French-speaking adult (the race match). These children's responses mirrored those of the older white children, rather than the younger white children.

The paper clarifies how researchers can better understand how young children develop understandings of social categories, Kinzler said. Some theorists have maintained that categorization occurs independently of culture, while others contend that the categories are the result of cultural influence. Kinzler said the work she did with Dautel suggests that both explanations may be valid: Although some understandings about social distinctions are formed early in childhood, others, such as understanding about race, may be highly
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Language may be dominant social marker for young children". EurekAlert. Posted: December 1, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/uoc-lmb113011.php

Papyrus research provides insight into job training, prayer and more in the ancient world

2011-12-18T08:15:00.014-07:00

Education, jobs, religion and even the cultural effects of bilingualism were as topical in the ancient world as they are today.

All of these topics and more are featured in translations of ancient papyrus in the University of Cincinnati-based journal, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, due out Dec. 2.

The annually produced journal, edited since 2006 by Peter van Minnen, UC associate professor and head of classics, features the most prestigious global research on papyri, a field of study known as papyrology. (Papyrology is formally known as the study of texts on papyrus and other materials, mainly from ancient Egypt and mainly from the period of Greek and Roman rule.)

Below are five topics treated in the 2011 volume of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists.

NAILING DOWN JOB TRAINING

Chris Eckerman of the University of Oregon edits a Greek apprenticeship contract for an uncle to teach his nephew the carpentry trade in an Egyptian village. The contract dates from the time of Roman rule in Egypt, which began in 30 BC. About 50 such contracts exist from that time period in Egypt. For instance, one contract from Alexandria calls for four years of musical training for a slave. Today's college students can probably relate.

WHAT LANGUAGE DO BILINGUAL DREAMERS (AND GODS) USE?

Stephen Kidd of New York University publishes an essay on dream records in bilingual (Greek and Egyptian) papyri from the second century BC. Dreams were then regarded as messages from the gods, and it would be safe to assume that in ancient Egypt, it was the "local" gods speaking to the local population. But this was a time when there were fully bilingual people in Egypt under Greek rule. Did they dream in Egyptian or Greek? Were the gods that were speaking the local Egyptian gods or "imported" Greek gods? It would seem that Egyptian interpretations held sway. While Greeks or sufficiently Hellenized people would record their dreams in Greek, the dream interpreters were Egyptians or at least thoroughly trained in Egyptian dream interpretation, and the record shows that essential portions and word associations (puns) were provided and unraveled for meaning in Egyptian.

A MIRACLE FIND

Albert Pietersma and Susan Comstock of the University of Toronto edit pages that, until recently, were missing from a famous early Christian papyrus codex (manuscript volume) from the fourth century AD. The codex itself has a fascinating history. It was acquired in the 1950s by the University of Mississippi with funds raised from, among others, William Faulkner. But, as things go, the university later sold the codex to a private collector in the 1980s, and it later wound up in the hands of a Norwegian shipping magnate who now owns the bulk of the codex. However, Pietersma and Comstock found missing pages from the codex in Dublin.

The codex, with its early Christian texts in Greek and Coptic, originally came from a monastery in Upper Egypt that was founded by Pachomius, an Egyptian Christian, who was the originator of the monastic way of life in which male or female monastics live together and have their possessions in common under the leadership of an abbot or abbess.

The recently found missing pages contain a Coptic prayer written by Pachomius for the annual Easter celebration. Arguably, Pachomius himself first recited this prayer at the end of the Easter service near the middle of the 4th century AD.

THE GREAT GRAIN ROBBERY

Ryan Boehm of the University of California, Berkeley, edits a 4th-century petition BC on papyrus, seeking justice from an administrator from Hermopolis. The petition charges an evil doer in an Egyptian village of stealing agricultural produce belonging to minors who are likely orphans.

FOREGOING MAGIC

Theodore de Bruyn and Jitse Dijkstra of the University of Ottawa publish a study of magical amulets from Egypt that contain Christian elements such as crosses and saints' names. About 200 such texts survive from Late Antiquity (4th to 8th centuries AD), a time when the church fathers were combating the use of magical amulets by Christians. These amulets ranged from those seeking revenge and cursing opponents (for example, an insomnia curse) to those seeking healing, prosperity, success, protection and even exorcism.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Papyrus research provides insight into job training, prayer and more in the ancient world". EurekAlert. Posted: November 30, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uoc-prp113011.php

Bavaria Germany: Neuschwanstein Among 20 Building Wonders of the World

2011-12-17T08:15:00.003-07:00

When I was a teenager, I lived in this small tourist town and worked at one of the souvenir stores there. It's nice to see that the local Neuschwanstein architecture is being recognized.

Neuschwanstein is on the list of the 20 building wonders of the world, and since 2007, people have voted for the world’s seven wonders, in fact, millions of people around the world voted. Neuschwanstein was not one of the seven. The seven wonders were: Chichén Itzá Temple in the Yucatan, the Christ statue outside Rio de Janeiro, the Colosseum in Rome, the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Wall of China, Petra in Jordan, Machu Pichu in Peru. The Egyptians were of course also on the list, and they became quite angry that the Pyramids were not included in the fine company of the seven. Maybe next time?

One could wonder, what a wonder really is, if the pyramids are not wonders? Maybe we live in a wonderful world with such wonders sprinkled around us like pearls on a string. We know they’re there, but how much do we really know about these wonders and history behind them? Do we really appreciate them? Makes you wonder… In any case, the Neuschwanstein fairytale castle is a really photogenic building and, thus, is one of the world’s most photographed buildings.

The history of Neuschwanstein has it all. It is the story of the handsome young King Ludwig II, who didn’t know which leg to stand on, when he became king. A sad story about an unrequited love, loneliness, art, music, wealth and a coup with a macabre end. When Maximilian II died as King of Bavaria in 1864, his son ascended the throne, only 18 years old. Ludwig II would be an absolute monarch, with power and everything that goes with it. Bavaria at that time, was a constitutional monarchy, so the kid did not have the full power over the country. He was pretty angry because of that.

As a young ambitious king, it was not satisfactory just to be a figurehead king. He tried to change the laws so he could obtain the power he so wanted, but he failed. It was only in history books, that he was able to read about the absolute monarchs. One could try to buy a kingdom, he thought. Ludwig II set about trying to buy the island of Mallorca, but Spain wanted 50 million Reichsmark, to insert him as ruler of the island. Ludwig II did not have that much money, so the idea was promptly dropped.

In 1866, after the ‘Seven Weeks War’ between Prussia and Bavaria, Ludwig II was instated in the disappointing role of Vassal King, a figurehead under the iron chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia. The young man was very weary of it all, and he fled into his own fantasy world, where only he ruled, supremely.

Ludwig II loved music, and especially works of composer Richard Wagner, (the temporal response to Rammstein), who was number one on the charts in southern Germany, with his romantic works which focused on German fairytales and legends. Ludwig II’s nanny at Hohenschwangau had introduced him to Richard Wagner’s musical universe, when he was only 13 years old, and it came to influence him for the rest of his life.

In 1860, Ludwig II saw Richard Wagner’s opera ‘Lohengrin’ live, and he was sold. In his childhood years in Hohenschwangau, he was surrounded by adventure in the form of romantic murals of German heroes and their deeds. He became so obsessed with the legendary figure Lohengrin, he began to compare himself with this romantic swan knight. He was such a hardcore fan of the composer Richard Wagner, he took the composer under his protective wings, which came to mean a leap ahead, for Richard Wagner’s life and career. Ludwig II was convinced that Richard Wagner was in touch with God, when he composed the music.

In 1864, just after Ludwig II became king, he sent a letter to his musical idol via his private secretary: “I have the honour of being King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s private secretary. The king has entrusted me, my dear master, to invite you to his palace, and ask that you must come without hesitation.”

Richard Wagner was reeling on his heels, and wrote back: “Beloved, most gracious liege! I’m sending you these tears of celestial motion to say that the miracle of poetry has finally come into my poor, loveless life as a divine truth.”

Richard Wagner went to the court in Munich, and met with Ludwig II for the first time. The 51-year-old composer was a close friend with the young king, through a short and stormy period, which had its hub in the summer castle Hohenschwangau. Richard Wagner composed, enjoyed life, and his new status in the castle. Ludwig II went to the bank and repaid Richard Wagner’s considerable debts, which made the composer uncannily creative and sharp. Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, was set up at Court Theatre in Munich on 10 June 1865, and was a resounding success.

In 1866, Ludwig II had a date of the serious kind. He met his future fiancée, Countess Sophie of Austria. Sophie was a music-happy girl, and they both loved Wagner’s music, but it was also the only thing they had in common. Sophie was his cousin, and sister of his good friend, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Ludwig II cancelled his engagement to Sophie shortly before the two should be welded together. Love just wasn’t there.

Ludwig II was a pretty mysterious fellow, and the women flocked around him. It’s good to be king. Ludwig II had many female acquaintances, but no one grasped his deep interest, and, as years went by, gossip and intrigue as to his sexual orientation abounded. It was not appropriate back then. Shut in, he slept all day and was only awake at night. Love was just something that existed in the music.

Although Ludwig was no good as king by day, he could be, by night. He planned his own private kingdom, which would consist of castles all over Bavaria. Like so many other kings through the ages, he was also an entrepreneur. But he also had an incredibly romantic imagination, which brought him over the edge of the ordinary human mind. Only a year after he became king, he wrote to Richard Wagner: “I plan to rebuild the old castle ruins in the same style as the old German knight’s castles. I look forward to living there someday. There will be many rooms and the views are wonderful over Tyrol. The location is one of the loveliest, holiest and most difficult to find. Thus, a worthy temple for my divine friend, who has brought salvation and true blessing to the world.

His friend Richard Wagner liked young women, and he had chosen a mate after writing ‘Tristan and Isolde’. During the same period, where Ludwig II muddled up his own engagement, the composer had seduced his conductor’s wife. Although the conductor, Hans von Bülow, was a significant piece of Richard Wagner’s life, and a good supporter, Wagner was cold as a stone, he wanted his wife. Cosima, as the young woman was named, was at Wagner’s side until his death, and bore him a daughter Isolde, so it may well have been true love.

Cosima was 24 years younger than Richard Wagner, and so again, the gossip went around, and many believed it was a proper scandal. Wagner fell into disfavour among persons at court, they feared that he would bring ideas into the mind of the young king, which he previously had done. Ludwig II was forced to send Richard Wagner away from court. Ludwig II was so depressed, and was on the verge of collapse. He thought of abdicating, so that he could follow his friend in exile. He found it hard to live a life without Richard Wagner and his music, at his side. Wagner managed to talk some sense into the young king, who in turn had Wagner installed in Villa Triebschen, on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Now, Wagner could be really creative, and the young king went ahead with plans for the construction, which would celebrate the composer, and would later become his destiny.

