Read moreThe genetic ancestry of the earliest Europeans survived the ferocious Ice Age that took hold after the continent was initially settled by modern people.
That is the suggestion of a study of DNA from a male hunter who lived in western Russia 36,000 years ago.
His genome is not exactly like those of people who lived in Europe just after the ice sheets melted 10,000 years ago.
But the study suggests the earliest Europeans did contribute their genes to later populations.
Europe was first settled around 40,000 years ago during a time known as the Upper Palaeolithic.
But conditions gradually deteriorated until ice covered much of the European landmass, reaching a peak 27,000 years ago.
The ice melted rapidly after 10,000 years ago, allowing populations from the south to re-populate northern Europe – during a time known as the Mesolithic. But the genetic relationships between pre- and post-Ice Age Europeans have been unclear.
Some researchers have in the past raised the possibility that pioneer populations in Europe could have gone extinct some time during the last Ice Age.
And one recent study looking at the skull features of ancient Europeans found that Upper Palaeolithic people were rather different from populations that lived during the later Mesolithic period.
In the latest study, an international team of researchers sequenced the genome (the genetic “blueprint” for a human) of a man buried in Kostenki, Russia.
They discovered a surprising genetic “unity” running from the first modern humans in Europe, through to later peoples. This, they claim, suggests that a “meta-population” of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers managed to survive the Ice Age and colonise the landmass of Europe for more than 30,000 years.
“That there was continuity from the earliest Upper Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic, across a major glaciation, is a great insight into the evolutionary processes underlying human success,” said co-author Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES).
“For 30,000 years ice sheets came and went, at one point covering two-thirds of Europe. Old cultures died and new ones emerged – such as the Aurignacian and the Gravettian – over thousands of years, and the hunter-gatherer populations ebbed and flowed.
“But we now know that no new sets of genes are coming in: these changes in survival and cultural kit are overlaid on the same biological background.”
She added: “It is only when farmers from the Near East arrived about 8,000 years ago that the structure of the European population changed significantly.”
Quotes
Read moreThere are no great inventors of history, after all. Henry Ford didn’t invent such a fantastic product, so much as stamp his name on the engineered optimization of a supply chain. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, he just did materials research until he found a viable product. The Wright Brothers didn’t invent an airplane, so much as improve their understanding of aeronautical principles until they could produce a proof of concept. Even the most brilliant, game-changing, turtleneck-wearing designers of today are trapped within their own particular contexts of supply chains and funding cycles, material fact, and physical laws. As ambitious young designers are finding out every week, a successfully funded Kickstarter is not a product delivered. And for those of us on the receiving end of the great technological juggernaut that our society has become, the consequences for what happens when things happen less-than-brilliantly are more dire than some negative blog reviews and a company dissolved by its investors.
Read moreUsing the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in near-infrared light, the team of astronomers observed 92 nearby stars to probe exozodiacal light from hot dust close to their habitable zones and combined the new data with earlier observations. Bright exozodiacal light, created by the glowing grains of hot exozodiacal dust, or the reflection of starlight off these grains, was observed around nine of the targeted stars.
From dark clear sites on Earth, zodiacal light looks like a faint diffuse white glow seen in the night sky after the end of twilight, or before dawn. It is created by sunlight reflected off tiny particles and appears to extend up from the vicinity of the Sun. This reflected light is not just observed from Earth but can be observed from everywhere in the Solar System.
The glow being observed in this new study is a much more extreme version of the same phenomenon. While this exozodiacal light—zodiacal light around other star systems—had been previously detected, this is the first large systematic study of this phenomenon around nearby stars.
In contrast to earlier observations the team did not observe dust that will later form into planets, but dust created in collisions between small planets of a few kilometres in size—objects called planetesimals that are similar to the asteroids and comets of the Solar System. Dust of this kind is also the origin of the zodiacal light in the Solar System.
“If we want to study the evolution of Earth-like planets close to the habitable zone, we need to observe the zodiacal dust in this region around other stars,” said Steve Ertel, lead author of the paper, from ESO and the University of Grenoble in France. “Detecting and characterising this kind of dust around other stars is a way to study the architecture and evolution of planetary systems.”…
By analysing the properties of the stars surrounded by a disc of exozodiacal dust, the team found that most of the dust was detected around older stars. This result was very surprising and raises some questions for our understanding of planetary systems. Any known dust production caused by collisions of planetesimals should diminish over time, as the number of planetesimals is reduced as they are destroyed.
The sample of observed objects also included 14 stars for which the detection of exoplanets has been reported. All of these planets are in the same region of the system as the dust in the systems showing exozodiacal light. The presence of exozodiacal light in systems with planets may create a problem for further astronomical studies of exoplanets.
