Humans Had Dogs Before They Had Farming

By roughly 14,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies across Europe had discovered dogs, scientists reported in two new papers, which were published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The studies provide the first definitive genetic evidence that dogs existed during the Paleolithic period, before humans developed agriculture.

The researchers, who used several approaches to analyze DNA extracted from ancient canine specimens, identified Paleolithic dogs at five different archaeological sites in Europe and Western Asia. The oldest of these dogs lived about 15,800 years ago, pushing back the oldest known genetic evidence of dogs by nearly 5,000 years.

These early dogs came from sites that extend from Britain to Turkey, and were associated with several very different hunter-gatherer populations. But the dogs themselves were closely related. Across the five sites, the dogs were more genetically similar than the humans were, the researchers found.

“The people are so different, but the dogs are very much the same,” said Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors on both new studies, which were conducted by large, international scientific teams.

The finding suggests that these early human societies were exchanging dogs or acquiring them from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around.” Dr. Larson said. “And it’s useful and it’s interesting and it’s probably cute.”

The research provides new insight into the early history of dogs, as well as the genetic legacy and the interspecies relationship that extends to today.

“It’s really a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of humans and dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute who was not involved in the research.

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The finding suggests that these early human societies were exchanging dogs or acquiring them from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around.” Dr. Larson said. “And it’s useful and it’s interesting and it’s probably cute.”

The research provides new insight into the early history of dogs, as well as the genetic legacy and the interspecies relationship that extends to today.

“It’s really a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of humans and dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute who was not involved in the research.

- More Here

Ancient Humans Show Evidence Of Plant-Heavy Diets

Previous research suggests that our ancient human ancestors were hunter-gatherers who relied heavily on eating animals. These assumptions have been replicated in popular “fad” diets such as Paleo and Carnivore, which emphasize humans’ ancestral diets and encourage heavy meat consumption. However, the science on prehistoric diets remains unclear. Did ancient humans truly prioritize hunting animals and only forage for plants when necessary?

According to the authors of this study, research on this topic typically relies on indirect evidence. Previous scholars excavated objects like spears and arrowheads, stone tools, and large animal bone fragments and made the assumption that large mammal hunting was the norm. However, other excavations suggest that plant-based foods were also part of early human diets, including studies of human dental remains. The authors wonder whether the overrepresentation of hunting-related artifacts in excavations, along with gender biases, have inflated the importance of hunting.   

In this study, researchers tested the hypothesis that human hunter-gatherers in the Andes highlands in South America relied mostly on large mammal hunting. They used a more direct research method called stable isotope analysis — this involves studying certain elements in human bone remains to reveal what types of food ancient humans ate. They also compared this information to plant and animal remains found at the excavation site. They sampled bones from 24 humans who lived in what is now Peru during the Archaic Period (9,000-6,500 years before present).

Researchers assumed their results would show a diverse diet with an emphasis on large animal consumption. However, contrary to previous research, the bone analysis suggested that plants dominated ancient diets in the Andes region, making up between 70-95% of dietary consumption. Wild tuber plants (like potatoes) were the main plant source, while large mammals played a secondary role. Meanwhile, meat from small mammals, birds, and fishes, as well as other plant types, played a much smaller dietary role. 

- More Here (full paper here)

This makes intuitive sense, try to replicate a typical American diet of three (or more) meals everyday with meat by hunting animals with rudimentary tools. Good luck, if you had a meal a week!

Our society, economy, and civilization is built on abusing animals. Most bodies are “built” on abusing animals. Factory farms is an euphemism for torture cambers for unwarranted protein needs of sedentary lifestyle of humans and masquerading in name of made up tradition, culture, health and god knows what else. In the end, these humans suffer in hospitals and hospice. 

How to stop this vicious cycle? I pretty much live to find even a marginal answer to this question. And I am open to the idea that this might be the wrong question and we need a new question(s). 

Archaea, Horizontal Gene Transfer et al.,

Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved.

The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (They look like bacteria through a microscope, but their DNA reveals they are shockingly different.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizontal gene transfer. (Heredity was supposed to move only vertically, from parents to offspring.) The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest ancestry. (It seems now that our lineage traces to the archaea.) So we ourselves probably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist.

One of the most disorienting results of these developments is a new challenge to the concept of “species.” Biologists have long recognized that the boundaries of one species may blur into another—by the process of hybridism, for instance. And the notion of species is especially insecure in the realm of bacteria and archaea.  But the discovery that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has occurred naturally, many times, even in the lineages of animals and plants, has brought the categorical reality of a species into greater question than ever. That’s even true for us humans—we are composite individuals, mosaics.

