Tag: bones

Move the date back on the first humans in North America — another 10,000 years!

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Click to enlarge — Bourgeon et al

❝ The timing of the first entry of humans into North America across the Bering Strait has now been set back 10,000 years.

This has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt by Ariane Burke, a professor in Université de Montréal’s Department of Anthropology, and her doctoral student Lauriane Bourgeon, with the contribution of Dr. Thomas Higham, Deputy Director of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

Their findings were published in early January in the open-access journal PLoS One.

❝ The earliest settlement date of North America, until now estimated at 14,000 years Before Present (BP) according to the earliest dated archaeological sites, is now estimated at 24,000 BP, at the height of the last ice age or Last Glacial Maximum.

❝ The researchers made their discovery using artifacts from the Bluefish Caves, located on the banks of the Bluefish River in northern Yukon near the Alaska border. The site was excavated by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars between 1977 and 1987. Based on radiocarbon dating of animal bones, the researcher made the bold hypothesis that human settlement in the region dated as far back as 30,000 BP…

To set the record straight, Bourgeon examined the approximate 36,000 bone fragments culled from the site and preserved at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau — an enormous undertaking that took her two years to complete. Comprehensive analysis of certain pieces at UdeM’s Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory revealed undeniable traces of human activity in 15 bones. Around 20 other fragments also showed probable traces of the same type of activity.

“Series of straight, V-shaped lines on the surface of the bones were made by stone tools used to skin animals,” said Burke. “These are indisputable cut-marks created by humans.”

❝ Bourgeon submitted the bones to further radiocarbon dating. The oldest fragment, a horse mandible showing the marks of a stone tool apparently used to remove the tongue, was radiocarbon-dated at 19,650 years, which is equivalent to between 23,000 and 24,000 cal BP (calibrated years Before Present).

“Our discovery confirms previous analyses and demonstrates that this is the earliest known site of human settlement in Canada,” said Burke. It shows that Eastern Beringia was inhabited during the last ice age.”…

The Beringians of Bluefish Caves were therefore among the ancestors of people who, at the end of the last ice age, colonized the entire continent along the coast to South America.

Bravo. If I was a young ‘un, again – this would be high on the list of work I’d love to be doing.

Skeleton of slave named Fortune buried 215 years after death

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The 18th-century slave called Fortune was laid to rest on Thursday, 215 years after he died, at a memorial service in Waterbury attended by hundreds of mourners, more than a dozen clergy and a gospel choir.

Fortune, who was enslaved by a Waterbury doctor, was never buried after his 1798 death because his owner wanted to use Fortune’s bones to teach anatomy. In the 20th century, Fortune’s skeleton was used as an exhibit at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury.

A project started in 1996 to discover the history of the museum’s skeleton culminated in Thursday’s burial, which was as dignified as demanded by the occasion, both a man’s funeral and a touchstone in the history of the city’s African American community.

Fortune’s bones lay in state for five hours at the state Capitol in Hartford on Thursday morning, then were taken to St. John’s Episcopal Church on the Green, the Waterbury parish in which Fortune was baptized in 1797…

Steven R. Mullins, president of the Southern Union of Black Episcopalians, said, “Mr. Fortune served as a slave all the years of his earthly life. What happened to Mr. Fortune should not happen to any human being in the world. … This is our opportunity today … to make up for that…”

Mullins savored the irony that Fortune’s remains are buried at Riverside Cemetery, in the same section where many members of Waterbury’s 18th century aristocracy are buried. “Talk about contrasts,” he said. “He is now good enough to rest in the same dirt as they’re in.”

Fools who prate about a post-racial America include those neo-Confederates who would still be upset over the bones of a Black man buried in their cemetery. Sad, but true.

Turkey wants Santa Claus’ bones back!

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The bakelite version was my favorite

A Turkish archaeologist has called on his government to demand that Italy return the bones of St Nicholas to their original resting place.

The 3rd Century saint – on whom Santa Claus was modelled – was buried in the modern-day town of Demre in Turkey. But in the Middle Ages his bones were taken by Italian sailors and re-interred in the port of Bari…

While Christmas is by and large not celebrated in Muslim Turkey, the Christmas figure of Santa Claus certainly is in the Mediterranean town of his birth.

He was born in what was then the Greek city of Myra in the third century, and went on to become the local bishop, with a reputation for performing miracles and secretly giving gold to the needy – on one occasion being forced to climb down a chimney to leave his donation.

After his death he was canonised as Saint Nicholas, and venerated in much of the Christian world. But when Myra was occupied by Arab forces in the 11th Century, Italian sailors came and took the saint’s bones to the port of Bari, where they remain interred to this day.

I know, I know – everyone should have the right to get their favorite superstitious bones back.

Ancient penguin DNA changes the rules on genetic dating

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Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal…

“Some earlier work based on small amounts of DNA indicated this same problem, but now we have more conclusive evidence based on the study of almost an entire mitochondrial genome,” said Dee Denver, an evolutionary biologist with the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University.

“The observations in this report appear to be fundamental and should extend to most animal species,” he added. “We believe that traditional DNA dating techniques are fundamentally flawed, and that the rates of evolution are in fact much faster than conventional technologies have led us to believe…”

“For the genetic analysis to be accurate, however, you must have the right molecular clock rate,” Denver said. “We now think that many genetic changes were happening that conventional DNA analysis did not capture. They were fairly easy to use and apply but also too indirect, and inaccurate as a result.”

RTFA. Start with finding a spot where penguins have been nesting, living and dying for 44,000 years. Talk about stuck in a neighborhood!

Bones beat trees as markers for environmental change

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To track atmospheric change caused by human activity, researchers have long studied a variety of materials, from tree rings to air trapped in glacial ice. A problem has been “noise”– natural variability caused by sampling and random events that affect atmospheric chemistry. Noise can make it hard to tease out trends from the data.

Joseph Bump, a PhD candidate in forest science at Michigan Tech, and his colleagues speculated that those trends would be picked up by top predators as well as by trees. And they further suspected that measurements from predators would show much less noise.

“Wolves consume many prey animals—a minimum of 150–200 moose contribute to an Isle Royale wolf’s diet over the course of its lifetime—and the prey consume a whole lot of plants,” Bump explains. “Just by being who they are, wolves and other top predators increase the sample size, because they do the sampling for us.”

The team studied moose and wolf bone samples dating back to 1958 from Isle Royale National Park, in Lake Superior, the site of the longest-running predator-prey study in the world. In addition, they looked at 30,000-year-old bones from the long-extinct dire wolf and prehistoric bison pulled from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. They compared the trend found in the bone chronologies to trends already established for tree rings in North America.

They found that gray and dire wolves, provide a much clearer record of environmental change than either the plants, the moose or the bison.

Some technical details are in the article. Plus reference to the published paper.