Almost 100 workers recover from coronavirus at locked-down farm

By Carmelo Garcia Local Democracy Reporter


OUTBREAK AT FARM

Almost 100 farm workers at AS Green and Co have now recovered from coronavirus. Picture: Rob Davies

Almost 100 people who were infected with coronavirus at the locked-down Herefordshire farm have now fought off the disease.

Rook Row Farm in Mathon was placed into lockdown two weeks ago after more than 70 cases were detected there.

Health officials conducted mass testing on more than 200 people who work for vegetable producer AS Green & Co after an initial single positive case was confirmed at the farm.

The total number of positive cases at the farm has risen to 134 but health officers say there only 12 of these cases are active.

Herefordshire's public health director Karen Wright said things were much better two weeks on from the outbreak.

“There are now 96 people who have had Covid-19 and are now well and are out of the period they need to isolate – so, people can now actually get back to work which is great really.

“Now there are 12 people who are positive on site.

“The guidance for anyone who is positive is that they have to self-isolate for seven days.

“And then in addition to that they have got to have 48 hours in which they haven’t had any symptoms of a high temperature or feeling unwell.

“People who have Covid-19 could have a cough for weeks, a loss taste or of smell which lasts for a long time.

“But as long as you’ve not had a temperature for 48 and are not feeling generally unwell that mean you are no longer infections and can get back to normal.

Ms Wright said people who have had coronavirus and recovered could still test positive weeks after fighting off the disease.

“That’s because your body can still have the virus within it but it’s no longer infectious.”

During the first days of the outbreak, three workers fled the lockdown at the farm - one of them was known to be infected.


READ MORE: All the latest on AS Green and Co's coronavirus outbreak

Workers there had visited four shops in the week, raising the possibility that they have spread the virus further.

But health officials say there will not be a review into the response of all the parties involved.

“Yes, there was a very small number of people who left the farm but that’s not surprising given the situation,” Ms Wright said.

She said most people on the site had been cooperative and they had worked well with the farm owners.

“My reinforcing message is the need to regularly wash your hands, dry them, social distancing and to get tested at any sign of symptoms.

“There can be a temptation for some businesses to think I’m not going to get my staff tested – but please do.

“To be fair, that’s what they did do at Rook Row Farm and we got that mass testing done really quickly.”

Scientists flock to mysterious 'blue hole' off Florida's Gulf Coast
The phenomenon is located about 425 feet below the water's surface.

By Karma Allen 22 July 2020,


Scientists are flocking to Florida’s Gulf Coast for a glimpse of a mysterious 425-feet-deep "blue hole" on the ocean floor.

The glowing mystery hole, about 155 feet below the water’s surface, is similar to the sinkholes seen on solid land, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The site, dubbed the "Green Banana,” has been a hot topic for scientists and deep-sea explorers who've been hoping for a glimpse of the phenomenon from afar.

Surprisingly, the first reports of blue holes came from fishermen and recreational divers, not scientists or researchers. In general, the holes appear to host diverse biological communities full of marine life, including corals, sponges, mollusks, sea turtles and sharks.

NOAA scientists already have collected 17 water samples from the area surrounding the hole along with four sediment samples.



Scientists are flocking toward the coast of Florida to explore a mysterious "blue hole" on the ocean floor.Scientists are flocking toward the coast of Florida to explore a mysterious "blue hole" on the ocean floor.Mote Marine Laboratory via NOAA

Remarkably, they also discovered two dead but intact smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom of the hole, according to NOAA. Remains of one of the animals were recovered for examination.
MORE: Polar bears may be extinct by 2100 if Arctic ice melts at projected rate, according to new study

NOAA scientists plan to embark on a new mission to a second, deeper area of the hole in August. That mission will consist of a team of scientists from Mote Marine Laboratory, Florida Atlantic University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the U.S. Geological Society, according to NOAA.

Researchers are interested in studying the seawater chemistry in the holes for its unique qualities.