It’s not just that—as you may have read in magazine articles—your human body contains at least as many bacterial cells as it does human cells. (This doesn’t even count all the nonbacterial microbes—the virus particles, fungal cells, archaea, and other teeny passengers inhabiting our guts, mouths, nostrils, and other bodily surfaces.) That’s the microbiome. Each of us is an ecosystem.

I’m talking about something else, a bigger and more shocking discovery that has come from the revolution in a field called molecular phylogenetics. (That phrase sounds fancy and technical, but it means merely the use of molecular information, such as DNA or RNA sequences, in discerning how one creature is related to another.) The discovery was that sizeable chunks of the genomes of all kinds of animals, including us, have been acquired by horizontal transfer from bacteria or other alien species.

How could that be possible? How could genes move sideways, between species, not just vertically along ancestral lineages? The mechanisms are complex, but one label that fits most of them is “infective heredity.”  DNA can be carried across boundaries, from one genome to another, by infective agents such as bacteria and viruses. Such horizontal gene transfer, like sex, has been a source of freshening innovation in otherwise discrete lineages, including ours—and it is still occurring.

This is an aspect of evolution that was unimagined by Charles Darwin. Evolution is trickier, far more intricate, than we had realized. The tree of life is more tangled.

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These discoveries should not merely complicate our magisterial human self-image, but also help lead us toward a wiser and humbler understanding of our place—collectively and as “individuals” within the “species” Homo sapiens—in the story of life on Earth.

It’s a story in which we humans are important protagonists but not the ultimate and predestined heroes. It’s a story in which heredity has moved sideways as well as vertically and all the conventional hierarchies and boundaries have proven more imperfect, transgressible, and leaky than we had supposed. But these revelations don’t diminish our responsibility, as humans, to respect and preserve the diversity of living creatures, with all their own mosaic genomes and tangled lineages, who cohabit the planet with us. On the contrary, I think. All this should make us only more amazed, respectful, and careful. Life on Earth is wondrous precisely because it’s so complicated.

- More Here

The Longevity Bottleneck Hypothesis: Could Dinosaurs Have Shaped Ageing In Present-Day Mammals?

Abstract

The evolution and biodiversity of ageing have long fascinated scientists and the public alike. While mammals, including long-lived species such as humans, show a marked ageing process, some species of reptiles and amphibians exhibit very slow and even the absence of ageing phenotypes. How can reptiles and other vertebrates age slower than mammals? Herein, I propose that evolving during the rule of the dinosaurs left a lasting legacy in mammals. For over 100 million years when dinosaurs were the dominant predators, mammals were generally small, nocturnal, and short-lived. My hypothesis is that such a long evolutionary pressure on early mammals for rapid reproduction led to the loss or inactivation of genes and pathways associated with long life. I call this the ‘longevity bottleneck hypothesis’, which is further supported by the absence in mammals of regenerative traits. Although mammals, such as humans, can evolve long lifespans, they do so under constraints dating to the dinosaur era.

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While fast ageing species can be found amongst reptiles, birds, amphibians and mammals, the slowest ageing species are non-mammals. Indeed, examples of amphibians, fishes and reptiles exhibiting negligible senescence have been reported, but no mammal. 

- More Here

The Past And Future Of Genomics

But more interesting than the exponential growth in data are the surprising things we have inferred from the data. In the heady early days of the publication of the draft of the human genome over twenty years ago, co-author Francis Collins asserted that the combination of molecular biology and genomics would “make a significant impact” on our attempt to understand and cure cancer. Despite some early instances where genomic sequencing was performed on cancer patients, like Steve Jobs in 2009, the overall impact of the new science on healthcare has been modest at best. Instead, paleoanthropology, prehistory, and history were transformed as genetics surveyed the pedigrees of the human past with a power and precision that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

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This shocking result only came out through ancient DNA. Not only do modern humans have Neanderthal ancestry, but some of us have Denisovan ancestry. It comprises 5% of the heritage of Papuans and lower fractions of Denisovan ancestry are found throughout Asia. There is an open question in anthropology as to whether humans are naturally promiscuous. The data from DNA shows that our forebears were sexually open to liaisons with populations and people quite different from them, and definitely forces us to lean in one direction in the debate.

Using a genomic clock, ‌Neanderthals and modern humans became separated 600,000 years ago. The most distinct lineage in modern populations, between South African Khoisan and all other humans, clocks in at 200,000 years. Our ancestors’ sexual preferences were evidently very broad. In a cave in Russia, Researchers have even discovered a young girl whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father was a Denisovan. Statistically, the probability of catching a first-generation hybrid is low; the fact that it was discovered shows that this behavior was common.

