Ancient, Modern DNA Tell Story of First Humans in the Americas

University of Illinois anthropology professor Ripan Malhi looks to DNA to tell the story of how ancient humans first came to the Americas and what happened to them once they were here.

He will share some of his findings at the meeting, "Ancient DNA: The First Three Decades," at The Royal Society in London on Nov. 18 and 19.

Malhi, an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, will describe his collaborative approach, which includes working with present-day Native Americans on studies of their genetic history.

He and a group of collaborators from the Tsimshian Nation on the northwest coast of British Columbia, for example, recently found a direct ancestral link between ancient human remains in the Prince Rupert Island area and the native peoples living in the region today. That study looked at changes in the mitochondrial genome, which children inherit only from their mothers.

Other studies from Malhi's lab analyze changes in the Y chromosome or the protein-coding regions of the genome.

"The best opportunity to infer the evolutionary history of Native Americans and to assess the effects of European colonization is to analyze genomes of ancient Native Americans and those of their living descendants," Malhi said.

"I think what makes my lab unique is that we focus not only on the initial peopling of the Americas but also what happened after the initial peopling. How did these groups move to new environments and adapt to their local settings over 15,000 years?"

While continuing his work in British Columbia, Malhi also is setting up study sites in California, Guatemala, Mexico and Illinois.

"What's interesting about the northwest coast and California is that these communities were complex hunter-gatherer societies, whereas in Mexico and Guatemala, it's more communities that transitioned to farming and then experienced the effects of European colonization," he said.

Genomic studies can fill in the blanks on studies that seek to tell the story of life in the Americas before and after European colonization, Malhi said. Researchers may draw the wrong conclusions about human history when looking only at artifacts and language, he said.
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References:

Science Daily. 2014. “Ancient, Modern DNA Tell Story of First Humans in the Americas”. Science Daily. Posted: November 18, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131118081251.htm

In Middle Ages, Societies Surprisingly Responsive To Natural Disasters

Our vision of medieval times is a world of violence and filth, when life, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Imagine the chaos in that world when a natural disaster like an earthquake, a flood or famine struck.

But, according to two British scientists, the societies between 1,000 and 1,500 A.D. were better organized than most people think, and actually employed some of the same techniques used today to survive or mitigate disasters, even if they didn’t always understand the causes.

Where we have the Red Cross and the United Nations to swoop into disaster zones, as some international organizations are doing now in the Philippines, societies of the Middle Ages relied on local governments, organizations, and charities to do much of the same, according to David Petley, a geographer, and Chris Gerrard, an archaeologist at Durham University in England.

In a paper published in the journal Natural Hazards, the researchers point out that the 500-year period of the Middle Ages was the time when modern societies began to emerge. The period also had to endure one calamity after another.

They estimate 250,000 to 500,000 people died during the Middle Ages due to natural disasters, not including epidemics like the Black Death, or wars. This is a surprisingly low number, but the population of Europe then was probably fewer than 70 million people, about one-tenth of Europe's population today.

There were earthquakes like the massive one in 1348 centered in Northern Italy; a famine produced by a volcanic eruption in 1258 in Indonesia, droughts, and the perpetual floods in Europe's Low Countries of the Netherlands and modern Belgium.

Archaeologists can uncover many of them by reading the journals and chronicles of the times and by digging. In 1356, a huge earthquake struck Basel, Switzerland.  In 1991, archaeologists found layers of burned rubble, weapons, and a bronze caldron, clearly abandoned in a hurry. They could also trace where the Swiss rebuilt the city after the quake.

Archaeologists can see where repairs were made on buildings or when there was extensive structural damage over a wide area, sometimes dating the events by counting the rings on the wooden beams, said Gerrard. They sometimes can tell whether the area was organized enough to bury the dead methodically, or whether the death toll exceeded capability.

They can sometimes find artifacts, but in the case of floods, people usually rescued their possessions before leaving. Not so for sudden events like earthquakes, he said.

“The country very much in the vanguard of this sort of work was Italy. ... by far the most organized country in dealing with natural disasters,” said Petley partly because it was prone to disasters and partly because it was divided into city-states which could operate more efficiently at a local level.

The Low Countries also were particularly adept because of the constant threat of flooding from the sea, according to Kelly DeVries, a historian at Loyola University of Maryland in Baltimore who was not part of this study.

"Usually [relief] wasn’t done at a national level. It was not organized by the king.” Petley said.

In an agrarian-based society, the king was more interested in the countryside, so the urban areas were left to fend for themselves, according to DeVries.

