China and Egypt have signed cooperation documents in space exploration in Beijing on Wednesday to boost deep space exploration, spacecraft development and construction of space infrastructure, which is of great significance to foster a comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries.
Zhang Kejian, administrator of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Sherif Sedky, Chief Operating Officer of the Egyptian Space Agency (EGSA), signed a memorandum of understanding between the governments of the two countries on space cooperation and peaceful use of outer space and a cooperation agreement between the CNSA and the EGSA on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).
According to the cooperation documents, both sides will encourage joint researches and development cooperation in a variety of areas including lunar and deep space exploration, development and launch of spacecraft, construction of space infrastructure, satellite data reception and application, the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation, space science and astronomical observation.
They will also collaborate on the joint demonstration and research of the ILRS, space missions, space systems and subsystems, space equipment, ground segments and applications, education and training and capacity building.
China and Egypt have achieved fruitful results in space cooperation. The China-assisted Egyptian Satellite Assembly, Integration and Test Center completed the acceptance checks in June this year. The China-funded MisrSat-2 satellite completed its assembly and testing at the center and was launched on Monday.
The satellite MisrSat-2, launched by a Long March-2C carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China's Gansu Province, will be used in Egypt's land and resource utilization, water conservancy, agriculture, and other fields. It is a landmark project of deep cooperation between China and Egypt in the field of aerospace high-tech, and is of milestone significance in aerospace cooperation between the two countries, according to the CNSA.
The signing of these space agreements between China and Egypt will guide future collaboration and play a significant role in advancing space technology and fostering comprehensive strategic partnerships between the two countries, said CNSA in a press release on Wednesday.
The Week of Italian Cuisine in the World kicked off on Monday, with the aim to promote exquisite Italian cooking, the Mediterranean diet, Italian agri-food products and wine. In the 2023 edition, as in past years, the week will be further enhanced by activities organized by the Italian Embassy in China together with the Italian business community operating in China.
Several Italian restaurants in Beijing, Tianjin, and Qingdao have been preparing special menus and typical dishes for Chinese friends and expatriates residing in China to enjoy throughout the Italian cuisine week that is set to run until November 19. Beijing's ABBOCCA restaurant, for instance, has provided a special selection for homemade fresh cheeses called "TRILOGY," which includes mozzarella, stracciatella, and ricotta, and has been dubbed a tasty journey through salty and sweet to stimulate all senses complete with fresh basil leaves, cherry tomatoes.
Parasites can drive their hosts to do weird, dumb things. But in certain oak trees, the parasites themselves get played.
“Creepy and awesome,” says Kelly Weinersmith of Rice University in Houston, who has helped reveal a Russian doll of nested parasitisms.
The saga begins when two majestic live oak species in the southeastern United States send out new shoots, and female crypt gall wasps (Bassettia pallida) arrive to lay eggs. A wasp mom uses the delivery end of her reproductive tract to drill through tree bark, injecting each of her eggs into a separate spot in the oak. Wasp biochemistry induces the tree to form a botanical womb with an edible lining largely free of oak defense chemicals. The tree is hijacked into nurturing each larva, and wasp life is good — until the unlucky ones get noticed by a second exploiter.
Another wasp species, a newly discovered Euderus, arrives, barely visible to the naked eye but “amazingly iridescent,” Weinersmith says. Her colleague at Rice, Scott Egan, named these jewel blue and green specks after Set, an Egyptian god of evil and chaos. E. set wasps enslave the B. pallida as laborers and living baby food. E. set females sense their prey inside the gall and inject eggs that hatch and feed on the original occupant. When the invaders mature, they are typically too frail to dig themselves out of the tree.But that’s not a problem, Weinersmith, Egan and colleagues report in the Jan. 25 Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That’s because, despite having a gnawing parasite inside, B. pallida wasps dig a tunnel to freedom.
Almost. When infested with E. set, the tunnelers don’t manage a large enough hole for their own escape. They die with their heads plugging the tunnel exit, perfect for the E. set attackers, who chew an escape hole through the stuck noggins.
Weinersmith and Egan may be the first to describe E. set’s manipulation, but what could be a much earlier example was collected by Alfred Kinsey — yes, that Kinsey. Before shocking mid-20th century America with explicit chronicles of human sexual behavior, he specialized in gall wasps.
Kinsey named more than 130 new species in just three years, collecting at least 5.5 million specimens, now at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. One of his Bassettia has its head stuck in a too-small exit hole in a stem, suggesting a chaos-and-death wasp lurks inside.
