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Tag Archives: Ancestor
We can still see these 5 traces of ancestor species in all human bodies today
Many of us are returning to work or school after spending time with relatives over the summer period. Sometimes we can be left wondering how on earth we are related to some of these people with whom we seemingly have nothing in common (especially with a particularly annoying relative).
However, in evolutionary terms, we all share ancestors if we go far enough back in time. This means many features in our bodies stretch back thousands or even millions of years in our great family tree of life.
In biology, the term “homology” relates to the similarity of a structure based on descent from a shared common ancestor. Think of the similarities of a human hand, a bat wing and a whale flipper. These all have specialist functions, but the underlying body plan of the bones remains the same.
Волков Владислав Петрович/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
This differs from “analogous” structures, such as wings in insects and birds. Although they serve a similar function, the wings of a dragonfly and the wings of a parrot have arisen independently, and don’t share the same evolutionary origin.
Here are five examples of ancient traits you might be surprised to learn are still seen in humans today.
One step ahead
What makes us human? This question has plagued scientists and scholars for centuries. Today it seems relatively straightforward to tell who is a human and who is not, but looking through the fossil record, things very quickly become less clear.
Does humanity begin with the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, from 300,000 years ago? Or should we stretch things back more than three million years to ancestors such as “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis) from eastern Africa? Or even further back to our split from the other great apes?
Whatever line you draw in the sand to pinpoint the birth of humanity, one thing is certain. The act of habitually walking around on two legs, known as “bipedalism”, was one of our ancestors’ greatest steps.
Microgen/Shutterstock
Almost every part of our skeleton was affected by the switch from walking on all fours to standing upright. These adaptations include the alignment and size of the foot bones, hip bones, knees, legs, and vertebral column.
Importantly, we know from fossil skulls that rapid increases in our brain size occurred shortly after we started walking upright. This required changes to the pelvis to allow for our larger-brained babies to fit through a widened birth canal.
Our broadened pelvis (sometimes called iliac flaring) is a homologous feature shared with several lineages of early fossil humans, as well as all those living today.
Those big brains of ours then fuelled an explosion of art, culture and language, important concepts when considering what makes us human.
A hole in your head
In addition to your eyeballs sitting in their orbits, you may be surprised to learn that you have other large holes (known as fenestrae) in your skull.
A single window is found on each side of the human skull, uniting us with our shared common ancestors from over 300 million years ago.
Animals with this single window in their skulls are known as synapsids. The word means “fused arch”, referring to the bony arch found underneath the opening in the skull behind each eye.
Today all mammals, including humans, are synapsids (but reptiles and birds are not).
Other famous synapsids from prehistoric times include the often misidentified Dimetrodon. The sail-backed ancient reptile is commonly mistaken for a dinosaur. However, with its sprawling limbs and single temporal fenestra it instead belongs to a lineage sometimes referred to as “mammal-like reptiles”, although we prefer the more accurate term of synapsid.
David Roland/Shutterstock
10 little fingers and 10 little toes
I am typing this article on my computer using ten of my digits (fingers and thumbs; digits also refer to toes but mine don’t reach the keyboard).
This pattern of five digits in the human hand or foot, known as a “pentadactyl limb”, is found in most amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.
But fish don’t have fingers and toes, so when was it that digits first evolved?
A recent study by myself and colleagues actually described the first digits found preserved within a fish fin. We used powerful imaging methods to peer inside a 380-million-year-old fossil called Elpistostege from Quebec, Canada, to reveal the oldest fish fingers!
Somewhat surprisingly, the first fish to evolve digits still retained fin rays around them so these bones would not have been visible on the animal externally.
The earliest tetrapods (four-limbed animals with a backbone that eventually moved out of water and onto land) “experimented” with the number of digits, sometimes being found with six, seven or eight of them.
These earliest tetrapods were likely still living in the water. It wasn’t until tetrapods became truly terrestrial that the five-digit limb arrived. This arrangement most likely arose as a practical solution to weight bearing on land.
Long in the tooth
Does your mind wander when you brush your teeth? Well, have you ever considered how evolutionarily old your pearly whites are?
In 2022 a team of palaeontologists described isolated fossil fish teeth from Silurian age rocks in Guizhou province, China. This remarkable discovery pushed the minimum age of teeth back a further 14 million years from previous findings. This means our dentition now harks back to a whopping 439 million years ago.
Citron/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
That new fish, a very early jawed vertebrate, was named Qianodus duplicis and is only known from isolated specialised teeth known as “whorls”. A tooth whorl is a bizarre row of teeth that curls in on itself in a spiral pattern (most famously present in the buzz-saw shark, Helicoprion).
Nevertheless, the teeth in the Chinese jawed fish have a number of features found in other modern jawed vertebrates, which highlight their relevance in understanding the evolution of our very own gnashers. Chomp on that!
Grow a spine
To “grow a spine” means to become emboldened and confident. The first animals to do just that must have surely been courageous to venture out into the perilous ancient seas 500 million years ago.
First, these worm-like animals evolved a “notochord” – a rod built of cartilage running along the back of the body. This enabled the attachment of segmented muscle blocks and a long tail extending beyond the anus. All animals with a notochord are called chordates, and includes everything from sea squirts to sea gulls, comprising more than 65,000 living species.
