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Health

Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat

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Researchers were reexamining the fossilized bones of a Neanderthal who was found in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. The “Old Man of La Chapelle,” as he became known, was the first relatively complete Neanderthal skeleton to be unearthed and is one of the best studied.

More than a century after his discovery, his bones are still yielding new information about the lives of Neanderthals, the heavily built Stone Age hominins that lived in Europe and parts of Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago.

The man, thought to be in his late 50s or 60s when he died about 50,000 years ago, had advanced osteoarthritis in his spinal column and hip joint, a study from 2019 had confirmed.

However, during that reanalysis, Dr. Martin Haeusler — a specialist in internal medicine and head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine — realized that not all the changes in the bones could be explained by the wear and tear of osteoarthritis.

“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” he said.

“A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”

The study with those findings was published in the journal Scientific Reports last month.

Zoonotic disease

Brucellosis is a disease that’s still widespread today. Humans generally acquire the disease through direct contact with infected animals, by eating or drinking contaminated animal products, or by inhaling airborne agents, according to the World Health Organization. Most cases are caused by unpasteurized milk or cheese from infected goats or sheep.

It’s also one of the most common zoonotic diseases — illnesses that are transmitted from animals to humans. They include viruses like HIV and the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

Brucella has a wide range of symptoms, including fever, muscular pain and night sweats, Haeusler said. It can last from a few weeks to many months or even years. Long-term problems resulting from the disease are variable but can include arthritis pain, back pain, inflammation of the testes — which can lead to infertility — and inflammation of the heart valves known as endocarditis, which Haeusler said was the most common cause of death from the disease.

The paper said the case was “the earliest secure evidence of this zoonotic disease in hominin evolution.”

The disease has also been found in Bronze Age Homo sapiens skeletons, which date back to around 5,000 years ago.

Diet

Brucellosis is found in many wild animals today, and Haeusler said that the Neanderthal man likely caught the disease from butchering or cooking an animal that had been hunted as prey. Possible sources include wild sheep, goats, wild cattle, bison, reindeer, hares and marmots — all of which were components of the Neanderthal diet. However, the paper said that the two large animals Neanderthals hunted, mammoths and woolly rhinoceros, were unlikely to be the disease reservoir — at least based on the animals’ living relatives, in which brucellosis has been largely undetected.

Given the man lived to what must have been a very old age for the period, Haeusler suspected that the Neanderthal may have had a milder version of the disease.

The “Old Man of Chapelle” played a significant role in misconceptions about Neanderthals being primitive Stone Age brutes, according to the Smithsonian. More recent research suggests that they were just as smart as we are.

An early reconstruction of the skeleton depicted the man with a slouching posture, bent knees and the head jutted forward. It was only later that scientists realized the skeleton had a deforming kind of osteoarthritis and perhaps was not a typical Neanderthal.

Haeusler said the study he published in 2019 showed that, even with the wear and tear from degenerative osteoarthritis, the “Old Man of Chapelle” would have walked upright. The man also had lost most of his teeth and may have had to have been fed by other members of his group.

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Why Was This Ancient Tusk 150 Miles From Land, 10,000 Feet Deep?

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Mammoth tusks that are over 100,000 years old are “extremely rare,” Mr. Mol added, and studying one could give scientists new insights about the Lower Paleolithic, a poorly understood era of Earth’s history.

Scientists know that around 200,000 years ago Earth was experiencing a glacial period and our ancestors were migrating out of Africa. But they don’t know exactly how the planet’s changing climate affected mammoths and other large animals during this time. What is also unclear is how arrival to North America altered the genetic diversity of mammoths.

“We don’t really know much of anything about what was happening during that time period,” Dr. Fisher said. “We don’t have access to a lot of specimens from this time period and that’s due in large part to the fact that getting access to sediments of this age is difficult.”

Mammoths, the furry, small-eared relatives of modern elephants, first appeared around five million years ago and became extinct around 4,000 years ago. The first mammoths came out of Africa and spread north, evolving into distinct species along the way, until they had colonized much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The earliest mammoths to venture into North America were known as Krestovka or steppe mammoths. These mammoths came from Eurasia 1.5 million years ago and did so by marching across the Bering Strait, which wasn’t covered by water like it is today. Hundreds of thousands of years later, another species of mammoth, the woolly mammoth, also crossed the Bering Strait and joined their cousins in North America. The two hybridized to produce the Columbian mammoth, but no one knows exactly when. A recent study estimated that the hybridization event occurred at least 420,000 years ago, but more research is needed to confirm this.