Much of what happens on the Earth’s surface is connected to activity far below. “Beneath Our Feet,” a temporary exhibit at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center in the Boston Public Library, explores the ways people have envisioned, explored and exploited what lies underground.
“We’re trying to visualize those places that humans don’t naturally go to,” says associate curator Stephanie Cyr. “Everybody gets to see what’s in the sky, but not everyone gets to see what’s underneath.” “Beneath Our Feet” displays 70 maps, drawings and archaeological artifacts in a bright, narrow exhibit space. (In total, the library holds a collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases.) Many objects have two sets of labels: one for adults and one for kids, who are guided by a cartoon rat mascot called Digger Burrows.
The layout puts the planet’s long history front and center. Visitors enter by walking over a U.S. Geological Survey map of North America that is color-coded to show how topography has changed over geologic time. Beyond that, the exhibit is split into two main themes, Cyr says: the natural world, and how people have put their fingerprints on it. Historical and modern maps hang side by side, illustrating how ways of thinking about the Earth developed as the tools for exploring it improved.
For instance, a 1665 illustration drawn by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher depicts Earth’s water systems as an underground network that churned with guidance from a large ball of fire in the planet’s center, Cyr says. “He wasn’t that far off.” Under Kircher’s drawing is an early sonar map of the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean, made by geologists Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen in 1969 (SN: 10/6/12, p. 30). Their maps revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Finding that rift helped to prove the existence of plate tectonics and that Earth’s surface is shaped by the motion of vast subsurface forces.
On another wall, a 1794 topological-relief drawing of Mount Vesuvius — which erupted and destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii in A.D. 79 — is embellished by a cartouche of Greek mythological characters, including one representing death. The drawing hangs above a NASA satellite image of the same region, showing how the cities around Mount Vesuvius have grown since the eruption that buried Pompeii, and how volcano monitoring has improved.
The tone turns serious in the latter half of the exhibit. Maps of coal deposits in 1880s Pennsylvania sit near modern schematics explaining how fracking works (SN: 9/8/12, p. 20). Reproductions of maps of the Dakotas from 1886 may remind visitors of ongoing controversies with the Dakota Access Pipeline, proposed to run near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and maps from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mark sites in Flint, Mich., with lead-tainted water.
Maps in the exhibit are presented dispassionately and without overt political commentary. Cyr hopes the zoomed-out perspectives that maps provide will allow people to approach controversial topics with cool heads.
“The library is a safe place to have civil discourse,” she says. “It’s also a place where you have access to factual materials and factual resources.”
An immune system mainstay in the fight against viruses may harm rather than help a pregnancy. In Zika-infected mice, this betrayal appears to contribute to fetal abnormalities linked to the virus, researchers report online January 5 in Science Immunology. And it could explain pregnancy complications that arise from infections with other pathogens and from autoimmune disorders.
In pregnant mice infected with Zika virus, those fetuses with a docking station, or receptor, for immune system proteins called type I interferons either died or grew more poorly compared with fetuses lacking the receptor. “The type I interferon system is one of the key mechanisms for stopping viral infections,” says Helen Lazear, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who coauthored an editorial accompanying the study. “That same [immune] process is actually causing fetal damage, and that’s unexpected.” Cells infected by viruses begin the fight against the intruder by producing type I interferons. These proteins latch onto their receptor on the surfaces of neighboring cells and kick-start the production of hundreds of other antiviral proteins.
Akiko Iwasaki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and immunologist at Yale School of Medicine, and her colleagues were interested in studying what happens to fetuses when moms are sexually infected with Zika virus. The researchers mated female mice unable to make the receptor for type I interferons to males with one copy of the gene needed to make the receptor. This meant that moms would carry some pups with the receptor and some without in the same pregnancy.
Pregnant mice were infected vaginally with Zika at one of two times — one corresponding to mid‒first trimester in humans, the other to late first trimester. Of the fetuses exposed to infection earlier, those that had the interferon receptor died, while those without the receptor continued to develop. For fetuses exposed to infection a bit later in the pregnancy, those with the receptor were much smaller than their receptor-lacking counterparts.
Story continues below graphic The fetuses without the receptor still grew poorly due to the Zika infection, which is expected given their inability to fight the infection. What was striking, Iwasaki says, is that the fetuses able to fight the infection were more damaged, and were the only fetuses that died.