To get an idea of the first chordates, today we can look to animals such as the lancelet (known as Amphioxus or Branchiostoma). Lancelets look a bit like tiny, primitive fishes without fins. They swim by undulating their body from side to side.
Hans Hillewaert/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Next come those with well organised heads (craniates), and those in which the notochord is replaced by a backbone in adults (vertebrates).
A backbone is built of individual segmented bones (vertebrae) which fit together in a specific interlocking pattern. We have a few tantalising fossils representing the earliest known examples of vertebrates, such as Metaspriggina known from Canada, or Haikouichthys from China in rocks more than 500 million years old.
So, whether it be your large brain and broad pelvis from walking around upright, skull with a single opening and bony arch, your fingers, toes, teeth or spinal cord, we humans share many ancient features in our bodies.
And so, in the words of the poet and activist Maya Angelou, it may be worth remembering that we are more alike than we are unalike.
Ancient Human Ancestor Walked on Two Legs 7 Million Years Ago, Scientists Find : ScienceAlert
The switch to walking on two legs, instead of four, is a major moment in the evolution of our species, which is why scientists are keen to pinpoint exactly when it happened – and a new study puts the adaptation as happening around 7 million years ago.
That’s based on a detailed analysis of thigh (femur) and forearm (ulna) fossils from Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the oldest representative species of humanity. These fossils were first discovered in Toros-Menalla in Chad in 2001.
At the same time, it’s probably likely these early hominins did a fair bit of tree climbing using all four limbs as well – as you would expect if the species made the gradual shift from four legs to two legs.
“Here we present postcranial evidence of the locomotor behavior of S. tchadensis, with new insights into bipedalism at the early stage of hominin evolutionary history,” write the researchers in their published paper.
By comparing the thigh and forearm fossils with the equivalent bones from humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, the researchers were able to figure out the mechanics of how they were used, and how this species moved about (its “locomotor mode”).
A total of 20 different characteristics of the fossilized bones were used to establish whether S. tchadensis walked on two legs or four, including the outer shape of the remains and the internal structures, assessed via microtomography imaging.
They concluded that “habitual bipedality” with some tree climbing was the most likely scenario.
The team also suggests that there is a difference between the way the species climbed trees compared to gorillas and chimpanzees of today: with firm hand grips, rather than leaning back on finger and toe bones.
“The curvature and cross-sectional geometric properties of the ulna… are indicative of habitual arboreal behaviors, including climbing and/or ‘cautious climbing’, rather than terrestrial quadrupedalism,” write the researchers.
The research builds on an earlier study of a skull fossil dug up at the same site and thought to also belong to S. tchadensis. The skull analysis suggested that these ape-like creatures were bipedal, but now there’s more comprehensive evidence.
The fossils date from around the time (between 6-8 million years ago) that humans split off genetically from chimpanzees and bonobos, which are our closest still-living relatives, so it’s a crucial stage – and one that has already attracted plenty of scientific debate.
These early hominins would have probably lived in an environment that mixed forests, palm groves and grasslands, with both walking on two legs and clambering up trees being options for them as they looked for food and water.
“The most parsimonious hypothesis remains that the postcranial morphology of Sahelanthropus is indicative of bipedality and that any other hypothesis would have less explanatory power for the set of features presented by the material from Chad,” write the researchers.
The research has been published in Nature.
Mammal ancestor looked like a chubby lizard with a tiny head and had a hippo-like lifestyle
An animal that lived before the dinosaurs looked like a rotund lizard with a very small head and had a hippo-like semiaquatic lifestyle, according to fossils that were recently excavated in France.
The amphibious animal, which represents a previously unknown genus and species of mammal ancestor, measured about 12 feet (4 meters) long, researchers reported in the October issue of the journal Palaeo Vertebrata, published online in July. They dubbed the new species Lalieudorhynchus gandi; it lived about 265 million years ago on the Pangaea supercontinent, just before the era of the dinosaurs.
Fossils of the unusual animal were first discovered in 2001 in the Lodève Basin in southern France, by study co-author and paleontologist Jörg Schneider, a professor in the Department of Paleontology and Stratigraphy at the University of Freiberg in Germany, and doctoral candidate Frank Körner. They found two large ribs, each measuring 24 inches (60 centimeters) long, in a rocky streambed. During later visits to the site, Körner found additional bones from the mystery animal: a femur measuring 14 inches (35 cm) long, and a shoulder blade measuring 20 inches (50 cm) long.
Their analysis has been 20 years in the making, largely because the fossils were encased in concrete-hard sandstone and their preparation took years to complete, the researchers reported in the study.
From this partial but well-preserved skeleton, the paleontologists deduced that the primitive creature was a type of caseid — an extinct group of fossil reptiles that possessed mammalian traits and are thought to be mammal ancestors — in the genus Lalieudorhynchus. Described in the press release as a “chubby lizard” and as a 3.5-meter-long “pile of meat”, the creature lived during the Permian, a period that began about 299 million years ago and ended about 252 million years ago with the onset of the Triassic period (and the rise of the dinosaurs).
Related: Ancient hippo-size reptile was a quick and ferocious killing machine
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Caseids were mainly herbivores — perhaps some of the earliest herbivores in evolutionary history. They had small heads and barrel-shaped bodies that held large digestive tracts for breaking down plants, and despite their reptilian appearance, caseids were ancestors of mammals. .