In 1868, Wagner’s opera “Die Meistersinger of Nuremberg”, premiered in Munich, and same year Cosima divorced from Hans von Bülow. In 1870, Wagner and Cosima married. Ludwig II, who was only 23 years old during those events, now began to live out his fantasies and began to build castles. Drawings and sketches where created for the new palace, and they were not accepted until all details were in order. All modern building techniques should be used, and no expense would be spared. Neuschwanstein would be a direct homage to Richard Wagner. A great operatic backdrop.

The decor inside, consists of murals with scenes from Richard Wagner’s operas. ‘Parsifal’, ‘Lohengrin’ and ‘Tristan and Isolde’. The old castle ruin, which was just opposite to Hohenschwangau, was the centrepiece of his imaginary royal kingdom. Richard Wagner was to be the musical bridge between God, king and the common people.

In 1869, the construction of Neuschwanstein started, and it would only be completed seventeen years later. When you are in close contact with the castle, one can hardly understand that it was possible to bring so much beauty into one building. Artists and architects must have stepped on each other’s toes in the creative process. In the seventeen years it took to build the castle, there was plenty of turmoil in Europe, while the Swan Knight King reigned quietly, without love, in his own fantasy realm.

He built for dear life, and spent more money than he had. He sat for days on end, and followed the construction by telescope. It was not just the new palace that had his interest, the king also built elsewhere in Bavaria. Richard Wagner tried to get Ludwig to take a little more interest in his country than just music, art and buildings. He failed, but Richard Wagner loved his young king: “This wonderful, unique, young man is deeply connected to me through the mystery and magic.”

Ludwig II was so much a fan of Richard Wagner, that he became addicted to the composer’s works. During the construction of Neuschwanstein, he became quite strange, and locked himself in his mother’s castle Hohenschwangau, with binoculars as the only window to the outside world. Ludwig II now assumed a really bad lifestyle, and as years went by, he fell more and more into disrepair. Teeth falling out, he got out of shape and became irritable, and slept all day. Sometimes he’d leave the palace at night to go for a ride in the dark, with all his other dark sides. In the years during construction of the dream palace, he banned visitors from come to Hohenschwangau, defending the construction of his dream castle. In 1883, Richard Wagner died without having seen the gigantic manifestation of his works. It was a real loss for Ludwig II.

In 1886, the dream castle was nearly completed, and Ludwig II moved into apartments in the new palace. He could now live in the palace, his imagination had fostered. But Ludwig’s days were literally numbered; he would only have 172 days in the castle. He was loved by the people and hated by the rulers. He now had some massive problems, with bad credit, and a debt of around 20 million Reichsmark. There was no chance that Bavaria could ever repay this debt, but Ludwig II didn’t care.

On June 10th of the same year, the castle invaded by a group of men forcing their way through the castle gates. They dragged Ludwig away, and he was deposed as king the same day, by both his own family, and the government. The official reason given to the people, was that he suffered from galloping insanity. He had spent too much money on his construction work across Bavaria, to complete his fantasy kingdom. The Swan Knight King was taken to Munich.

On June 12, the King was out taking a walk with his private physician, but the two never returned from that trip. Their bodies were found in the Starnberger See, and there were no witnesses to this drama. The official explanation was that Ludwig II had beaten his doctor to death, and then had killed himself, because he had lost his royal title. But how could this mad romantic soul who loved music, art and beauty, beat another man to death? How insane was Ludwig II anyway? One thing is for sure. He was a great financial burden for Bavaria, and this was probably why he was killed.

The last second before the swan knight king slipped into death, he may have heard Wagner’s music in his mind’s ear, and thought of a letter he sent the composer after a concert in Bayreuth: “Oh, now I recognize again the beautiful world that I’ve been away from, the sky opened up again for me, the angels rays of colour, spring reaches into my soul with thousands of sweet sounds. The true artist of God’s grace that has brought the sacred fire from heaven to earth to clean, to sanctify, to salvation. The God-Man cannot get lost and cannot fail “.

When you exit the castles and continue your trip, you can sit and think in the saddle of this mysterious tale. About all the architecture and furniture loaded into Neuschwanstein. About life at Hohenschwangau, and the wealth the king and his family surrounded themselves with. About the mad king, his debauchery and decadence. About how his food was raised up through the floors of Hohenschwangau, because he did not like servants, and how his lovers walked through the castle in secret passages. About how his servants stood on top of his bedroom, and shone lights into the room through coloured glass. About the room where Richard Wagner was asleep drunk, while he was wondering how he could seduce some young girls, not to forget the natural environment and location of the palaces, which were literally royal houses, fit for kings.

Ludwig II, in his brief and mysterious life, through the composer Richard Wagner’s music, his own wild imagination, and on the brink of romantic insanity, left us a marvel of a castle at the bottom of the A7 motorway. A romantic monument, perhaps to remind us that love and romance can be found in the real world. Perhaps the message from Ludwig II to the future of humanity is: “Find love while you live, and don’t end up like I did”?
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References:

OByrne, Dave. 2011. "Bavaria Germany: Neuschwanstein Among 20 Building Wonders of the World". We Blog the World. Posted: December 9, 2011. Available online: http://www.weblogtheworld.com/countries/europe-countries/germany/city-munich/bavaria-germany-neuschwanstein-among-20-building-wonders-of-the-world/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter

The 2000 year old food forest

2011-12-16T08:15:00.003-07:00

In 1975, Geoff Lawton discovered a remarkable oasis in the Moroccan desert, a remnant of an ancient sustainable agriculture, the 2000 year old food forest farmed by 800 people. He returned to document it 28 years later. Date palms are the main overstorey species with an understorey of carob, bananas, quince, olives, figs, pomegranates, guava, citrus, mulberries, tamarinds, grapes... and many more smaller species. He found the food forest to have a wonderful atmosphere – cool, lush, shaded as if he was inside an organism, safe and secure yet surrounded by desert. Imagine a world where desert food forests stretch from North Africa to Central Asia in various forms. Geoff suggests we should document these food forests before all the young farmers migrate to the cities for work and they are lost forever. Our ancestors had a true knowledge of sustainable, extremely long term sustainable multi-species food systems. We are going to need them.

Geoff Lawton made the film Establishing a Food Forest which explains the patterns of a food forest and then he turns the theory into action, planting the seeds and watching the system grow. (Some species not suitable for N Europe.) He also visits other established food forests around the world.
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References:

Lawton, Geoff. 2011. "The 2000 year old food forest". Permaculture. Posted: December 9, 2011. Available online: http://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos/2000-year-old-food-forest

Babies embrace punishment earlier than previously thought, study suggests

2011-12-15T08:15:00.006-07:00

Babies as young as eight months old prefer it when people who commit or condone antisocial acts are mistreated, a new study led by a University of British Columbia psychologist finds.

While previous research shows that babies uniformly prefer kind acts, the new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that eight month-old infants support negative behavior if it is directed at those who act antisocially – and dislike those who are nice to bad guys.

“We find that, by eight months, babies have developed nuanced views of reciprocity and can conduct these complex social evaluations much earlier than previously thought,” says lead author Prof. Kiley Hamlin, UBC Dept of Psychology, who co-authored the study with colleagues from Yale University and Temple University.

“This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades,” says Hamlin. “Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger and prefer to see antisocial behavior regulated.”

For the study, researchers presented four scenarios to 100 babies using animal hand puppets. After watching puppets act negatively or positively towards other characters, the babies were shown puppets either giving or taking toys from these “good” or “bad” puppets. When prompted to choose their favorite characters, babies preferred puppets that mistreated the bad characters from the original scene, compared to those that treated them nicely.

The researchers also examined how older infants would themselves treat good and bad puppets. They tested 64 babies aged 21 months, who were asked to give a treat to, or take a treat away from one of two puppets – one who had previously helped another puppet, and another who had harmed the other puppet. These older babies physically took treats away from the “bad” puppets, and gave treats to the “good” ones.

Hamlin, who conducted the research with Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom of Yale University’s Dept. of Psychology, and Neha Mahajan of Temple University, says the findings provide new insights into the protective mechanisms humans use to choose social alliances, which she says are rooted in self-preservation.

Hamlin says the infant responses may be early forms of the complex behaviors and emotions that get expressed later in life, such as when school children tattle on kids who break the rules, the rush people feel when movie villains get their due, and the phenomenon of people cheering at public executions.

Hamlin says while such tendencies surely have many learned components, the fact that they are present so early in life suggests that they may be based in part on an innate foundation of liking those who give others their “just desserts.”
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Babies embrace punishment earlier than previously thought, study suggests". EurekAlert. Posted: November 28, 2011. Available online: http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/111125-science-maya2-230p.grid-3x2.jpg

Mexico adds yet another brick to the 2012 Maya legend

2011-12-14T08:15:00.019-07:00

Archaeologists say another artifact refers to date, but downplays doomsday angle

Mexico's archaeology institute downplays theories that the ancient Maya predicted some sort of apocalypse would occur in 2012, but on Thursday it acknowledged that a second reference to the date exists on a carved fragment found at a southern Mexico ruin site.

Most experts had cited only one surviving reference to the date in Mayan glyphs, a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.

But the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement that there is in fact another apparent reference to the date at the nearby Comalcalco ruin. The inscription is on the carved or molded face of a brick. Comalcalco is unusual among Mayan temples in that it was constructed of bricks.

Arturo Mendez, a spokesman for the institute, said the fragment of inscription had been discovered years ago and has been subject to thorough study. It is not on display and is being kept in storage at the institute.

The "Comalcalco Brick," as the second fragment is known, has been discussed by experts in some online forums. Many still doubt that it is a definite reference to Dec. 21, 2012 or Dec. 23, 2012, the dates cited by proponents of the theory as the possible end of the world.

Referring to past or future?

"Some have proposed it as another reference to 2012, but I remain rather unconvinced," David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a message to The Associated Press.

Stuart said the date inscribed on the brick "'is a 'Calendar Round,' a combination of a day and month position that will repeat every 52 years."

The brick date does coincide with the end of the 13th Baktun; Baktuns were roughly 394-year periods, and 13 was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas. The Mayan Long Count calendar begins in 3114 B.C., and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.

But the date on the brick could also correspond to similar dates in the past, Stuart said.