Divers found two deceased smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom of Amberjack Hole. The deceased sawfish were intact enough to be collected for research, and Mote scientists... moreDivers found two deceased smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom of Amberjack Hole. The deceased sawfish were intact enough to be collected for research, and Mote scientists quickly reported the discovery to NOAA and the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and obtained the required permit for collection of one of the sawfish, a male measuring an impressive 12 feet long.Mote Marine Laboratory via NOAA

"Little is known about blue holes due to their lack of accessibility and unknown distribution and abundance," NOAA said in a statement. "The opening of a blue hole can be several hundred feet underwater, and for many holes, the opening is too small for an automated submersible."

Researchers don’t know much about blue holes, but scientists are hoping to learn if the holes are connected to Florida’s groundwater or if there is groundwater intrusion into the Gulf of Mexico.

They're also looking to see if a particular blue hole is secreting nutrients or harbors microenvironments or new species of microbes.

Humans may have arrived in Americas much earlier than thought, research shows

Artifacts discovered in a cave in Mexico are about 30,000 years old.

By Charles Q. Choi | INSIDE SCIENCE
26 July 2020
This is an Inside Science story.

The Americas may have been home to humans for more than 12,000 years longer than previously thought, new research finds.

The arrival of humans to the Americas from Asia marked a major step in humanity's journey across the globe, but the exact timing of this entry remains hotly debated. Based on stone tools dating back about 13,000 years, archaeologists long thought the first Americans were part of a prehistoric culture known as the Clovis. However, scientists have recently uncovered many sites that suggested humans were in the New World before Clovis, up to roughly 18,000 years ago. Now new studies extend that time to more than 30,000 years ago.

In the new work, researchers focused on Mexico, which is typically on the periphery of the hunt for the first Americans, given its distance from the Bering Strait and Beringia, the landmass that had connected Asia and North America. However, recent findings have unearthed hints of an ancient human presence in Mexico.



In this 2019 photo provided by Devlin A. Gandy, assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen takes samples of cave sediments to look for DNA in Zacatecas,... moreIn this 2019 photo provided by Devlin A. Gandy, assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen takes samples of cave sediments to look for DNA in Zacatecas, central Mexico. Artifacts from the site suggest people were living in North America much earlier than most scientists think.Devlin A. Gandy/AP

The scientists investigated Chiquihuite Cave in the Astillero Mountains of central Mexico, the most promising of dozens of sites they explored in the region. They spent a number of winters excavating a 3-meter-deep pit 50 meters from the cave's mouth. They lived inside the cave for seven to nine weeks in a row during the winters, cooking in the area and sleeping meters away from the dig while wary of drug cartels, said archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico.

Ardelean and his colleagues unearthed about 1,900 stone artifacts. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating of the objects suggest humans might have occupied the area 31,000 to 33,000 years ago. Given how far away Chiquihuite is from the coasts, much less Asia, the researchers suggest humans may have first arrived in the New World during a period 29,000 to 57,000 years ago. They detailed their findings in two studies in the July 23 issue of the journal Nature.

These newfound artifacts show a tool manufacturing style, or “lithic industry,” never previously known in the New World. "Actually, all pre-Clovis sites in the Americas have lithic industries that don't match each other," Ardelean said. "This seems to be the norm."

The cave is located roughly 2,740 meters above sea level (nearly 9,000 feet), almost on the top of the highest mountain in the region. Archaeologists looking for ancient sites in the New World typically focus on lake shores, rolling hills and other areas that we might find comfortable, Ardelean said. "I wanted to search for sites in all sorts of locations, even where we wouldn't go to live as modern people. The ice age was a different world, with different minds and psychologies, more courageous than ours. They were adapted to mountains, and for them, it must have been just normal." Although the area is now part of the southernmost section of the giant Chihuahuan desert, it was more like the Pacific Northwest during the last ice age, Ardelean said.



A prehistoric stone tool found at a cave in Zacatecas in central Mexico is seen in this image released on July 22, 2020.A prehistoric stone tool found at a cave in Zacatecas in central Mexico is seen in this image released on July 22, 2020.Ciprian Ardelean/via Reuters

"We anticipate that the results will spur new interest in surveying regions like this for new sites," said archaeological scientist Thomas Higham at the University of Oxford in England, a co-author on both studies. The fact that a high-altitude site such as Chiquihuite "contains earlier human presence will invite archaeologists to widen the places they seek to look for early archaeological sediments."