“The highly diverse group of mammal ancestors was the dominant group before the dinosaur ages,” Frederik Spindler, co-author of the study and scientific director at the Dinosaur Museum Altmühltal in Denkendorf, Germany, told Live Science. When Spindler examined the newfound fossils, he concluded that they belonged to a new species. There have been fewer than 20 species of caseids identified in the fossil record to date; most came from the United States and Russia, but some have recently been found in southern Europe, Spindler said.
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However, L. gandi could be a particularly advanced species of caseid, unlike any seen before, Spindler added. “New genera are diagnosed by detailed anatomical comparisons,” and the analysis on L. gandi was conducted by lead study author Ralf Werneburg, director of the Natural History Museum at Bertholdsburg Castle in Schleusingen, Germany, Spindler said. Werneburg identified five unique features “that are not known in any other caseids, and 20 more that make up a unique combination within this family,” Spindler explained.
This newly identified creature is not a so-called missing link in any evolutionary lineage of the mammal family tree, but its status as one of the youngest caseids yet found may be significant for understanding mammalian evolution. “It increases the known diversity of large caseids, marking them as a very important herbivorous group,” Spindler said. What’s more, L. gandi could be the pinnacle of evolution for all caseids before they went extinct, meaning that the species had the most advanced features in the group, Spindler said.
The structure of L. gandi‘s bones, which were spongy and flexible when viewed under a microscope, hinted to the study authors that the ancient caseid may have led a semiaquatic lifestyle, much like that of modern hippos. In life, L. gandi likely weighed hundreds of pounds, and all that body weight may have required extra support from immersion in water, according to the study.
However, L. gandi is not a hippo relative, and any similarities to modern hippos are in the ancient animal’s habits and not its anatomy, Spindler said.
“Spongy bones can imply a diving lifestyle in some extinct amphibians and marine reptiles,” Spindler said. By comparison, most mammals — including hippos — have denser bone tissue. “Our new caseid would swim better, whereas hippos walk closer to the ground,” Spindler said.
“A low browsing semiaquatic lifestyle is what large caseids share with hippos, if we are right,” Spindler said. “One could say that Lalieudorhynchus gandi ‘invented’ a niche that hippos repeated later.”
Originally published on Live Science.
The Saga of a World War II Ancestor of Miss Piggy, Bert and Yoda
The puppet stands 20 inches tall, hand-painted and carved out of wood, its uniform tattered and torn. But for all it has endured over more than 80 years — buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif. — it remains, with its black toothbrush mustache and right arm raised in a Nazi salute, immediately and chillingly recognizable.
It is a depiction of Hitler, hand-carved and painted in the late 1930s by an amateur Dutch puppeteer, Isidore (Mike) Oznowicz, and clothed by his Flemish wife, Frances, as they lived in prewar Belgium.
The Hitler marionette, an instrument of parody and defiance, offers an intriguing glimpse into the strong puppetry tradition in the family of the man who retrieved it from that attic: Frank Oz, one of its creators’ sons, who went on to become one of the 20th century’s best-known puppeteers, bringing Cookie Monster, Bert, Miss Piggy and others to life through his collaborations with Jim Henson, and later becoming a force in the Star Wars movies, giving voice to Yoda. The marionette will be shown publicly for the first time later this month at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
Oz’s father was drawn to puppetry from the day when, as an 11-year-old boy, he passed a street show of outsize, colorful Sicilian puppets in Antwerp. “As a youngster, I was interested in things three-dimensional,” Oznowicz told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. After they arrived in Oakland in 1951, Oz’s parents founded the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild, and the family living room became a gathering spot for puppet makers and enthusiasts from across the region. Oz learned how to string puppets from his father, and as a teenager, he earned $25 an hour doing puppet shows, and served as an apprentice puppeteer at Children’s Fairyland, an amusement park.
But Oz — who parlayed his successes in puppetry into a long career as an actor and a director — was never drawn to carrying on the family tradition.
“It was a great training ground for me until I hit 18 and I said, I’m done with this, I don’t want to be a puppeteer,” Oz, 78, said in a recent interview as he sat on a bench in Riverside Park in New York. “I never wanted to be a puppeteer. I want to be a journalist, actually.”
It was a chance encounter with Henson, whom he met at a puppeteer’s convention when he was still a teenager, that changed the course of his life.
“I really don’t care about puppets,” Oz said, under the mist of a light June rain. “I really don’t. And never did. And Jim showed me how to be successful. Then I became successful at the very thing that I didn’t initially want, but the joy was working with Jim and the Muppets.”
Oz was startled when he came across the puppet years ago in the attic of his family home in Oakland — “I thought, ‘Oh My God.’” He brought it to New York where he displayed it, along with seven marionette heads carved by his father, in a museum case in his apartment on the Upper West Side.
The puppet, the carved heads and a video interview Frank conducted with his father before his death in 1998, will be shown at “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History,” opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on July 21. (Frank’s nom-de-Hollywood is “Oz,” but his legal name remains Oznowicz.)