"There's no reason it couldn't be also a date in ancient times, describing some important historical event in the Classic period. In fact, the third glyph on the brick seems to read as the verb huli, 'he/she/it arrives,'" Stuart wrote. "There's no future tense marking (unlike the Tortuguero phrase), which in my mind points more to the Comalcalco date being more historical than prophetic."

Cryptic characteristics

Both inscriptions — the Tortuguero tablet and the Comalcalco brick — were probably carved about 1,300 years ago, and both are cryptic in some ways.

Tortuguero tablet
Source: INAH
The Tortuguero stone tablet apparently refers to an event that is due to occur in 2012, but a crack in the stone makes the final passage almost illegible.

The Tortuguero inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation. However, erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible, though some read the last eroded glyphs as perhaps saying, "He will descend from the sky."

The Comalcalco brick is also odd in that the molded or inscribed faces of the bricks were probably laid facing inward or covered with stucco, suggesting they were not meant to be seen.

The Institute of Anthropology and History has long said rumors of a world-ending or world-changing event in late December 2012 are a Westernized misinterpretation of Mayan calendars.

The institute repeated Thursday that "Western messianic thought has twisted the cosmovision of ancient civilizations like the Maya."

The institute's experts say the Maya saw time as a series of cycles that began and ended with regularity, but with nothing apocalyptic at the end of a given cycle.

Given the strength of Internet rumors about impending disaster in 2012, the institute is organizing a special round table of 60 Mayan experts next week at the archaeological site of Palenque, in southern Mexico, to "dispel some of the doubts about the end of one era and the beginning of another, in the Mayan Long Count calendar."
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References:

Stevenson, Mark. 2011. "Mexico adds yet another brick to the 2012 Maya legend ". MSNBC. Posted: November 25, 2011. Available online: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45438811/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TtOeS1auPPo

Our ancestors speak out after 3 million years

2011-12-13T08:15:00.008-07:00

YOU may think humanity's first words are lost in the noise of ancient history, but an unlikely experiment using plastic tubes and puffs of air is helping to recreate the first sounds uttered by our distant ancestors.

Many animals communicate with sounds, but it is the variety of our language that sets us apart. Over millions of years, changes to our vocal organs have allowed us to produce a rich mix of sounds. One such change was the loss of the air sac - a balloon-like organ that helps primates to produce booming noises.

All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ. Palaeontologists can date when our ancestors lost the organ, as the tissue attaches to a skeletal feature called the hyoid bulla, which is absent in humans. "Lucy's baby", an Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived 3.3 million years ago, had a hyoid bulla; but by the time Homo heidelbergensis arrived on the scene 600,000 years ago, air sacs were a thing of the past.

To find out how this changed the sounds produced, Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands created artificial vocal tracts from shaped plastic tubes. Air forced down them produced different vowel sounds, and half of the models had an extra chamber to mimic an air sac.

De Boer played the sounds to 22 people and asked them to identify the vowel. If they got it right, they were asked to try again, only this time noise was added to make it harder to identify the sound. If they got it wrong, noise was reduced.

He found that those listening to tubes without air sacs could tolerate much more noise before the vowels became unintelligible.

The air sacs acted like bass drums, resonating at low frequencies, and causing vowel sounds to merge; Lucy's baby would have had a greatly reduced vocabulary. Even simple words - such as "tin" and "ten" - would have sounded the same to her.

Observations of soldiers from the first world war corroborate de Boer's findings. Poison gas enlarged the vestigial air sacs of some soldiers, who are said to have had speech problems that made them hard to comprehend.

De Boer's study provides clear evidence supporting the idea that the need to produce complex sounds to communicate better made air sacs shrink, says Ann MacLarnon of the University of Roehampton in London. More sounds meant more information could be shared, giving those who lacked air sacs a better chance of survival in a dangerous world.

De Boer found that air sacs also interfered with the workings of the vocal cords, making consonants trickier. Only once they had gone could words like "perpetual", requiring rapid changes in sound, be produced.

What, then, might our ancestors' first words have been? With air sacs, vowels tend to sound like the "u" in "ugg". But studies suggest it is easier to produce a consonant plus a vowel, and "d" is easier to form with "u". "Drawing it all together, I think it is likely cavemen and cavewomen said 'duh' before they said 'ugg'," says de Boer.

Visit the site to get sound samples from the experiment
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References:

Harvey, Charles. "Our ancestors speak out after 3 million years". New Scientist. Posted: November 23, 2011. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228404.400-our-ancestors-speak-out-after-3-million-years.html

Journal reference: Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.07.007

Native American Blankets Made With Dog Hair

2011-12-12T08:15:00.009-07:00

To Native Americans known as the Coast Salish, the hair of the dog isn't a dubious hangover cure—it's a key ingredient in the large, beautiful blankets woven by their ancestors more than a century ago. A molecular analysis of some of these venerable textiles now confirms they are made partly of yarn spun from the fur of an unusual canine, verifying oral accounts handed down through the Pacific Northwest tribe over generations.

The Coast Salish live in northern Washington and southern British Columbia, and according to tribal lore, their ancestors raised a strange breed of canine. The Salish woolly dog was bred, the story goes, specifically for its fleecy undercoat and long outer hairs, which were woven into the famous Salish blankets. Salish oral tradition about the canine is corroborated by historical accounts, such as the journal of 18th century explorer George Vancouver, who wrote that the Salish dogs had coats that were "a mixture of a coarse kind of wool, with very fine, long hair, capable of being spun into yarn."

Recent research shows the woolly dog probably resembled a current breed called the Spitz, a thick-coated, curly-tailed dog native to Finland. By 1900, however, the Salish woolly dog had vanished. Today the only known physical evidence of it is a single pelt—rediscovered in 2004 in a drawer at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.—of a woolly dog named "Mutton," the pet of a 19th century ethnographer who studied the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

Despite the tribal lore and other ample evidence, some have dismissed the claim that Salish blankets contain canine hair as just a shaggy-dog story. A survey of more than 100 items woven by the Salish found no dog hair, according to a seminal 1980 book on Salish textiles. And a 2006 DNA analysis that analyzed a small sample of textiles was inconclusive.

The new work, published in the December issue of Antiquity, sheds light on why past studies could have missed dog hair. Using mass spectrometry, a molecular technique for revealing the components of complex mixtures, biochemist Caroline Solazzo of the University of York in the United Kingdom and colleagues analyzed nine blankets woven in the 19th or early 20th centuries by the Coast Salish. They found protein fragments, or peptides, matching peptides from the hair of sheep and mountain goats, as expected. But some of the peptides in five of the nine blankets matched ones from the pelt of Mutton, indicating that the blanket peptides comes from dog hair. Only the older blankets—those woven in the first half of the 19th century—contained dog yarn, and none of them was pure dog. (The earlier DNA analysis had looked at only more recent blankets, which the new analysis showed did not have dog hair.) In most cases, the weavers had combined dog fiber with the highly prized fiber from mountain goats to make a mixed yarn.

Canine hair was easier to come by than mountain goat hair, which could be obtained only by trading with nearby tribes with access to goats, the researchers say. "Dog hair was probably used for less important blankets, blankets with less value, and for common usage, [not] ceremonial usage," Solazzo says. She and her colleagues found, for example, two very plain ceremonial blankets that contained only goat hair. The weaver might have avoided dog hair because the blankets' stark design shows off all their fibers rather than concealing some of them.

Klaus Hollemeyer, a researcher at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, who developed the mass spectrometry technique used by Solazzo's team, believes the new work is definitive. The protein analysis is "well done and documented," he writes via e-mail.

The new study also helps erase doubts about the accuracy of the Salish oral tradition, says textile conservator Susan Heald of the National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, and a co-author of the new study. "It's been close to 10 years since Coast Salish community curator Marilyn Jones asked me if I could find out if dog hair was used in any of the Coast Salish blankets" displayed in a particular museum exhibit, Heald writes via e-mail. "I'm pleased that we can finally tell Marilyn that we did find dog hair in the older blankets, corroborating the oral history."
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References:

Watson, Traci. 2011. "Native American Blankets Made With Dog Hair". Science. Posted: November 23, 2011. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/native-american-blankets-made-wi.html

Art rocks in Saudi Arabia

2011-12-11T08:15:00.027-07:00

“Jubbah is one of the most curious places in the world, and to my mind one of the most beautiful,” wrote Lady Anne Blunt. The granddaughter of Lord Byron had arrived in January 1879 with her husband, Wilfrid, at the oasis two-thirds of the way across the Nafud desert. En route to the city of Hail to see, and perhaps buy, some of the famous horses of Ibn Rashid, then ruler in Najd, they were among the first travelers from the West to set foot in Jubbah.

Near Bir Hima, the camel on this panel is a recent addition to an otherwise curious frieze: An oryx faces one of the most naturalistic human figures found in Saudi rock art; he wields a spear and holds what may be a shield, wears feathered headgear and shows what may be tattoos on his abdomen. A smaller figure— a child?—appears under his arm. Photo: Lars Bjurström/Saudi Aramco World/SAWDIA

Although not geologists, they recognized that the plain, more than 16 kilometers long and five kilometers wide (10 x 3 mi)—”a great bare space fringed by an ocean of sand” and overlooked by a sandstone massif”—was the site of a former lake. Among the rocks, Wilfrid found inscriptions. They had been on the lookout for traces of ancient writing, but had “hitherto found nothing except some doubtful scratches, and a few of those simple designs one finds everywhere on the sandstone, representing camels and gazelles.”

When it came to rock art, 19th-century westerners were interested mainly in writing: Anything else they found unworthy of attention. But attitudes have changed. Today, rock art is recognized as sophisticated, complex and esthetically interesting evidence of how early humans socialized their landscapes. Pictures carved or pecked into rock speak to us all, however faintly or incomprehensibly, across great divides of time, and appeal powerfully to our imaginations. According to Paul Bahn, a leading scholar of prehistoric art, it “gives humankind its true dimension” by showing that even from the earliest times, “human activities hold meanings other than those of a purely utilitarian kind.”

The “simple designs” that the Blunts saw can still be seen today: a veritable gallery of rock art that survives in the stark mountain area west of what is now a small modern town. The parade of images and elaborate symbols, left there by successive prehistoric nomadic and settled groups, leads up to more recent written inscriptions that lie on the horizon of history.
The first survey

Nearly a century after the Blunts’ visit, scholars began to grasp the importance of these pictures. The first state-sponsored archaeological and paleo-environmental surveys of Jubbah and other sites were conducted by Saudi Arabia’s Department of Antiquities in 1976 and 1977. These located and recorded thousands of images and inscriptions, and they proved that the Jubbah site did indeed lie on an ancient lake-bed stretching eastward from the sandstone mountain called Jabal Um Sanaman, “Two Camel-Hump Mountain.”

