The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia.
Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.
All of the Neanderthals were heavily inbred, a consequence, the researchers believe, of the Neanderthals’ small population size, with communities scattered over vast distances and numbering only about 10 to 30 individuals.
Laurits Skov, first author on the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said the fact that the Neanderthals were alive at the same time was “very exciting” and implied that they belonged to a single social community.
Neanderthal remains have been recovered from numerous caves across western Eurasia – territory the heavy-browed humans occupied from about 430,000 years ago until they became extinct 40,000 years ago. It has previously been impossible to tell whether Neanderthals found at particular sites belonged to communities or not.
“Neanderthal remains in general, and remains with preserved DNA in particular, are extremely rare,” said Benjamin Peter, a senior author on the study in Leipzig. “We tend to get single individuals from sites often thousands of kilometres, and tens of thousand of years apart.”
In the latest work, researchers including Svante Pääbo, who won this year’s Nobel prize in medicine for breakthrough studies on ancient genomes, examined DNA from the remains of Neanderthals found in the Chagyrskaya cave and nearby Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.
Neanderthals sheltered in the caves about 54,000 years ago, seeking cover to feast on the ibex, horse and bison they hunted as the animals migrated along the river valleys the caves overlook. Beyond Neanderthal and animal bones, tens of thousands of stone tools were also found.
Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how the ancient DNA points to the Neanderthals living at the same time, with some being members of the same family.
Further analysis revealed more genetic diversity in Neanderthal mitochondria – the tiny battery-like structures found inside cells which are only passed down the maternal line – than in their Y chromosomes, which are passed down from father to son. The most likely explanation, the researchers say, is that female Neanderthals travelled from their home communities to live with male partners. Whether force was involved is not a question DNA can answer, however. “Personally, I don’t think there is particularly good evidence that Neanderthals were much different from early modern humans that lived at the same time,” said Peter.
“We find that the community we study was likely very small, perhaps 10 to 20 individuals, and that the wider Neanderthal populations in the Altai mountains were quite sparse,” Peter said. “Nevertheless, they managed to persevere in a rough environment for hundreds of thousands of years, which I think deserves great respect.”
Dr Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin, called the study a “milestone” as “the first genomic snapshot of a Neanderthal community”.
“Understanding how their societies were organised is important for so many reasons,” Cassidy said. “It humanises these people and gives rich context to their lives. But also, down the line if we have more studies like this, it may also reveal unique aspects of the social organisation of our own Homo sapiens ancestors. This is crucial to understanding why we are here today and Neanderthals are not.”
But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of a great entrepreneur to not be “reasonable”), nor by the things of the soul (the dominant belief seems to be a form of materialism). It is a place, rather, governed by the creation of value. And a large component of value is utility—whether something is useful, or is at least perceived as good or beneficial.
I realize that some people in Silicon Valley think of themselves as building rationalist enterprises. Some of them might be. The city’s guiding spirit, however, is summed up by investor and podcast host Shane Parris, popular among the Silicon Valley set, when he says: “The real test of an idea isn’t whether it’s true, but whether it’s useful.” In other words, utility trumps truth or reason.
Our new century—the world from 2000 to the present day—is dominated by Silicon Valley’s technological influence. This city has produced world-changing products and services (instantaneous search results, next-day delivery of millions of products, constant connectivity to thousands of “friends”) that create and shape new desires. This new city and the new forces it has unleashed are affecting humanity more than anything Tertullian could have imagined.
And this new city is growing in power. Never before have the questions of Athens and the questions of Jerusalem been mediated to us by such a great variety of things that vie for our attention and our desires. Silicon Valley, this third city, has altered the nature of the problem that Tertullian was wrestling with. The questions of what is true and what is good for the soul are now mostly subordinated to technological progress—or, at the very least, the questions of Athens and Jerusalem are now so bound up with this progress that it’s creating confusion.
It is hard to escape the utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, and we lie to ourselves when we rationalize our motivations. The most interesting thing about the cryptocurrency craze was the ubiquity of “white papers”—the framing of every new product in purely rational terms, or the need to present it as a product of Athens. And then there was Dogecoin.
We’re not living in a world of pure reason or religious enchantment, but something entirely new.