The exhibition tracks the remarkable story of this puppet and how Isidore, who was Jewish and was born in Amsterdam, and Frances, who was Catholic, fled Antwerp in 1940 as the Nazis advanced and bombs exploded across Belgium. At the urging of Frances’s mother, who was fearful that they would be captured with such a defiant marionette as they tried to outrace the Nazis, they buried the puppet in their backyard.
“He and Mom made a pact that when the bombs landed in Antwerp — and they were expecting that — they’d be ready go to,” said Ronald Oznowicz, 80, who is Frank’s older brother. “They had their bikes ready and their food ready. They had a whole plan and the object was to get to England.”
Isidore and Frances traveled through southern France, Spain, Morocco and Portugal — the tale of their journey is recounted in the video interview — before settling in England, where Frank and Ronald were born.
The family returned to Antwerp after the war and dug up the puppet. It was another five years before they obtained a visa and came to the United States. The puppet came with them. (A third child, Jenny, was born after they settled in the United States.)
“I have to tell you: This is a son’s remembrance,” Oz said. “My parents left Belgium in time. But sadly, half of his family was killed in the gas chambers because they didn’t leave. My father never really liked to talk about it. It was too difficult for him.”
“All these stories of my mother and father, they were just fairy tales to me,” he said.
Indeed, much of this story is murky, as it reconstructs the life of the parents of one of the men so instrumental in making the Muppets beloved: Isidore was, by day, a window trimmer and sign painter, and Frances became a dressmaker. It is not exactly clear how — or even if — the Hitler puppet was used in performances.
This exhibit came to be because of happenstance. “The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited,” which was first shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, was set to move this summer to The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the institution, in keeping with its mission, was looking for ways to place the exhibition in some sort of Jewish context.
“I was aware that Frank Oz was Jewish and wondered if there was any kind of story that Frank would want to tell here,” said Heidi Rabben, the senior curator of the museum. Karen Falk, the head archivist for the Henson collection, told her about the puppet that Oz had retrieved from his parents’ attic, and Rabben asked Oz if she could borrow it for this exhibit.
“It was such an incredibly inspiring story about resilience and resistance,” Rabben said. “That is what we are interested in: What are the ways we can share stories of the Holocaust? We have limited information and it’s very selective based on what our parents and grandparents chose to share. How do we make sure we never forget?”
The two exhibits will overlap for a few weeks; the Henson exhibit closes in mid-August.
The Hitler puppet is the centerpiece of “Oz is for Oznowicz.” The mustache, the hair and the eyebrows are painted black; Isidore carved the mustache so that it protrudes from the puppet. A Nazi arm band is strapped around the left arm. No effort was made to refurbish the Hitler puppet or any of the heads; they are being presented the way Frank found them. The marionette’s right leg is exposed because of a tear in the uniform.
Given its subject matter and the sensitivities of a museum dedicated to addressing questions of Jewish history, “Oz is for Oznowicz,” contains a warning for attendees: “This exhibition contains a marionette of Adolf Hitler that may be disturbing for some viewers. Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today.”
Isidore’s sons remember him as a man of pointed humor with a strong political sensibility, and said it was in character for him to use humor and parody for political effect. But once they made it back to the United States, and embarked on lives as immigrants in a new country, they tried to put that chapter of their lives behind them.
After their meeting at a convention of the National Puppeteers of America, Jim Henson asked Frank Oz to come to New York and work part-time with him for six months in 1963. He stayed with Henson until 1986.
Oz said he jumped at the chance to lend his parents’ work to the Henson exhibition.
“I want to show how people can express themselves in a positive way during a war — and make fun of people through other means,” he said. “I just want to honor my parents. I want to people to see how lucky we are right now, even in the terrible situation we are in right now.”
Astrophysicists Create “Time Machine” Simulations To Observe the Lifecycle of Ancestor Galaxy Cities
Scientists create “time machine” simulations studying the lifecycle of ancestor galaxy cities.
Many processes in astrophysics take a very long time, making their evolution tricky to study. For example, a star like our sun has a lifespan of about 10 billion years and galaxies evolve over the course of billions of years.
One way astrophysicists deal with this is by looking at various different objects to compare them at different stages of evolution. They can also look at distant objects to effectively peer back in time, because of the length of time the light took to travel to reach our telescopes. For example, if we are looking at an object 10 billion light years away, we are seeing it as it was 10 billion years ago.
Now, for the first time, researchers have created simulations that directly recreate the full life cycle of some of the largest collections of galaxies observed in the distant universe 11 billion years ago, reports a new study published on June 2, 2022, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Cosmological simulations are crucial to studying how the universe became the shape it is today, but many do not typically match what astronomers observe through telescopes. Most are designed to match the real universe only in a statistical sense. Constrained cosmological simulations, on the other hand, are designed to directly reproduce the structures we actually observe in the universe. However, most existing simulations of this kind have been applied to our local universe, meaning close to Earth, but never for observations of the distant universe.
A team of researchers, led by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe Project Researcher and first author Metin Ata and Project Assistant Professor Khee-Gan Lee, were interested in distant structures like massive galaxy protoclusters, which are ancestors of present-day galaxy clusters before they could clump under their own gravity. They found current studies of distant protoclusters were sometimes oversimplified, meaning they were done with simple models and not simulations.