And now, 25 years after the surveys, Jubbah is the centrepiece of some 2000 known rock-art sites across Saudi Arabia. Both within the country and internationally, with interest sparked by new finds and increasingly accurate dating methods, their significance is finally emerging.
A growing understanding

Although rock art has been found in just about every nation, Saudi Arabia’s extensive heritage has remained virtually unknown. For example, the 1998 Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art does not mention Saudi Arabia, and its map of prehistoric rock-art sites shows the whole of the Arabian Peninsula as a blank.

This shows how much there is yet to learn, says Robert Bednarik, founder and current president of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations (IFRAO). “Saudi Arabia is one of the four richest regions in the world for rock art, along with South Africa, Australia and India. It possesses a major concentration of sites—yet, until now, this has not been realized internationally.”

Bednarik paid his first visit to Saudi Arabia in November, including a visit to a major new discovery in a remote area of Saudi Arabia that until now was thought to be devoid of rock art. The site, called Shuwaymas after the nearest village, “stands ready to surpass…any other rock-art site on the Arabian Peninsula,” he says.

In contrast to Jubbah, Shuwaymas is surrounded by black volcanic lava, not sand, in one of the dry valley systems in the south of Hail province. Professor Saad Abdul Aziz al-Rashid, Deputy Minister for Antiquities and Museums, calls it “a unique and very important find,” and points out that it can tell us much about the early domestication of animals. “As well as rock art, there are also numerous ancient stone ‘kites,’ mounds, tails and enclosures in the area,” says al-Rashid.

The discovery came in March 2001, when a Bedouin told Mahboub Habbas al-Rasheedi, a teacher in the nearby town, about rock images he had spotted while grazing his camels. After days scouring the crumbling sides of valleys up to 65 kilometres distant from the school, al-Rasheedi stumbled into a proliferation of rock art tableaux, including an unusually detailed carving nearly two meters from head to tail that has been dubbed “the lion of Shuwaymas.”

Further explorations by al-Rasheedi and his brother Saad yielded fresh discoveries incised and pecked into the rock: images of cheetah, hyenas, dogs, long- and short-horned cattle, oryx, ibex, horses, mules, camels and ostrich; human figures; geometric shapes, serpentine squiggles, inscrutable symbols, carved-out footprints and, perhaps, hoofprints.

“We kept coming back to reflect on the place, on what these pictures mean and the stories they tell. Somehow we are connected to them,” says Mahboub al-Rasheedi. The brothers took their local school superintendent, Mamduah Ibrahim al-Rasheedi, to the site. “As soon as I returned home,” says Mamduah, “I clambered up a nearby hill where my cell phone can work, and I called the provincial director of antiquities in Hail to report that we had found something.”

The Shuwaymas area is densely peppered with rock art, and it likely had a very heavy and significant concentration of Neolithic people,” says Bednarik, whose more than 650 publications in more than 50 professional journals make him one of the most extensively published archaeological authors. “Clearly a great deal of labor has been invested here. It reminds me of Egyptian material and also Saharan rock art. There are lots of questions here that, if answered, could well change opinions and attitudes. This is the beginning of a major research opportunity.”

Jubbah, 25 years ago, was just as little known as Shuwaymas is now. But now we are aware that Arabia has not always been desert, and indeed that the region has undergone considerable climatic changes. The sequence of strata in the lakebed at Jubbah is similar to those in locations in the Rub’ al-Khali (the Empty Quarter) and the al-Jafr Basin in Jordan, as well as long-dry African lake basins in the Sahara. All of this region underwent successive moist and arid periods, and during the Neolithic Wet Phase (9000-6000 years ago), savannah grasslands supported cattle.
A long history of use

Archaeologists have found evidence of four major periods of settlement at Jubbah stretching back through the Middle Palaeolithic period, 80,000 to 25,000 years ago. They also found Neolithic sites and evidence of early trade: finely retouched arrowheads, blades and awls manufactured from stone that had been carried in from sources up to 145 kilometres (90 mi) away.

The panoply of rock art around Jubbah’s Jabal Um Sanaman covers some 39 square kilometers (15 sq mi), and it presents a rich, often perplexing gallery, including panels depicting early domesticated dogs and long-horned cattle, and others that suggest a transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural communities. The abundant images of camels raise the intriguing possibility that the camel was first domesticated in northern Arabia, not southern, as is usually believed. Among the hundreds of thousands of camel figures carved in rocks throughout the Arabian Peninsula, the ones at Jubbah are believed to be the oldest: At approximately 4000 years old, they date back to the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Among the most recent markings in the chronology of Jubbah’s early civilizations are 3000-year-old inscriptions in Thamudic, the oldest known script of the Arabian Peninsula. Majeed Khan, the leading authority on the rock art of Arabia and the Middle East, is currently an advisor to the national Antiquities Department; he has spent 27 years studying rock art and inscriptions. The Thamudic script, he says, “evolved independently within the Peninsula from an earlier rock-art system of communication, an embryonic form of writing employing elaborate signs and symbols as ideograms.”

Along with Khan, archaeologist Juris Zarins worked on the early surveys in the mid-1970’s, before joining the faculty of Southwest Missouri State University. Over the past two decades, he has taken many SMSU students to Saudi Arabia, and he was chief archaeologist of the 1992 Transarabia Expedition, which made the headline-grabbing discovery of what they believed was the ancient city of Ubar.

“Pound for pound and piece for piece, in terms of rock art concentration and importance, Jubbah is the number-one or number-two site in the whole of the Middle East,” Zarins says. “It rivals anything in North Africa. With the art going back at least to the Pottery Neolithic period 7000 to 9000 years ago, and with paleo-environment and geology showing traces of human activity extending into the Middle Palaeolithic period, it’s a treasure trove for answering questions about the Middle East.”

If so, then why has Saudi Arabia so long remained a blank spot on the international rock-art map? One reason, contends Zarins, has to do with an ancient bias: “Throughout the world, scholarship has always slighted deserts. Even the ancients despised the desert people. This has carried over into the modern world, since history is written by settled, civilized peoples.”
A curious oversight

What makes the oversight more curious still is that there has been activity between the time of the Blunts’ visit and the modern Saudi studies. In 1972, a four-volume work, Rock-Art in Central Arabia, was published by Emmanuel Anati. Although he never visited the country, he worked from a huge corpus of photographs, tracings and sketches acquired from the explorer, mapmaker and writer on Arabia Harry St. John Philby. In the winter of 1952, Philby had set off on a three-month field survey of rock art and inscriptions in the south of the country. Accompanying him were a renowned Belgian scholar of Semitic studies, Monseigneur Gonzague Ryckmans, pre-Islamic historian Jacques Ryckmans and a photographer of rock art and epigraphy, Count Philippe Lippens. The expedition returned to Riyadh with records of 13,000 previously unknown petroglyphs. “Sad to say,” wrote Elizabeth Monroe, Philby’s biographer, in 1973, “only a fraction of this major addition to the world’s knowledge of Arabia has so far been published.” (The originals are today at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.) So rich was one of the sites west of the ancient wells of Bir Hima that one of the expedition members was able to copy 250 images without moving from his seat.

Look carefully at the black rock,” says Naif al-Ateek, the curator of the rock-art site at Jubbah and a descendant of the town amir who welcomed the Blunts. “If you concentrate, you’ll see a faint carving lying behind the clear and lighter top one.” Even with such a lead—for without it only the superficial images would register—intently staring at the blackened rock surface is an exercise akin to picking out a modern three-dimensional picture that appears buried within an inscrutable, computer-generated pattern. Yet al-Ateek is right: If one adjusts one’s eye, focusing and refocusing slowly, another image appears in the background, a work executed perhaps millennia before the more apparent images.

“The darker ones are the oldest,” he explains, showing a life-sized figure, depicted with a characteristic oval head, holding a curved, boomerang-like throwing stick and followed by a short-horned bovine. “Now let me show you our prize figure, an ancient ruler.” Finely incised in the dark patina of desert varnish is a life-sized male human figure with a crown-like headdress. Nearby is the curved horn of an ibex reaching and arching to its back, its face complete with a small beard.

Later, after a day spent scrambling over rock surfaces, al-Ateek serves coffee in the same smoke-blackened parlor that the Blunts sat in. He has built up a small museum that includes several rock-art fragments found in the sands and brought in by Bedouin over the years.

“We are proud of our mountain and the heritage it contains,” says Bandar al-Amar, who has opened Jubbah’s own Internet café, runs computer courses and created an Arabic-language website for the town. “Twenty years ago our parents pressed to have a tarred road brought across the dunes to Jubbah from Hail,” he says. “The authorities suggested that we move to Hail and resettle in the modern town. The answer was ‘Okay, so long as you move our mountain with us.’ This here is all part of our deep past, even though its history is difficult to understand.”

Just three years ago, a rock with one of Arabia’s most intriguing petroglyphs was moved: A helicopter hoisted it from its site 160 kilometers (100 mi) north of Najran and lowered it onto a flatbed trailer, and it was later craned onto the marble floor of Riyadh’s National Museum. The rough, pyramid-shaped sandstone rock, 1.3 meters tall, shows arms and hands waving on one side and another hand, apparently with a broken arm, on the other. The motif is ubiquitous in rock art throughout the world.
The difficulty of interpretation

The Department of Antiquities and Museums is also quartered at the National Museum. In his office, surrounded by journals, surveys, publications and rock-art conference proceedings, Majeed Khan explains why he prefers not to interpret the meaning of the waving hands, let alone any other rock art images.
Carved footprints. Photo: Lars Bjurström/Saudi Aramco World/SAWDIA

Carved footprints. Photo: Lars Bjurström/Saudi Aramco World/SAWDIA

“The biggest challenge with rock art is chronology and dating. Once we tried to interpret the art, but with our modern minds interpretation is entirely hypothetical. So now we concentrate on dating, chronology and the technical aspects.” He adds one exception, unique to Saudi Arabia:

Tribal markings called wasum are still used today by Bedouin to mark territorial and animal possessions. They provide a modern link with much older rock art. Khan’s Wasum: The Tribal Symbols of Saudi Arabia was published by the Ministry of Education in 2000.

In the museum gallery, Khan demonstrates further the pitfalls of interpretation. “You might say this is a territorial marker,” he says as he and a group of schoolchildren ponder the rock with the waving hands. “That child might say it’s a keep-out sign, for the broken arm on the rear face shows the consequence of intrusion. I might suggest that it reveals supplication to some deity. You could speculate these incised images from handprints daubed onto the rock are mere doodles by a person with time—and paint—on his hands: Art for art’s sake!