It’s unclear how this antiviral immune response causes fetal damage. But the placentas—which, like their fetuses, had the receptor — didn’t appear to provide those fetuses with enough oxygen, Iwasaki says.
The researchers also infected pregnant mice that had the receptor for type I interferons with a viral mimic — a bit of genetic material that goads the body to begin its antiviral immune response — to see if the damage happened only during a Zika infection. These fetuses also died early in the pregnancy, an indication that perhaps the immune system could cause fetal damage during other viral infections, Iwasaki notes.
Iwasaki and colleagues next added type I interferon to samples of human placental tissue in dishes. After 16 to 20 hours, the placental tissues developed structures that resembled syncytial knots. These knots are widespread in the placentas of pregnancies with such complications as preeclampsia and restricted fetal growth.
Figuring out which of the hundreds of antiviral proteins made when type I interferon ignites the immune system can trigger placental and fetal damage is the next step, says Iwasaki. That could provide more understanding of miscarriage generally; other infections that cause congenital diseases, like toxoplasmosis and rubella; and autoimmune disorders that feature excessive type I interferon production, such as lupus, she says.
A pooling of plastic waste floating in the ocean between California and Hawaii contains at least 79,000 tons of material spread over 1.6 million square kilometers, researchers report March 22 in Scientific Reports. That’s the equivalent to the mass of more than 6,500 school buses. Known as the great Pacific garbage patch, the hoard is four to 16 times as heavy as past estimates.
About 1.8 trillion plastic pieces make up the garbage patch, the scientists estimate. Particles smaller than half a centimeter, called microplastics, account for 94 percent of the pieces, but only 8 percent of the overall mass. In contrast, large (5 to 50 centimeters) and extra-large (bigger than 50 centimeters) pieces made up 25 percent and 53 percent of the estimated patch mass. Much of the plastic in the patch comes from humans’ ocean activities, such as fishing and shipping, the researchers found. Almost half of the total mass, for example, is from discarded fishing nets. A lot of that litter contains especially durable plastics, such as polyethylene and polypropylene, which are designed to survive in marine environments. To get the new size and mass estimates, Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit foundation in Delft, the Netherlands, and his colleagues trawled samples from the ocean surface, took aerial images and simulated particle pathways based on plastic sources and ocean circulation. Aerial images provided more accurate tallies and measurements of the larger plastic pieces, the researchers write. That could account for the increase in mass over past estimates, which relied on trawling data and images taken from boats, in addition to computer simulations. Another possible explanation: The patch grew — perhaps driven by an influx of debris from the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan and washed trash out to sea (SN: 10/28/17, p. 32).
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — A young, ultrabright Jupiter may have desiccated its now hellish moon Io. The planet’s bygone brilliance could have also vaporized water on Europa and Ganymede, planetary scientist Carver Bierson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. If true, the findings could help researchers narrow the search for icy exomoons by eliminating unlikely orbits.
Jupiter is among the brightest specks in our night sky. But past studies have indicated that during its infancy, Jupiter was far more luminous. “About 10 thousand times more luminous,” said Bierson, of Arizona State University in Tempe. That radiance would have been inescapable for the giant planet’s moons, the largest of which are volcanic Io, ice-shelled Europa, aurora-cowled Ganymede and crater-laden Callisto (SN: 12/22/22, SN: 4/19/22, SN: 3/12/15). The constitutions of these four bodies obey a trend: The more distant the moon from Jupiter, the more ice-rich its body is.
Bierson and his colleagues hypothesized this pattern was a legacy of Jupiter’s past radiance. The team used computers to simulate how an infant Jupiter may have warmed its moons, starting with Io, the closest of the four. During its first few million years, Io’s surface temperature may have exceeded 26° Celsius under Jupiter’s glow, Bierson said. “That’s Earthlike temperatures.”
Any ice present on Io at that time, roughly 4.5 billion years ago, probably would have melted into an ocean. That water would have progressively evaporated into an atmosphere. And that atmosphere, hardly restrained by the moon’s weak gravity, would have readily escaped into space. In just a few million years, Io could have lost as much water as Ganymede may hold today, which may be more than 25 times the amount in Earth’s oceans.
A coruscant Jupiter probably didn’t remove significant amounts of ice from Europa or Ganymede, the researchers found, unless Jupiter was brighter than simulated or the moons orbited closer than they do today.
The findings suggest that icy exomoons probably don’t orbit all that close to massive planets.