If the tusk is as old as scientists suspect, it “could really help clarify the timing of this hybridization event,” said Pete Heintzman, an associate professor at the Arctic University Museum of Norway who studies the DNA of mammoths and other ice age creatures.

Although exposure to saltwater can be destructive to biological tissue, the deep sea can be ideal for DNA preservation.

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Perseverance rover on Mars bites into layered rocks in hunt for clues of ancient water

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NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has begun scraping away at an intriguing set of layered rocks that may have formed in liquid water.

“Peering inside to look at something no one’s ever seen,” Perseverance rover mission managers wrote in a Twitter update Tuesday (Nov. 9). “I’ve abraded a small patch of this rock to remove the surface layer and get a look underneath. Zeroing in on my next target for #SamplingMars.”

The rover has already collected two samples on its larger hunt to search for ancient microbes on Mars. The goal is to get a large set of these collections to place into a cache, and leave behind for a future sample-return mission to pick up.

In photos: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet

Image 1 of 3

These close-up photos show the drill marks mark on a layered Mars rock under study by NASA’s Perseverance rover for possible sample collection in November 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Image 2 of 3

These close-up photos show the drill marks mark on a layered Mars rock under study by NASA’s Perseverance rover for possible sample collection in November 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Image 3 of 3

These close-up photos show the drill marks mark on a layered Mars rock under study by NASA’s Perseverance rover for possible sample collection in November 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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Perseverance, which has been in remaining in place since a solar conjunction temporarily interrupted communications last month, is also on a larger mission to look for evidence on the floor of Jezero Crater and to characterize the geology of the area, among other duties.

The rover hasn’t moved very far since solar conjunction, with the odometer remaining at 1.66 miles (2.67 km) for several weeks. But its mission partner, the Ingenuity drone, has already taken to the air again. Ingenuity’s aerial photos are meant to provide a wider context for Perseverance’s work as the rover zeroes in on potential targets of interest.

Ingenuity completed its 15th Martian flight on Nov. 6 as it continues an extended mission testing out flying in changing conditions on the Red Planet, and assisting a land-bound rover with its work.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



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Ferocious ‘penis worms’ were the hermit crabs of the ancient seas

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The Cambrian period (543 million to 490 million years ago) brought the first great explosion of biodiversity to Earth, with the ancestors of practically all modern animals first appearing. One of the most feared among them was the penis worm.

Technically known as priapulids — named for Priapus, the well-endowed Greek god of male genitals — penis worms, as they’re commonly known, are a division of marine worms that have survived in the world’s oceans for 500 million years. Their modern descendants live largely unseen in muddy burrows deep underwater, occasionally freaking out fishermen with their floppy, phallus-shaped bodies. But fossils dating back to the early Cambrian show that penis worms were once a scourge of the ancient seas, widely distributed around the world and in possession of extendible, fang-lined mouths that could make a snack out of the poor marine creature that crossed them.

But, fearsome as they were, penis worms themselves were not without fear. In a new study published Nov. 7 in the journal Current Biology, researchers discovered four priapulid fossils that were nestled into the cone-shaped shells of hyoliths, a long-extinct group of marine animals.

Related: Image gallery: Bizarre Cambrian creatures

Because all of the worms were found in the same type of shell, and in roughly the same position, it’s likely that the worms had appropriated the shells as their homes, just as modern hermit crabs do, the researchers said.

If that’s the case, then it would seem that penis worms invented the “hermit” lifestyle hundreds of millions of years before the crustaceans that made it famous.

One of the fossils showing a penis worm chilling in the shell of a dead hyolith. (Image credit: Zhang Xiguang)

“The only explanation that made sense was that these shells were their homes — something that came as a real surprise,” study co-author Martin Smith, an associate professor of paleontology at Durham University in England, said in a statement via email.

The team discovered the four hermit penis fossils in the collections of the Guanshan fossil deposits, from southern China. These fossil deposits, dating to the early Cambrian (about 525 million years ago) are famous for preserving not just hard structures such as teeth and shells, but also soft tissue — like the bodies of priapulids — which are much rarer to find in the fossil record.

In each shell, the worm’s bottom sits squished into the bottom of the cone, while the worm’s head and mouth dangle out over the side — sort of like a melting swirl of soft-serve ice cream. According to the researchers, the fossil region contained dozens of other empty shells, but no other free-living priapulids, suggesting the connection between the two was no mere accident. Furthermore, each worm fit snugly in its sheath, suggesting the creatures chose their shells for permanent protection from Cambrian predators, rather than as temporary refuge.