“With such a diversity of ideas, how can we interpret the meaning of people’s thoughts thousands of years ago?” asks Khan. “One thing is clear to me though: These images were symbolic, communicating meaning which the artist and the ancient people of the time could understand.”

Khan’s words echo those of Paul Bahn. In most rock art, argues Bahn, “individual artistic inspiration was related to some more widespread system of thought and had messages to convey: signatures, ownership, warnings, exhortations, demarcations, commemorations, narratives, myths and metaphors.”
A shared legacy

Among the younger Saudi scholars devoted to rock art is Abdulraheem Hobrom, one of the first to undertake postgraduate studies in the subject at Riyadh’s King Sa’ud University. He sees a wide-open field, and attitudes changing in ways that will favor further study. “Islam encourages us to explore and discover the world. People are recognizing the significance of the shared legacy and heritage of rock art. Our ancestors created these works, and we need to understand them,” he says.

More publications, increased survey activities and a documentary film in progress, intended for broadcast in Europe, all show the growing interest in Saudi rock art, says Daifallah al-Talhi, director general of the Antiquities Research and Survey Center. “We display rock art in our provincial museums, our mobile exhibition on education in history includes it and we will soon launch a website for the National Museum which will feature petroglyphs,” he says. Provincial representatives of the Ministry of Education discuss the country’s rock-art heritage in presentations to schools throughout Saudi Arabia’s 13 provinces.

This heightened interest, naturally, is leading to another prospect—more discoveries. Saad al-Rashid is a busy man these days, one who often returns to his office at the National Museum in the evenings to work past midnight. He talks of prospects for new studies to address the questions that multiply with the discoveries. “To what extent are the wasum of today inherited by tribes, and were there tribes that no longer exist? When were the animals domesticated in Arabia? There are so many facets to examine— and of course always the scientific challenge of accurate absolute dating.”

His enthusiasm is echoed by Bednarik. “Saudi Arabia is taking on a pioneer role. This could lead to better things in terms of rock-art studies in other Arab countries, and opting for a scientific approach rather than one of interpretation makes eminent sense. It’s also appropriate, as the Arabs were at the forefront of scientific tradition and innovation in the past.”

In the middle of the broad, flat, sandy valley of the Shuwaymas site, a small campfire flickers under a canopy of stars in a crystalline sky. Sharing its warmth, sipping coffee and tea, are two Bedouin who live in tents a few kilometers away and who are now officially charged with guarding the site. Also sitting at the fire are Mamduah Ibrahim al-Rasheedi, the school superintendant who called in the find, his teacher colleagues and Saad Rowaisan, the visiting provincial director of antiquities from Hail. They muse over how this once-populated site has been virtually unknown for nearly the full duration of recorded history, and they speculate what their find will bring to this remote area: survey teams, archeologists, students, international specialists, film crews and curious visitors with four-wheel drives and GPS navigation units. Al-Rasheedi already plans a visit for his schoolchildren. There will, of course, be more.

As the coffee-maker tends the embers, talk turns to the people who left their mark on the rocks. “Our children will ask, ‘Who were the people who left all this? How did they live, how did they cut the pictures and symbols in the stone?’” says Ruwaisan. “’What were the dogs used for, and why did the cows, lions and cheetahs disappear?’”

Later, after a simple meal, the conversation dies, marking the time for reflective silence interspersed with poetry recitations. The small cloaked gathering draws closer to the fire and listens to verses from an eighth-century qasidah by Jarir ibn ‘Atiya that opens in the traditional way, with an image of a deserted campsite. Like the art flickering faintly on the rocks, it seems to speak from a distant past.

Source: This article appeared on pages 18-25 of the Compilation Issue 2008 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

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References:

Harrigan, Peter. 2011. "Art rocks in Saudi Arabia". Past Horizons. Posted: November 23, 2011. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/11/2011/art-rocks-in-saudi-arabia

Brain study explores what makes colors and numbers collide

2011-12-10T08:15:00.008-07:00

Someone with the condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia might experience the number 2 in turquoise or the letter S in magenta. Now, researchers reporting their findings online in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 17 have shown that those individuals also show heightened activity in a brain region responsible for vision.

The findings provide a novel way of looking at synesthesia as the product of regional hyperexcitability in the brain, the researchers say. They also provide a window into our understanding of individual differences in perception.

"Most of us tend to assume that we experience the world in the same way as everyone else, but synesthesia provides a clear example of a group that perceives the world in a fundamentally different way," says Devin Blair Terhune of the University of Oxford. "The majority of people do not have conscious experiences of color when they look at numbers, letters, and words, whereas synesthetes do. Studying these people can thus shed light on the brain mechanisms underlying conscious awareness."

Earlier studies had shown that synesthetes who experience color for numbers and letters also discriminate among colors better than those with other types of synesthesia. Those findings hinted that an overactive visual cortex might be in play.

Terhune's team, which is led by Roi Cohen Kadosh, found that average people do indeed require three times greater magnetic stimulation to their visual cortex than synesthetes do in order to experience phosphenes, transient flashes of light or other visual disturbances.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of the difference," Terhune said. "The synesthetes in our study displayed considerably greater levels of cortical excitability than our participants without synesthesia. These results point to a very large effect that may reflect a fundamental difference between the brains of those with and without synesthesia."

It's not that the enhanced excitability of the visual cortex is directly responsible for the experience of synesthesia, however. Further experiments showed that reducing the excitability of visual cortex in synesthetes actually increased their experience of colors with numbers. Meanwhile, increasing excitability in that brain region made the synesthesia more intense.

Terhune says they now suspect that the enhanced excitability of synesthetes' brains might be related to the development of the condition, but it doesn't produce the phenomenon in adults.

Ultimately, the findings might allow for treatments designed to reduce or eliminate the experience of synesthesia or to make it even more vivid, he says. The work also raises new questions in other fields that examine atypical perceptions, such as hallucinations, he says. "Might it be that the same principle is applying also there?"
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Brain study explores what makes colors and numbers collide". EurekAlert. Posted: November 17, 2011. Available online:http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/cp-bse111111.php

Only four degrees of separation, says Facebook

2011-12-09T08:15:00.010-07:00

We are all a lot closer to Kevin Bacon than we thought.

A few months ago, we reported that a Yahoo team planned to test the six degrees of separation theory on Facebook. Now, Facebook's own data team has beat them to the punch, proving that most Facebook users are only separated by four degrees.

Facebook researchers pored through the records of all 721 million active users, who collectively have designated 69 billion "friendships" among them. The number of friends differs widely. Some users have designated only a single friend, probably the person who persuaded them to join Facebook. Others have accumulated thousands. The median is about 100.

To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). Paths were even shorter within a single country, typically involving only three other people, even in large countries such as the US.

Sociologist Stanley Milgram, who tested the six degrees theory in the 1960s, found an average of 5.2 intermediate people in the US. At the time, he wrote that people at the end points were "not five persons apart, but 'five circles of acquaintances' apart." He thought of them as different "worlds" of acquaintances." Now, the Facebook team concludes, "people are in fact only four worlds apart."

The world just became a little smaller.
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References:

Hecht, Jeff. 2011. "Only four degrees of separation, says Facebook". New Scientist. Posted: November 22, 2011. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/11/now-were-all-just-5-degrees-se.html

Why does religion keep telling us we're bad?

2011-12-08T08:15:00.010-07:00

Evolution has carried us a long way, but we can become complacent, which is where religious admonitions come in

When I told my father I was going to Cambridge to give a talk on the question of whether humans were good or bad, he looked at me sternly over his glasses. "You know what the answer is, don't you?" Total depravity and filthy rags he was hoping I would say of our nature – the first is a primary tenet of Calvinist doctrine, and the second is a phrase from Isaiah. I was about to say that we are at our root neither good nor bad, but pulled in contrary directions with the ability to make a decision. So I knew we were in for … a discussion.

From an evolutionary perspective, considering other social species on this earth, it is remarkable that a bunch of unrelated adult males can sit on a plane together for seven hours in the presence of fertile females, with everyone arriving alive and unharmed at the end of it. We could be a lot worse than we are, according to our common notions of right and wrong. We have certainly come a long way towards becoming a co-operative, sympathetic, even loving species.

Granted, this depends on your perspective: if you're a biologist, as I am, you might notice how far we've come. If you're a theologian, perhaps the more salient realisation is how far we haven't. The meeting place between these perspectives is that we are full of conflicting tendencies and inconsistencies in our attitudes and behaviour. So we would do well to ask why this conflict exists, in addition to arguing whether we've done well or poorly in it.

At several points in our evolutionary history, sources of conflict have arisen, leading to moral tension and ambivalence. Perhaps the oldest and most significant is the fact that we as individuals have gained by looking out for ourselves in competition with others, but that we also have depended on our social groups and so gained by supporting and contributing to the stability of those groups. From this ancient situation eventually arose the tug of war between selfishness and altruism that is a common aspect of our moral experience.

We should realise, however, that these often contrary tendencies both evolved in our nature through natural selection based on individual advantage. Even more importantly, though, we should realise that an evolutionary mechanism does not necessarily trickle down into our intentions and motives – caring for each other may have evolved by natural selection, but this does not rule out the possibility of genuine love and kindness.

Furthermore, we can extend our moral consideration far beyond what was beneficial to our ancestors – to humanity as a whole, even to the natural world. This leads to another important source of angst in our moral life: the difference between attitudes and behaviours that would have been advantageous for our ancestors, and those we wish to embrace and promote today. We need not wait for evolutionary adaptation to catch up with our vision of goodness, if ever it would. We can do this on our own, but it requires that familiar battle between what we feel like doing and what we know we ought to do. The former very often comes from our past, our evolutionary heritage, whereas the latter comes from whatever is most important to us.

Many of the evolutionarily savvy among us have chosen one of two roads with regard to describing our moral nature. One is the comforting notion that we are generally prosocial nice folks except for those odd meanies who must be explained as having some strange allele or bad childhood environment. The other common option is a descent into moral scepticism or nihilism where nothing matters anyway because it's all just a product of our evolution. These alternatives together look remarkably like a sour grapes attitude: either we are fundamentally good, or else forget it there's no such thing as good and bad. The main reason for Isaiah's admonition to remember how we fall short, as for most Jewish and Christian moral admonitions come to think of it, is to counteract our tendency to look at ourselves with rose-coloured glasses and become complacent. It looks like we could use a dose of my father's old time religion after all.
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References:

Lahti, David. 2011. "Why does religion keep telling us we're bad?". The Guardian. Posted: November 22, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/nov/22/religion-bad-evolution-religious-admonitions

Ice Mummy May Have Smashed Eye in Fall

2011-12-07T08:15:00.003-07:00

CT scans suggest the Iceman may have shattered his eye in a fall after he was wounded by an arrow.

