Anthropology.net

The permafrost of Siberia has once again forwarded us a message from the Ice Age, with this one containing a mammoth specimen so well preserved that scientists are hopeful of extracting sufficient genetic material that it will eventually help to enable them to ‘resurrect the mammoth’…

The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago. The animal’s trunk and eyes are still intact and some of its fur remains on the body. The 130cm (4ft 3ins) tall, 50kg Siberian specimen dates to the end of the last Ice Age, when the great beasts were vanishing from the planet. It was discovered by a reindeer herder in May this year. Yuri Khudi stumbled across the carcass near the Yuribei River, in Russia’s Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.

Later in the article we learn that the discoverer, Yuri Khudi is not alone when it comes to discovering mammoth remains, as many other indiduals are leaving no block of frozen soil unturned in their efforts to recover other remains, whose various components have fuelled a growing market in the trade of mammoth ivory, and even mammoth hair which is rumoured to fetch no less than $50 per inch – I’m not entirely sure how collectors of mammoth hair would exhibit their prized possessions, although I can imagine some might opt to have wigs or toupées woven into ill-fitting and ruinously expensive conversation pieces.

Here are some thoughts from Dr. Larry Agenbroad, speaking on behalf of the Mammoth Site Of Hot Springs Research Centre in South Dakota…

“To find a juvenile mammoth in any condition is extremely rare.” Dr Agenbroad added that he knew of only three other examples. Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth. Despite the inherent difficulties, Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning. “When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: ‘if you can get us good DNA, we’ll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months’,” he told BBC News. That specimen failed to yield DNA of sufficient quality, but some researchers believe it may only be a matter of time until the right find emerges from Siberia. Bringing mammoths back from the dead could take the form of injecting sperm into the egg of a relative, such as the Asian elephant, to try to create a hybrid. Alternatively, scientists could attempt to clone a pure mammoth by fusing the nucleus of a mammoth cell with an elephant egg cell stripped of its DNA.

There has also been coverage in recent weeks of the concept of ‘re-wilding‘ in areas such as Siberia, notably regarding the efforts of biologist Sergei Zimov, in the eastern Siberian province of Sakha, also known as Yakutia – he believes that it was mankind that caused the extinction of much of the megafaunal population at the beginning of the Holocene, rather than climate, and his aim is to restore part of that faunal suite… Read the rest of this entry »

As many will be aware, the Archaeology Channel has for some time been an excellent resource for archaeology and anthropology related films and videos, with their latest offering is described thus…

Tikal, a World Heritage Site in Guatemala, exemplifies CyArk, a project of the Kacyra Family Foundation that is preserving the world’s most valued cultural heritage sites in three-dimensional digital form. Tikal, the largest ancient Mayan city, contains some of the most spectacular Mayan architecture, but is subject to natural erosion as well as the impacts of massive tourist traffic. This video shows how CyArk is preserving the site in digital imagery through laser-scanning technology and the most accurate 3D models possible today.

I hadn’t previously come across CyArk, but they have a very impressive website, including examples of other sites such as Chavin de Huantar, Mesa Verde and Tambo Colorado, amongst others of their past projects, and a visit to their site is definitely worthwhile. (TJ)

Martin at Aardvarchaeology has written up a brief post in which he comments on the possibility of being able in the future to visit a suitable retail outlet, and have them print you up a copy of a desired book which itself may no longer be in print, hopefully at a price significantly lower than had you tried to purchase the original and potentially expensive ‘collectable’ version. As he comments…

Lately I have come to think of books as computer devices, combining the functions of screen and backup medium. All texts these days are written and type-set on computers, so the paper thingy has long been a secondary manifestation of the text. People like publisher Jason Epstein and book blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman have predicted that we will soon have our books made on demand at any store that may today have a machine for making photographic prints. The texts will reside on the net, on our USB memory sticks or on our handheld computers/cell phones. The paper output/backup-storage device we call “a book” will be produced swiftly in the store by a dedicated machine.