Reason, religion, and the technology-driven quest to create value at any cost are now interacting in ways we scarcely understand, but which have vast influence over our everyday lives. Our two-decades-long experiment with social media has already shown the extent to which reason, or Athens, is being flooded with so much content that many have referred to it as a post-truth environment. Some social psychologists, like Jonathan Haidt, believe it’s making us crazy and undermining our democracy. Humanity is at a crossroads. We are trying to reconcile various needs—for rationality, for worship, for productivity—and the tension of this pursuit shows up in the things we create. Because the three cities are interacting, we are now living with technology-mediated religion (online church services) and technology-mediated reason (280-character Twitter debates); religiously adopted technology (bitcoin) and religiously observed reason (Covid-19 cathedrals of safety); rational religion (effective altruism) and “rational” technology (3D-printed assisted-suicide pods).
If Tertullian were alive today, I believe he would ask: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem—and what do either have to do with Silicon Valley?” In other words, how do the domains of reason and religion relate to the domain of technological innovation and its financiers in Silicon Valley? If the Enlightenment champion Steven Pinker (a resident of Athens) walked into a bar with a Trappist monk (Jerusalem) and Elon Musk (Silicon Valley) with the goal of solving a problem, would they ever be able to arrive at a consensus?
(Newser) –
A hobbit-like human species has survived for hundreds of thousands of years in the forests of a remote island—and is still surviving. That’s the stunning theory of a retired anthropologist, who believes sightings of an “ape-man” on Indonesia’s Flores island could signal that so-called hobbit human Homo floresiensis never went extinct. Evidence of the roughly 3.5-foot-tall ancient hominin with an unknown place on the human family tree was first discovered in Flores’ Liang Bua cave in 2003. “Archaeological evidence (mostly associated stone tools) suggests H. floresiensis lived at Liang Bua from at least 190,000 to 50,000 years ago,” making it “one of the latest-surviving humans along with Neanderthals, Denisovans and our own species H. sapiens,” according to the Australian Museum.
Gregory Forth, who’s spent decades doing fieldwork on Flores, argues H. floresiensis is still out there. In his new book, Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid, out next month, Forth references 30 eyewitness accounts from the indigenous Lio of a hobbit-like human species living in Flores’ forests. “The best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times,” Forth writes at the Scientist. In a book excerpt, he describes speaking with a man who claimed to have found the body of an elderly female hominoid with a human face and “well-formed” nose and a body covered in light-colored hair as “dense as a puppy dog’s,” with noticeable breasts and a very short tail.
Forth would argue it’s not so unbelievable to think that H. floresiensis could have survived for so long as bones uncovered at Flores’ Mata Menge site in 2014 are thought to belong to a population of the species that existed 700,000 ago. And it’s not known when the species went extinct. But other experts are incredulous. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, tells Live Science that there are 2 million people spread across Flores, which “has about the same area of Connecticut,” so the chance that a large primate population has survived mostly unobserved “is pretty close to zero.” Others speculate that accounts could stem from oral histories dating back to a time when modern humans and H. floresiensis may have overlapped. (Read more Homo floresiensis stories.)
A 125,000-year-old site in Germany known as Neumark-Nord reveals the earliest evidence of one of our hominin relatives, Neanderthals, leaving a lasting mark on their landscape.
Located about 22 miles east of Leipzig, Neumark-Nord was dotted with small lakes during an era 130,000 to 115,000 years ago when glaciers had retreated from Europe. Archaeological evidence suggests Neanderthals, who hunted and gathered, moved into the area to capitalize on the milder climate during that time, and altered their landscape through increased use.
These hominins hunted and butchered animals, produced tools, collected firewood and built campfires in the Neumark-Nord region for about 2,000 years, in turn modifying the local ecosystem for the duration of the Neanderthals’ stay, a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances says.
“Initially a forested area, the area became open when Neanderthals arrived, and stayed open for about 2,000 years. Upon their leaving, the forest closed in again,” said Wil Roebroeks, a professor of Paleolithic archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.
The research suggests our species isn’t the first to have modified their landscape.
A model of a Neanderthal male at the Natural History Museum in London.
Photo:
Will Oliver/PA Images/Getty Images
“Modern humans today are impacting ecosystems on a global scale with severe consequences for biodiversity and habitats around the world,” said Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany who wasn’t involved in the study.
The new study is “pointing to a significant impact of human activities on ecosystems even by small hunter-gatherer groups predating the arrival of modern Homo sapiens,” she added.
“It adds an important aspect to early human (including Neanderthals) behavior, with them impacting ecosystems very far into the past, even though we do not know whether this was intentional behavior intended to make and keep the landscape open,” Dr. Roebroeks said.
Archaeologists first identified Neumark-Nord as a hotbed of hominin occupation in 1985. Excavations in the late 1990s expanded the site and continued between 2003 and 2008.
To confirm that it was indeed the Neanderthals’ presence that affected this landscape 125,000 years ago, Dr. Roebroeks’s group compared evidence, including pollen data, found in the Neumark-Nord area to evidence found from two similar lake basins nearby that dated to the same time for the new study.
