Amazing Science

University of British Columbia and Berkeley researchers have used a sophisticated new computer system to quickly reconstruct protolanguages – the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved.

University of British Columbia and Berkeley researchers have used a sophisticated new computer system to quickly reconstruct protolanguages – the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved

The results, which are 85 per cent accurate when compared to the painstaking manual reconstructions performed by linguists, will be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We're hopeful our tool will revolutionize historical linguistics much the same way that statistical analysis and computer power revolutionized the study of evolutionary biology," says UBC Assistant Prof. of Statistics Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, lead author of the study. "And while our system won't replace the nuanced work of skilled linguists, it could prove valuable by enabling them to increase the number of modern languages they use as the basis for their reconstructions." Protolanguages are reconstructed by grouping words with common meanings from related modern languages, analyzing common features, and then applying sound-change rules and other criteria to derive the common parent. The new tool designed by Bouchard-Côté and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley analyzes sound changes at the level of basic phonetic units, and can operate at much greater scale than previous computerized tools. The researchers reconstructed a set of protolanguages from a database of more than 142,000 word forms from 637 Austronesian languages—spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and parts of continental Asia.

Scientists using a "more reliable" form of radiocarbon dating have re-assessed fossils from the region and found them to be far older than anyone thought. The work appears in the journal PNAS.

Its results have implications for when and where we - modern humans - might have co-existed with our evolutionary "cousins", the Neanderthals.

"The picture emerging is of an overlapping period [in Europe] that could be of the order of perhaps 3,000-4,000 years - a period over which we have a mosaic of modern humans being present and then Neanderthals slowly ebbing away, and finally becoming extinct," explained co-author Prof Thomas Higham from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford, UK.

"What our research contributes is that in southern Spain, Neanderthals don't hang on for another 4,000 years compared with the rest of Europe. And the hunch must be that they go extinct in the south of Spain at the same time as everywhere else," he told BBC News.

Though once thought to have been our ancestors, the Neanderthals are now considered an evolutionary dead end.

They first appear in the fossil record hundreds of thousand of years ago and, at their peak, dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east. Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe somewhere around the 45,000-year mark.

No-one can say for sure what, if any, active role modern humans had in the decline of Europe's Neanderthals.

What is clear though is that some mixing must have occurred somewhere at some point. This is evident from DNA studies that prove Neanderthals made a small but significant contribution to the genetics of many modern humans.

However, scientists think this interbreeding could have occurred outside Europe, in the eastern Mediterranean or Middle East region (the area archaeologists call the "Levant"), and quite probably even deeper in time - some 80,000-90,000 years or so ago.

A new DNA analysis method reveals how ancient skeletons would have looked in the flesh and even predicts hair and eye color.

For years, when museums, textbooks or other outlets attempted to illustrate what a particular ancient human skeleton would have looked like in the flesh, their method was admittedly unscientific—they basically had to make an educated guess.

Now, though, a group of researchers from Poland and the Netherlands has provided a remarkable new option, described in an article they published in the journal Investigative Genetics on Sunday. By adapting DNA analysis methods originally developed for forensic investigations, they’ve been able to determine the hair and eye color of humans who lived as long as 800 years ago.

The team’s method examines 24 locations in the human genome that vary between individuals and play a role in determining hair and eye color. Although this DNA degrades over time, the system is sensitive enough to generate this information from genetic samples—taken either from teeth or bones—that are several centuries old (although the most degraded samples can provide information for eye color only).

As a proof of concept, the team performed the analysis for a number of people whose eye and hair color we already know. Among others, they tested the DNA of Władysław Sikorski, a former Prime Minister of Poland who died in a 1943 plane crash, and determined that Sikorski had blue eyes and blonde hair, which correctly matches color photographs.

For example, in the paper, the researchers analyzed the hair and eye color for a female skeleton buried in the crypt of a Benedictine Abbey near Kraków, Poland, sometime between the 12th and 14th centuries. The skeleton had been of interest to archaeologists for some time, since male monks were typically the only people buried in the crypt. The team’s analysis showed that she had brown eyes and dark blond or brown hair.