In a book about his travels in Africa published in 1907, British explorer Arnold Henry Savage Landor recounted witnessing an impromptu meal that his companions relished but that he found unimaginably revolting.
As he coasted down a river in the Congo Basin with several local hunter-gatherers, a dead rodent floated near their canoe. Its decomposing body had bloated to the size of a small pig.
Stench from the swollen corpse left Landor gasping for breath. Unable to speak, he tried to signal his companions to steer the canoe away from the fetid creature. Instead, they hauled the supersize rodent aboard and ate it. “The odour when they dug their knives into it was enough to kill the strongest of men,” Landor wrote. “When I recovered, my admiration for the digestive powers of these people was intense. They were smacking their lips and they said the [rodent] had provided most excellent eating.”
Starting in the 1500s, European and then later American explorers, traders, missionaries, government officials and others who lived among Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world wrote of similar food practices. Hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers everywhere commonly ate putrid meat, fish and fatty parts of a wide range of animals. From arctic tundra to tropical rainforests, native populations consumed rotten remains, either raw, fermented or cooked just enough to singe off fur and create a more chewable texture. Many groups treated maggots as a meaty bonus.
Descriptions of these practices, which still occur in some present-day Indigenous groups and among northern Europeans who occasionally eat fermented fish, aren’t likely to inspire any new Food Network shows or cookbooks from celebrity chefs.
Case in point: Some Indigenous communities feasted on huge decomposing beasts, including hippos that had been trapped in dug-out pits in Africa and beached whales on Australia’s coast. Hunters in those groups typically smeared themselves with the fat of the animal before gorging on greasy innards. After slicing open animals’ midsections, both adults and children climbed into massive, rotting body cavities to remove meat and fat.
Or consider that Native Americans in Missouri in the late 1800s made a prized soup from the greenish, decaying flesh of dead bison. Animal bodies were buried whole in winter and unearthed in spring after ripening enough to achieve peak tastiness.
But such accounts provide a valuable window into a way of life that existed long before Western industrialization and the war against germs went global, says anthropological archaeologist John Speth of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Intriguingly, no reports of botulism and other potentially fatal reactions to microorganisms festering in rotting meat appear in writings about Indigenous groups before the early 1900s. Instead, decayed flesh and fat represented valued and tasty parts of a healthy diet. Many travelers such as Landor considered such eating habits to be “disgusting.” But “a gold mine of ethnohistorical accounts makes it clear that the revulsion Westerners feel toward putrid meat and maggots is not hardwired in our genome but is instead culturally learned,” Speth says.
This dietary revelation also challenges an influential scientific idea that cooking originated among our ancient relatives as a way to make meat more digestible, thus providing a rich calorie source for brain growth in the Homo genus. It’s possible, Speth argues, that Stone Age hominids such as Neandertals first used cooking for certain plants that, when heated, provided an energy-boosting, carbohydrate punch to the diet. Animals held packets of fat and protein that, after decay set in, rounded out nutritional needs without needing to be heated. Putrid foods in the diets of Indigenous peoples Speth’s curiosity about a human taste for putrid meat was originally piqued by present-day hunter-gatherers in polar regions. North American Inuit, Siberians and other far-north populations still regularly eat fermented or rotten meat and fish.
Fermented fish heads, also known as “stinkhead,” are one popular munchy among northern groups. Chukchi herders in the Russian Far East, for instance, bury whole fish in the ground in early fall and let the bodies naturally ferment during periods of freezing and thawing. Fish heads the consistency of hard ice cream are then unearthed and eaten whole.
Speth has suspected for several decades that consumption of fermented and putrid meat, fish, fat and internal organs has a long and probably ancient history among northern Indigenous groups. Consulting mainly online sources such as Google Scholar and universities’ digital library catalogs, he found many ethnohistorical descriptions of such behavior going back to the 1500s. Putrid walrus, seals, caribou, reindeer, musk oxen, polar bears, moose, arctic hares and ptarmigans had all been fair game. Speth reported much of this evidence in 2017 in PaleoAnthropology.
In one recorded incident from late-1800s Greenland, a well-intentioned hunter brought what he had claimed in advance was excellent food to a team led by American explorer Robert Peary. A stench filled the air as the hunter approached Peary’s vessel carrying a rotting seal dripping with maggots. The Greenlander had found the seal where a local group had buried it, possibly a couple of years earlier, so that the body could reach a state of tasty decomposition. Peary ordered the man to keep the reeking seal off his boat.
