Ancient teeth reveal mammalian responses to climate change in Southeast Asia

New isotopic analysis of fossil teeth uncovers how dietary flexibility determined survival or extinction over the last 150,000 years

Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

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Examples of fossil teeth analyzed in this study, including specimens of 1) a macaque, 2) an extinct giant tapir, 3) a wild boar, 4) a wild large-sized bovid, 5) a tiger, 6) a porcupine, 7) a Sumatran rhinoceros, 8) a dhole, 9) an orangutan and 10) a giant panda. 

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Credit: Dr. Nicolas Bourgon

A new study published in Science Advances and led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology uncovers how flexibility made the difference between survival and extinction. By analyzing fossil teeth from Vietnam and Laos, an international team reconstructed the diets and habitats of extinct, extirpated, and still-living species. The results show that animals with varied diets and habitats were more likely to endure, while narrow specialists largely disappeared.

The team examined 141 fossil teeth dating from 150,000 to 13,000 years ago and combined them with existing records. Using stable isotope analysis of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and zinc, they examined dietary responses to environmental shifts.

“By analyzing chemical traces in tooth enamel, we can piece together ancient diets and environments in remarkable detail,” says lead author Dr. Nicolas Bourgon. “Comparing species across time shows why some survived while others vanished.”

Animals like sambar deer, macaques, and wild boar proved adaptable, as reflected in wide isotopic ranges. In contrast, specialists such as orangutans, tapirs, and rhinoceroses showed narrower profiles tied to particular habitats. As environments shifted, generalists endured while specialists were left vulnerable.

Orangutans, now limited to Borneo and Sumatra, once ranged widely across Southeast Asia. Isotope results suggest they consistently relied on fruit from closed-canopy forests, even during environmental change.

“Even though modern orangutans can turn to alternative foods during hard times, their survival still depends on intact forests,” says Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Huong, co-author from the Anthropological and Palaeoenvironmental Department of Vietnam’s Institute of Archaeology. “It looks like this has been true for tens of thousands of years.”

With Southeast Asia facing the fastest tropical deforestation worldwide, the lessons from the past are urgent. “Understanding how species coped with ancient pressures helps predict their resilience today,” said senior author Prof. Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute. The study highlights the need to conserve not just species, but the ecological conditions that sustain them.

“This is about more than just ancient animals,” Bourgon adds. “It’s about learning from the past to protect the future.”

  

View of the limestone hill that houses Coc Muoi cave, located near the Chinese border about 155 km northeast of Hanoi, in Vietnam’s Lang Son province. The surrounding landscape is characterized by limestone hills and tower karsts. Since the 1960s, Lang Son has produced major fossil assemblages that have been central to building the biochronology of the Middle to Late Pleistocene in the Indochinese region.

Credit

Dr. Anne-Marie Bacon, UMR 8045 BABEL, Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Franc

The forested entrance of Coc Muoi cave, located about 10 meters above the surrounding cultivated plain. Hidden in the limestone hills of Vietnam’s Lang Son province, the cave has preserved fossil remains of Pleistocene mammals that provide vital insights into how species responded to past climate and environmental changes.

Credit

Truong Huu Nghia, Anthropological and Palaeoenvironmental Department of Vietnam’s Institute of Archaeology

Archaeologists working deep within Coc Muoi cave during a Vietnamese–French collaborative field campaign. The illuminated excavation area yielded fossil teeth of Pleistocene mammals, later analyzed for their chemical signatures to reconstruct ancient diets and environments.

Credit

Truong Huu Nghia, Anthropological and Palaeoenvironmental Department of Vietnam’s Institute of Archaeology

Dr. Nicolas Bourgon (left) preparing samples for zinc isotope analysis, and Dr. Tina Lüdecke (right) carefully adding liquid nitrogen to a beaker as part of ultra-sensitive nitrogen isotope measurements. These cutting-edge laboratory techniques allow scientists to extract chemical signals preserved in fossil tooth enamel, providing unprecedented insights into the diets and ecological flexibility of ancient mammals.

Credit

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Max Planck Institute for Chemistry

Journal

Science Advances

Subject of Research

Animal tissue samples

Article Title

Faunal persistence and ecological flexibility in Pleistocene Southeast Asia revealed through multi-isotope analysis

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2025

 

Analysis of 4.4-million-year-old ankle exposes how earliest ancestors moved, evolved

Washington University in St. Louis

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Thomas (Cody) Prange

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Credit: WashU

For more than a century, scientists have been piecing together the puzzle of human evolution, examining fossil evidence to understand the transition from our earliest ancestors to modern humans.