The team is not sure yet just how old a skeleton has to be for its DNA to be degraded beyond use—the woman buried in the crypt was the oldest one tested—so it’s conceivable that it might even work for individuals who’ve been in the ground for more than a millenium. The researchers suggest this sort of analysis could soon become part of a standard anthropological toolkit for evaluating human remains.

Two thousand years ago, people could not go to the nearest pharmacy for Cold-Eeze, but they appear to have concocted their very own zinc remedy, according to a new analysis of ancient remnants.

Scientists have characterized the mineralogical and chemical ingredients of medicine from a 2,200-year-old shipwreck, revealing new insights into the pharmaceutical practices of the ancient world.

A number of small, airtight tin containers thought to contain substances for therapeutic use were recovered from the remains of the shipwreck, discovered off the coast of Italy in the late 1980s. When scientists later unsealed one of the small containers, they found six well-preserved, grey tablets, each approximately the shape of a circular makeup sponge.

A preliminary DNA analysis of the tablets in 2010 had revealed around a dozen herbal components, including carrots, parsley and wild onion, bound by clay. However, the total composition and medicinal characteristics remained unknown until now.

To explore potential medicinal uses, researchers employed a combination of analytical techniques, including mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, and spectroscopy.

They found that inorganic elements accounted for 80% of the total sample. Zinc, in the form of hydrozincite and smithsonite minerals, was by far the most abundant component, comprising three-quarters of the inorganic elements. Organic components, like wheat flour, vegetable and animal fats, beeswax, pollen grains, and other herbs accounted for the other 20%. “The research highlights the presence of zinc compounds as the active ingredients,” says Gianna Giachi, a chemist at the Superintendence for the Archaeological Heritage of Tuscany, in Florence, Italy.

The Romani people—once known as “gypsies” or Roma—have been objects of both curiosity and persecution for centuries. Today, some 11 million Romani, with a variety of cultures, languages and lifestyles, live in Europe—and beyond. But where did they come from?

A team of European researchers has now collected data on some 800,000 genetic variants (single nucleotides polymorphisms) in 152 Romani people from 13 different Romani groups in Europe. The team then contrasted the Romani sequences with those already known for more than 4,500 Europeans as well as samples from the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia and the Middle East.

According to the analysis, the initial founding group of Romani likely departed from what is now the Punjab state in northwestern India close to the year 500 CE. From there, they likely traveled through Central Asia and the Middle East but appear to have mingled only moderately with local populations there. The subsequent doorway to Europe seems to have been the Balkan area—specifically Bulgaria—from which the Romani began dispersing around 1,100 CE.

These travels, however, were not always easy. For example, after the initial group left India, their numbers took a dive, with less than half of the population surviving (some 47 percent, according to the genetic analysis). And once groups of Romani that would go on to settle Western Europe left the Balkan region, they suffered another population bottleneck, losing some 30 percent of their population. 

Local mixing was not constant over the past several centuries—even in the same groups. The genetic history, as told through this genome-wide analysis, reveals different social mores at different times. For example, Romani populations in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Croatia show genetic patterns that suggest a limited pairing with local populations until recently. Whereas Romani populations in Portugal, Spain and Lithuania have genetic sequences that suggest they had previously mixed with local European populations more frequently but have “higher levels of recent genetic isolation from non-Romani Europeans,” the researchers noted in their paper.

A brain in near-perfect condition is found in a body-less skull of a person who was decapitated over 2,600 years ago in England.

One of the world's best preserved prehistoric human brains was recently found in a waterlogged U.K. pit. The brain belonged to an Iron Age man who was hanged and then decapitated, with his head falling in the pit shortly thereafter. Scientists believe that submersion in liquid, anoxic environments helps to preserve human brain tissue. 

The brain is the oldest known intact human brain from Europe and Asia, according to the authors, who also believe it's one of the best-preserved ancient brains in the world.