As many of us will be aware, there are vast numbers of books out there, particularly in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, no longer in print, and so prohibitively expensive that any thought of ownership is the stuff of dreams, partly because the book itself might have a high ‘rarity’ premium attached, regardless of whatever the text may comprise. Here’s a quick look at the post to which he refers at Grumpy Old Bookman, who in turn introduces us to the ‘long tail’… Read the rest of this entry »

Readers of these pages over the last couple of weeks will be familiar with the idea that archaic humans may have put to sea hundreds of thousands of years earlier than was thought possible, and to this end I’ve concentrated on the replicative archaeology of Robert Bednarik, who in recent years has designed and built various watercraft, such as the Nale Tasih, in order to undertake similar quests…

“We know that these sea journeys occurred, and we know approximately when. But we do not know how they were accomplished. This project examines that question in great detail, in Indonesia and in other parts of the world. For this purpose, a number of rafts, each designed differently, are constructed with Palaeolithic stone tool replicas, and it is attempted to sail them across stretches of sea known to have been crossed in the Ice Age, in Indonesia, the Mediterranean, in Japan and off California.”

We now have news of another adventurer, by the name of Dominique Goerlitz, who is attempting a rather unusual sea crossing of his own – he intends to sail a reed boat, the Abora III from New York across the Atlantic to Europe, by way of the Azores, Cadiz and the Canary Islands – but what makes his journey different from previous experiments which exploited favourable winds and currents, is that by trying to navigate from east to west, he will need to be able to tack into the prevailing wind…

“Goerlitz, 41, and a crew of eight plan to set sail Wednesday from New York in a prehistoric-style reed boat to show that people 6,000 to 14,000 years ago could have made the more complicated eastward journey from the New World to get back home again.

The reed boat – called the Abora III – is constructed along the lines of Heyerdahl’s Ra, out of 17 tonnes of reed papyrus that grows at the 3,800-metre-high Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia. Goerlitz in fact had some input from the late Norwegian explorer on some of his earlier boats launched in Europe.

Unlike the Ra, however, the Abora has 16 lee boards – or retractable foils – for steering, a refinement that will enable Abora to tack into the wind and carry it eastwards.

‘Why did I not see this?’ Goerlitz quoted Heyerdahl as saying after their first meeting in 1995 in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Heyerdahl was referring to the keel-board evidence in ancient drawings that Goerlitz had found.” Read the rest of this entry »

Just a very quick update to report that English Heritage have visited the site, I think on the afternoon of Monday the 9th, and it is expected that a decision will be reached over the next few weeks…

English Heritage inspectors made a visit to the 4,000-year-old archaeological feature in Herefordshire on July 9 to advise the council on further archaeological investigations, preservation measures and to see if it should be preserved as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.

The 197ft (60m) long curved ribbon of stones, dubbed the Rotherwas Ribbon, is a surface of cracked stones discovered as a result of the archaeological investigations carried out prior to the construction of the Rotherwas access road, located just south of Hereford city.

Its discovery has sent ripples of excitement through the archaeological community and beyond and now a groundswell of opinion is building that opposes the original council plan of preserving the site in a protective casing and allowing the road to be built over the top of it.

Whilst many might be surprised that there’s even a debate over the future of the site, and would question why a ‘cease and desist order’ regarding the road construction wasn’t immediately nailed to the nearest noticeboard, supporters of the campaign to preserve the site will doubtless take heart from the fact that an official government body have seen fit to visit the site so promptly, an indication of the importance they attach to the site, as we see from their statement…

English Heritage, who have been advising the council on the preservation of the site, issued a statement on July 10, which read: “In the long term, English Heritage considers that this is a significant find worthy of being fully recorded for future research and protected in-situ.”

“Each part of the find is very fragile and by keeping the remains in their context they can help us understand how people used to live in this landscape setting. English Heritage will make sure the local authority has access to its expertise in this process.”