Miffed at this unexpected rejection, the hunter “told us that the more decayed the seal the finer the eating, and he could not understand why we should object,” Peary’s wife wrote of the encounter.
Even in temperate and tropical areas, where animal bodies decompose within hours or days, Indigenous peoples have appreciated rot as much as Peary’s seal-delivery man did. Speth and anthropological archaeologist Eugène Morin of Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, described some of those obscure ethnohistorical accounts last October in PaleoAnthropology. Early hominids may have scavenged rotten meat These accounts undermine some of scientists’ food-related sacred cows, Speth says. For instance, European explorers and other travelers consistently wrote that traditional groups not only ate putrid meat raw or lightly cooked but suffered no ill aftereffects. A protective gut microbiome may explain why, Speth suspects. Indigenous peoples encountered a variety of microorganisms from infancy on, unlike people today who grow up in sanitized settings. Early exposures to pathogens may have prompted the development of an array of gut microbes and immune responses that protected against potential harms of ingesting putrid meat.
That idea requires further investigation; little is known about the bacterial makeup of rotten meat eaten by traditional groups or of their gut microbiomes. But studies conducted over the last few decades do indicate that putrefaction, the process of decay, offers many of cooking’s nutritional benefits with far less effort. Putrefaction predigests meat and fish, softening the flesh and chemically breaking down proteins and fats so they are more easily absorbed and converted to energy by the body.
Given the ethnohistorical evidence, hominids living 3 million years ago or more could have scavenged meat from decomposing carcasses, even without stone tools for hunting or butchery, and eaten their raw haul safely long before fire was used for cooking, Speth contends. If simple stone tools appeared as early as 3.4 million years ago, as some researchers have controversially suggested, those implements may have been made by hominids seeking raw meat and marrow (SN: 9/11/10, p. 8). Researchers suspect regular use of fire for cooking, light and warmth emerged no earlier than around 400,000 years ago (SN: 5/5/12, p. 18).
“Recognizing that eating rotten meat is possible, even without fire, highlights how easy it would have been to incorporate scavenged food into the diet long before our ancestors learned to hunt or process [meat] with stone tools,” says paleoanthropologist Jessica Thompson of Yale University.
Thompson and colleagues suggested in Current Anthropology in 2019 that before about 2 million years ago, hominids were primarily scavengers who used rocks to smash open animal bones and eat nutritious, fat-rich marrow and brains. That conclusion, stemming from a review of fossil and archaeological evidence, challenged a common assumption that early hominids — whether as hunters or scavengers — primarily ate meat off the bone.
Certainly, ancient hominids were eating more than just the meaty steaks we think of today, says archaeologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of Rice University in Houston. In East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge, butchered animal bones at sites dating to nearly 2 million years ago indicate that hominids ate most parts of carcasses, including brains and internal organs.
“But Speth’s argument about eating putrid carcasses is very speculative and untestable,” Domínguez-Rodrigo says.
Untangling whether ancient hominids truly had a taste for rot will require research that spans many fields, including microbiology, genetics and food science, Speth says.
But if his contention holds up, it suggests that ancient cooks were not turning out meat dishes. Instead, Speth speculates, cooking’s primary value at first lay in making starchy and oily plants softer, more chewable and easily digestible. Edible plants contain carbohydrates, sugar molecules that can be converted to energy in the body. Heating over a fire converts starch in tubers and other plants to glucose, a vital energy source for the body and brain. Crushing or grinding of plants might have yielded at least some of those energy benefits to hungry hominids who lacked the ability to light fires.
Whether hominids controlled fire well enough to cook plants or any other food regularly before around 400,000 to 300,000 years ago is unknown. Neandertals may have hunted animals for fat Despite their nutritional benefits, plants often get viewed as secondary menu items for Stone Age folks. It doesn’t help that plants preserve poorly at archaeological sites.
Neandertals, in particular, have a long-standing reputation as plant shunners. Popular opinion views Neandertals as burly, shaggy individuals who huddled around fires chomping on mammoth steaks.
That’s not far from an influential scientific view of what Neandertals ate. Elevated levels of a diet-related form of nitrogen in Neandertal bones and teeth hint that they were committed carnivores, eating large amounts of protein-rich lean meat, several research teams have concluded over nearly the last 30 years.