When the scientists examined the age of Chiquihuite and 41 other archaeological sites in North America and Beringia, their computer model suggested humans were likely present in the Americas before, during and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum -- the period around 19,000 to 26,500 years ago when the ice age was at its peak and glaciers covered roughly one-third of Earth's land. During such early times, a land passage to the New World would have been blocked by either treacherous open water or impenetrable ice sheets, suggesting "the path humans took to the Americas was likely a coastal route," Becerra-Valdivia said.

"It changes our comprehension of the settlement of the Americas considerably," said bioanthropologist Mark Hubbe at the Ohio State University in Columbus, who was not involved in this work. "There have been a few sites in South America that have claimed earlier human occupations, but most of them have been largely dismissed because of a combination of unreliable evidence and the fact that they were such chronological outliers that it is more parsimonious to assume the dates were wrong. It is nice to see that we are broadening our perspective and allowing for the possibility that the Americas may have been occupied significantly longer than we ever thought possible."

Archaeologist John Hoffecker at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who did not participate in this study, noted that "for more than a decade and half, evidence of people in Beringia before the end of the Last Glacial Maximum has been accumulating," lending credence to a possible ancient human presence in Mexico. Still, "it continues to strike me as odd that, if people were present in the Western Hemisphere outside eastern Beringia at this earlier time, the evidence for their presence is so sparse, because at this time in northern Eurasia, people are all over the place, occupying large sites with abundant artifacts, many features, and heaps of food debris."

However, sparse evidence of humans in the New World during the last ice age "is not surprising; the harshness of the Last Glacial Maximum would have kept populations low, leaving little trace behind for archaeologists to discover in the future," Becerra-Valdivia said. "Once a warming period began, humans were then able to thrive and expand across the region."

Ardelean cautioned that scientists still need to discover more similarly early sites to confirm a human presence in the New World during or before the Last Glacial Maximum. "The evidence is still very scarce and blurry," Ardelean said. "Chiquihuite is simply a very dim light in a vast darkness ignored so far." 

Future research can investigate how related or not these ancient Americans were to later groups. "Did they contribute to form Native Americans, or were they an unsuccessful attempt to occupy the continent that was later replaced by the ancestors of Native Americans?" Hubbe said.

"We need to start exploring underwater sites, as has recently been done in Australia," added geographer Umberto Lombardo, who did not take part in this research. A research program taking hundreds of core samples along the coasts of North and Central America would cost a lot, "but it could be done by a large consortium of universities."

Inside Science is an editorially independent nonprofit print, electronic and video journalism news service owned and operated by the American Institute of Physics.

Remains of Aztec Palace of Axayácatl & House Built by Hernán Cortés Discovered


Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have discovered basalt slab floors from the Palace of Axayácatl, and remains of a house built by the conquistador Hernán Cortés.

The discovery was made during works on the Monte de Piedad building in Mexico City, revealing basalt dressed stones that formed part of the palaces open plaza or courtyard.

Axayácatl reigned between 1469 and 1481 and was the father of Montezuma II, one of the last rulers of the Aztec Empire. Moctezuma brought the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés to his palace in Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City) where the Spaniards lived as his guests for several months.

Montezuma was taken prisoner and subsequently killed. Two other Aztec rulers succeeded Moctezuma, but their reigns were short-lived and the Aztec Empire quickly collapsed under them.   

Part of the house of Hernán Cortés – Image Credit : Oliver Santana

Excavations also revealed a house built for Cortés from the early Viceregal period (1521-1620 AD). The house was where the Spanish conqueror resided for several years and would also become the seat of the first Cabildo of New Spain (around 1525) and of the Marquessate of the Valley of Oaxaca, granted to the conqueror four years later.

Archaeologists excavated a series of test pits that unearthed the remains of a stone masonry wall – 1.50 meters high by 1.25 m wide wall that served as a foundation and basal platform for a series of columns from the building.

INAH said: Vestiges of that pre-Hispanic palace, and of the remains of a later house built under the orders of Hernán Cortés, with reused materials from the previous Tenochca building, revives the memory of those historical events, five centuries later.