By looking at pollen preserved in the lake sediments, the researchers reconstructed changes in the local plant life over time. They found birch and pine trees initially dominated the landscape, but were replaced by herbs that aren’t typical of a closed-canopy forest at around the same time hominins arrived in the area.
In a 61-acre region of Neumark-Nord, the researchers found scores of clues pointing to our ancestors’ activities there year-round.
“Tens and thousands of stone artifacts, hundreds of thousands of bone fragments, the remains of many hundreds of butchered animals as a result of countless Neanderthal hunting episodes, in combination with abundant traces of fire use,” Dr. Roebroeks said. The study also described charred seeds, heated stone tools and burned wood.
He added that the shores of Neumark-Nord’s ancient lakes were still “a far cry” from the first villages or towns.
While the Neanderthals that used the area may have been less mobile, and possibly lived in larger groups, they remained hunter-gatherers who traveled from place to place during that last interglacial period, Dr. Roebroeks said.
The other lakes, between 20 and 34 miles away, lacked traces of significant Neanderthal presence. And pollen data showed closed forests perpetually dominated the environment there.
Both Neumark-Nord and the comparative lakes are in the eastern region of Germany’s Harz Mountains, suggesting that a difference in rainfall or temperature between the areas didn’t explain the differences in the respective landscapes.
That is suggestive of a “hominin ecological footprint” at Neumark-Nord, Dr. Roebroeks’s group said, revealing that the Neanderthals’ repetitive campfires and repetitive trampling of the area while hunting there may have reshaped the local vegetation.
It’s no secret that beer and blue cheese go hand in hand – but a new study reveals how deep their roots run in Europe, where workers at a salt mine in Austria were gorging on both up to 2,700 years ago.
Scientists made the discovery by analysing samples of human excrement found at the heart of the Hallstatt mine in the Austrian Alps.
Frank Maixner, a microbiologist at the Eurac Research Institute in Bolzano, Italy, who was the lead author of the report, said he was surprised to learn salt miners more than two millennia ago were advanced enough to “use fermentation intentionally.”
“This is very sophisticated in my opinion,” Maixner said. “This is something I did not expect at that time.”
The finding was the earliest evidence to date of cheese ripening in Europe, according to researchers.
And while alcohol consumption is certainly well documented in older writings and archaeological evidence, the salt miners’ faeces contained the first molecular evidence of beer consumption on the continent at that time.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that not only were prehistoric culinary practices sophisticated, but also that complex processed foodstuffs as well as the technique of fermentation have held a prominent role in our early food history,” Kerstin Kowarik, of the Museum of Natural History Vienna, said.
The town of Hallstatt, a Unesco World Heritage Site, has been used for salt production for more than 3,000 years.
The community “is a very particular place, it’s located in the Alps, in the middle of nowhere,” Maixner said. “The whole community worked and lived from this mine.”
The miners spent their entire days there, working, eating and going to the bathroom in the mine.
It is thanks to the constant temperature of around 8C (46F) and the high concentration of salt at the mine that the miners’ faeces were preserved particularly well.
Researchers analysed four samples: one dating back to the bronze age, two from the iron age and one from the 18th century.
One of them, about 2,700 years old, was found to contain two fungi, Penicillium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Both are known today for their use in food making.
“The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry,” Maixner said.
The researchers also studied the miners’ diet, which consisted mainly of cereals, some fruit, and beans and meats as the source of protein.
“The diet was exactly what these miners needed, in my opinion,” Maixner said. “It’s clearly balanced and you have all major components you need.”
The main difference with today’s menus is the degree of food processing, which was very low at the time. The bronze and iron age miners used whole grains, suggesting the consumption of some kind of porridge. For the 18th-century miners, the grains appeared ground, indicating they ate bread or cookies.
One of the study’s other findings was the composition of the miners’ microbiota, or the set of bacteria present in their bodies.
In the four samples studied, the microbiota were very similar to that of modern non-western populations, which tend to have a more traditional lifestyle.
This suggests a “recent shift” in the microbiota of industrialised humans, “probably due to modern lifestyle, diet, or medical advances,” the study said.
However, microbiota are often linked to different modern diseases, Maixner said. According to him, determining when exactly this change occurred could help scientists understand what caused it.
The study was published in the journal Current Biology on Wednesday.
From the medieval fashion for pointy shoes to Victorian waist-squeezing corsets and modern furry onesies, what we wear is a window to our past.