But consuming that much protein from meat, especially from cuts above the front and hind limbs now referred to as steaks, would have been a recipe for nutritional disaster, Speth argues. Meat from wild, hoofed animals and smaller creatures such as rabbits contains almost no fat, or marbling, unlike meat from modern domestic animals, he says. Ethnohistorical accounts, especially for northern hunters including the Inuit, include warnings about weight loss, ill health and even death that can result from eating too much lean meat.
This form of malnutrition is known as rabbit starvation. Evidence indicates that people can safely consume between about 25 and 35 percent of daily calories as protein, Speth says. Above that threshold, several investigations have indicated that the liver becomes unable to break down chemical wastes from ingested proteins, which then accumulate in the blood and contribute to rabbit starvation. Limits to the amount of daily protein that can be safely consumed meant that ancient hunting groups, like those today, needed animal fats and carbohydrates from plants to fulfill daily calorie and other nutritional needs.
Modern “Paleo diets” emphasize eating lean meats, fruits and vegetables. But that omits what past and present Indigenous peoples most wanted from animal carcasses. Accounts describe Inuit people eating much larger amounts of fatty body parts than lean meat, Speth says. Over the last few centuries, they have favored tongue, fat deposits, brisket, ribs, fatty tissue around intestines and internal organs, and marrow. Internal organs, especially adrenal glands, have provided vitamin C — nearly absent in lean muscle — that prevented anemia and other symptoms of scurvy.
Western explorers noted that the Inuit also ate chyme, the stomach contents of reindeer and other plant-eating animals. Chyme provided at least a side course of plant carbohydrates. Likewise, Neandertals in Ice Age Europe probably subsisted on a fat- and chyme-supplemented diet (SN Online: 10/11/13), Speth contends.
Large numbers of animal bones found at northern European Neandertal sites — often viewed as the residue of ravenous meat eaters — may instead reflect overhunting of animals to obtain enough fat to meet daily calorie needs. Because wild game typically has a small percentage of body fat, northern hunting groups today and over the last few centuries frequently killed prey in large numbers, either discarding most lean meat from carcasses or feeding it to their dogs, ethnographic studies show.
If Neandertals followed that playbook, eating putrid foods might explain why their bones carry a carnivore-like nitrogen signature, Speth suggests. An unpublished study of decomposing human bodies kept at a University of Tennessee research facility in Knoxville called the Body Farm tested that possibility. Biological anthropologist Melanie Beasley, now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., found moderately elevated tissue nitrogen levels in 10 deceased bodies sampled regularly for about six months. Tissue from those bodies served as a stand-in for animal meat consumed by Neandertals. Human flesh is an imperfect substitute for, say, reindeer or elephant carcasses. But Beasley’s findings suggest that decomposition’s effects on a range of animals need to be studied. Intriguingly, she also found that maggots in the decaying tissue displayed extremely elevated nitrogen levels.
Paleobiologist Kimberly Foecke of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., has also found high nitrogen levels in rotting, maggot-free cuts of beef from animals fed no hormones or antibiotics to approximate the diets of Stone Age creatures (SN: 1/2/19).
Like arctic hunters did a few hundred years ago, Neandertals may have eaten putrid meat and fish studded with maggots, Speth says. That would explain elevated nitrogen levels in Neandertal fossils.
But Neandertal dining habits are poorly understood. Unusually extensive evidence of Neandertal big-game consumption has come from a new analysis of fossil remains at a roughly 125,000-year-old site in northern Germany called Neumark-Nord. There, Neandertals periodically hunted straight-tusked elephants weighing up to 13 metric tons, say archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany and colleagues.
In a study reported February 1 in Science Advances, her group analyzed patterns of stone-tool incisions on bones of at least 57 elephants from 27 spots near an ancient lake basin where Neandertals lit campfires and constructed shelters (SN: 1/29/22, p. 8). Evidence suggests that Neandertal butchers — much like Inuit hunters — removed fat deposits under the skin and fatty body parts such as the tongue, internal organs, brain and thick layers of fat in the feet. Lean meat from elephants would have been eaten in smaller quantities to avoid rabbit starvation, the researchers argue.
Further research needs to examine whether the Neandertals cooked elephant meat or boiled the bones to extract nutritious grease, Speth says. Mealtime options would have expanded for hominids who could not only consume putrid meat and fat but also heat animal parts over fires, he suspects.