A sharp incision in his right eye may have contributed to the rapid demise of Ötzi the Iceman, the famous mummy who died in the Italian Alps more than 5,000 years ago.

Twenty years after two hikers stumbled upon the Iceman in a melting glacier, new analyses have revealed that a deep cut likely led to heavy bleeding in the man's eye. In the cold, high-altitude conditions where he was found, that kind of injury would have been tough to recover from.

The official opinion remains that an arrow in his left shoulder was the cause of death for Ötzi. But the new study raises the possibility -- for some, at least -- that he fell over after being shot by an arrow. And, at higher than 10,000 feet in elevation, his alpine fall may have made the situation much worse.

"Maybe he fell down or maybe he had a fight up there, nobody knows," said Wolfgang Recheis, a physicist in the radiology department at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. "With this cut alone, at 3,250 meters, it would have been a deadly wound up there. Bleeding to death in the late afternoon when it was getting cold up there, this could be really dangerous."

Ever since his discovery in 1991, Ötzi has been measured, photographed, X-rayed, CT-scanned and endlessly speculated about. The Iceman Photoscan website allows anyone to scrutinize every inch of the body, which belonged to a 5'3", 110-pound, 45-year old man.

Ten years ago, researchers found a flint arrowhead buried in Ötzi's left shoulder blade inside a two-centimeter (0.8-inch) wide hole. They concluded that the arrow pierced a major artery and killed him within minutes. At a conference in September, experts reaffirmed that assessment.

But in one of the latest studies, Recheis used the most advanced CT-scanning technology available to take a closer look at Ötzi's right eye. Earlier examinations had shown a crack in the skull in that spot. The new work revealed a deep incision in the same place.

Scans also revealed iron crystals around the right eye and forehead, which produce a bluish hue. And since the region's rocks are naturally low in iron, Recheis and colleagues suspect the iron is a sign of a hematoma, or massive bleeding outside of the blood vessels. A biopsy is needed for confirmation.

Despite the officially stated opinion on Ötzi's cause of death, Recheis is not convinced that the arrow wound was deadly on its own.

"My South Tyrolean colleagues say the arrow most probably hit the sub-clavicular artery or other vital vessel and thus the Iceman died," Recheis said. "But there are doubts. It's justified that the arrow did not hit any vital vessels or nerves as far as we can say from the data we have."

"This could be the first thing," he added. "He was up there and shot by an arrow. And then he fell down, cut his eye and bled to death."

Albert Zink, head of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, was surprised and perplexed to hear of these new claims. At a conference this fall, he said, a whole table-full of experts discussed the evidence and unanimously agreed that the arrow killed the Iceman.

The shoulder wound, he said, was clearly fresh and bleeding heavily when Ötzi died.

"It is impossible that he walked around or that this was an old injury because this was a very severe injury," Zink said. "If you don't have the possibility to do surgery, you cannot survive from this for longer than 10 or 15 minutes."

The eye injury could have happened from a fall after Ötzi was shot or from a blow to the head by his attacker. But whatever the cause, Zink is sure that it was secondary to the arrow strike.

"It's true that there might be new evidence that there was a little crack in the skin, so maybe he was bleeding from skull trauma," he added. "But it doesn't change anything in the end."

According to some news reports, the new findings could support a theory that Ötzi was the victim of a mountaineering accident. Both Recheis and Zink agreed that this was unlikely. Based on his muscle strength and patterns of joint degeneration, the Iceman was a fit and experienced climber. And he was near an easy path when he died.
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References:

Sohn, Emily. 2011. "Ice Mummy May Have Smashed Eye in Fall". Discovery News. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/iceman-oetzi-eye-injury-111121.html

The cool twists of language

2011-12-06T08:15:00.011-07:00

Guardian letter writers have been enjoying dissecting the word 'cool' – it may have had a surprising path to its modern meaning

The Oxford philosopher JL Austin once observed in a lecture that in English a double negative implied a positive meaning, whereas no language had been found in which a double positive implied a negative meaning. Another philosopher who was in the audience that day made a very simple counterclaim just by saying "yeah, yeah".

Over time words and expressions change in sound, in spelling and in use, sometimes at a snail's pace and sometimes almost overnight – as contributors to the Guardian's letters page have recently reminded us with reference to "cool". A change in meaning may follow a comprehensible if always tortuous path (from the coarse cloth, or bure, on the tables of medieval clerks to the modern bureaucrat, for example), or it may switch at a stroke into its opposite. Rien, the French word for "nothing", for example, is derived from the Latin rem, which means "something" (in the accusative case). By what path can a word get from meaning "something" to meaning "nothing"? It's like asking how anything can be "hot" and "cool" at the same time. Obviously, they can be – especially if you don't even know whether the jazz throbbing through the speakers is hot, cool, or just loud.

In Chekhov's short story Agafya, two rather disreputable fellows offer a girl a glass of vodka. She replies with a colloquial expression – Выдумал! – that means something like "Where did you get the idea [that I drink vodka]?" or "What put that idea into your head?" or "Don't insult me!" A thoughtful professional American translator of Chekhov expresses the force of the girl's response by "Oh! Please!" To my British ear, however, "Oh! Please!" is not a negative but an extremely positive expression. I can hear the young woman clapping her hands and springing to her feet to say in a squeaky treble, ooopleeeez! But for my American colleague, "oh please" is pronounced with an intercalated aspirated schwa between the first two consonants – p-h-er-leez – and for her it is a put-down, a wrist-slap, a no-no. The English word "please" means "yes" – and it means "no".

It's not enough to say that's just a difference between British and American English. Speakers of British English know that "Oh please" if said with the extra half-syllable between the p and l is a negative expression, just as Americans know that "Oh please" said with a rising intonation is a positive. When written down, the words oh please mean anything you want them to mean in the imaginary linguistic context your mind supplies. Same in French, as a matter of fact: merci means "thank you" and it also means "no thank you", depending on how you say it, in what circumstances, and to whom.

Most philosophers do not like expressions that mean one thing and its opposite. Aristotle came up with the law of excluded middle to get rid of them: "For any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is." Yet ordinary language users are addicted to using and inventing expressions that mean one thing or its opposite depending on who's listening. Taboo words are almost always capable of reversing their meaning – they can be used for purposes that are diametrically opposed. Shit! may express strong disapproval in many circumstances, but among the right crowd it may equally well be used by the same speaker to express delight and surprise.

"Cool" probably didn't come to mean stylish, swish, glamorous or desirable by the same kind of forking path that makes please and shit into bipolar expressions. As an antonym of "hot" it probably had the power to mean "not angry", "not hurried" and all sorts of more desirable attributes than those that are normally associated with heat. It may well be that the first "cool" was nonchaloir, an Old French expression meaning "non-heat" (from the obsolete verb chaloir, "to be hot"). Given the muddled history of words moving from French to English and back again, "cool" – as in a "cool customer", "as cool as a cucumber" – might have started out as a translation of nonchalant into the local lingo. As we British do admire restraint in outward behaviour, it's no surprise that a nonchalant gentilhomme – a real cool gent – was one to be imitated and admired, and that coolness became associated with stylish and fashionable things.

Of course this is all speculation, as are most forms of word history. But just as languages constantly change and switch things around, so too are they surprisingly conservative, and what often seems most modern and trendy turns out to be a reminiscence or a revival of some forgotten form in the language of yore. It's possible that the present vast spread of "cool" in our own language (and far beyond, not just back into French baba-cool, but into Chinese 酷 kù as well) wouldn't have arisen without cool jazz; but it's just as likely that had jazz never been invented the idea that there's something stylish about not being hot (bothered, angry, puce…) would have given "cool" many of the meanings it now has.

In Tallinn and Tartu, however, what's really kool is school. No wonder Estonians are so high up the league tables.
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References:

Bellos, David. 2011. "The cool twists of language". The Guardian. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/21/cool-language-guardian-letter-writers

Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations

2011-12-05T08:15:00.012-07:00

WUSTL paleoanthropologist, colleagues develop artificial neural network model to predict location of fossil sites

In 1991, a team led by Washington University in St. Louis paleoanthropologist Glenn Conroy, PhD, discovered the fossils of the first — and still the only — known pre-human ape ever found south of the equator in Africa after only 30 minutes of searching a limestone cave in Namibia.

Traditionally, fossil-hunters often could only make educated guesses as to where fossils lie. The rest lay with chance — finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

"I don't want to say it's total luck," says Conroy, professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences, "but it's a combination of hard work, meticulous planning and, well, a good dose of luck."

But thanks to a software model used by Conroy and researchers at Western Michigan University, fossil-hunters' reliance on luck when finding fossils may be diminishing.

Using artificial neural networks (ANNs) — computer networks that imitate the workings of the human brain — Conroy and colleagues Robert Anemone, PhD, and Charles Emerson, PhD, developed a computer model that can pinpoint productive fossil sites in the Great Divide Basin, a 4,000-square-mile stretch of rocky desert in Wyoming.

The basin has proved to be a productive area for fossil hunters, yielding 50 million- to 70 million-year-old early mammal fossils.

The software builds on satellite imagery and maps fossil-hunters have used for years to locate the best fossil sites. It just takes the process a step further, Conroy says.

With information gathered from maps and satellite imagery — such as elevation, slope, terrain and many other landscape features — the ANN was "trained" to use details of existing fossiliferous areas to accurately predict the locations of other fossil sites elsewhere in the Great Divide Basin.

Because few sites are 100 percent identical, researchers had to "teach" the ANNs to recognize sites that shared key features in common. With the help of guidance from the scientists, the ANNs use pattern recognition to identify sites that share similar features.

"The beauty and power of neural networks lie in the fact that they are capable of learning," says Conroy, also a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the School of Medicine. "You just need to give them a rule to deal with things they don't know."

Conroy and colleagues tested the software at the Great Divide Basin last summer. The ANNs correctly identified 79 percent of the area's known fossil sites, and 99 percent of the sites it tagged contained fossils.

Next up, the scientists tested the software on the nearby Bison Basin, also in Wyoming. Despite having been taught to recognize fossil sites at a neighboring location (the Great Divide Basin), the ANNs correctly identified four fossil sites in the Bison Basin.

"That gave us encouragement that a blind test based on a neural network for a different basin still gave us pretty good predictive results," Conroy says.

Next, Conroy is planning to continue to use the software to search for early hominid fossil sites in South Africa.