Now researchers say they have found some of the earliest evidence of humans using clothing in a cave in Morocco, with the discovery of bone tools and bones from skinned animals suggesting the practice dates back at least 120,000 years.
Dr Emily Hallett, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the first author of the study, said the work reinforced the view that early humans in Africa were innovative and resourceful.
“Our study adds another piece to the long list of hallmark human behaviours that begin to appear in the archaeological record of Africa around 100,000 years ago,” she said.
While skins and furs are unlikely to survive in deposits for hundreds of thousands of years, previous studies looking at the DNA of clothing lice have suggested clothes may have appeared as early as 170,000 years ago – probably sported by anatomically modern humans in Africa.
The latest study adds further weight to the idea that early humans may have had something of a wardrobe.
Writing in the journal i Science, Hallett and colleagues report how they analysed animal bones excavated in a series of digs spanning several decades at Contrebandiers Cave on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The cave has previously been revealed to contain the remains of early humans.
Hallett said she began studying the animal bones in 2012 because she was interested in reconstructing the diet of early humans and exploring whether there had been any changes in diet associated with changes in stone tool technology.
However, she and her colleagues found 62 bones from layers dating to between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago that showed signs of having been turned into tools.
Sand fox, golden jackal and wildcat bones held further clues, showing cut marks associated with fur removal. Illustration: Jacopo Niccolò Cerasoni
While the purpose of many of the tools remains unknown, the team found broad, rounded end objects known as spatulates that were fashioned from bovid ribs.
“Spatulate-shaped tools are ideal for scraping and thus removing internal connective tissues from leathers and pelts during the hide or fur-working process, as they do not pierce the skin or pelt,” the team write.
Sand fox, golden jackal and wildcat bones held further clues, showing cut marks associated with fur removal.
The team also found a whale tooth, which appeared to have been used to flake stone. “I wasn’t expecting to find it since whale remains have not been identified in any Pleistocene contexts in north Africa,” said Hallett.
While Hallett said it was possible the bone tools could have been used to prepare leather for other uses, the combined evidence suggests it is likely – particularly for fur – that the early humans made clothes.
But mysteries remain including what the resulting outfits would have looked like, and whether they were primarily used for protection against the elements or more symbolic purposes.
Hallett added that she believed European Neanderthals and other sister species were making clothing from animal skins long before 120,000 years ago – not least as they lived in temperate and cold environments.
“Clothing and the expanded toolkits of early humans are likely parts of the package that led to the adaptive success of humans and our ability to succeed globally and in climatically extreme regions,” she said.
Dr Matt Pope, an expert on Neanderthals at the UCL Institute of Archaeology who was not involved in the study, said clothing almost certainly had an evolutionary origin before 120,000 years ago, noting among other evidence finds of even older stone scrapers, some with traces of hide working.
But, he added, the new research suggested Homo sapiens at Contrabandiers Cave, like Neanderthal people from sites such as Abri Peyrony and Pech-de-l’Azé in France, were making specialised tools to turn animal hides into smooth, supple leather – a material that could also be useful for shelters, windbreaks and even containers.
“This is an adaptation which goes beyond just the adoption of clothing, it allows us to imagine clothing which is more waterproof, closer-fitting and easier to move in, than more simple scraped hides,” said Pope. “The early dates for these tools from Contrebandiers Cave help us to further understand the origins of this technology and its distribution amongst different populations of early humans.”
The Neanderthal bone carving. Image: V. Minkus/NLD
Patterns deliberately etched onto a bone belonging to a giant deer is further evidence that Neanderthals possessed the capacity for symbolic thought.
Neanderthals decorated themselves with feathers, drew cave paintings, and created jewelry from eagle talons, so it comes as little surprise to learn that Neanderthals also engraved patterns onto bone. The discovery of this 55,000-year-old bone carving, as described in Nature Ecology & Evolution, is further evidence of sophisticated behaviour among Neanderthals.
“Evidence of artistic decorations would suggest production or modification of objects for symbolic reasons beyond mere functionality, adding a new dimension to the complex cognitive capability of Neanderthals,” as Silvia Bello, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum in London, explained in an associated New & Views article.
The carving was found at the Einhornhöhle archaeological site in the Harz mountains of northern Germany, and it features a line pattern consisting of six etchings that form five stacked chevrons. The “parallel and regularly spaced engravings have comparable dimensions and were very probably created in a uniform approach suggesting an intentional act,” according to the study, led by archaeologist Dirk Leder from the State Service for Cultural Heritage Lower Saxony in Hannover, Germany.