Screenshots from the simulation show (top) the distribution of matter corresponding to the observed galaxy distribution at a light travel time of 11 billion years (when the Universe was only 2.76 billion years old or 20% its current age), and (bottom) the distribution of matter in the same region after 11 billion lights years or corresponding to our present time. Credit: Ata et al.
“We wanted to try developing a full simulation of the real distant universe to see how structures started out and how they ended,” said Ata.
Their result was COSTCO (COnstrained Simulations of The COsmos Field).
Lee said developing the simulation was much like building a time machine. Because light from the distant universe is only reaching Earth now, the galaxies telescopes observe today are a snapshot of the past.
“It’s like finding an old black-and-white picture of your grandfather and creating a video of his life,” he said.
In this sense, the researchers took snapshots of “young” grandparent galaxies in the universe and then fast forwarded their age to study how clusters of galaxies would form.
The light from galaxies the researchers used traveled a distance of 11 billion light-years to reach us.
What was most challenging was taking the large-scale environment into account.
“This is something that is very important for the fate of those structures whether they are isolated or associated with a bigger structure. If you don’t take the environment into account, then you get completely different answers. We were able to take the large-scale environment into account consistently, because we have a full simulation, and that’s why our prediction is more stable,” said Ata.
Another important reason why the researchers created these simulations was to test the standard model of cosmology, that is used to describe the physics of the universe. By predicting the final mass and final distribution of structures in a given space, researchers could unveil previously undetected discrepancies in our current understanding of the universe.
Using their simulations, the researchers were able to find evidence of three already published galaxy protoclusters and disfavor one structure. On top of that, they were able to identify five more structures that consistently formed in their simulations. This includes the Hyperion proto-supercluster, the largest and earliest proto-supercluster known today that is 5000 times the mass of our
Their work is already being applied to other projects including those to study the cosmological environment of galaxies, and absorption lines of distant quasars to name a few.
Details of their study were published in Nature Astronomy on June 2.
Reference: “Predicted future fate of COSMOS galaxy protoclusters over 11 Gyr with constrained simulations” by Metin Ata, Khee-Gan Lee, Claudio Dalla Vecchia, Francisco-Shu Kitaura, Olga Cucciati, Brian C. Lemaux, Daichi Kashino and Thomas Müller, 2 June 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01693-0
Human ‘hobbit’ ancestor may be hiding in Indonesia, new controversial book claims
Between about 700,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago, a diminutive early human walked the island of Flores, in what is now Indonesia. Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the “hobbit” because it stood only about 3 feet, 6 inches (106 centimeters) tall, was a small-brained, large-footed toolmaker, and no one knows where it evolved from.
Now, one anthropologist is arguing that no one really knows that H. floresiensis went extinct — and that it may survive into the modern day. In a new book, Gregory Forth, an anthropologist retired from the University of Alberta, argues that reports of an “ape-man” on Flores could be sightings of the ancient human ancestor, still kicking today.
“We simply don’t know when this species became extinct or indeed dare I say — I did dare say — we don’t even know if it is extinct,” Forth told Live Science. “So there is some possibility that it is still alive.”
Needless to say, this is a dramatic claim, and experts who study H. floresiensis are skeptical.
“Flores is an island that has about the same area of Connecticut and has two million people living on it today,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The population is spread out across the island, he added.
Related: Top 10 things that make humans special
“Realistically, the idea that there’s a large primate that is unobserved on this island and surviving in a population that can sustain itself is pretty close to zero,” Hawks told Live Science.
A long-lost relative
Forth sees it differently. He has been doing anthropological fieldwork on the island since 1984, and since that time has heard local stories of small, hairy, humanoid creatures living in the forest. He wrote about these tales in his research until 2003, when H. floresiensis was discovered. It was then, he told Live Science, that he made the connection.
“I heard about these similarly small humanlike creatures in a region called Lio, which were said to still be alive, and people were giving accounts of what they looked like,” Forth said. In one excerpt from his new book, “Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid,” (Pegasus Books, 2022), Forth describes an interview with a man who says he disposed of the corpse of a creature that could not have been a monkey but that was also not human, with straight light-colored hair on its body, a well-formed nose, and a stub of a tail. Over the years, Forth collected 30 eyewitness accounts of similar creatures that, he said, match the description of H. floresiensis.
Of course, there are many eyewitness accounts of cryptic creatures around the world, such as Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, said Mark Collard, an evolutionary anthropologist based at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Humans are adept at telling and believing stories, Collard told Live Science, and those stories can easily become central to people’s beliefs.
The tales of these “ape-men” on Flores are different from those of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest, Forth argued, because there have never been non-human apes in North America. But in Flores, he said, H. floresiensis indubitably did exist.
But how long did they exist? H. floresiensis bones were first found in Liang Bua cave on Flores in 2003. The youngest evidence of the hobbits using the cave dates back to 50,000 years ago, said Elizabeth Veatch, a zooarchaeologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who studies the species. Modern humans don’t appear on Flores until 47,000 years ago, Veatch told Live Science, and there is no evidence that the two species overlapped at Liang Bua cave. In fact, H. floresiensis wasn’t using the site much after 60,000 years ago, she said.
“Based on faunal evidence, there was likely an environmental change that occurred around 60,000 years ago that altered the landscape around Liang Bua which caused Homo floresiensis to migrate elsewhere on the island to forage in more suitable habitats,” Veatch said.