The scientists hope this new application of existing technology will help increase the efficiency of paleontological fieldwork.

"In the old days, we'd all bring different maps, and start walking," Conroy says. "Now, we're talking about ways to improve one's chances."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations". EurekAlert. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/wuis-hai112111.php

UCSB scholar's reading of hieroglyphic verb alters understanding of Mayan ritual texts

2011-12-04T08:15:00.011-07:00

By presenting a new interpretation of a Maya hieroglyphic verb, Gerardo Aldana, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara, has revised the understanding of one of the longest-studied texts in Maya archaeology. Aldana's research appears in his new book, "Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing: New Translations of k'al, the Dresden Codex Venus Pages and Classic Period Royal 'Binding' Rituals" (Archaeopress, 2011).

According to Aldana, at the end of the 19th century, the German philologist Ernst Förstemann discovered the basis of the modern interpretation of a Venus table in the 13th-century Maya manuscript known as the Dresden Codex. The six-page Venus table is an almanac dedicated to tracking the observable phases of the planet Venus. Förstemann's interpretation laid the groundwork for academic and popular 20th-century characterizations of the Maya as "obsessed" with astronomy and time. While scholars have added to his interpretation over the next 100 years, all have followed the basic model resulting from his work.

In his new book, Aldana shows that "k'al," the main verb referring to Venus events in the Dresden Codex, has been misread. He argues that the verb refers to an "enclosing" of time and space, such as that found throughout the Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual activity. "The key to my argument is that previously recognized records are pictorial, graphically representing the 'cosmogram' that ties space and time together," Aldana said. "But I show that the Dresden Codex Venus Table records the same concept in hieroglyphic text –– the idea is the same in both cases, but represented by an image in the Aztec convention, and by hieroglyphic text according to Mayan sensibilities."

The new hieroglyphic reading is accompanied by a revision of the mathematics of the Venus Table, also departing from the 70-year-old tradition in the field, Aldana said. "Overall, the result shows a much greater coherence to Postclassic religion throughout Mesoamerica," he explained. "And while contact between the regions has never been in question –– the Venus pages in the Dresden Codex, for example, include the names of Aztec deities, modified so they could be written with Mayan hieroglyphs –– the new interpretation goes beyond the mere appropriation of 'gods' to the sharing of deeper religious concepts."

The revision is also tied to Aldana's recent work on the calendar correlation, the means of correlating dates on the ancient Maya calendar with those on the Gregorian –– or modern –– calendar. In his chapter, titled "The Maya Calendar Correlation Problem," which appeared in the book, "Calendar and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), he showed that the currently accepted correlation constant –– the GMT –– is incorrect. Based in part on astronomical events, the GMT is named for early Mayanists Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez, and J. Eric S. Thompson. Each contributed to the calculation.

In "Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing," Aldana demonstrates the scholarly value of letting go of the GMT. Without the GMT, he argues, a new coherence is revealed between the architecture and hieroglyphic texts of Late Classic Copan and the material in the Postclassic Dresden Codex. "This interpretation shows that the same religious ideas of astronomy, calendrics, space, and time were held in the Classic period, through the Postclassic period, and into early Colonial times," he said.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "UCSB scholar's reading of hieroglyphic verb alters understanding of Mayan ritual texts". EurekAlert. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uoc--usr112111.php

Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Possibly Solved

2011-12-03T08:15:00.011-07:00

The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.

The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.

Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.

Iconic scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C. The scrolls contain a wide variety of writings including early copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with hymns, calendars and psalms, among other works. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls]

Nearly 200 textiles were found in the same caves, along with a few examples from Qumran, the archaeological site close to the caves where the scrolls were hidden.

Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, compared the white-linen textiles found in the11 caves to examples found elsewhere in ancient Israel, publishing their results in the most recent issue of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

A breakthrough in studying these remains was made in 2007 when a team of archaeologists was able to ascertain that colorful wool textiles found at a site to the south of Qumran, known as the Christmas Cave, were not related to the inhabitants of the site. This meant that Shamir and Sukenik were able to focus on the 200 textiles found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves and at Qumran itself, knowing that these are the only surviving textiles related to the scrolls.

They discovered that every single one of these textiles was made of linen, even though wool was the most popular fabric at the time in Israel. They also found that most of the textiles would have originally been used as clothing, later being cut apart and re-used for other purposes such as bandages and for packing the scrolls into jars. [Photos of Dead Sea textiles]

Some of the textiles were bleached white and most of them lacked decoration, even though decoration is commonly seen in textiles from other sites in ancient Israel.

According to the researchers the finds suggest that the residents of Qumran dressed simply.

"They wanted to be different than the Roman world," Shamir told LiveScience in a telephone interview. "They were very humble, they didn't want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles."

The owners of the clothing likely were not poor, as only one of the textiles had a patch on it."This is very, very, important," Shamir said. "Patching is connected with [the] economic situation of the site."

Shamir pointed out that textiles found at sites where people were under stress, such as at the Cave of Letters, which was used in a revolt against the Romans, were often patched. On the other hand "if the site is in a very good economic situation, if it is a very rich site, the textiles will not be patched," she said. With Qumran, "I think [economically] they were in the middle, but I'm sure they were not poor."

Robert Cargill, a professor at the University of Iowa, has written extensively about Qumran and has developed a virtual model of it. He said that archaeological evidence from the site, including coins and glassware, also suggests the inhabitants were not poor.

"Far from being poor monastics, I think there was wealth at Qumran, at least some form of wealth," Cargill said, arguing that trade was important at the site. "I think they made their own pottery and sold some of it, I think they bred animals and sold them, I think they made honey and sold it."

Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran. Some argue that the scrolls were written at the site itself while others say they were written in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel.

Qumran itself was first excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s. He came to the conclusion that the site was inhabited by a religious sect called the Essenes who wrote the scrolls and stored them in caves. Among the finds he made were water pools, which he believed were used for ritual bathing, and multiple inkwells found in a room that became known as the "scriptorium." Based on his excavations, scholars have estimated the population of the site at as high as 200.

More recent archaeological work, conducted by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, suggests that the site could not have supported more than a few dozen people and had nothing to do with the scrolls themselves. They believe that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by refugees fleeing the Roman army after Jerusalem was conquered in A.D. 70.

Magen and Peleg found that the site came into existence around 100 B.C. as a military outpost used by the Hasmoneans, a Jewish kingdom that flourished in the area. After the Romans took over Judaea in 63 B.C. the site was abandoned and eventually was taken over by civilians who used it for pottery production. They found that the pools de Vaux discovered include a fine layer of potters' clay.

There are other ideas as well. Cargill argues that while Qumran started out as a fort it was later occupied by a sectarian group whose members were deeply concerned with ritual purity. "Whether or not they are the Essenes, that's a different question," he said. This group, much smaller than earlier estimates of 200 people, would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others, he argues.

Other groups, not part of the Qumran community, may also have been putting scrolls into the caves, Cargill said.

Can clothing solve the mystery?

The new clothing research may help to identify the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shamir told LiveScience that it is unlikely the scrolls were deposited in the caves by Roman refugees. If that were the case, the more-popular textile in ancient Israel, wool, would have been found in the caves along with other garments.

"If people run away from Jerusalem they would take all sorts of textiles with them, not only linen textiles," she said. "The people who ran away to the Cave of Letters, they took wool textiles with them."

Peleg, the archaeologist who co-led the recent archaeological work at Qumran, told LiveScience he disagrees with that assessment. He said he stands by the idea that there is no connection between Qumran and the scrolls stored in the caves.

"We must remember that almost all the textiles were found in the caves and not at the site. The main question is the connection between the site and the scrolls," Peleg wrote in an email. "I can find alternative explanations for the fact that scrolls were found with linen."

For instance, linen could have been chosen as scroll wrapping for religious reasons or perhaps priests were responsible for storing the scrolls and they wore linen clothing. "The clothes of the priests were made from linen," Peleg wrote.

In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik say that the clothing found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves is similar to historical descriptions of the clothing of the Essenes, suggesting that they in fact lived at Qumran. They point to an ancient Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, who wrote that the Essenes "make a point of keeping a dry skin and always being dressed in white." (However, Josephus never said anything about the clothing being made of linen, Peleg points out.)

Josephusalso wrote that the Essenes were very frugal when it came to clothing and shared goods with each other.

"In their dress and deportment they resemble children under rigorous discipline. They do not change their garments or shoes until they are torn to shreds or worn threadbare with age. There is no buying or selling among themselves, but each gives what he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange something useful to himself ..."

(Translation from "Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans: Primary Readings," Louis Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, 1996.)

In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik also point to another ancient writer, Philo of Alexandria, who wrote that the Essenes wore a common style of simple dress.

"And not only is their table in common but their clothes also. For in winter they have a stock of stout coats ready and in summer cheap vests, so that he who wishes may easily take any garment he likes, since what one has is held to belong to all and conversely what all have one has."

(Translation from the "Selected Writing of Philo of Alexandria," edited by Hans Lewy, 1965.)

Cargill said that the clothing is further evidence that there was a Jewish sectarian group living at Qumran.

"You do have evidence of a group that raised its own animals, pressed its own date honey, that appears to have worn distinctive clothes and made its own pottery, and followed its own calendar, at least a calendar different from the temple priesthood," he said. "Those are all signs of a sectarian group."

He also noted the presence of mikveh (ritual baths) at the site and the fact that the residents could make pottery that was ritually pure.

This group appears to have wanted to separate itself from the priests based at the temple in Jerusalem. "There is a congruency within many of the sectarian documents that appears to be consistent with a sectarian group that has separated itself from the temple priesthood in Jerusalem," Cargill said.

According to Cargill's theory, the people of Qumran would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others. "Obviously they didn't write all of the scrolls," Cargill said. Dating indicates some of the scrolls were written before Qumran even existed. One unusual scroll, made of copper, may have been deposited after Qumran was abandoned in A.D. 70.

Cargill says it's possible that some of the scrolls may have been put in caves from people outside the community. If that's true, some of the textiles could also be from people outside of Qumran.

"[If] not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the responsibility of sectarians at Qumran then it would follow that not all of the textiles that are discovered in the caves are [the] product of a sect at Qumran," Cargill said.

Were there women at Qumran?

The new research may also shed light on who created the textiles.

The textiles are of high quality and, based on the archaeological finds at Qumran itself, where there is little evidence of spindle whorls or loom weights, the team thinks it's unlikely they would have been made at the site.

"This is very, very important, because this is connected to gender," Shamir said, "spinning is connected with women."