Header Image Credit : INAH

Rewriting History: New Evidence Challenges Euro-Centric Narrative of Early Colonisation

In American history, we learn that the arrival of Spanish explorers led by Hernando de Soto in the 1500s was a watershed moment resulting in the collapse of Indigenous tribes and traditions across the southeastern United States.

While these expeditions unquestionably resulted in the deaths of countless Indigenous people and the relocation of remaining tribes, new research from Washington University in St. Louis provides evidence that Indigenous people in Oconee Valley — present-day central Georgia — continued to live and actively resist European influence for nearly 150 years.

The findings, published July 15 in American Antiquity, speak to the resistance and resilience of Indigenous people in the face of European insurgence, said Jacob Lulewicz, a lecturer in archaeology in Arts & Sciences and lead author.

“The case study presented in our paper reframes the historical contexts of early colonial encounters in the Oconee Valley by way of highlighting the longevity and endurance of Indigenous Mississippian traditions and rewriting narratives of interactions between Spanish colonizers and Native Americans,” Lulewicz said.

It also draws into question the motives behind early explanations and interpretations that Euro-Americans proposed about Indigenous earthen mounds — platforms built out of soil, clay and stone that were used for important ceremonies and rituals.

‘Myths were purposively racist’

“By the mid-1700s, less than 100 years after the abandonment of the Dyar mound [now submerged under Lake Oconee], explanations for the non-Indigenous origins of earthen mounds were being espoused. As less than 100 years would have passed between the Indigenous use of mounds and these explanations, it could be argued that the motives for these myths were purposively racist, denying what would have been a recent collective memory of Indigenous use in favor of explanations that stole, and disenfranchised, these histories from contemporary Indigenous peoples,” Lulewicz said.

The Dyar mound was excavated by University of Georgia archaeologists in the 1970s to make way for a dam. Lulewicz and co-authors — Victor D. Thompson, professor of archaeology and director of the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia; James Wettstaed, archaeologist at Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests; and Mark Williams, director emeritus of the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia — received funding from the USDA Forest Service to re-date the platform mound, which contained classic markers of Indigenous rituals and ceremonies.

Using advanced radiocarbon dating techniques and complex statistical models, modern-day archaeologists are able to effectively construct high-resolution, high-precision chronologies. In many cases, they can determine, within a 10- to 20-year range, dates of things that happened as far back as 1,000 years ago.

“Radiocarbon dating is really important, not just for getting a date to see when things happened, but for understanding the tempo of how things changed throughout time and really understanding the complex histories of people over hundreds of years,” Lulewicz said. “In archaeology, it’s really easy to group things in long periods of time, but it would be false to say that nothing changed over those 500 years.”

Their research yielded 20 new dates from up and down the mound, which provided a refined perspective on the effects that early Indigenous-colonizer encounters did, and did not, have on the Indigenous people and their traditions.

Missing from the mound was any sign of European artifacts, which is one of the reasons why archaeologists originally believed sites in the region were abruptly abandoned just after their first encounters with Spanish colonizers. “Not only did the ancestors of Muscogee (Creek) people continue their traditions atop the Dyar mound for nearly 150 years after these encounters, but they also actively rejected European things,” Lulewicz said.

According to Lulewicz, the Dyar mound does not represent an isolated hold-over after contact with European colonizers. There are several examples of platform mounds that were used beyond the 16th century, including the Fatherland site associated with the Natchez in Louisiana, Cofitachequi in South Carolina and a range of towns throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley.

“However, the mound at Dyar represents one of the only confirmed examples, via absolute dating, of continued Mississippian traditions related to mound-use and construction to date.”

Today, members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, descendants of the Mississippians who built platform mounds like the one at Dyar, live in Oklahoma. “We have a great, collaborative relationship with archaeologists of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Historic and Cultural Preservation Department, so we sent them the paper to review. It was really well received. They saw, reflected in that paper, a lot of the traditions they still practice in Oklahoma and were generous enough to contribute commentary that bolstered the results presented in the paper,” he said.