In 2014, archaeologists discovered another site on Flores, Mata Menge, with a fossil mandible and teeth from a hominin dating back to about 700,000 years ago. These bones are thought to be from a far older population of H. floresiensis. Stone tools were also found at the site.
These findings suggest that H. floresiensis had a long history on Flores (the species has not been found on any other island). But anthropologists and archaeologists have seen no indication that the hobbit lived alongside modern humans.
It is possible that they did, for a time, Thompson said. And if so, perhaps the stories in the Lio region of Flores are a very deep cultural memory. In Australia, Indigenous people have stories that clearly correspond to real events that occurred thousands of years prior, including a dramatic meteor strike. Something similar might be happening on Flores, Thompson said.
“What we might have is a situation where [H. floresiensis] potentially persisted in mythology for a really long time,” she told Live Science.
But Thompson, too, was skeptical that a 3-foot-tall primate could go largely undetected on Flores until the modern day.
“We do turn up species that we think are extinct in science, it happens,” she said, “But it’s small things. It’s not something that would be so noticeable.”
Collard agreed. “I just think we have to be very cautious with oral history,” he said. “I think it has value, but it has to be approached skeptically.”
Mysterious ancestor
That’s not to say that H. floresiensis isn’t mysterious. The two sites containing bones and tools from the primate date hundreds of thousands of years apart from each other, leaving a huge gap in history. Researchers do know that hobbit used cobbles to make sharp stone flakes, knifelike tools that could have been used to cut plants or meat or carve other tools out of wood, Hawks said. It’s unknown whether H. floresiensis used fire or hunted large prey.
Perhaps the biggest question about H. floresiensis is where the species came from. Anatomically, the “hobbit” has teeth that look much like those of other Homo species such as Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. H. floresiensis’ presence in Indonesia some 700,000 to 800,000 years ago predates H. sapiens’ arrival by a huge margin.
H. erectus, though, left Africa 1.8 million years ago, and popped up on what is today the island of Java before H. floresiensis in the fossil record. This raises the possibility that the hobbit descended from H. erectus and perhaps that it evolved a small body size as a result of island living, a phenomenon called island dwarfism.
But there are problems with that hypothesis. For one, Thompson told Live Science, H. erectus survived on other islands in Southeast Asia at its usual size until about 115,000 years ago, and it would be odd for island dwarfism to occur only on Flores and nowhere else over hundreds of thousands of years. And H. floresiensis has many anatomical features, such as its shoulders and wrists, that look less like its Homo cousins and more like earlier human ancestors such as Australopithecus.
“The anatomy doesn’t make it clear,” Hawks said.
The anatomical evidence suggests that H. floresiensis could have been the descendent of a human ancestor that left Africa before H. erectus, Collard said. If so, scientists haven’t yet found archaeological evidence for who that ancestor might have been or when they left.
Whatever the story of the journey, it must have been incredible. Tiny H. floresiensis or its ancestors somehow made it across continents and rough open water to land on the island of Flores. (There was always open water there, Collard said, even as sea levels rose and fell over hundreds of thousands of years.) Evidence of other early hominins, such as the Philippines’ Homo luzonensis, discovered in 2019 on the island of Luzon, suggests that human ancestors were doing far more than anthropologists and archaeologists ever believed possible.
“Was it an accidental rafting situation? Was it a deliberate rafting situation?” Collard said. “It seems unlikely, but were they able to use boats?”
Overlapping populations?
What researchers in human origins are now learning is that the interactions between early populations of Homo species were extraordinarily complex. It’s now common knowledge that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and that Neanderthal DNA persists in modern humans. Humans in Oceania and East Asia also interbred with another human ancestor, Denisovans, about which little is known. Remarkably, Hawks said, Denisovan genes persist in east Indonesian populations, suggesting that these human relatives were also living on these islands. No fossil record has been found of Denisovans in eastern Indonesia thus far, however.
The oldest cave art on record also comes from Indonesia, in the form of a red pig painted on the island of Sulawesi 45,500 years ago.This art may have been made by Homo sapiens.
There is no evidence that humans and H. floresiensis ever interbred. Scientists haven’t found any unknown genes in the modern Indonesian genome that could hail back to the little hominin. The timing of the fossils that have been found suggest that the hobbit could have been living happily on Flores until modern humans showed up and wiped it out, inadvertently or not, Hawks said.
“It’s very plausible that modern humans are responsible for its extinction,” he said.
Or perhaps there are newer H. floresiensis fossils waiting to be found that will prove that the two Homo species overlapped. The last decade has been a golden age for Indonesian archaeology and international collaborations between local scientists and the rest of the world, Hawks said. It’s almost certain that more discoveries are to come.
“The fact that we only have a handful of sites that represent almost a million years of habitation of some of these places tells us that there’s a whole lot that we haven’t found,” Hawks said.
Originally published on Live Science
NASA Hubble Archives Reveal Mysterious Ancestor of Supermassive Black Holes
An illustration of what GNz7q might have once looked like. Though they’re extremely rare, examples of both dusty starburst galaxies and luminous quasars have been detected in the early universe. The team believes that GNz7q could be the “missing link” between these two classes of objects.
ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann
Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was born with a fierce Big Bang. For the following many millennia, however, it was more of an interstellar day care.