A new study from Washington University in St. Louis, published October 15 in Communications Biology, presents compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that humans evolved from an African ape-like ancestor. With this discovery, which challenges previous findings, researchers are able to narrow the range of explanations for the origin of human lineage. In doing so, scientists are one step closer to answering one of life’s greatest questions, “where do we come from?”

The research, led by Thomas (Cody) Prang, assistant professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at WashU, revisits the breakthrough discovery of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus — nicknamed “Ardi” — which was discovered in 1994.  

Ardi is one of the oldest and most complete skeletons to ever be discovered. Approximately 1 million years older than “Lucy,” another well-known early human ancestor skeleton, Ardi represents an earlier stage of human evolution, according to Prang.

“One of the surprises in this discovery was that Ardi walked upright, yet retained a lot of ape-like characteristics, including a grasping foot,” Prang said.

“Apes, like chimpanzees and gorillas, have a big toe that’s divergent, which allows them to grip tree branches as part of a climbing lifestyle. Yet it also had features that align with our lineage. That makes Ardipithecus a true transitional species.”

Researchers initially proposed that Ardi demonstrated a generalized form of locomotion rather than behavior typical of African apes, leading them to conclude that this very early human ancestor was not similar to apes after all, Prang said. That came as a big surprise to the paleoanthropology community.

“Based on their analysis, they concluded that living African apes — like chimpanzees and gorillas — are like dead ends or cul-de-sacs of evolution, rather than stages of human emergence,” Prang said. “Instead, they thought that Ardi provided evidence for a more generalized ancestor that wasn’t similar to chimps or gorillas.”

Rethinking Ardi

By studying chimpanzees’ and gorillas’ talus — the large bone in the ankle that joins with the tibia of the leg and the calcaneus (heel) of the foot —  researchers can decipher how they move — specifically, how they climb trees vertically. This important bone also offers insight into how early species transitioned to bipedal (two-legged) locomotion.

For this study, Prang and colleagues compared Ardi’s ankle to the ankles of apes, monkeys and early humans. Their analysis showed that Ardi’s ankle is the only one in the primate fossil record that shares similarities with African apes.

According to Prang, these apes are known for their adaptations to vertical climbing and terrestrial plantigrade quadrupedalism — a form of locomotion where an animal moves on four limbs on the ground with the entire soles of its feet, including the heel, touching the surface — hinting that Ardi might have used its feet similarly. In addition to these primitive features, Ardi’s talus also exhibited characteristics suggesting an enhanced push-off mechanism in the foot. This complexity indicates a blend of climbing and walking behaviors in this early hominin species, which is pivotal in understanding the evolution of bipedalism.

“The finding is both controversial and also aligned with what people thought originally,” Prang said.

“Nobody disputes the importance of the discovery (of Ardi), of course, but many people in the field would say the initial interpretation was probably flawed. And so, this paper is a correction of that initial idea that distanced Ardi from chimpanzees and gorillas.”

It’s important to note that this paper does not imply that humans evolved from chimpanzees. However, the research adds more evidence to the hypothesis that the common ancestor humans share with chimpanzees was probably quite similar to the chimpanzees living today, Prang explained.

Contributing to the study are Matthew W. Tocheri at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada; Biren A. Patel at University of Southern California; Scott A. Williams at New York University; and Caley M. Orr at the University of Colorado Anschutz.

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Journal

Communications Biology

DOI

10.1038/s42003-025-08711-7 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Ardipithecus ramidus ankle provides evidence for African ape-like vertical climbing in the earliest hominins

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2025

 

BIOFAIR roadmap for an integrated biological and environmental data network

Community-led initiative addresses data fragmentation in the biodiversity sciences

American Institute of Biological Sciences

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The Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), in collaboration with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), has developed a comprehensive roadmap toward an integrated biological and environmental data network. The initiative, known as the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (BIOFAIR) Data Network project, addresses the urgent need to connect fragmented data held in biodiversity collections and other biological and environmental data repositories to tackle pressing societal challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, invasive species, and emerging public health threats.