This type of “hermiting” behavior has never been seen in priapulids before, nor in any species before the Mesozoic era (250 million to 65 million years ago), the researchers wrote. For Smith, it’s “mind-boggling” that this complex behavior could have emerged so soon after the great burst of biodiversity known as the Cambrian explosion, more than 500 million years ago. In the harsh world of the early ocean, it seems even fearsome penis worms had to get creative.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Ancient Comet May Have Turned Chilean Desert Into Glass

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Clods of glass in the Atacama Desert, site of an ancient fireball airburst.
Photo: R. Scott Harris

Nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Chilean coast are covered with oblong fragments of desert glass that researchers who recently studied them say came from a comet’s explosion over the Atacama Desert about 12,000 years ago.

The explosion was what’s called an airburst, which can happen when an object like a meteor or comet falls to Earth. These objects heat up due to friction with our planet’s atmosphere. While some burn up entirely in the atmosphere, other objects explode when they come in contact with thicker parts of the atmosphere. They can cause ground temperatures to be as hot as the Sun, with beyond-hurricane-force winds.

Such was the case for a comet that fell to Earth during the late Pleistocene, according to the team of researchers who studied the composition of the silicate glasses littered about Chile’s Atacama. They found the fireball’s explosion caused bits of space rock to fuse with the molten soils below, forming glasses. Their results were published this week in Geology.

“The Atacama is perfect for preserving the record,” Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University, told Gizmodo in an email. “The difference between other glasses across the Atacama and these glasses is that our glasses are really large and indicate complex interactions between the airburst, heating, and winds.

“In other words, it teaches us about the details of the event for the first time,” Schultz added. “We actually have more glasses in Argentina of much older ages but can show that these were produced by actual collisions.”

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Previously, a different team thought that the glasses came from ancient grass fires, long before the area became desert, that burned hot enough to transform the soil. But the recent team suspects an extraterrestrial object is the source of the geological oddity because of the unique mineral constitution and structure of the glasses, which showed evidence of being bent and transformed while still liquid. Those details have been observed in other airburst remnants and wouldn’t look so violent in grassfire glasses.

Furthermore, the team found minerals that come from other space rocks, like troilite and cubanite. Such inclusions are similar to those collected by NASA during the Stardust mission, from dust of the Wild-2 comet in 2004.

​​“Those minerals are what tell us that this object has all the markings of a comet,” said Scott Harris, a planetary geologist at the Fernbank Science Center and a co-author of the study, in a Brown University release. “To have the same mineralogy we saw in the Stardust samples entrained in these glasses is really powerful evidence that what we’re seeing is the result of a cometary airburst.”

The current age estimate of the airburst remains a work in progress on the testing front. The youngest date estimate, made by another co-author, was about 11,500 years ago. “There’s also a chance that this was actually witnessed by early inhabitants, who had just arrived in the region,” Schultz said in the same release. “It would have been quite a show.”

If not for humans, depending on the timing, one has to pity the doomed giant ground sloths and other megafauna in the area. They would’ve been burned to a crisp in an instant.

More: Here’s What Would Happen If a Giant Asteroid Struck the Ocean

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An ancient fireball turned miles of this desert to glass

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The research published Tuesday in the journal Geology.

About 12,000 years ago, intense heat turned Atacama’s sandy soil into vast areas of glass stretching for 46.6 miles (75 kilometers), but researchers weren’t sure what caused such a drastic change.

The Atacama Desert is the driest desert region on Earth, with incredibly little moisture or precipitation. The fragmented desert glass contains tiny mineral fragments that are often found in meteorites that land on Earth.

The minerals found in this glass matched up with particles collected by NASA’s Stardust mission, which sampled a comet known as Wild 2. The researchers are confident that the minerals found in the Chilean desert are what’s left after a comet similar to Wild 2 exploded over the sands and melted them.

“This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface,” said Pete Schultz, study author and a professor emeritus of geological science at Brown University and research professor at Brown’s department of earth, environmental and planetary sciences, in a statement. “To have such a dramatic effect on such a large area, this was a truly massive explosion. Lots of us have seen bolide (bright meteor) fireballs streaking across the sky, but those are tiny blips compared to this.”