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The Roman recollection of the rape of the Sabine women likely reflects cultural memory of events in prehistory, where victorious males obtained mates from the lands they conquered after killing the fathers and brothers of the women they would make wives. Prehistoric human males behaved like lions taking over a pack, killing everyone among the conquered except for nubile females. Genetics shows that since the end of the last Ice Age, paternal lineages are characterized by periodic explosions, where one clan seems to have replaced all the others through a process of competition and polygyny.

Call it the “Genghis Khan effect,” but the Mongolian world emperor was simply the last in a long line of “super-males” that have defined much of the last 12,000 years. They say to believe them when they tell you who they are, and the legends of the Indo-Europeans reflect a patriarchal and warlike culture, destroyers of cities like the god Indra and near-immortal warriors like Achilles, and this is exactly what genetics tell us about them. In prehistoric Sweden, the Neolithic Megalith builders who dominated the region for more than 1000 years seem to have been totally exterminated by the invading “Battle-Axe” culture. The development of agriculture was a new technology that allowed for the expansion of human societies and the emergence of social stratification, but combined with our innate instincts, genetics make it clear that the drive to extermination manifested itself in most places and most times.

We cannot avoid what human nature was for tens of thousands of years in the past. It was bloody, it was brutal, and it was typified by genocide. This is the legacy we inherit, but it is not the legacy we need to replicate. The average life expectancy in the past was also much shorter than in the present, but the application of technology and social institutions has ameliorated the toll that disease takes on the human body. Human societies are also organisms and their rise and fall are measured in the waves of change in the genes of our own species. To the victors go the spoils and the seeds of the future. But institutions like monogamy and a modicum of wealth redistribution can be thought of as social technologies that dampen the volatility inherent in human relationships, a volatility that can manifest in chaos and warfare. Not a war of all against all, but a war where winners took all.

- Read the whole piece by Razib Khan

What I've Been Reading

Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.

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Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in pervious pre-crisis eras similarly didn't imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.  

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

I have been following Turchin for many years now and his work "predicted" the path that led to the 2020 election madness. And he coined the term Cliodynamics.

The book is based on models built using CrisisDB (work in-progress - global history database) that includes one hundred cases from European, Chinese, Russian and American history (no Indian or other countries yet) 

The core findings behind "End Times" faced by past societies: 

1. Popular Immiseration - The proportion of GDP consumed by the government has not changed much in the last four decades and it has grown for elites. The main loser has been the common American. 

2. Elite Overproduction - What determines whether we have a problem of elite overproduction is the balance of the supply of youth with advanced degrees and the demand for them - the number of jobs that require their skills. By the 2000s, unfortunately, as is well known, the number of degree holders were greatly outnumbering the position for them. 

Surprisingly, Turchin's research doesn't count ideology as the primary factor. 

Well.. humans are convenient creatures and ideology evolves over time. Lot of people today avoid mRNA vaccines but it's a matter of time as they get older they will embrace mRNA treatment with relish for cancer treatment.  On the other hand, "green" and "eco-savvy" people gluttonize a poor cow or worse baby cow using "veal" as a euphemism. 

I admire Turchin's rigor of applying data to find patterns in history. 

Yes, Turchin's models are not even close to perfect but if the same rigor continues for a few more years or decades (and we happen to survive) then Cliodynamics has a potential to become more robust. 

• Pundits and politicians often invoke "lessons of history". The problem is that the historical record is rich and each pundit an easily find cases in it to support whichever side of a policy debate they favor. Clearly, inference from such "cherry-picked" examples is not the way to go. 

• A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science; complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes. 

• What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different. 

• First, let's avoid blaming the rich. The economic elites are not evil - or, at least, the proportion of evil people among them is not terribly different from that of the rest of the population. They are motivated by self-interest, but Mother Teresas, if absent among the ruling class, are quite rate in general population as well. 

The Secrets to Evolutionary Success

There may be a lot of traits that exist for no good reason at all.

We know examples from the wild too. There are subterranean caves that have been completely closed off from the outside world for millions of years. And when people went into those caves and sampled bacteria that had never been in touch with human civilization, they found that these bacteria were resistant against multiple antibiotics. And some of these antibiotics are not natural molecules — they are molecules that occur only in the laboratory.

It could seem almost like these bacteria are clairvoyant, you know? Like they anticipated that at some point they would need to be resistant against antibiotics when humanity came along, right? But there’s a very mundane explanation that has to do with these latent kinds of traits that we identified in experiments in the lab. So these traits really exist out in nature. They’re not just artifacts of experiments.