Exozodiacal dust emission, even at low levels, makes it significantly harder to detect Earth-like planets with direct imaging. The exozodiacal light detected in this survey is a factor of 1000 times brighter than the zodiacal light seen around the Sun. The number of stars containing zodiacal light at the level of the Solar System is most likely much higher than the numbers found in the survey. These observations are therefore only a first step towards more detailed studies of exozodiacal light.
“The high detection rate found at this bright level suggests that there must be a significant number of systems containing fainter dust, undetectable in our survey, but still much brighter than the Solar System’s zodiacal dust,” explains Olivier Absil, co-author of the paper, from the University of Liège. “The presence of such dust in so many systems could therefore become an obstacle for future observations, which aim to make direct images of Earth-like exoplanets.”
Read morethis is the most culturally relevant film Christopher Nolan has yet directed… As a response to the incredibly popular Gravity, Interstellar loudly proclaims LIFE IN SPACE IS POSSIBLE! That instead of becoming naught but dust on the wind, we can be instruments to populate a living universe. Placed with the recent Guardians of the Galaxy and the upcoming film from the Wachowskis, Jupiter Ascending, it’s hopeful to think we’re entering a new golden age of the space opera. That humanity is summoning its courage and looking to stars again.
As Michael Caine frequently repeats, reciting the lines of the Dylan Thomas poem, not just to the mission crew and Murph, but to us all, to a world in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, looming economic and ecological collapse:
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I was talking to a friend who was feeling down about human-caused global climate change. “It may be,” I told a friend in London as we walked across Tower Bridge, “that our ticket was punched before we ever got started.” While there is no doubt we’re cutting our time on earth shorter through carbon emissions and the destruction of the ecology, it might be that our species was never going to make it past the end of the womb of our ice-age birth. I explained this, about how fragile an organism we are, and how the ice ages cycle. She laughed, she was used to my strange form of hope.
“You have to choose to have hope, or just jump out of a window,” a person I was interviewing once told me, a person who’d been accused of techno-utopianism. We were walking along the California coast hills at sunset, talking about all the ways our technological lives could go wrong, and the many ways it is going wrong. He wasn’t utopian, it turned out, he’d thought of the worst long before his detractors had. He’d decided to try to head it off, instead of jumping out of a window.
We are diseased and angry and we kill each other and ourselves and all the world. We are killing off life on Earth like a slow moving asteroid. I try to look at this, and my own part in it. Sometimes it is overwhelming. I feel so powerless trying to comprehend all the terrible things we face, much less get past them into our future, with our humanity and our inconceivably beautiful little blue-green planet preserved.
…
All these grown-up monsters for my grown-up mind, they are there in the nights I wake up terrified and taunted by death. When I feel so small and broken, when despair and terror take me, I have a secret tool, a talisman against the night. I don’t use it too often so that it doesn’t lose its power. I learned it on airplanes, which are strange and thrilling and full of fear and boredom and discomfort. When I am very frightened, I look out the window on airplanes and say very quietly:
I have seen the tops of clouds
And I have. In all the history of humanity, I am one of the few that has seen the tops of clouds. Many would have died to do so, and some did. I have seen them many times. I have seen the Earth from space, and spun it around like a god to see what’s on the other side. We are the only consciousness we’ve ever found that has looked deep into the infinite dark, and instead of dark, we saw galaxies. Galaxies! Suns and worlds beyond number. We have looked into our world and found atoms, atomic forces, systems that dance to the glorious music of the universe. We have seen actual wonders that verge on the ineffable. We have coined a word for the ineffable. We have coined thousands of words for the ineffable. In our pain we find a kind of magic, in our worst and meanest specimens we find the flesh of a common human story. We are red with it.
I know mysteries that great philosophers would have died for, just to have them whispered in their dying ears. I can look them up on my smartphone. I live in the middle of miracles, conceptions and magics easily worth many lifetimes to learn, from which I can pick and choose. I have wisdom and knowledge poured around me like a river, more than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes, and I am still alive. It is good that I am alive, it is good that we are alive. Even if we kill ourselves off with nuclear fire, or gray goo, or drown ourselves in stinking acid oceans, it is good that we have lived, that we did all of this, and that we grew into what we are, and learned to dream of what we could be. The only thing we can say for sure is that we will die, but we will die having gone so far above our primordial ponds and primate forests that we saw the tops of clouds.
I Have Seen The Tops of Clouds — Quinn Norton (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)
with bonus link in the post to my now public again ello.
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Read moreGenetic data on 27 Easter Island natives indicated that interbreeding between the Rapa Nui and native people in South America occurred roughly between 1300 and 1500.
“We found evidence of gene flow between this population and Native American populations, suggesting an ancient ocean migration route between Polynesia and the Americas,” said geneticist Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, who led the study.
The genetic evidence indicates either that Rapa Nui people traveled to South America or that Native Americans journeyed to Easter Island. The researchers said it probably was the Rapa Nui people making the arduous ocean round trips.