The startling fields of glass, which appear dark green or black, stretch across an area east of the Pampa del Tamarugal plateau, located between the Andes Mountains and the Chilean Coastal Range. While volcanic activity can create this kind of glass, there was no evidence to support that the Atacama glass was formed that way.

Previously, researchers have suggested that ancient fires were the cause. The area once hosted grassy wetlands derived from rivers. If those ancient grasses burned in widespread wildfires, some believe it may have created the glass.

However, the glass itself is more complicated. Up close, it appears the glass pieces had been twisted, folded, rolled and thrown while they were still molten. This, the researchers say, would only be possible with an airburst explosion that can unleash winds rivaling those of tornadoes.

A chemical analysis of the glass revealed zircons, or minerals that thermally decomposed to form baddeleyite crystals. This change can only happen when temperature spike above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which would definitely exceed the heat generated by grass fires.

The analysis also showed minerals like cubanite and troilite, both found in the Wild 2 comet and meteorites.

“Those minerals are what tell us that this object has all the markings of a comet,” said Scott Harris, study coauthor and a planetary geologist at the Fernbank Science Center in Georgia, in a statement. “To have the same mineralogy we saw in the Stardust samples entrained in these glasses is really powerful evidence that what we’re seeing is the result of a cometary airburst.”

The researchers want to focus on dating the glass to determine its exact age, as well as the potential size of the comet, but their current expectation that the impact occurred 12,000 years ago aligns with when large mammals disappeared from the area.

“It’s too soon to say if there was a causal connection or not, but what we can say is that this event did happen around the same time as when we think the megafauna disappeared, which is intriguing,” Schultz said. “There’s also a chance that this was actually witnessed by early inhabitants, who had just arrived in the region. It would have been quite a show.”

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On ancient Earth, it never rained but it poured

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Today, we are experiencing the dramatic impacts that even a small increase in global temperatures can have on a planet’s climate. Now, imagine an Earth 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (11 – 17 C) hotter than today. Earth likely experienced these temperatures at various times in the distant past and will experience them again hundreds of millions of years from now as the sun continues to brighten.

Little is known about how the atmosphere and climate behaved during these so-called hothouse periods. In a new study, researchers from Harvard University found that during these epochs of extreme heat, Earth may have experienced cycles of dryness followed by massive rain storms hundreds of miles wide that could dump more than a foot of rain in a matter of hours.

“If you were to look at a large patch of the deep tropics today, it’s always raining somewhere,” said Jacob Seeley, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at Harvard and first author of the paper. “But we found that in extremely warm climates, there could be multiple days with no rain anywhere over a huge part of the ocean. Then, suddenly, a massive rainstorm would erupt over almost the entire domain, dumping a tremendous amount of rain. Then it would be quiet for a couple of days and repeat.”

“This episodic cycle of deluges is a new and completely unexpected atmospheric state” said Robin Wordsworth, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the study.

The research not only sheds light on Earth’s distant past and far-flung future but may also help to understand the climates of exoplanets orbiting distant stars.

The research is published in Nature.

In an atmospheric model, Seeley and Wordsworth cranked up Earth’s sea surface temperature to a scalding 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 C), either by adding more CO2—about 64-times the amount currently in the atmosphere—or by increasing the brightness of the sun by about 10 percent.

At those temperatures, surprising things start happening in the atmosphere. When the air near the surface becomes extremely warm, absorption of sunlight by atmospheric water vapor heats the air above the surface and forms what’s known as an “inhibition layer”, a barrier that prevents convective clouds from rising into the upper atmosphere and forming rain clouds.

Instead, all that evaporation gets stuck in the near-surface atmosphere.

At the same time, clouds form in the upper atmosphere, above the inhibition layer, as heat is lost to space. The rain produced in those upper-level clouds evaporates before reaching the surface, returning all that water to the system.

“It’s like charging a massive battery,” said Seeley. “You have a ton of cooling high in the atmosphere and a ton of evaporation and heating near the surface, separated by this barrier. If something can break through that barrier and allow the surface heat and humidity to break into the cool upper atmosphere, it’s going to cause an enormous rainstorm.”

That’s exactly what happens. After several days, the evaporative cooling from the upper atmosphere’s rainstorms erodes the barrier, triggering an hours-long deluge. In one simulation, the researchers observed more rainfall in a six-hour period than some tropical cyclones drop in the U.S. across several days.

After the storm, the clouds dissipate, and precipitation stops for several days as the atmospheric battery recharges and the cycle continues.