Our Milky Way galaxy was in its formative decades, baby stars were burping out their very first sparkles, and even black holes we now view as frightening giants were wispy eyelets just getting used to their strength, probably knocking over all the asteroid legos.
And to scientists’ surprise, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope unknowingly caught one such toddler void in its tracks, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Its birthday is about 750 million years post-Big Bang, and it’s nicknamed GNz7q. Adorable.
For years, this rapidly growing, soon-to-be-supermassive black hole had been hidden in old Hubble data despite living in one of the best-studied areas of the sky, one that’s covered by the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North. Then, one day, GNz7q appeared as a mysterious red dot amid space’s dark background.
The black hole can be seen as a bright red dot on the Hubble GOODS-North field sky survey.
NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, P. Oesch, R. Bouwens and I. Labbé, and the Science Team, S. Fujimoto et al.
“GNz7q is a unique discovery that was found just at the center of a famous, well-studied sky field,” Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer from the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “It’s unlikely,” he added, “that discovering GNz7q within the relatively small GOODS-North survey area was just ‘dumb luck,’ but rather that the prevalence of such sources may in fact be significantly higher than previously thought.”
In other words, there may be a bunch more baby black holes that were accidentally overlooked and are waiting to be found. GNz7q might also help scientists achieve an even greater cosmic task: decoding the origin of supermassive black holes.
Connecting the cosmic dots
“Supermassive” barely begins to explain how absolutely gigantic black holes can get. These voids are millions of times the size of our sun. For context, a million Earths could fit within our host star. I don’t even want to think about how many could nestle into an enormous black hole.
Anyway, because of this, a longstanding question for astronomers is one you may be pondering right now: How do some black holes get so big? Where does it all start?
“Understanding how supermassive black holes form and grow in the early universe has become a major mystery,” Brammar said in a statement.
GNz7q might be able to help with that.
Brammar explains that scientists think supermassive black holes originate in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, or galaxies that pop out stars super quickly. Then, while chomping on all the starburst dust and gas, the abyss presumably gains lots of heat and eventually emerges from its cocoon accompanied by a quasar, or luminous central jet.
Somewhere along the way, these black holes are thought to relentlessly grow in size and turn into the spectacles we observe.
However, even though scientists have found both starburst galaxies and dazzling quasars in the past to bolster the beginning and end of the theory, the story’s middle chapters are based on computer simulations. An intermediary between the starburst galaxy start and quasar finale hadn’t been observed before — until GNz7q, that is.
“GNz7q provides a direct connection between these two rare populations and provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early days of the universe,” Seiji Fujimoto, an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the paper, said in a statement.
An artist’s concept of a galaxy with a brilliant quasar at its center.
NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)
In essence, though it lived during an era known as the Cosmic Dawn, GNz7q could finally explain how supermassive black holes that reside in later epochs of the universe came to be. NASA even calls the ancient chasm a potential “missing link” for the supermassive black hole origin theory, especially because it also exhibits a ton of similarities with both quasars and starburst galaxies.
“The object’s properties across the electromagnetic spectrum are in excellent agreement with predictions from theoretical simulations,” Fujimoto said. For instance, its redness on the GOODS-North survey is likely the product of quasar light that’s reddened due to starburst dust.
NASA James Webb to study an ancient black hole
Hubble has been on a roll lately, having recently spotted things like the most distant single star humanity has ever laid eyes on and a mesmerizing comet with a “dirty snowball” nucleus.
And even aside from our trusty telescope, astronomy revelations seem to be ramping up as a whole. One team, for example, located a candidate for the most distant galaxy we’ve ever seen, and it feels like we’re gaining new knowledge about exoplanets by the day.
This steady influx of interstellar object sightings is all wonderful news for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and GNz7q’s saga is no exception.
Webb is already poised to use its unprecedented infrared imaging capabilities to unveil the universe’s deepest, and literally darkest, secrets. It has the power to peer way, way (way) into the past, just after the Big Bang, which is why it’s going to be an excellent tool to study Hubble’s newly discovered black hole in immense detail.
An artist’s conception of the James Webb Space Telescope flying through space.
Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, NASA Animator
“Fully characterizing these objects and probing their evolution and underlying physics in much greater detail will become possible with the James Webb Telescope,” Fujimoto said. “Once in regular operation, Webb will have the power to decisively determine how common these rapidly growing black holes truly are.”
Now up in orbit, Webb is expected to send its first images back this summer. And when we have our first look at those highly anticipated pictures, we may want to remember an important message that GNz7q’s unexpected discovery has offered us.
As Brammer puts it, “It shows that big discoveries can often be hidden just in front of you.”
Scientists investigate supermassive black hole ancestor from universe’s ‘cosmic dawn’
Early in our universe’s history, a strange object formed. Studying the object in archival data, scientists now find that it appears to be somewhere between a galaxy and a quasar (distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our sun.)
Researchers investigating the object in a new study have termed the object, dubbed GNz7q, the “ancestor of a supermassive black hole,” as it was created just 750 million years after the Big Bang took place, sparking our universe 13.8 billion years ago.
“The discovered object connects two rare populations of celestial objects, namely dusty starbursts and luminous quasars, and thereby provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe,” lead study author Seiji Fujimoto, a postdoctoral fellow based at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, said in a university statement.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
The team spotted the object in archival data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope through a project called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), which links Hubble and other space observatories to survey the deep universe, according to the Space Telescope Research Institute in Baltimore, which operates Hubble.