The brain-containing skull was found at Heslington, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. O'Connor and her team suspect the site served a ceremonial function that persisted from the Bronze Age through the early Roman period. Many pits at the site were marked with single stakes. The remains of the man were without a body, but the scientists also found the headless body of a red deer that had been deposited into a channel.

Laser imaging, chemical analysis and other examinations revealed that the brain naturally preserved over the millennia. The scientists found no evidence for bacterial or fungal activity, and described the tissue as being "odorless…with a resilient, tofu-like texture."

The star exhibit initially promised for the British Museum’s “Ice Age Art” show will not be coming—but for a good reason. New pieces of Ulm’s Lion Man sculpture have been discovered and it has been found to be much older than originally thought, at around 40,000 years. This makes it the world’s earliest figurative sculpture.

The story of the discovery of the Lion Man goes back to August 1939, when fragments of mammoth ivory were excavated at the back of the Stadel Cave in the Swabian Alps, south-west Germany. This was a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War. When it was eventually reassembled in 1970, it was regarded as a standing bear or big cat, but with human characteristics.

The ivory from which the figure had been carved had broken into myriad fragments. When first reconstructed, around 200 pieces were incorporated into the 30cm-tall sculpture, with about 30% of its volume missing.

Further fragments were later found among the previously excavated material and these were added to the figure in 1989. At this point, the sculpture was recognised as representing a lion. Most specialists have regarded it as male, although paleontologist Elisabeth Schmid controversially argued that it was female, suggesting that early society might have been matriarchal.

The latest news is that almost 1,000 further fragments of the statue have been found, following recent excavations in the Stadel Cave by Claus-Joachim Kind. Most of these are minute, but a few are several centimetres long. Some of the larger pieces are now being reintegrated into the figure.

Even more exciting than the discovery of new pieces, the sculpture’s age has been refined using radio-carbon dating of other bones found in the strata. This reveals a date of 40,000 years ago, while until recently it was thought to be 32,000 years old. Once reconstruction is completed, several tiny, unused fragments of the mammoth ivory are likely to be carbon dated, and this is expected to confirm the result.

This revised dating pushes the Lion Man right back to the oldest sculptures, which have been found in two other caves in the Swabian Alps. These rare finds are dated at 35,000 to 40,000 years, but the Lion Man is by far the largest and most complex piece. A few carved items have been found in other regions which are slightly older, but these have simple patterns, not figuration.

Southern Africa's bushmen, and their relatives the Khoe, veered off on their own path of genetic development 100,000 years ago, according to a new study.

The split, gleaned from an analysis of genetic data, is the earliest divergence scientists have discovered in the evolution of modern humans.

The Khoe and the San peoples - who speak click languages, and live across a wide swath of southern Africa from Namibia to Mozambique to South Africa - have long fascinated scientists.

The San, in particular, were one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies, living well into the 20th century in a style anthropologists think was similar to humans' most ancient ancestors.

The study published in the journal Science analyses the genes of 220 members of the Khoe and San groups. Researchers looked at 2.3 million genetic variations for each participant, learning important information about the Khoe-San and, more generally, the origins of modern humans.

Japanese could become extinct in 1,000 years if current population trends continue, according to researchers. Researchers at Tohoku University Graduate School of Economics in Sendai unveiled a population clock — available on the university's website — that showed the nation ending up with no children aged under 15 by May 18, 3011.

The calculation is based on the fact that the current population of children aged up to 14 — 16.6 million — is shrinking at the rate of one every 100 seconds, Agence France-Presse reported. The researchers reportedly did not take into account potential disasters, wars, or other global changes. "If the rate of decline continues, we will be able to celebrate the Children's Day public holiday on May 5, 3011 as there will be one child," AFP cited Hiroshi Yoshida, an economics professor at Tohoku University, as saying. "But 100 seconds later there will be no children left. The overall trend is towards extinction, which started in 1975 when Japan's fertility rate fell below two."