Greyscale images made from micro-CT scans of the relic. A total of 10 etchings were found on the bone, six of which (shown in red) were used to create the chevron pattern.Image: NLD
G/O Media may get a commission
Radiocarbon dating places the 2.2-inch-long toe bone to the Middle Paleolithic, and shortly before the arrival of Homo sapiens to the region. Microscopic analysis of the fossil suggests it was boiled prior to etching, which was likely done to soften the bone prior to carving, according to the research. The markings don’t resemble cuts typically associated with butchering, and the decorated item is of “no practical use,” as the researchers write in the study. The carving likely held significant symbolic meaning given the rarity of giant deer north of the alps during this time period. The exact meaning of the patterns, however, is anyone’s guess.
That the bone carving was produced by Neanderthals is not a certainty. Genetic evidence presented earlier this year places the arrival of anatomically modern humans to central Europe at around 45,000 year ago, which post-dates the carving by around 6,000 years. This apparent temporal gap points to the artifact as belonging to Neanderthals, but it’s not entirely implausible to suggest that Homo sapiens produced, or possibly influenced, the creation of this artwork.
Bello, who was not involved in the new study, said “we cannot exclude a similarly early exchange of knowledge between modern human and Neanderthal populations, which may have influenced the production of the engraved artefact from Einhornhöhle.” This possibility, that Neanderthals learned this skill from modern humans, doesn’t diminish their cognitive capacities, however.
“On the contrary, the capacity to learn, integrate innovation into one’s own culture and adapt to new technologies and abstract concepts should be recognized as an element of behavioural complexity,” wrote Bello. “In this context, the engraved bone from Einhornhöhle brings Neanderthal behaviour even closer to the modern behaviour of Homo sapiens.”
Of course, it’s also possible that the authors of the new study are completely right—that Neanderthals were indeed responsible for the bone carving, and that modern humans had nothing to do with it. Neanderthals, in addition to their aforementioned cultural contributions, engaged in many other sophisticated behaviors, such as caring for disabled loved ones, burying their dead, and taking care of their teeth. That Neanderthals carved patterns onto bone is thus hardly a stretch.
IMAGE: Fossilised Squalicorax tooth Nr. #07815 from the Jerusalem site.
view more
Credit: Omri Lernau
Scientists have found an unexplained cache of fossilised shark teeth in an area where there should be none – in a 2900 year old site in the City of David in Jerusalem. This is at least 80 km from where these fossils would be expected to be found. There is no conclusive proof of why the cache was assembled, but it may be that the 80 million-year-old teeth were part of a collection, dating from just after the death of King Solomon*. The same team has now unearthed similar unexplained finds in other parts of ancient Judea.
Presenting the work at the Goldschmidt Conference, lead researcher, Dr. Thomas Tuetken (University of Mainz, Institute of Geosciences) said:
“These fossils are not in their original setting, so they have been moved. They were probably valuable to someone; we just don’t know why, or why similar items have been found in more than one place in Israel”.
The teeth were found buried in material used to fill in a basement before conversion to a large Iron-Age house. The house itself was situated in the City of David, one of the oldest parts of Jerusalem, found nowadays in the largely Palestinian village of Silwan. They were found together with fish bones thrown away as food waste 2900 years ago, and other infill material such as pottery. Intriguingly, they were found together with hundreds of bullae – items used to seal confidential letters and packages – implying a possible connection with the administrative or governing class at some point. Normally archaeological material is dated according to the circumstances where it is found, and so at first it was assumed that the teeth were contemporary with the rest of the find. Dr. Tuetken said:
“We had at first assumed that the shark teeth were remains of the food dumped nearly 3000 years ago, but when we submitted a paper for publication, one of the reviewers pointed out that the one of the teeth could only have come from a Late Cretaceous shark that had been extinct for at least 66 million years. That sent us back to the samples, where measuring organic matter, elemental composition, and the crystallinity of the teeth confirmed that indeed all shark teeth were fossils. Their strontium isotope composition indicates an age of about 80 million years. This confirmed that all 29 shark teeth found in the City of David were Late Cretaceous fossils – contemporary with dinosaurs. More than that, they were not simply weathered out of the bedrock beneath the site, but were probably transported from afar, possibly from the Negev, at least 80 km away, where similar fossils are found”.
Since the first finds, the team have found other shark teeth fossils elsewhere in Israel, at the Maresha and Miqne sites. These teeth are also likely to have been unearthed and moved from their original sites.