“It seems most likely that they voyaged from Rapa Nui to South America and brought South Americans back to Rapa Nui and admixed with them,” said Mark Stoneking, a geneticist with Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who collaborated on a related study of Brazil’s indigenous Botocudo people. “So it will be interesting to see if in further studies any signal of Polynesian, Rapa Nui ancestry can be found in South Americans.”
In making their way to South America and back, the Rapa Nui people may have spent perilous weeks in wooden outrigger canoes.
The researchers concluded that the intermixing occurred 19 to 23 generations ago. They said Rapa Nui people are not believed to have started mixing with Europeans until much later, the 19th century. Malaspinas said the genetic ancestry of today’s Rapa Nui people is roughly 75 percent Polynesian, 15 percent European and 10 percent Native American.
A second study, also published in Thursday’s issue of Current Biology, illustrates another case of Polynesians venturing into South America. Two ancient human skulls from Brazil’s indigenous Botocudo people, known for the large wooden disks they wore in their lips and ears, belonged to people who were genetically Polynesian, with no detectable Native American ancestry.
“How the two Polynesian individuals belonging to the Botocudos came into Brazil is the million-dollar question,” said University of Copenhagen geneticist Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics, who led the study on the Botocudos.
The findings suggest these Polynesians reached South America and made their way to Brazil, either landing on the western coast of the continent and crossing the interior or voyaging around Tierra del Fuego and up the east coast, Stoneking said.
Read moreThe irony being, of course, that the world normcore wants to escape from is the very world co-opted by trend forecasters and their ilk, a world where everything we own is imagined to be a prop, where our clothes are costumes and the places we live are stage sets. In other words, any authentic cultural expression has been rendered impossible by the kind of industry that K-Hole represents. Normcore is the sound of that world collapsing from the inside even as it smirks.
Read moreIn 2012, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues took samples from the bone to search for DNA. To their surprise, it held a number of genetic fragments.
“This is an amazing and shocking and unique sample,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new study.
The researchers used the DNA fragments to recreate a high-resolution copy of the man’s complete genome. A Y chromosome revealed that the thighbone belonged to a man.
The scientists then compared the genome of the so-called Ust’-Ishim man to those of ancient and living people.
They found that his DNA was more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans. But the Ust’-Ishim man was no more closely related to ancient Europeans than he was to East Asians.
He was part of an earlier lineage, the scientists concluded — a group that eventually gave rise to all non-African humans.
Homo sapiens, our own species, appeared in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Previous studies — both on genes and fossils — have suggested that they then expanded through the Near East to the rest of the Old World.
The Ust’-Ishim man’s genome suggests he belonged to a group of people who lived after the African exodus, but before the split between Europeans and Asians.
Dr. Paabo and his colleagues also found that the Ust’-Ishim man had pieces of Neanderthal DNA in his genome, just as living non-Africans do. But his Neanderthal DNA has some important differences.
Fossils indicate that Neanderthals spread across Europe and Asia before becoming extinct an estimated 40,000 years ago. Today, the Neanderthal DNA in each living non-African human is broken up into short segments sprinkled throughout the genome.
Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have hypothesized that this arrangement is the result of how cells divide.
During the development of eggs and sperm, each pair of chromosomes swaps pieces of their DNA. Over the generations, long stretches of DNA get broken into smaller ones, like a deck of cards repeatedly shuffled.
Over thousands of generations, the Neanderthal DNA became more fragmented. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues predicted, however, that Neanderthal DNA in the Ust’-Ishim man’s genome would form longer stretches.
And that’s exactly what they found. “It was very satisfying to see that,” Dr. Paabo said.
By comparing the Ust’-Ishim man’s long stretches of Neanderthal DNA to shorter stretches in living humans, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues estimated the rate at which they fragmented. They used that information to determine how long ago Neanderthals and humans interbred.
Previous studies — based on only living humans — had yielded an estimate between 37,000 and 86,000 years. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have now narrowed down that estimate dramatically: Humans and Neanderthals interbred between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, according to the new data.
Read moreHumans are not patient. Machines are very, very patient.
During my travels of the last year, people at Microsoft gave me a full demonstration and run-through of the abilities and affordances of the Kinect camera and the Xbox One. One guy showed me realtime take of the camera reading the heartbeats of the people in the room. As he was doing it, I stepped behind him and loudly clapped my hands. I watched his heart rate spike on the big screen. Discussed potentials for this technology included, yes, learning when people were getting hyped up by action movies, but also registering excitement caused by advertisements.
Here’s a fun idea. Remember Facebook’s experiment in emotional contagion? Deliberately setting some people’s Facebook timelines to show only sad things, to see what it did to them? Imagine an emotional-contagion experiment where they could access your heartrate off your smartwatch too.
Orbital Operations
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 