“This is where the archaeology that we write becomes so important in the present. … Without this type of work, we are contributing to the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples from their history.”

“Of course, they already knew many of the things we ‘discovered,’ but it was still meaningful to be able to reaffirm their ancestral link to the land.”

In the end, Lulewicz said this is the most important part of the paper. “We are writing about real human lives — Indigenous lives that we have historically treated very poorly and who continue to be treated poorly today in some cases. With the use of advanced radiocarbon dating and the development of really high resolution chronologies, we are able to more effectively reinject lives into narratives of the past.”

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Header Image – Jacob Lulewicz, lecturer in archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, studies southeastern/midwestern ethnohistory and archaeology including Indigenous-colonizer dynamics; social networks and sociopolitics. Image Credit : WUSTL

Archaeologists Discover the Lost Dragon City, Capital of Xiongnu Empire

Archaeologists conducting excavations in central Mongolia along the Orkhon River believe they have discovered the “Dragon City” of Luut/Luncheng, the Xiongnu/Khunnu capital.

The Xiongnu were a tribal confederation that inhabited the eastern Eurasian Steppe from the 3rd century BC to the late 1st century AD. The ruler of the Xiongnu was called the Chanyu, who exercised direct authority over the central territory from Luncheng. Their relations with adjacent Chinese dynasties to the south-east were complex, with repeated periods of conflict and intrigue, alternating with exchanges of tribute, trade, and marriage treaties.

Excavations financed by the Ulaanbaatar State University in the Ulziit district of Arkhangai province first made the discovery in 2017, but details of the findings have only now been published in local media.

Image Credit : Iderkhangai Tumur-Ochir

Iderkhangai Tumur-Ochir, leader of the archaeological research team from Ulaanbaatar State University said: “The city is believed to have originated in the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia, according to ancient sources.”

The researchers revealed that the city has a double wall and a man-made pool used for water management or a reservoir. Excavations found the remains of a structure that was decorated with an ancient kanji inscription stating, “Son of Heaven” which is the first evidence found within the region to suggest the site is the Dragon City of Luncheng.

Iderkhangai told Xinhua “”As a result of more than a decade of research on the political centre of the Xiongnu Empire, I am very happy that we have discovered and excavated the empire’s capital Dragon City or Luncheng City”

Header Image Credit : Iderkhangai Tumur-Ochir

Climate Scientists Increasingly Ignore Ecological Role of Indigenous People

In their zeal to promote the importance of climate change as an ecological driver, climate scientists increasingly are ignoring the profound role that indigenous peoples played in fire and vegetation dynamics, not only in the eastern United States but worldwide, according to a Penn State researcher.

“In many locations, evidence shows that indigenous peoples actively managed vast areas and were skilled stewards of the land,” said Marc Abrams, professor of forest ecology and physiology. “The historical record is clear, showing that for thousands of years indigenous peoples set frequent fires to manage forests to produce more food for themselves and the wildlife that they hunted, and practiced extensive agriculture.”

Responding to an article published earlier this year in a top scientific journal that claimed fires set by Native Americans were rare in southern New England and Long Island, New York, and played minor ecological roles, Abrams said there is significant evidence to the contrary.


In an article published today (July 20) in Nature Sustainability, Abrams, who has been studying the historical use of fire in eastern U.S. forests for nearly four decades, refutes those contentions.

“The palaeoecological view — based on a science of analyzing pollen and charcoal in lake sediments — that has arisen over the last few decades, contending that anthropogenic fires were rare and mostly climate-driven, contradicts the proud legacy and heritage of land use by indigenous peoples, worldwide,” he said.

In his article, Abrams, the Nancy and John Steimer Professor of Agricultural Sciences in the College of Agricultural Sciences, argues that the authors of the previous paper assumed that the scarcity of charcoal indicated that there had not been burning. But frequent, low-intensity fires do not create the amount of charcoal that intense, crown-level, forest-consuming wildfires do, he pointed out.


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“Surface fires set by indigenous people in oak and pine forests, which dominate southern New England, often produced insufficient charcoal to be noticed in the sediment,” said Abrams. “The authors of the earlier article did not consider charcoal types, which distinguish between crown and surface fires, and charcoal size — macro versus micro — to differentiate local versus regional fires.”