Dr. Tuetken said:
“Our working hypothesis is that the teeth were brought together by collectors, but we don’t have anything to confirm that. There are no wear marks which might show that they were used as tools, and no drill holes to indicate that they may have been jewellery. We know that there is a market for shark’s teeth even today, so it may be that there was an Iron Age trend for collecting such items. This was a period of riches in the Judean Court. However, it’s too easy to put 2 and 2 together to make 5. We’ll probably never really be sure”.
The shark teeth which have been identified come from several species, including from the extinct Late Cretaceous group Squalicorax. Squalicorax, which grew to between 2 and 5 metres long, lived only during the Late Cretaceous period (which was the same period as the late dinosaurs), so acts as a reference point in dating these fossils.
Commenting, Dr. Brooke Crowley (University of Cincinnati) said:
“This research by Dr. Tuetken and colleagues is an excellent example of why it is so important to approach a research question with as few assumptions as possible, and how sometimes we have to revisit our initial assumptions. It also highlights how beneficial it can be to apply multiple tools to answer a research question. In this case, the authors used both strontium and oxygen isotopes, as well as x-ray diffraction and trace element analysis to establish most likely age and origin of the fossil teeth. It was a monumental of work but these efforts have revealed a much more interesting story about the people who lived in this region in the past. I am very excited by this work and hope that one day, we might be able to unravel the mystery of why these fossil teeth are being recovered from cultural deposits”.
###
Dr. Crowley was not involved in this work. The work relating to the Jerusalem finds has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 8:570032 (https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.570032), Dr. Crowley edited this paper for the journal. This press release contains additional material not mentioned in the publication.
Notes
This work is presented on 6th July, but is being released to the press early.
*The find dates from the time of the immediate descendants of King Solomon; Rehoboam, Abija, Assa, and Jehoshapat.
The Goldschmidt Conference is the World’s main geochemistry conference. It is hosted alternately by the European Association of Geochemistry (Europe) and the Geochemical Society (USA). The 2021 conference (virtual) takes place from 4-9 July, https://2021.goldschmidt.info/. The 2022 conference takes place in Hawaii.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
The bones of Black children who died in 1985 after their home was bombed by Philadelphia police in a confrontation with the Black liberation group which was raising them are being used as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course presented by an Ivy League professor.
It has emerged that the physical remains of one, or possibly two, of the children who were killed in the aerial bombing of the Move organization in May 1985 have been guarded over the past 36 years in the anthropological collections of the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.
The institutions have held on to the heavily burned fragments, and since 2019 have been deploying them for teaching purposes without the permission of the deceased’s living parents.
To the astonishment and dismay of present-day Move members, some of the bones are being deployed as artifacts in an online course presented in the name of Princeton and hosted by the online study platform Coursera. Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology focuses on “lost personhood” – cases where an individual cannot be identified due to the decomposed condition of their remains.
It uses as its main “case study” the events of May 1985, producing as prime evidence a set of bones belonging to a girl in her teens retrieved from the ashes of the Move house at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia.
The revelation comes just days before Philadelphia stages its first official day of remembrance over the 1985 bombing, following a formal apology issued by the city council last year.
The disclosure, first reported by the local news outlet Billy Penn, also lands in the middle of a fevered debate over academia’s handling of African American remains that has been rocket-charged by the nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis last year by a police officer.
On 13 May 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb from a helicopter on to the roof of a communal house occupied by members of Move, an organization that bore comparison to the Black Panthers combined with back-to-nature environmental activism. In the ensuing inferno, the Move house as well as the entire surrounding neighborhood was razed to the ground.
Eleven people linked to the group were killed. Among them were five children, aged seven to 14.
Last year the city apologized formally for the “immeasurable and enduring harm” caused in the bombing, paving the way to this year’s inaugural commemoration.
Smoke billows over rowhouses in West Philadelphia after the 1985 bombing. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
The forensic anthropology course in which the bones of a Move child are being used has almost 5,000 enrolled students. It was filmed in February 2019 and is taught by Janet Monge, an adjunct professor in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor in the same subject at Princeton.
The Move “case study” is broken up into five online videos, in which Monge relates the history of the 1985 catastrophe. In one video she picks up the bones and holds them up to the camera.
Monge describes the remains in vivid terms. They consist of two bones – a pelvis and femur – that belonged to a small girl probably in her teens that were discovered held together “because they were in a pair of jeans”.
The pelvis was cracked “where a beam of the house had actually fallen on this individual”. The fragment showed signs of burnt tendons around the hip joint.
“The bones are juicy, by which I mean you can tell they are the bones of a recently deceased individual,” Monge continues. “If you smell it, it doesn’t actually smell bad – it smells kind of greasy, like an older-style grease.”