Neandertals who hunted elephants must also have eaten a variety of plants to meet their considerable energy requirements, says Gaudzinski-Windheuser. But so far, only fragments of burned hazelnuts, acorns and blackthorn plums have been found at Neumark-Nord. Neandertals probably carb-loaded Better evidence of Neandertals’ plant preferences comes from sites in warm Mediterranean and Middle Eastern settings. At a site in coastal Spain, Neandertals probably ate fruits, nuts and seeds of a variety of plants (SN: 3/27/21, p. 32).
Neandertals in a range of environments must have consumed lots of starchy plants, argues archaeologist Karen Hardy of the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Even Stone Age northern European and Asian regions included plants with starch-rich appendages that grew underground, such as tubers.
Neandertals could also have obtained starchy carbs from the edible, inner bark of many trees and from seaweed along coastlines. Cooking, as suggested by Speth, would have greatly increased the nutritional value of plants, Hardy says. Not so for rotten meat and fat, though Neandertals such as those at Neumark-Nord may have cooked what they gleaned from fresh elephant remains.
There is direct evidence that Neandertals munched on plants. Microscopic remnants of edible and medicinal plants have been found in the tartar on Neandertal teeth (SN: 4/1/17, p. 16), Hardy says.
Carbohydrate-fueled energy helped to maintain large brains, enable strenuous physical activity and ensure healthy pregnancies for both Neandertals and ancient Homo sapiens, Hardy concludes in the January 2022 Journal of Human Evolution. (Researchers disagree over whether Neandertals, which lived from around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, were a variant of H. sapiens or a separate species.) Paleo cuisine was tasty Like Hardy, Speth suspects that plants provided a large share of the energy and nutrients Stone Age folks needed. Plants represented a more predictable, readily available food source than hunted or scavenged meat and fat, he contends.
Plants also offered Neandertals and ancient H. sapiens — whose diets probably didn’t differ dramatically from Neandertals’, Hardy says — a chance to stretch their taste buds and cook up tangy meals.
Paleolithic plant cooking included preplanned steps aimed at adding dashes of specific flavors to basic dishes, a recent investigation suggests. In at least some places, Stone Age people apparently cooked to experience pleasing tastes and not just to fill their stomachs. Charred plant food fragments from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan and Franchthi Cave in Greece consisted of crushed pulse seeds, possibly from starchy pea species, combined with wild plants that would have provided a pungent, somewhat bitter taste, microscopic analyses show.
Added ingredients included wild mustard, wild almonds, wild pistachio and fruits such as hackberry, archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu of the University of Liverpool in England and colleagues reported last November in Antiquity.
Four Shanidar food bits date to about 40,000 years ago or more and originated in sediment that included stone tools attributed to H. sapiens. Another food fragment, likely from a cooked Neandertal meal, dates to between 70,000 and 75,000 years ago. Neandertal fossils found in Shanidar Cave are also about 70,000 years old. So it appears that Shanidar Neandertals spiced up cooked plant foods before Shanidar H. sapiens did, Kabukcu says.
Franchthi food remains date to between 13,100 and 11,400 years ago, when H. sapiens lived there. Wild pulses in food from both caves display microscopic signs of having been soaked, a way to dilute poisons in seeds and moderate their bitterness.
These new findings “suggest that cuisine, or the combination of different ingredients for pleasure, has a very long history indeed,” says Hardy, who was not part of Kabukcu’s team.
There’s a hefty dollop of irony in the possibility that original Paleo diets mixed what people in many societies today regard as gross-sounding portions of putrid meat and fat with vegetarian dishes that still seem appealing.
Hayabusa2 has blasted the asteroid Ryugu with a projectile, probably adding a crater to the small world’s surface and stirring up dust that scientists hope to snag.
The projectile, a two-kilogram copper cylinder, separated from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft at 9:56 p.m. EDT on April 4, JAXA, Japan’s space agency, reports.
Hayabusa2 flew to the other side of the asteroid to hide from debris that would have been ejected when the projectile hit (SN: 1/19/19, p. 20). Scientists won’t know for sure whether the object successfully made a crater, and, if so, how big it is, until the craft circles back. But by 10:36 p.m. EDT, Hayabusa2’s cameras had captured a blurry shot of a dust plume spurting up from Ryugu, so the team thinks the attempt worked. “This is the world’s first collision experiment with an asteroid!” JAXA tweeted.
Hayabusa2 plans to briefly touch down inside the crater to pick up a pinch of asteroid dust. The spacecraft has already grabbed one sample of Ryugu’s surface (SN Online: 2/22/19). But dust exposed by the impact will give researchers a look at the asteroid’s subsurface, which has not been exposed to sunlight or other types of space radiation for up to billions of years.