“It was more of a local issue; it would be local landowners, as they accumulated assets and had more potential losses in disasters, they started to develop structures that would effectively insure them against the risk,” Petley said. In big cities it was the city authorities that organized disaster mitigation and relief.

To some extent, the people also appealed to the supernatural, the researchers wrote, praying disasters wouldn’t happen and praying again after the event for survival.

However, their reliance on religion also took a practical bent. There were acts of charity, especially from guilds and religious organization to victims of disasters. Some, like Italy’s Archiconfraternity of Misericordia, founded in 1244, are still operating.

When Florence flooded in 1333, the local authorities essentially took on the role of today's Federal Emergency Management Agency. They formed a committee to make repairs, gave tax relief to victims, and organized a system to get food to those stranded by the water. They built a temporary bridge over the River Arno.

There were organized search and rescue operations in some places, as is happening now, following Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Dikes and barriers were built to prevent flood damage. If the barriers didn’t work, people were relocated, just as Alaska native villages are being relocated now as climate change alters the floodplain of rivers.

Grain was stored in case of famine and insurance organizations were created to share the risk just as risk is shared now.
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References:

Shurkin, Joel N. 2014. “In Middle Ages, Societies Surprisingly Responsive To Natural Disasters”. Inside Science. Posted: November 18, 2013. Available online: http://www.insidescience.org/content/middle-ages-societies-surprisingly-responsive-natural-disasters/1493

Peru’s Warriors of the Clouds

High on a remote cliffside in northern Peru, a line of sentinels gaze out from a ledge, their unblinking eyes painted onto clay faces that guard the mummified occupants within. These are the purunmachu – sarcophagi – in which the Chachapoya people, placed their dead.

Warriors of the clouds

By the time the Spanish arrived in Peru at the beginning of the 16th Century the Chachapoya people had already been conquered and absorbed in to the Inca Empire.  Although they had resisted, the lands of these Warriors of the Clouds had been annexed and the people forced to adopt the customs and culture of their conquerors. However, they left one thing behind as a monument to their existence – the strange sarcophagi.

Thirty miles away from the city of Chachapoyas lies the Utcubamba valley where in 1928 an earthquake shook the hills and  revealed a seven foot tall clay square-jawed figure that had tumbled from a high cliff.

An incredibly rare find

Archaeologists were called in to investigate further, as this represented an incredibly rare find. Most purunmachus had either been partially or totally destroyed by looters in the past, but the archaeologists found seven more on the high cliff where their inaccessibility prevented the same fate as the others.

Carbon 14 dating at some time later was carried out on the mummies and the results placed them around the 1470s – the time that the Inca overwhelmed the Chachapoya people.

Preparing for the afterlife

According to Adriana von Hagen, who has carried out a study of the purunmachus, they were constructed by first building a low circular wall on a ledge. Then, the wrapped body was inserted into this container. A clay body was then built around the funerary bundle and long poles were inserted into the construction.

This structure was then covered in a mixture of mud and straw and painted white or cream before details such as necklaces or pectorals, feathered tunics, faces and genitals were added in shades of yellow ochre and two shades of red.

The head was fashioned of clay tempered with straw and almost all appear to have been given  headdresses. However, at the site of Carajía, the cone-shaped heads of the purunmachus  end in a point with a human skull placed on top.

Several burial sites are embellished with pictographs in red ochre representing herding or hunting scenes of llamas or deer, flanked by human figures with rays emanating from their heads, probably feathered headdresses.

Purunmachus have also been discovered in nearby Aya-chaqui and while there are some differences between the two types, they obviously belong to the same culture.  It seems likely that this practice was relatively widespread for hundreds of years.

A sad end

As for the Chachapoya themselves, a century after the arrival of the Spanish they had been effectively wiped out -  with census reports showing a dramatic decline.

Accompanied by 3,000 troops and bearers, Alvarado explored and “pacified” these lands in 1539. “The land,” noted the chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León “is very populated, and the Inkas always kept a garrison there because the people are very spirited.”

But, within 200 years of Alvarado’s first meeting with Guaman in Cochabamba, more than 90 percent of the region’s estimated 300,000 people had perished. “The Indians are so reduced in number that these lands are almost depopulated,” lamented the Chachapoyas town council records. By 1606 the native population is reduced to only 20,000 inhabitants.

Once their culture had disappeared the sarcophagi were no longer sacred and so most were desecrated and destroyed by looters in search of any riches might lie inside.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2014. “Peru’s Warriors of the Clouds”. Past Horizons. Posted: November 15, 2013. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/11/2013/perus-warriors-clouds

Science on the trail of The Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood

Mathematical modelling provides insights into the origins and evolution of folk tales

New insights into the origins and development of folk tales such as Little Red Riding Hood are being provided by the application of scientific analysis more commonly used by biologists to produce an evolutionary tree of life diagram.