The UPenn and Princeton academic does not inform her students that she is displaying the remains without permission of the girl’s family. She is, however, open about the tragic nature of the confrontation that led to the child’s death in Osage Avenue.
“It was one of the great tragedies, to witness the remains as they were found and moved from this location … I still feel unsettled by many aspects of it,” she says. She also shares with the class that Move continues to exist to this day: “The organization is still active in Philadelphia.”
The display of the human remains of a Black girl who would be in her 40s today had she survived the police bombing that took her life is certain to intensify the debate over the way the remains of Black people are handled by academia. The subject has been a talking point for decades, but has intensified in recent months following the mass protests over Floyd’s death.
The Move bones have never positively been identified. But given their small size and features, they almost certainly belong to one of the older Move girls who died in the inferno.
The oldest was a 14-year-old called Tree Africa (all members of Move take the last name Africa to denote their collective commitment to Black liberation). Michael Africa Jr, a Move member who was a friend of Tree’s and who was six at the time of the bombing, described her as a responsible kid who, as her name suggested, was passionate about climbing trees.
“When we went to a park, the first thing she would do is scout out the biggest tree. She was always the first one up, and she always went the highest,” he told the Guardian.
Tree’s mother is Consuela Dotson Africa. At the time of the fire she was serving a 16-year prison sentence related to an earlier police confrontation with Move in 1978; she still lives in the Philadelphia area.
Michael Africa Jr in 2018. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/The Guardian
The other possible identification of the bones would be Delisha Africa, who was 12 in 1985. When she died, both her parents – Delbert Africa and Janet Africa – were similarly in prison in relation to the 1978 confrontation.
They were part of the so-called Move 9 who were each sentenced to 30 years to life for the contested shooting of a police officer.
Both Delisha’s parents were released from prison after more than 40 years behind bars. Delbert died last June, five months after he was paroled.
Janet was set free in 2019, just three months after Monge recorded her forensic anthropology course using bones that potentially belonged to Janet’s daughter. Janet Africa continues to be an active Move member living in Philadelphia.
Neither Janet nor Consuela have commented on the revelation that their daughters’ remains are possibly being used to teach online anthropology courses. But it is understood that neither of them gave their consent for them to be used that way.
“Nobody said you can do that, holding up their bones for the camera. That’s not how we process our dead. This is beyond words. The anthropology professor is holding the bones of a 14-year-old girl whose mother is still alive and grieving,” Michael Africa Jr said.
Africa Jr said that the discovery of the online course just days before the inaugural day of remembrance of the 1985 bombing was “such a shame, such a tragedy. After 36 years we find out that not only were these children abused and mistreated and bombed and burned, they haven’t even been allowed to rest in peace.”
The precise sequence of events relating to the Move bones remains sketchy. For years they sat in a cardboard box at the Penn Museum, part of the University of Pennsylvania where Monge is the leading bones expert.
It transpires that a Penn anthropologist, Alan Mann, acquired the remains after he was asked in the immediate aftermath of the bombing to provide specialist advice to the Philadelphia medical examiner in an attempt to identify the fragments. Mann kept possession of the bones, and in 2001 took them with him when he transferred to Princeton.
The remains appear to have shuttled between the two Ivy League institutions until 2019, when Monge, who had worked closely with Mann over many years, filmed her online course using the pelvis and femur fragments.
Where the bones are now located remains a mystery. The University of Pennsylvania told the Guardian that a set of remains of two bones from one individual, who has never been identified, “have been returned to the custody of Dr Mann at Princeton University”.
But Princeton told the Guardian that it had only become aware of the issue this week and insisted it was not in possession of the bones. “We can confirm that no remains of the victims of the Move bombing are being housed at Princeton University,” a spokesman said.
Monge did not respond to Guardian inquiries.
The controversy over the Move bones comes just a week after Penn Museum apologized for the “unethical possession of human remains” in its Samuel Morton Cranial collection.
The collection was compiled in the first half of the 19th century and used by Morton to justify white supremacist theories; it contained the remains of Black Philadelphians as well as 53 crania of enslaved people from Cuba and the US, which will now be repatriated or reburied.
A view of Osage Avenue in Philadelphia after the bombing. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Anthropologists and historians have become increasingly sensitive to the issues around the handling of remains. Michael Blakey, professor of anthropology at the College of William & Mary, was involved in the first reburial of African American bones from the Smithsonian Institution, which took place a year after the Move bombing, in 1986, and involved the remains of Black Philadelphians.
In the 1990s he directed the development of the African Burial Ground in New York, which was turned into a national monument following the full involvement of the local Black community. “We decided then we would not conduct any research without the permission of the community, and we created the precedent for informed consent involving any skeletal remains,” Blakey said.
