There are a number of interesting anthropology stories in the news. My picks below the fold.
Live Science has an interesting article about Ulcers Discovered in Mummies. The article discusses recent research on several “pre-Columbian” mummies from caves in Northern Mexico. The research identified signs of Helicobacter pylori in two of the four mummies studied. The research is being published in BMC Microbiology and is open access. The paper has an interesting discussion of the importance of mummies to paleopathological research and discusses some of the challenges such research has to overcome. (If anybody has access to JAMA this article is also quite interesting)
The Guardian has an interesting article called Ancient bones could help combat TB. The article concerns research on skeletons from Jericho:
The team, which also includes Israeli, Palestinian and German researchers, will be following up pioneering work by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon. In the Fifties she made a series of important digs at Jericho and found bones from thousands of humans, some dating back 8,000 years.
When these bones were examined, it was discovered many had lesions, indicating that the city’s men and women had suffered from tuberculosis. The walls of Jericho may have come down, not with a trumpet blast, but with epidemic of coughing, it seems.
Now Spigelman and his team have begun studying DNA from these remains in order to identify genes that might have helped to make the people of Jericho susceptible or resistant to tuberculosis, and so help in the development of more effective treatments for the disease.
In addition, the team will study how the TB bacterium evolved over the millennia. ‘As humans grew up, the bugs grew up – and we are looking for these changes,’ said Spigelman.
Live Science has a article called Cave Men Loved to Sing:
Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.
The Upper Paleolithic people responsible for the paintings had likely fine-tuned their hearing to recognize the sound qualities in certain parts of the cave and chose to do their artwork there as a kind of landmark, perhaps as part of a singing ritual, said researcher Iegor Reznikoff, a specialist in ancient music at the University of Paris X in Nanterre.
The whole article is quite fascinating but gets a little off the wall (no pun intended):
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like sonar to explore the crooks and crannies of a newfound cave, Reznikoff explained.
“When acting in a cave in conditions similar to prehistoric ones … the surroundings a few meters ahead are almost completely dark,” he said, adding that “since sound reaches much farther than reduced light, especially in irregular surroundings, the only possibility and security is to explore the cave with the voice and its echoing effects.”
H’mm, maybe humans are secondarily terrestrial bats after all…
Finally, Science Daily has an article called First Humans To Settle Americas Came From Europe, Not From Asia Over Bering Strait Land-ice Bridge, New Research Suggests:
Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake and Porter counties in Northwest Indiana into northeastern Illinois – about 12 years ago. Over the past few years, approximately a dozen Valparaiso undergraduates have worked with Dr. Janke to create the first detailed maps of the Kankakee Sand Islands, study their composition and survey wildlife and plants inhabiting the islands.
What they ties in with the asteroid impact theory and the Clovis came from Europe theory, but you will have to read the article to find out how…
Update 1: For those inclined to pursue the literature on the Solutrean Hypothesis, Kris has some excellent references here. (Note I don’t have any of them so if some one could send them to me I would appreciate it)