Also, lightning in New England could not account for the ignition of so many fires, Abrams argues. In southern New England, lightning-strike density is low and normally is associated with rain events.

“The region lacks dry lightning needed to sustain large fires,” he said. “Moreover, lightning storms largely are restricted to the summer when humidity is high and vegetation flammability is low, making them an unlikely ignition source.”

Early explorers and colonists of southern New England routinely described open, park-like forests and witnessed, firsthand, Native American vegetation management, Abrams writes in his article, adding that oral history and numerous anthropological studies indicate long-term burning and land-use for thousands of years by indigenous people.

Burning near Native American villages and along their extensive trail systems constitutes large land areas, and fires would have kept burning as long as fuel, weather and terrain allowed, he explained. Following European settlement, these open oak and pine woodlands increasingly became closed by trees that previously were held in check by frequent fire.

The authors of the previous paper also argued that fire should not be used as a present-day management tool, a view that Abrams does not support.

The role of anthropogenic fires is front and center in the long-running climate-disturbance debate, according to Abrams, who notes that fires increased with the rise of human populations. The world would be a very different place without those fires, he contends.

“Surprisingly, the importance of indigenous peoples burning in vegetation-fire dynamics is increasingly downplayed among paleoecologists,” he writes. “This applies to locations where lightning-caused fires are rare.”

Abrams points out that he is not denying the importance of climate in vegetation and fire dynamics or its role in enhancing the extent of human fires. “However,” he writes, “in oak-pine forests of southern New England, Native American populations were high enough, lighting-caused fires rare enough, vegetation flammable enough and the benefits of burning and agriculture great enough for us to have confidence in the importance of historic human land management.”

PENN STATE

Header Image Credit : Public Domain

Google Launches Hieroglyphic Translator
Google has launched a new translator for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics based on machine learning.

The translator is part of Google’s arts & culture application “Fabricius” that has been in development through the Ubisoft Hieroglyphics Initiative first launched at the British Museum in 2017.

In collaboration with Google, the Australian Center for Egyptology, at Macquarie University, Psycle Interactive, Ubisoft, and Egyptologists from around the world, the project was created to determine the possibility of using machine learning to process and collate the language of the Ancient Egyptians.
Image Credit : Google

Hieroglyphics was the formal writing system of Ancient Egypt, with the first decipherable sentence dating to the Second Dynasty (28th century BC). Hieroglyphics combine logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements with over 1,000 distinct characters.

With the final closing of pagan temples across Egypt in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost until their decipherment in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

Fabricius allows users to upload images of hieroglyphs, which the software then tries to match with symbols in a database and analyse historical records and definitions to decipher the different meanings.

Dr Alex Woods, from the Australian Centre for Egyptology told the BBC: “Digitising textual material that was up until now only in handwritten books will completely revolutionise how Egyptologists do business. Digitised and annotated texts could potentially help us to reconstruct broken texts on the walls and even to discover texts we didn’t know were there.”

Fabricius Application

Header Image Credit : Public Domain

Breakthrough in Studying Ancient DNA From Doggerland That Separates The UK From Europe


Thousands of years ago the UK was physically joined to the rest of Europe through an area known as Doggerland. However, a marine inundation took place during the mid-holocene, separating the British landmass from the rest of Europe, which is now covered by the North Sea.

Scientists from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick have studied sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) from sediment deposits in the southern North Sea, an area which has not previously been linked to a tsunami that occurred 8150 years ago.

The paper, led by the University of Bradford and involving Universities of Warwick, Wales St. Trinity David, St. Andrews, Cork, Aberystwyth, Tartu as well as the Smithsonian and Natural History Museum, ‘Multi-Proxy Characterisation of the Storegga Tsunami and Its Impact on the Early Holocene Landscapes of the Southern North Sea’, published in the Journal Geosciences, sees Life Scientists from the University of Warwick work specifically on the sedimentary ancient DNA from Doggerland.