The project, described in a recent article in the journal BioScience, was underpinned by extensive community engagement with ecological, climate, environmental, genetic, health, biodiversity informatics, and federal stakeholders. Through six virtual listening sessions, project organizers engaged 199 stakeholders representing 142 organizations, followed by a workshop with 75 participants affiliated with 110 organizations and initiatives. The collaborative effort developed five cross-cutting themes to guide data integration: stocktaking and gap analysis, technological capacity building, best practices and standards, education and training, and community building.

"Biodiversity collections, including over a billion specimens in the United States, offer unparalleled information for understanding evolution, biological processes, and biodiversity responses to environmental change," the authors explain. Uniting species occurrence data from collections with other data sources related to their biology, interactions with other organisms, and their physical environment will require thoughtful community coordination, they say, but the benefit to science could be massive: "An integrated data network... could enable transformative research across biology, ecology, public health, and environmental science." Such infrastructure could support forecasting biodiversity changes, predicting invasive species distributions, and informing public health policies in response to newly emerging diseases.

The project's organizers emphasize that success depends on both technical infrastructure and large-scale community action, stressing that building the BIOFAIR Network will require "an inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable community of data providers, managers, and users that can integrate across technical, educational, and policy boundaries to support collective data sharing."

Funded by the National Science Foundation (DBI award no. 2303588), more information on the BIOFAIR Data Network project can be found at https://bcon.aibs.org/biofair.

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Journal

BioScience

DOI

10.1093/biosci/biaf150 

Article Title

Integrating biological and environmental data to solve key scientific and societal challenges

 

SwRI, 8 Rivers patent more cost-effective, efficient power generation system with liquid oxygen storage

Technology will generate, store pure oxygen during off-peak hours to power clean energy cycle

Southwest Research Institute

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Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and 8 Rivers have patented a system that leverages fluctuations in energy demand by using liquid oxygen storage (LOX) to make power plants more cost-effective and efficient. The researchers are considering incorporating it into the Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) Demo pilot plant at SwRI’s San Antonio headquarters to make the facility even more fuel efficient.

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Credit: Southwest Research Institute

SAN ANTONIO — October 15, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and 8 Rivers have patented a system that leverages fluctuations in energy demand by using liquid oxygen storage (LOX) to make power plants more cost-effective and efficient. To accomplish this, the Institute modified a recently developed power cycle, the Allam-Fetvedt Cycle, which combusts fuel, like natural gas, using an oxygen and carbon dioxide mixture to allow complete carbon capture, producing minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

The Allam-Fetvedt Cycle requires high-purity oxygen separated from air, which is mostly nitrogen and trace amounts of other gases. This separation process is energy-intense and consumes 10% of a power plant’s output.

“Our idea is to generate oxygen during off-peak hours, when electricity is less expensive because demand is lower,” said SwRI Institute Engineer Dr. Jeffrey Moore, one of the new system’s inventors. “The oxygen can then be stored in liquid form and then converted back into gas for use in the plant later. This boosts plant output while lowering operating costs.”

To ensure that a power plant utilizing this technology would be profitable, SwRI conducted a techno-economic analysis, modeling both plant performance and hour-by-hour costs over a full year. Studies by Princeton University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed that current price volatility for electricity will continue to increase as more forms of renewable energy come online, indicating that the economic benefits of the application will persist or grow in the future.

“The data show that in some regions prices may stay low for weeks, then spike for long periods, depending on renewable penetration. Right now, the grid is about 10–15% renewables. If that rises to 30%, the problems associated with fluctuations in wind and solar energy production will be exacerbated, making energy storage critical for overall grid reliability,” Moore said. “Currently, there’s no large-scale energy storage system on the grid, though research is underway. This oxygen storage system is one way to effectively store energy, by generating liquid oxygen when power is cheap and using it later when prices are higher.”

The researchers are also considering incorporating it into the Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) Demo pilot plant at SwRI’s San Antonio headquarters. It’s one of the largest demonstration facilities in the world for supercritical carbon dioxide power generation. Adding LOX and the Allam-Fetvedt cycle to STEP would make it even more fuel-efficient.

“The components of this system are very mature,” Moore said. “Air separation and liquid oxygen generation have been around for decades. That’s what got us to the moon. We’re putting these tested individual pieces together at larger scales, to reach greater heights in clean energy production and improving net present value of the plant.”

For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/power-generation-utilities/advanced-power-systems.