In the scientific journal, PLOS ONE, published today (13 November), Dr Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University, England, resolves a long-running debate by demonstrating that Little Red Riding Hood shares a common but ancient root with another popular international folk tale The Wolf and the Kids, although the two are now distinct stories.

"This is rather like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into distinct species," explained Dr Tehrani, who found that The Wolf and the Kids probably originated in the 1st century AD, with Little Red Riding Hood branching off 1,000 years later.

The Wolf and the Kids, popular in Europe and the Middle East, is a story about a wolf who impersonates a nanny goat and devours her kids, whereas Little Red Riding Hood is about a wolf who devours a young girl after impersonating her grandmother. Variants of the story are common in Africa and Asia, for example, The Tiger Grandmother in Japan, China and Korea.

Little Red Riding Hood was told by the Brothers Grimm 200 years ago but that version was based on an earlier, 17th century, story written by the Frenchman Charles Perrault, which itself derived from an older, oral tradition of storytelling in France, Austria and northern Italy.

Dr Tehrani subjected 58 variants of the folk tales with phylogenetic analysis, a method more commonly used by biologists for grouping together closely-related organisms to form a tree of life diagram, mapping out the various branches of evolution from the earliest life forms.

The analysis focused on 72 plot variables, such as the character of the protagonist (for example male or female, single child or group of siblings); the character of the villain (wolf, ogre, tiger or other creature), the tricks used by the villain to deceive the victim and whether the victim is eaten, escapes or is rescued.

Phylogenetics involves a mathematical modelling process that compares similarities between the plot variables and scores them according to the probability that they have the same origin. This enables a tree to be constructed showing the most likely paths, or branches, of the evolution of the story.

Dr Tehrani said: "My research cracks a long-standing mystery. The African tales turn out to be descended from The Wolf and the Kids but over time, they have evolved to become like Little Red Riding Hood, which is also likely to be descended from The Wolf and the Kids.

"This exemplifies a process biologists call convergent evolution, in which species independently evolve similar adaptations. The fact that Little Red Riding Hood 'evolved twice' from the same starting point suggests it holds a powerful appeal that attracts our imaginations.

"There is a popular theory that an archaic, ancestral version of Little Red Riding Hood originated in Chinese oral tradition. It is claimed the tale spread west, along the Silk Route, and gave rise to both The Wolf and the Kids and the modern version of Little Red Riding Hood. My analysis demonstrates that in fact the Chinese version is derived from European oral traditions, and not vice versa.

"Specifically, the Chinese blended together Little Red Riding Hood, The Wolf and the Kids and local folktales to create a new, hybrid story. Interestingly, this tale was first written down by the Chinese poet Huang Zhing, who was a contemporary of Perrault, who first wrote down the European version of Little Red Riding Hood in the 17th century.

"This implies that the Chinese version is not derived from literary versions of Little Red Riding Hood but from the older, oral version, with which it shares crucial similarities. It is therefore understandable that previous scholars have assumed it to be ancestral to the European tale – but actually it's the other way around."

Dr Tehrani, whose research is funded by Research Councils UK, is now applying phylogenetics to other folk tales and believes that his research could shed light on the migration patterns of humans in ancient times, by determining the origins and evolution of the folk stories being told at various locations and dates.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Science on the trail of The Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood”. EurekAlert. Posted: November 13, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-11/du-sot111213.php

Toddlers Can Learn Verbs Even in Non-Social Contexts

Language acquisition has traditionally been considered a social, interactive process, however new research from Boston University College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College reveals that toddlers are able to acquire the meanings of words even in "socially impoverished contexts" where social or visual information is absent.

Sudha Arunachalam, Ph.D., director of the BU Child Language Lab and assistant professor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Sargent College authored the study which provides new evidence that just overhearing words may be enough for children to learn them.

This study builds upon previous research from Arunachalam demonstrating that by age two, toddlers can extract information about a new verb from its syntactic context, even before viewing a relevant event. These new findings show that children can do so even in an impoverished social context, without discourse context or visual access to the speakers.

"The only information provided was linguistic," said Arunachalam. "Our goal was to determine whether 2-year-olds, on hearing new verbs in informative sentences, could use their syntactic content alone to map the novel verbs to meaning, even though no social or visual information was available."

Arunachalam and her team presented sentences as ambient noise -- meaning toddlers did not have to directly attend to anyone. Researchers then tested whether the toddlers had learned the word meanings by tracking the children's eye gaze as they looked at potential referents for the verbs.