“Our research goes to show that there are still a lot of surprises in the climate system,” said Seeley. “Although a 30-degree increase in sea surface temperatures is way more than is being predicted for human-caused climate change, pushing atmospheric models into unfamiliar territory can reveal glimpses of what the Earth is capable of.”

“This study has revealed rich new physics in a climate that is only a little bit different from present-day Earth from a planetary perspective.” said Wordsworth. “It raises big new questions about the climate evolution of Earth and other planets that we’re going to be working through for many years to come.”

Size of raindrops can help identify potentially habitable planets outside our solar system

More information:
Jacob Seeley, Episodic deluges in simulated hothouse climates, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03919-z. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03919-z
Provided by
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Citation:
On ancient Earth, it never rained but it poured (2021, November 3)
retrieved 3 November 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-11-ancient-earth.html

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Vast patches of glassy rock in Chilean desert likely created by ancient exploding comet

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Deposits of dark silicate glass are strewn across a 75-kilometer corridor in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. New research shows that those glasses were likely formed by the heat of an ancient comet exploding above the surface. Credit: P.H. Schultz/Brown University

Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno.

In a study published in the journal Geology, researchers show that samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin. Those minerals closely match the composition of material returned to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission, which sampled the particles from a comet called Wild 2. The team concludes that those mineral assemblages are likely the remains of an extraterrestrial object—most likely a comet—that streamed down after the explosion that melted the sandy surface below.

“This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface,” said Pete Schultz, a professor emeritus in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “To have such a dramatic effect on such a large area, this was a truly massive explosion. Lots of us have seen bolide fireballs streaking across the sky, but those are tiny blips compared to this.”

The glasses are concentrated in patches across the Atacama Desert east of Pampa del Tamarugal, a plateau in northern Chile nestled between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west. Fields of dark green or black glass occur within a corridor stretching about 75 kilometers. There’s no evidence that the glasses could have been created by volcanic activity, Schultz says, so their origin has been a mystery.

Some researchers have posited that the glass resulted from ancient grass fires, as the region wasn’t always desert. During the Pleistocene epoch, there were oases with trees and grassy wetlands created by rivers extending from mountains to the east, and it’s been suggested that widespread fires may have burned hot enough to melt the sandy soil into large glassy slabs.

Deposits of dark silicate glass are strewn across a 75-kilometer corridor in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. New research shows that those glasses were likely formed by the heat of an ancient comet exploding above the surface. Credit: P.H. Schultz/Brown University

But the amount of glass present along with several key physical characteristics make simple fires an impossible formation mechanism, the new research found. The glasses show evidence of having been twisted, folded, rolled and even thrown while still in molten form. That’s consistent with a large incoming meteor and airburst explosion, which would have been accompanied by tornado-force winds. The mineralogy of the glass casts further serious doubt on the grassfire idea, Schultz says. Along with researchers from the Fernbank Science Center in Georgia, Chile’s Universidad Santo Tomás and the Chilean Geology and Mining Service, Schultz and colleagues performed a detailed chemical analysis of dozens of samples taken from glass deposits across the region.

The analysis found minerals called zircons that had thermally decomposed to form baddeleyite. That mineral transition typically happens in temperatures in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—far hotter than what could be generated by grass fires, Schultz says.

The analysis also turned up assemblages of exotic minerals only found in meteorites and other extraterrestrial rocks, the researchers say. Specific minerals like cubanite, troilite and calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions matched mineral signatures from comet samples retrieved from NASA’s Stardust mission.

“Those minerals are what tell us that this object has all the markings of a comet,” said Scott Harris, a planetary geologist at the Fernbank Science Center and study co-author. “To have the same mineralogy we saw in the Stardust samples entrained in these glasses is really powerful evidence that what we’re seeing is the result of a cometary airburst.”

More work needs to be done to establish the exact ages of the glass, which would determine exactly when the event took place, Schultz says. But the tentative dating puts the impact right around time that large mammals disappeared from the region.

Analysis of the glass samples revealed a mineralogy that was consistent with a cometary origin. Credit: P.H. Schultz/Brown University

“It’s too soon to say if there was a causal connection or not, but what we can say is that this event did happen around the same time as when we think the megafauna disappeared, which is intriguing,” Schultz said. “There’s also a chance that this was actually witnessed by early inhabitants, who had just arrived in the region. It would have been quite a show.”

Schultz and his team hope that further research may help to constrain the timing and shed light on the size of the impactor. For now, Schultz hopes this study may help researchers identify similar blast sites elsewhere and reveal the potential risk posed by such events.

