Ancient

For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America reveals that gender differences immaterial. The surprising discovery of an early female hunter burial led University of California, Davis researchers to ask whether she was part of a broader pattern of female hunters or merely a one-off. Looking at published records of late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials throughout North and South America, the researchers identified 429 individuals from 107 sites. Of those, 27 individuals were associated with big-game hunting tools – 11 were female and 15 were male. This level of participation is very different from the hunter-gatherers, and even farming and capitalist societies, where hunting is a decidedly male activity.

Since first appearing in late 2019, the novel virus, COVID-19, has had a range of impacts on those it infects. There are several factors that influence your susceptibility to having a severe reaction, like age and other medical conditions. But genetics also plays a role, and, says a new study, published in ‘Nature’ genetic variants in one region on chromosome 3 impose a larger risk that their carriers will develop a severe form of the disease. This genetic region is almost identical to that of a 50,000-year old Neanderthal from southern Europe. Through interbreeding, the variants came over to the ancestors of modern humans about 60,000 years ago. Says researcher Professor Hugo Zeberg, “Those who carry these Neanderthal variants have up to three times the risk of requiring mechanical ventilation.”

For decades, scholars have assumed that the reason humans are so commonly afflicted with back problems is because we walk on two legs. A new study, published in the journal ‘Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health’, is the first to show a clear link between the shape of our vertebrae, bipedalism, and the health of our spine. The researchers used advanced 3D shape analysis techniques to compare the final lumbar vertebrae of humans with and without spondylolysis to the same bones in our closest living relatives, the great apes. The team found that the differences between human vertebrae with spondylolysis and great ape vertebrae were greater than those between healthy human vertebrae and great ape vertebrae. People who developed spondylolysis have vertebrae that are more wedge-shaped, where the front is taller than the back, in addition to other subtle shape differences. The differences are consistent with the vertebrae having ‘overshot’ the optimum for walking on two legs, leaving the individual prone to developing spondylolysis.

Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late Cretaceous. This means a day lasted 23 and a half hours, according to a study in by American Geophysical Union’s journal ‘Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology’. The length of a year has been constant over earth’s history, because earth’s orbit around the sun does not change. But the number of days within a year has been shortening over time because days have been growing longer. The length of a day has been growing steadily longer as friction from ocean tides, caused by the moon’s gravity, slows earth’s rotation. Of course, in the history of the moon, 70 million years is a blink in time.

The El Algar society thrived in complex hilltop settlements across the Iberian Peninsula from 2200-1550 cal BCE, says a report in the journal PLOS ONE Researchers decided to find out what they ate and conducted carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis at two different El Algar hilltop settlements in present-day Totana, Murcia, and Turre, Almería in Spain. While the elite ate more animal-based foods, the others focussed on barley and dairy. Other studies have shown that rice and tea hadn’t made their entry yet in this particular society and the focus remained on wheat, millets and barley. Bronze Age babies drank animal milk and archaeologists have found little sippy cups with drinking spouts. By the Bronze Age, there was no more dependence on foraging because farming was very much prevalent as people realised that it could sustain more people.

A new study, led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, says that cereals from the Fertile Crescent and broomcorn millet from northern China spread across the ancient world, integrating into complex farming systems. This resulted in demographic expansions in Europe and Asia. The pre-Silk Route exchange paths played an important role in shaping human cultural developments across Europe and Asia, and also facilitated the dispersal of technologies such as horse breeding and metal smelting into East Asia. This study illustrates how adaptable ancient crop plants were to new ecological constraints and how human cultural practices allowed people to survive in unpredictable environments.

Despite significant advancements in protection from ballistics and blunt impacts, old military helmets, especially the French Adrian helmet, actually performs better than modern designs, biomedical engineers from Duke University say. Notes researcher Joost Op’t Eynde, “While we found that all helmets provided a substantial amount of protection against blast, we were surprised to find that the 100-year-old helmets performed just as well as modern ones. Indeed, some historical helmets performed better in some respects.” No currently-deployed helmet has been specifically designed for blast protection. Because soldiers today experiencing shock waves while wearing body armour aren’t all that different from soldiers 100 years ago experiencing shock waves while in the trenches, the research could help improve the blast protection of future helmets. It could be through choosing different materials, layering multiple materials of different acoustic impedance, or altering their geometry.

Human activity thousands of miles away managed to reach Himalayan glaciers contaminating them even before humans set foot on them, research from the Ohio State University shows. The study indicates that the byproducts of burning coal in Europe in the late 18th century made their way to the Dasuopu glacier in the central Himalayas, some 6,400 miles from London, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. And so the use of coal combustion also started to cause emissions that we think were transported by winds up to the Himalayas. The team found higher-than-natural levels of a number of toxic metals, including cadmium, chromium, nickel and zinc, in the ice starting at around 1780 — the very start of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom. Those metals are all byproducts of burning coal, a key part of industry at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.