If all goes as planned, Hayabusa2 will return to Earth with both samples in late 2020. A third planned sample pickup has been scrapped because Ryugu’s boulder-strewn surface is so hazardous for the spacecraft. Comparing the two samples will reveal details of how being exposed to space changes the appearance and composition of rocky asteroids, and will help scientists figure out how Ryugu formed (SN Online: 3/20/19). Scientists hope that the asteroid contains water and organic material that might help explain how life got started in the solar system.
A skull found in a cliffside cave on Greece’s southern coast in 1978 represents the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside Africa, scientists say.
That skull, from an individual who lived at least 210,000 years ago, was encased in rock that also held a Neandertal skull dating to at least 170,000 years ago, contends a team led by paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
If these findings, reported online July 10 in Nature, hold up, the ancient Greek H. sapiens skull is more than 160,000 years older than the next oldest European H. sapiens fossils (SN Online: 11/2/11). It’s also older than a proposed H. sapiens jaw found at Israel’s Misliya Cave that dates to between around 177,000 and 194,000 years ago (SN: 2/17/18, p. 6).
“Multiple Homo sapiens populations dispersed out of Africa starting much earlier, and reaching much farther into Europe, than previously thought,” Harvati said at a July 8 news conference. African H. sapiens originated roughly 300,000 years ago (SN: 7/8/17, p. 6). A small group of humans may have reached what’s now Greece more than 200,000 years ago, she suggested. Neandertals who settled in southeastern Europe not long after that may have replaced those first H. sapiens. Then humans arriving in Mediterranean Europe tens of thousands of years later would eventually have replaced resident Neandertals, who died out around 40,000 years ago (SN Online: 6/26/19).
But Harvati’s group can’t exclude the possibility that H. sapiens and Neandertals simultaneously inhabited southeastern Europe more than 200,000 years ago and sometimes interbred. A 2017 analysis of ancient and modern DNA concluded that humans likely mated with European Neandertals at that time.
The two skulls were held in a small section of wall that had washed into Greece’s Apidima Cave from higher cliff sediment and then solidified roughly 150,000 years ago. Since one skull is older than the other, each must originally have been deposited in different sediment layers before ending up about 30 centimeters apart on the cave wall, the researchers say. Earlier studies indicated that one Apidima skull, which retains the face and much of the braincase, was a Neandertal that lived at least 160,000 years ago. But fossilization and sediment pressures had distorted the skull’s shape. Based on four 3-D digital reconstructions of the specimen, Harvati’s team concluded that its heavy brow ridges, sloping face and other features resembled Neandertal skulls more than ancient and modern human skulls. An analysis of the decay rate of radioactive forms of uranium in skull bone fragments produced an age estimate of at least 170,000 years.
A second Apidima fossil, also dated using uranium analyses, consists of the back of a slightly distorted braincase. Its rounded shape in a digital reconstruction characterizes H. sapiens, not Neandertals, the researchers say. A bunlike bulge often protrudes from the back of Neandertals’ skulls. But without any facial remains to confirm the species identity of the partial braincase, “it is still possible that both Apidima skulls are Neandertals,” says paleoanthropologist Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University. Hershkovitz led the team that discovered the Misliya jaw and assigned it to H. sapiens.
Harvati and her colleagues will try to extract DNA and species-distinguishing proteins (SN: 6/8/19, p. 6) from the Greek skulls to determine their evolutionary identities and to look for signs of interbreeding between humans and Neandertals.
The find does little to resolve competing explanations of how ancient humans made their way out of Africa. Harvati’s suggestion that humans trekked from Africa to Eurasia several times starting more than 200,000 years ago is plausible, says paleoanthropologist Eric Delson of City University of New York’s Lehman College in an accompanying commentary. And the idea that some H. sapiens newcomers gave way to Neandertals probably also applied to humans who reached Misliya Cave and nearby Middle Eastern sites as late as around 90,000 years ago, before Neandertals occupied the area by 60,000 years ago, Delson says.
Hershkovitz disagrees. Ancient humans and Neandertals lived side-by-side in the Middle East for 100,000 years or more and occasionally interbred, he contends. Misliya Cave sediment bearing stone tools dates to as early as 274,000 years ago, Hershkovitz says. Since only H. sapiens remains have been found in the Israeli cave, ancient humans probably made those stone artifacts and could have been forerunners of Greek H. sapiens.