The sooner this site becomes scheduled as an ancient monument, the better, and as there appears ot be every indication that the planned road would have been of limited use or commercial value, so there should be no problem in not only saving the site, but generating sufficient funds for the necessary archaeology to take place – with the long term prosepect of the site becoming accessible to the public, who are the true owners of any nation’s ancient heritage. (TJ)

see also: Save The Dinedor Serpent (or Rotherwas Ribbon)

e-Petition 10, Downing Street – (256, signatures so far, a few million more should do the trick)

News from Woranso-Mille, in Ethiopia via Yahoo!, which although is as yet brief, will doubtless receive more detailed coverage in due course…

Ethiopian scientists said on Tuesday they have discovered hominid fossil fragments dating from between 3.5 million and 3.8 million years ago in what could fill a crucial gap in the understanding of human evolution.

Ethiopian archaeologist Yohannes Haile Selassie said the find included several complete jaws and one partial skeleton and were unearthed in the Afar desert at Woranso-Mille, near where the famous fossil skeleton known as Lucy was found in 1974.

“This is a major finding that could fill a gap in human evolution,” he told a news conference in Addis Ababa.

The fossil hominids from the Woranso-Mille area sample a time period that is poorly known in human evolutionary study.”

Lucy, the most famous find, lived between 3.3 million and 3.6 million years ago. But Yohannes said Afar had yielded early hominid fossil remains spanning the last 6 million years.

That’s all that seems to be up at the moment, and I’ll check around later in the day for further news or developments. In the meantime, this link will take to you to a page hosted by Cleveland Museum of Natural History, detailing the Woranso-Mille Project, described here…

From 2003-2005, the Woranso-Mille project in the Mille district of the Afar Regional State of Ethiopia recovered about 1,000 fossil specimens of various animals from sediments between 3.5 million and 4 million years old. Among these are early human ancestor fossils, including a partial skeleton of an adult individual, that are believed to shed light on a period of human evolution that was previously little documented.

It sounds as though there are plenty more fossils out there awaiting excavation, though whether their discovery will clarify or further complicate our perceptions regarding evolution in early hominids, remains to be seen. (TJ)

(via Anthro-L)

Image: Project participant and famous hominid fossil finder Alemayehu Asfaw discovered a hominid lower jaw on February 9, 2006.

Just a very brief post which I’ll write up more fully later, and today comes news via Science Daily that much of the DNA in our genome appears to be neutral, i.e. large parts of it have appear to have no directly beneficial or detrimental effects to the whole.

“For a long time, the basic belief of evolution was that all random genetic changes that manage to stick around have some selective advantage,” says Nicholas Katsanis, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Hopkins’ Institute of Genetic Medicine. “But our work adds to the case that frequently, we are what we are largely due to random changes that are completely neutral.”

“I am not at all discounting the role of natural selection, the persistence of genetic changes that confer some advantage,” Katsanis adds, “because it has been instrumental. What this study does is to reinforce and highlight the equal, and in some cases greater, importance of neutral genetic drift.”

I’ll need to read up on this some more, but this research would seem to highlight how little we really understand about the function of DNA and what makes us uniquely human. Here’s another excerpt from Science Daily, describing numts (pronounced ‘new mights‘), the genomic sequence of mitochondria…

When they expanded their study across the whole human genome, they found more than 1200 such pieces of mitochondrial DNA of various lengths embedded into chromosomes. While chimps have a comparable number, mice and rats only have around 600 numts. Since they increase in frequency as species advance, it suggested there was some evolutionary purpose to keeping them around.

Strikingly, however, none of these numts contained the blueprint (an actual gene) to make a protein that does anything, nor did they seem to control the function of any nearby genes. “At best, it seems numts are a neutral part of our genome,” says Katsanis. “If anything, they may be mildly negative since long repeat sequences can be unstable or get inserted inside genes and disrupt them.” Read the rest of this entry »