The Guardian asked Blakey for his reaction to the news that anthropologists were still deploying African American bones in their teaching to this day in the absence of community permission. He replied: “The United States continues to operate on the basis of white privilege. What you are seeing here is the scientific manifestation of that – the objectification of the ‘other’, and the disempathy that is socialized in a society in which whites assume that they have control.”
The misuse of Black remains for scientific purposes has a long history in America. In 1989, construction workers in Augusta, Georgia, discovered almost 10,000 individual human bones under the former premises of the Medical College of Georgia.
The fragments came from corpses that were sold to the college by grave robbers and taken from Augusta’s cemetery for impoverished African Americans. The college used them in medical training and dissections.
Samuel Redman, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, said the discovery of the Move bones was all the more disturbing given how recently the deaths occurred.
“There are people alive who are affected by this, not just in an emotional way but in a trauma-inducing way that could be harmful. The notion of ‘do no harm’ should be part and parcel of our research and teaching – we need to wrestle with this problem much more completely.”
Ardipithecus ramidus skull in National Museum of Natural Sciences of Spain.Photo: Tiia Monto
More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team of anthropologists have looked at the 4.4 million-year-old fossilized hand of one specimen (affectionately dubbed “Ardi”), and argue that the human ancestors’ roaming may have involved more swinging through the trees than previously thought.
Published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the team’s comparative analysis focuses on Ardi’s hand morphology in the context of extinct and extant relatives. In conversation with bones from elsewhere in our family tree, the traits of Ardi’s hand indicate when specific adaptations currently observed in different primates came to be. Specifically, knowing how Ardi moved gets us closer to knowing how we (Homo sapiens) came to be a terrestrial, bipedal bunch of primates.
The team of Thomas Cody Prang, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University and lead author of the recent paper, noted some key traits of Ardi’s hand that indicated how it may have moved. The specimen’s phalanges were long relative to its estimated body size. Those bones also curved inwards, suggesting the hand was predisposed for grabbing. “The fact that Ardipithecus overlaps in finger length and curvature with the most suspensory primates strongly implies that Ardipithecus was adapted to suspension,” Prang said.
“Now, that doesn’t mean that, you know, humans evolved from an ancestor that looked exactly like a chimpanzee,” he added in a phone call. “It doesn’t mean that chimpanzees are living fossils, or that chimpanzees themselves haven’t evolved. Instead, our study shows that Ardipithecus, and likely, the earliest fossil humans retain characteristics from an ancestor that is most similar to chimpanzees and bonobos, than to any other living primate.”
G/O Media may get a commission
Both Ardipithecus and Lucy were found in the Afar region of Ethiopia.Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Fair Use)
Originally excavated and described in the early 1990s by a team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White, Ardipithecus ramidus received more attention following the 2009 description of a partial skeleton (nicknamed Ardi) in the journal Science. White doesn’t agree with the findings of the recent paper, on the basis of the specific bones and specimens selected for analysis, and the exclusion of others.
“We do not dispute the well-established fact that the human hand evolved through time. However, there are no novel data or interpretations here,” White wrote in an emailed statement. “We cannot take these authors seriously until they come to grips with the unique anatomy of Ardi’s hand, rather than using limited, selected measurements in a post hoc argument supporting the discredited notion that our ancestors were specifically chimpanzee-like.”
If you’re relatively new to the debate on the nature of human origins and how our ancestors may have strolled on the ground or swung through the trees, be prepared to hang out. Back in 2009, White’s team argued that Ardi lacked characteristics that would indicate it was suited for an ape-like life; such absent traits included a morphological set-up for swinging through trees and climbing them, and walking on their knuckles. White’s team posited that the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees was probably quite different from any extant ape.
Prang’s team argues the opposite in this paper, stating that the ancestor (which preceded Ardi) was closer to chimpanzees than anything else. They go on to report that more human-like hands first crop up with the more familiar Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy’s species.
The sparseness of the fossil record doesn’t help matters much, though Ardi’s hand is a more complete than the younger Lucy’s. Prang added that interpretations of Ardi’s hand are helpful in narrowing the goalposts of what may have been the circumstances of its evolution (and by proxy, what arose before Ardi and afterwards).
“It illustrates the point that in science, we’re not proving something to be true. Instead, we’re discarding hypotheses and alternatives that are likely to be false,” Prang said. “In this case, the hypothesis that humans evolved from an ancestor that lacked suspensory characteristics, and an ancestor that was more monkey-like, I think can be discarded on the basis of Ardipithecus.”