- Interview with Andreas Wagner author of the new book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture

Why Do We Get Sick? - The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine

Evolutionary medicine identifies six reasons why our bodies are vulnerable to disease. They are: 

1) defences,

2) environmental mismatch, 

3) trade-offs, 

4) conflict between survival and reproduction, 

5) co-evolution with infectious parasites 

6) constraints on natural selection. 

This explanatory framework yields insights about everything from cancer to why we age and die.

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Constraints on natural selection

Natural selection is powerful, but it’s not omnipotent. There are limits. For example, natural selection can only work with the raw material it has; if there is no genetic variation for a given trait, there’s simply nothing that can be done. Natural selection is also constrained by history, or what’s sometimes called “path dependence.” Because of the precursor from which our visual system evolved, we are stuck with the suboptimal design of having a blind spot in both eyes. Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer, so it can only proceed in a gradual step-by-step fashion, and each step must be a definite improvement over the last. There’s no such thing as going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch the way an engineer might. Because of this historical inertia, we’re stuck with the inelegant setup of the trachea and the oesophagus, which poses a serious choking hazard. Evolutionarily, where we can go next is limited by where we’ve already been and the existing body plan that we’re saddled with. These and other constraints limit the power of natural selection.

Since its inception, medicine has focused almost exclusively on the “how” questions of disease, largely setting aside the “why.” By tackling the missing why question—why our bodies are vulnerable to disease in the first place—evolutionary medicine supplies an exciting new layer of understanding.

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Evolutionarily informed cancer research is still in its infancy, but even so, it has already led to many new findings, and it promises more insights and practical applications over the next few years. As researchers Athena Aktipis and Randy Nesse note,

An evolutionary approach can help us understand why cancer exists and how it progresses (somatic evolution), how cancer cells interact with environments (ecological approaches), why it is not more common (natural selection for cancer suppression mechanisms), and why cancer suppression mechanisms can never be perfect (constraints, trade-offs, and other evolutionary reasons for vulnerability to disease). Evolution is essential for understanding cancer.

And It’s Not Just Cancer

Evolutionary medicine extends far beyond cancer and illuminates a wide range of health conditions. The science of why we get sick offers new insights into cardiovascular problems, tooth disease, blood iron deficiency, breastfeeding, pregnancy and miscarriage, pain, Alzheimer’s disease, aging and senescence, sepsis and even psychological disorders. We are only in the beginning stages of a revolution that is already transforming how we think about medicine, health and disease.

- More Here

How Cats Took Over the World

After studying the mitochondrial DNA of those 209 ancient cats, the study's authors say cat populations seem to have expanded in two waves. The first occurred in early Middle Eastern farming villages, where wild cats with a distinct mitochondrial lineage grew along with the human communities, eventually reaching the Mediterranean. As rodents congregated to steal food, wild cats were probably just capitalizing on the easy prey at first, then were adopted as farmers realized their benefits.

The second wave came millennia later, as the descendants of Egyptian domestic cats spread around Africa and Eurasia. Many of those Egyptian cat mummies had a particular mitochondrial lineage, and the researchers found that same lineage in contemporary cats from Bulgaria, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa.

This rapid expansion of cats was most likely linked to ship travel, the researchers say. Like farmers, mariners were often plagued by rodents seeking their food stores—and thus naturally predisposed to welcome rat-killing carnivores onboard. Geigl and her co-authors even found this same DNA lineage in cat remains at a Viking site in northern Germany, which they dated between the eighth and 11th centuries.

"There are so many interesting observations," Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved in the study, tells Nature News. "I didn't even know there were Viking cats."

- More Here

And Fluffy and Garph seamlessly took over the micro world of even a guy like me who's life is smitten by Max. 

How Wolf Became Dog

When modern humans arrived in Europe perhaps 45,000 years ago, they encountered the gray wolf and other types of wolves, including the megafaunal wolf, which pursued large game such as mammoths. By that time wolves had already proved themselves among the most successful and adaptable species in the canid family, having spread across Eurasia to Japan and into the Middle East and North America. They were not confined to a single habitat type but flourished in tundra, steppelands, deserts, forests, coastal regions and the high altitude of the Tibetan Plateau. And they competed with the newly arrived humans for the same prey—mammoths, deer, aurochs, woolly rhinoceroses, antelopes and horses. In spite of this competition, one type of wolf, perhaps a descendant of a megafaunal wolf, apparently began living close to people. For many years scientists concurred on the basis of small portions of the genome that this species was the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus) and that this canid alone gave rise to dogs.