It’s common for new discoveries to be made from such archival data revisited with the latest techniques and models, but the strange object is still noteworthy because it is in a particularly well-studied patch of sky called GOODS North.
“GNz7q is a unique discovery that was found just at the center of a famous, well-studied sky field — it shows that big discoveries can often be hidden just in front of you,” Gabriel Brammer, a co-author on the new research and an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement. “It’s unlikely that discovering GNz7q within the relatively small GOODS-North survey area was just ‘dumb luck,’ but rather that the prevalence of such sources may in fact be significantly higher than previously thought.”
GNz7q is located in a region of intense star birth, in a galaxy that forms stars roughly 1,600 times faster than our own galaxy, the Milky Way. As these stars are formed, they generate cosmic dust, which causes the galaxy to glow in infrared light — so bright that its dust makes it more luminous than any other known object of its era, the researchers said in the same statement.
Researchers think that GNz7q represents a transition phase that has not yet been spotted so early in the universe’s history. The object’s origins may tell scientists more about how supermassive black holes evolve, as it may reveal more about how the interplay of gas and dust could influence the growth of a black hole, the team suggested.
“Although luminous quasars had already been found even at the earliest epochs of the universe, the transition phase of rapid growth of both the black hole and its star-bursting host had not been found at similar epochs,” Brammer said in the University of Copenhagen statement.
Given that GNz7q’s properties match well with the theory, Brammer added, indications are “GNz7q is the first example of the transitioning, rapid growth phase of black holes at the dusty star core, an ancestor of the later supermassive black hole.”
The team plans to scour other datasets from high-resolution surveys, as well as forthcoming information from the James Webb Space Telescope that should see first light around June.
“Fully characterizing these objects and probing their evolution and underlying physics in much greater detail will become possible with the James Webb Telescope. Once in regular operation, Webb will have the power to decisively determine how common these rapidly growing black holes truly are,” Fujimoto said.
A study based on the research was published in Nature on Wednesday (April 13).
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Hubble Space Telescope Spots a Supermassive Black Hole Ancestor GNz7q Hiding in Plain Sight
For years, astronomers have been searching for a “missing link” that bridges quasars—a term for incredibly bright supermassive black holes—and star-forming galaxies known as “starburst” galaxies. Such a discovery would help better our understanding of the origins of the universe and how galaxies form (and by extension, stars like the sun and planets like Earth). While modeling and simulations suggested that these objects existed, it hadn’t actually been observed—that is, until now.
An international team of astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen published a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday detailing the discovery of an ancient ancestor of supermassive black holes. The object—dubbed GNz7q—was born 750 million years after the Big Bang in an epoch known as the “Cosmic Dawn.”
The team believe that GNz7q might be the missing link that helps confirm theories that supermassive black holes can emerge from star-forming galaxies. The object also gives researchers even further insight into the formation of the universe.
A picture of GNz7q captured by the Hubble Space Telescope can be seen as a red dot in the center of the image on the right.
NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (UC Santa Cruz), Pascal Oesch (UC Santa Cruz, Yale), Rychard Bouwens (LEI), I. Labbe (LEI), Cosmic Dawn Center/Niels Bohr Institute/University of Copenhagen, Denmark
“The rapid formation and evolutionary mechanisms of supermassive black holes are still one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy,” Seiji Fujimoto, a galaxies and black hole researcher at University of Copenhagen and the lead author of the new study, told The Daily Beast in an email. He later added that the discovery of GNz7q “paves a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of the supermassive black holes in the early universe.”
Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, Fujimoto and his team were able to peer into GNz7q’s host galaxy and discover a chaotically intense star factory. The galaxy is pumping out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way. Such conditions are optimal for researching the origins of quasars, making it a perfect spot to find an object like GNz7q.
“Its properties are clearly in between these very luminous quasars that others have discovered in the early universe, as well as galaxies,” Gabriel Brammer, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of the study, told The Daily Beast. “It kind of sits halfway between the two, which is part of why we’re excited about this object. It’s a case study for how these two phenomena are connected.”
He added that he and his team believe GNz7q to be the first observed example of an “ancestor of supermassive black holes.”
Ironically, the object was discovered in an often observed and studied region of space called the Hubble GOODS North field. For years, it went undiscovered, hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t until Brammer gathered and analyzed all of the datasets from Hubble holistically that the team was able to pick out GNz7q.
“That particular object pops out as being the brightest of these very distant galaxies in that field,” Brammer explained. “At the same time it had this very unique appearance of being a very compact source. That’s characteristic of black holes.”
Fujimoto added: “We started to think that the object could be the missing link between galaxies and the emergence of the supermassive black hole in the early universe.”
Since the North field is a relatively small area of space too, Brammer believes that objects like GNz7q could be “more common than we thought.” Luckily, now that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is up in orbit, the team now hopes that they’ll be able to utilize the powerful observatory to research GNz7q further—and potentially find other objects like it.
“JWST will have the power to decisively determine how common these rapidly growing black holes truly are,” Fujimoto explained. “So perhaps, we might soon discover the second, third, or even more number of objects similar to GNz7q in the coming years.”