“There may be lots of these blast scars out there, but until now we haven’t had enough evidence to make us believe they were truly related to airburst events,” Schultz said. “I think this site provides a template to help refine our impact models and will help to identify similar sites elsewhere.”

Other authors of the study were Sebastian Perroud, Nicolas Blanco and Andrew Tomlinson.

Planetary scientists unravel mystery of Egyptian desert glass

More information:
Peter H. Schultz et al, Widespread glasses generated by cometary fireballs during the late Pleistocene in the Atacama Desert, Chile, Geology (2021). DOI: 10.1130/G49426.1
Provided by
Brown University

Citation:
Vast patches of glassy rock in Chilean desert likely created by ancient exploding comet (2021, November 2)
retrieved 3 November 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-11-vast-patches-glassy-chilean-ancient.html

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Rare, ancient Maya canoe found in Mexico’s Yucatan

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MEXICO CITY, Oct 29 (Reuters) – A wooden canoe used by the ancient Maya and believed to be over 1,000 years old has turned up in southern Mexico, officials said on Friday, part of archeological work accompanying the construction of a major new tourist train.

The extremely rare canoe was found almost completely intact, submerged in a fresh-water pool known as a cenote, thousands of which dot Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, near the ruins of Chichen Itza, once a major Maya city featuring elaborately carved temples and towering pyramids.

Measuring a little over 5 feet (1.6 meters) in length and 2-1/2 feet (80 cm) wide, the canoe was possibly used to transport water from the cenote or deposit ritual offerings, according to a statement from Mexican antiquities institute INAH.

The institute described the extraordinary find as “the first complete canoe like this in the Maya area,” adding that experts from Paris’ Sorbonne University will help with an analysis of the well-preserved wood to pin-point its age and type.

A three-dimensional model of the canoe will also be commissioned, the statement added, to facilitate further study and allow for replicas to be made.

The canoe is tentatively dated to between 830-950 AD, near the end of the Maya civilization’s classical zenith, when dozens of cities across present-day southern Mexico and Central America thrived amid major human achievements in math, writing and art.

It was found while workers building a tourist rail project championed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador were inspecting the area surrounding the cenote which is near a section of the project that will connect with Cancun, Mexico’s top beach resort.

Lopez Obrador has pitched the so-called Maya Train as tourist-friendly infrastructure that will help alleviate poverty in Mexico’s poorer southern states, while critics argue it risks damaging the region’s delicate ecosystems.

Reporting by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Sandra Maler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Restored ancient mosaic, 1 of world’s largest, unveiled at Jericho desert castle

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Palestinian authorities on Thursday unveiled one of the largest floor mosaics in the world, in the West Bank city of Jericho, after years of restoration.

Resembling a fine carpet, the vast, ancient mosaic covers 836 square meters (8,998 square feet) at the Hisham Palace, an Islamic desert castle dating from the eighth century. The palace and its stone mosaic, with intricate geometric patterns, were built during the reign of the Umayyads, the first hereditary Muslim dynasty, which ruled from Damascus. The palace was the winter resort of Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 724 to 743 CE.

The images, seen on dozens of panels, include a lion attacking a deer to symbolize war and two gazelles which symbolize peace, as well as delicate floral and geometric designs.

Hisham Palace had lain forgotten for centuries until it was rediscovered in the 19th century and explored in the 1930s. It was then that the mosaic was uncovered beneath the dust.

But it still remained neglected until five years ago when the site was closed to visitors as a $12 million Japan-funded restoration effort was launched.

“This mosaic contains more than five million pieces of stone from Palestine which have a natural and distinctive color,” Saleh Tawafsha, the under-secretary at the Palestinian tourism and antiquities ministry, told AFP during the unveiling ceremony.

One of the largest mosaic panels in the world has been unveiled following a multi-year restoration project at Hisham’s Palace in the West Bank city of Jericho on October 28, 2021. (Photo by ABBAS MOMANI / AFP)

He said he hoped that the restoration will draw tourists to Jericho.

The project included the construction of a large dome to protect the mosaic from the elements. Tourists can now view the mosaic from a new walkway suspended above it.

The project was originally supposed to be completed in 2018 but was delayed, in part because of the challenge of anchoring the dome without disturbing the archaeological remains.

The Hisham Palace near the Dead Sea covers about 150 acres (60 hectares) and comprises baths and an agricultural estate.

The Ummayad Dynasty lasted from 660 to 750 AD.

AP contributed to this report.

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