Findings indicate that toddlers can learn at least some aspects of word meaning from contexts in which they are not directly attending to the conversation around them, without observational or social information for cues.

"What this new research tells us is that toddlers have strong abilities to extract meanings, and not just word forms, from the ambient speech stream." Arunachalam said.

Arunachalam explains that she and other researchers have begun to address the question "Can toddlers can benefit from socially impoverished learning situations?" by closing in on the kinds of information, at a minimum, that toddlers require to establish a new word's meaning.

These results shed light on the way toddlers may acquire aspects of verb meaning by overhearing conversations in which they may not be directly involved, and in which no visual referent, discourse context, or child-directed conversation is available.

"Of course we do not claim that toddlers don't use observational and social information to acquire the meanings of words when they are available," said Arunachalam. "Rather, we argue that when these sources of information are absent, toddlers nevertheless posit rudimentary word meanings that can be built upon in future encounters."
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References:

Science Daily. 2014. “Toddlers Can Learn Verbs Even in Non-Social Contexts”. Science Daily. Posted: November 14, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131114101923.htm

Social networks make us smarter

The secret to why some cultures thrive and others disappear may lie in our social networks and our ability to imitate, rather than our individual smarts, according to a new University of British Columbia study.

The study, published today by the Proceedings of the Royal Academy: Biological Sciences, shows that when people can observe and learn from a wider range of teachers, groups can better maintain technical skills and even increase the group's average skill level over successive generations.

The findings show that a larger population size and social connectedness are crucial for the development of more sophisticated technologies and cultural knowledge, says lead author Michael Muthukrishna, a PhD student in UBC's Dept. of Psychology.

"This is the first study to demonstrate in a laboratory setting what archeologists and evolutionary theorists have long suggested: that there is an important link between a society's sociality and the sophistication of its technology," says Muthukrishna, who co-authored the research with UBC Prof. Joseph Henrich.

For the study, participants were asked to learn new skills – digital photo editing and knot-tying – and then pass on what they learned to the next "generation" of participants. The groups with greater access to experts accumulated significantly more skill than those with less access to teachers. Within ten "generations," each member of the group with multiple mentors had stronger skills than the group limited to a single mentor.

Groups with greater access to experts also retained their skills much longer than groups who began with less access to mentors, sustaining higher levels of "cultural knowledge" over multiple generations.

According to the researchers, the study has important implications for several areas, from skills development and education to protecting endangered languages and cultural practices.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Social networks make us smarter”. EurekAlert. Posted: November 13, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-11/uobc-snm111213.php

Evidence of Ancient Human History Encoded in Music's Complex Patterns

In the same way that fragments of ancient pottery and bones offer valuable information about human history, music can also reveal previously hidden clues about the past, according to new research from an international team led by McMaster University psychologist Steven Brown.

The team has established for the first time that the history of human populations is embedded in music, where complex combinations of rhythm, pitch and arrangement form a code that scientists can read in a manner that can be compared to the way they read changes in human DNA and language.

"Music is an untapped migrational marker that can be used to help people understand the history of human populations," says Brown, an associate professor of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. "It adds to the whole story of human history. We need more evidence, and this is a new kind of evidence that we can add to the pot."

Brown's research team used a comparison between the mitochondrial DNA and the folk music of nine indigenous populations of Taiwan to show that each tells a similar story about the ways those populations have changed and converged over the last 6,000 years.

Mitochondrial DNA changes at a predictable rate, acting as an evolutionary clock that makes it ideal for such comparisons.

The group included researchers from Tokyo University of the Arts, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and China Medical University and Mackay Memorial Hospital, both in Taiwan. Their results are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, one of the society's biological journals.

The researchers analyzed the structures of 220 Taiwanese choral songs recorded since the 1940s. They compared the results with DNA samples taken from 1,050 subjects from different parts of the island and found that the musical results shared significant similarities to the genetic results when it came to tracking changes over thousands of years.

The findings prove that music can be a repository of scientific information about the people who make it, says Brown, who is director of the NeuroArts Lab in McMaster's Department of Psychology.

"Languages and genes change slowly over time, but music can change much more quickly," Brown says. "I think people thought that music was too transient to carry evidence of what happened thousands of years ago. Our results support the idea that music actually has elements in it that are ancient. In addition to being able to evolve quickly, it can also retain traces of ancient population movements."

Brown's lab is devoted to understanding of the neural, cognitive and evolutionary foundations of the arts, including: music, dance, drama and the visual arts, and is associated with McMaster's Institute for Music and the Mind. Research on the project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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References:

2014. “Evidence of Ancient Human History Encoded in Music's Complex Patterns”. Science Daily. Posted: November 19, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131119152816.htm