A number of innovative breakthroughs were achieved by the University of Warwick scientists in terms of analysing the sedaDNA. One of these was the concept of biogenomic mass, where for the first time they were able to see the how the biomass changes with events, evidence of this presented in the paper refers to the large woody mass of trees from the tsunami found in the DNA of the ancient sediment.

New ways of authenticating the sedaDNA were also developed, as current methods of authentication do not apply to sedaDNA which has been damaged whilst under the sea for thousands of years because there is too little information for each individual species. Researchers therefore came up with a new way, metagenomic assessment methodology, whereby the characteristic damage found at the ends of ancient DNA molecules is collectively analysed across all species rather than one.

Alongside this a key part of analysing the sedaDNA is to determine whether or not it was deposited in situ or has moved over time. This led researchers to develop statistical methods to establish which scenario was appropriate, using stratigraphic integrity they were able to determine that the sedaDNA in the sediment deposits had not moved a massive amount since deposition by assessing the biomolecules vertical movement in the core column of the sedaDNA.


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Identifying which organisms the ancient fragmented molecules of DNA came from is also challenging because often there is nothing to directly compare. In a fourth innovation the researchers refined algorithms to define these regions of “dark phylogenetic space” from where organisms must have originated overcome this issue.

Professor Robin Allaby from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick comments: “This study represents an exciting milestone for sedimentary ancient DNA studies establishing a number of breakthrough methods to reconstruct an 8,150 year old environmental catastrophe in the lands that existed before the North Sea flooded them away into history.”

Professor Vince Gaffney from the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford said: “Exploring Doggerland, the lost landscape underneath the North Sea, is one of the last great archaeological challenges in Europe. This work demonstrates that an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and scientists can bring this landscape back to life and even throw new light on one of prehistory’s great natural disasters, the Storegga Tsunami.

“The events leading up to the Storegga tsunami have many similarities to those of today. Climate is changing and this impacts on many aspects of society, especially in coastal locations.”

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Header Image Credit : Daleyhl

Ancient Ancestors of Domestic Cat was Opportunistic

An international study by researchers from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen has determined that the first known cats in Europe were opportunistic and did not rely directly on humans for survival.

The study reveals that around 6,200 to 4,300 years ago cats survived by hunting wild animals such as rodents and were closely associated with human agriculture.

The African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica) is the ancestor of all present-day domestic cats. The sandy-colored animals originated on the African continent. “Around 6,000 years ago, the animals also became established in Europe, where they spread as domesticated cats,” explains Prof. Dr. Hervé Bocherens of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, and he continues, “The oldest fossils date back about 6,200 years and were discovered in Poland. We asked ourselves how these animals were domesticated after they spread into Europe.”


To answer these questions, Bocherens, together with the study’s lead author, Magdalena Krajcarz of the Nikolaus Kopernikus University in Toruń, Poland, and an international team, measured stable isotopes in the fossilized cats’ bone collagen.

The different isotope ratios allow scientists to make inferences about the animals’ diet. “We examined a total of six cat fossils from discovery sites in Poland. For comparison purposes, we also measured fossils of the oldest known domestic cats from Poland as well as 34 additional animals that occurred alongside the cats in Europe around 6,000 years ago,” explains the scientist from Tübingen.

The study aims to also reconstruct the historical connections between humans and cats by studying the ecology and sociology of the immigrated African wildcats.
The study’s results show that the newly arrived ancestors of the domestic cat did not entirely rely on humans. Bocherens explains, “The bones in the cat fossils contain evidence of rodents that occurred in close association with human agriculture, along with signs of wild prey animals.” These analysis results indicate that the ancestors of modern domestic cats continued to live in the wild and only obtained part of their diet near human habitations. “This means that the animals were not synanthropic, i.e., entirely adapted to humans and their environment, but – contrary to the dogs of that period – led an ‘opportunistic’ lifestyle.

When they were unable to find food in the wild, which they had to share with the native European wildcats, they were not averse to foraging in the vicinity of human dwellings,” says Bocherens in summary, and he adds, “The native European wildcats also fed on these rodents, so there really was a direct competition for food between the two forms. However, due to the ample food supply, this apparently did not lead to the displacement of either one of these felines.”

Universität Tübingen