She explained that the textiles were likely created at another site in Israel, with women playing a key role in their production. This suggests that there were few women living at Qumran itself. "Weaving is connected with men and women, but spinning was only a production of women, [and] we don't find this item at Qumran."
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2011. "Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Possibly Solved". Live Science. Posted: November 21,2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17123-dead-sea-scrolls-writers-textiles.html

Peru archaeologists find pre-Inca sacrificed babies

2011-12-02T08:15:00.010-07:00

Researchers at the Sillustani archaeological site in Peru say they have found the bodies of 44 children thought to have been sacrificed between 600 and 700 years ago.

They were buried in pairs in baskets placed around stone funerary towers.

Researchers said their ages ranged from newborns to three years old.

The archaeologists believe they belonged to the Kolla culture, which ruled parts of the Puno region of southern Peru between 1200 and 1450.

All the bodies had a volcanic stone placed on their chest, and were surrounded by a variety of offerings, including animals, food, dishes and pitchers, archaeologist Eduardo Arisaca said.

Researchers at the site say ceramics with paintings of scenes of war found with the bodies suggest the children were sacrificed during a period of conflict between the Kolla and a rival culture.

They said the bodies were found near a 10m-tall (32ft) circular stone tower known as Chullpa Lagarto.

The bodies of some 200 people have been unearthed near the tower at the Sillustani site some 1,300km (800 miles) south-east of the capital, Lima.

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References:

BBC News. 2011. "Peru archaeologists find pre-Inca sacrificed babies". BBC News. Posted: November 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15813793

We Are Hardwired to Walk

2011-12-01T08:15:00.012-07:00

Watching a toddler take his first steps, it's obvious he's learned through observation and encouragement. But are our brains specially wired to learn this important behavior so early on?

Scientists are beginning to think so, according to one article published in the journal Science.

By looking at the body's neural circuitry in rats, humans and other animals, researchers pieced together that the process of learning to move around looks similar across species, despite most mammals moving on four legs and Homo sapiens stepping with two. The finding indicates that humans' innate ability to walk has a lengthy evolutionary history.

Previously, neuroscience experts thought pathways in the nervous system changed dramatically during human development, allowing new pathways to replace the deeply -rooted connections shared with other mammals. Not so, says lead researcher Francesco Lacquaniti, according to one article in The Atlantic. He provided an analogy comparing learning to walk with learning to drive a stick shift car. New drivers first learn the basic gears, but then add more with time. Yet even the most advanced drivers still need the first gear to drive. The same principle applies to learning to walk, with humans and animals sharing a common circuitry and gradually building on it in different ways.

Instead, toddlers continue to use these primitive connections in muscles, adding to them as they become more skilled at walking. In the study, Lacquaniti and colleagues looked at the electrical activity in muscles in newborns, toddlers, preschoolers and adults. They found the same connections were at play among cats, guineafowl, non-human primates and rats as well.

Scientists estimate that this circuitry became more diversified in animals at least 100 million years ago, say the article's authors.
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References:

English, Marianne. 2011. "We Are Hardwired to Walk". Discovery News. Posted: November 18, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/human/humans-walking-evolution-111121.html

Punishment of egoistic behavior is not rewarded

2011-11-30T08:15:00.011-07:00

People do not like to be observed when they cause harm to others

The heated debate surrounding the German "state Trojan" software for the online monitoring of telecommunication between citizens shows that the concealed observation of our private decisions provokes public disapproval. However, as a recent experimental study has revealed, observing and being observed are integral components of our social repertoire. Human beings show a preference for social partners whose altruistic behaviour they have been able to confirm for themselves. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the University of Cologne have discovered that people select future social partners on the basis of their cooperative behaviour and not according to whether they punish the egoism of others. This finding is surprising as it shows that people identify particularly altruistic partners in this way and could benefit from their behaviour. Consequently, people conceal uncooperative behaviour. However, it remains a mystery as to why people would like to conceal occasions when they punish others for their self-interest, despite the fact that they have no sanctions to fear.

Cooperative behaviour is generally associated with personal disadvantage. Scientists have therefore long been unable to explain why, despite this, altruism exists in nature. However, altruistic behaviour can be successful if organisms improve their reputation through unselfish behaviour and can benefit from it at a later stage: those who give receive; but those who refuse to lend support cannot expect help in an emergency. Solidarity is also the outcome of social evolution in humans. However, altruism can only enhance an individual's reputation and prevail if the corresponding behaviour is known to others.

Thus, people behave more cooperatively when they are observed. Accordingly, as soon as they are aware that they are being observed, egoists try to conceal their behaviour and pretend to act cooperatively. The observer, in turn, would like to prevent this and tries to conceal his or her attention. The researchers from Cologne and Plön discovered this interaction with the help of public goods games, in which the participants could benefit from egoistic behaviour. Their experiments showed that external observers prefer people who show solidarity as future game partners. Moreover, they are willing to pay to conceal their observation of another player. The players were also willing to pay to conceal egoistic behaviour. "A kind of 'arms race' thus arises between the two parties. They both want to keep their intentions secret from the other," says Manfred Milinski from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology.

Interestingly, observers seldom select people who punish others for egoistic behaviour. In effect, such sanctions are an expression of altruistic behaviour, as they are associated with personal costs incurred for the general good. "A person who observes other people with a view to finding cooperative partners would be expected to take punishment behaviour into account. The finding that people do not use this information raises important new research questions," says Bettina Rockenbach from the University of Cologne.

The researchers also observed that people prefer to hide the fact that they have punished others for egoistic behaviour. This is also surprising as punishments can be justified in terms of concern for the general good. Despite this, people apparently fear for their reputation if they punish others severely for egoistic behaviour. This finding is all the more unexpected as the tests showed that observers do not attach any importance to this information.

The researchers analysed three variants of a public goods game in their study. In all three games, the participants were accompanied by an observer who, after 15 rounds of the game, could remove a random or specific player and play himself; the replacement of a specific player incurred a cost. The observer could also conceal which players he or she was observing at a cost. The players, in turn, could pay to ensure that the observer did not find out anything about a decision.

In the simple variant of the game, a group of four participants merely had to decide between uncooperative and cooperative behaviour. They were given an actual sum of money and could decide whether to pay part of it into a shared kitty or keep all of it for themselves. At the end of the round, the sum in the group kitty was doubled and distributed evenly among the participants. The more players that paid into the kitty, the more they all benefited from it - however, the egoists profited most at the cost of the altruists. Under these conditions, egoistic behaviour prevailed after a few repetitions of the game.

In contrast, altruistic behaviour could prove a successful strategy in the other two variants of the game. Each of the participants was able impose punishments on the other players upon completion of a round of the public goods game. The punishments were withdrawn from the account of the individual in question and he or she also had to contribute something for the punishment. In the third variant, having been informed about the contributions received and made by the potential recipient, each of the participants was able to make contributions to one of the other players and receive them from another depending on whether he or she had improved his reputation by paying into the group kitty.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Punishment of egoistic behavior is not rewarded". EurekAlert. Posted: November 14, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/m-po111411.php

Original publication:

"To qualify as a social partner, humans hide severe punishment, although their observed cooperativeness is decisive" Bettina Rockenbach, and Manfred Milinski
PNAS, November 08, 2011,vol. 108(45): 18307-18312 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1108996108)

Archeologists Discover Huge Ancient Greek Commercial Area On Island of Sicily

2011-11-29T08:15:00.011-07:00

The Greeks were not always in such dire financial straits as today. German archeologists have discovered a very large commercial area from the ancient Greek era during excavations on Sicily.

Led by Professor Dr. Martin Bentz, archeologists at the University of Bonn began unearthing one of Greek antiquity's largest craftsmen's quarters in the Greek colonial city of Selinunte (7th-3rd century B.C.) on the island of Sicily during two excavation campaigns in September 2010 and in the fall of 2011.

The project is conducted in collaboration with the Italian authorities and the German Archaeological Institute. Its goal is to study an area of daily life in ancient cities that has hitherto received little attention.

"To what extent the ancient Greeks already had something like 'commercial areas' has been a point of discussion in expert circles to this day," said Bonn archeologist Dr. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, a research associate who coordinates the Selinunte project together with Dr. Jon Albers from the Institut für Klassische Archäologie der Universität Bonn at the Chair of Prof. Dr. Martin Bentz. "A concentration of certain 'industries' and craftsmen in special districts does not only presuppose proactive planning; it is also based on a certain idea of how a city should best be organized -- from a practical as well as from a social and political point of view, e.g., who will be allowed to live and work where?" The University of Bonn excavations are now contributing to finding a new answer to such questions.

Huge kilns, used communally

Concentration in a certain city district applied primarily to potteries in Selinunte, which were massed on the edge of the settlement in the very shadow of the city wall. "Consequently, their smoke, stench and noise did not inconvenience the other inhabitants as much," explained Dr. Zuchtriegel. "At the same time, this allowed several craftsmen to use kilns and storage facilities together." The excavations showed that the potters joined cooperatives that shared in the use of gigantic kilns with a diameter of up to 7 meters. The craftsmen's district in Selinunte probably stretched for more than 600 meters along the city walls and is thus among the largest ones known today. The excavations are in the hands of faculty and students from Bonn and Rome -- and they are exhausting. For excavations go on in August and September, when the heat reaches its peak -- but in exchange, there is very little rain.

"This work is a challenge for all involved," commented dig manager Bentz. "This is no camping trip." But for students, it is a great opportunity to learn archeological methods by doing. The Bonn researchers were surprised to find even older remnants of workshops under the 5th c. kilns. While these finds have not been completely excavated yet, indications are -- so the archeologists -- that pottery workshops existed in the same location during the city's early phase in the 6th century B.C. This means that craftsmen were probably intentionally housed on the edge as early as during the design of the city, which was -- like many colonies -- planned on the drawing board.

Reconstructing the past

The finds from the craftsmen's district are not exactly treasures, but they are still valuable for reconstructing the past. In the early phase, widely ranging finds of clay vessels, tiles and bronzes -- among them also imports from Athens and Sparta -- indicate that living and work quarters were housed together. Over the course of the 5th century, the two areas were separated increasingly.

"We hope to improve our understanding of that in future," said Prof. Bentz. But so far, he continued, little was known about the social conditions prevailing during the founding of a colony. What was certain is that often, it was hunger and need that drove settlers to emigrate and found a new city. Why and under what conditions some of them became potters, other farmers, and others yet rich landowners who could afford to participate in the Olympic games -- these are questions that the excavations can shed some light on.
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References:

Science Daily. 2011. "Archeologists Discover Huge Ancient Greek Commercial Area On Island of Sicily". Science Daily. Posted: November 14, 2011. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111114093411.htm