But last January geneticists discovered that this long-held “fact” was wrong. Repeated interbreeding between gray wolves and dogs, which share 99.9 percent of their DNA, had produced misleading signals in the earlier studies. Such consorting between the two species continues today: wolves with black coats received the gene for that color from a dog; shepherd dogs in Georgia's Caucasus Mountains mate so often with the local wolves that hybrid ancestors are found in both species' populations, and between 2 and 3 percent of the sampled animals are first-generation hybrids. (Building on the admixture theme, in June researchers writing in Current Biology reported on the sequencing of DNA from a 35,000-year-old wolf fossil from Siberia. This species appears to have contributed DNA to high-latitude dogs such as huskies through ancient interbreeding.)

Analyzing whole genomes of living dogs and wolves, last January's study revealed that today's Fidos are not the descendants of modern gray wolves. Instead the two species are sister taxa, descended from an unknown ancestor that has since gone extinct. “It was such a long-standing view that the gray wolf we know today was around for hundreds of thousands of years and that dogs derived from them,” says Robert Wayne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We're very surprised that they're not.” Wayne led the first genetic studies proposing the ancestor-descendant relationship between the two species and more recently was one of the 30 co-authors of the latest study, published in PLOS Genetics, that debunked that notion.

- More Here

Did Eating Only Meat Lead Neanderthals's Demise?

For the last two decades, advances in molecular biology have deepened archaeologists’ understanding of early human diets. The cool conditions in Northern Europe, such as France and Germany, help preserve collagen in fossil bone. With a technique called stable isotope analysis, we can recover minute amounts of carbon and nitrogen from the collagen in early human bones and find out where the protein they ate came from. Isotopes are groups of atoms belonging to the same element, but they have different masses. Studies of these bones’ isotopes have shown Neanderthals in Northern Europe got 80–90 percent of their protein from animals. That’s up there with the wolves and hyenas. In the arid southern parts of Europe, we’re not so lucky. Collagen in fossil bone easily disintegrates in warmer climates, taking with it the clues to southern Neanderthals’ diets.

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The zinc level in carnivores’ bones is lower than those of their prey. The difference is not affected by age, sex, or decay over time. Zinc ratios can be measured from samples as small as 1 milligram of bone. Even these tiny amounts allow an accurate assessment of an animal’s place in the food chain when they were alive.

The recent study’s analysis of zinc from the tooth enamel of a Neanderthal who lived and died around 150,000 years ago in the Spanish Pyrenees gives new insights into the diet of ancient humans. Zinc isotopes were analyzed from 43 teeth of 12 animal species living in a grassland around the Los Moros I Cave in Catalonia, Spain. These included carnivores such as wolf, hyena, and dhole (also known as mountain wolf); omnivorous cave bears; and herbivores including ibex, red deer, horse, and rabbit. The results brought to life a food web of the Pleistocene steppe, a system of interlocking food chains from plants up to the top carnivores. The zinc in the Neanderthal’s tooth had by far the lowest zinc value in the food web, revealing they were a top-level carnivore.

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Isotopes taken from sites across Europe from remains of the H. sapiens groups who inherited Pleistocene Eurasia from the Neanderthals reveal they had broader dietary range. Plants, birds, and fish were main courses for these early humans. The Pleistocene was the grassland-steppe ecosystem that dominated Siberia during the Pleistocene and disappeared 10,000 years ago. It had a remarkably unstable climate and changed from dry grasslands and wet tundra to coniferous woodlands, constantly shaking up the variety and number of large herbivores grazing there. So, an omnivorous diet would have made these people far more resilient than those who relied on big game hunting. We don’t know much about what happened to Neanderthals when big game populations collapsed. If reindeer failed to show, what could they do? But with rapid progress in biomolecular science, I doubt we will have to wait long to find out. 

More Here

Evolution Of Whales

We know more about the universe outside our solar system than we do about the depths of our own ocean.

- Josh Trosvig, Captain of Fishing Boat in Alaska

We know that dogs evolved from wolves, chickens are the closest relative of dinosaurs  and sapiens from apes. But evolution of whales, the largest mammal is not common knowledge. 

Whales are among the largest animals to ever exist on Earth, with some adult blue whales reaching 180 tonnes, nearly 21 times the weight of a Tyrannosaurus rex. And the long history of whales, which spans more than 50 million years, is chock-full of surprises. The earliest whales lived near water—but not in it—and they looked very different from the whales we know today. Pakicetus, for example, was a wolf-sized animal with four legs, a long snout, and a big tail. It hunted small prey along the coastal margins of Pakistan some 50 million years ago. But what links Pakicetus and the other early whales to modern cetaceans is a distinctive anatomical feature they all share: a bulbous structure in their ears known as an involucrum. This ancient structure may assist today’s whales and dolphins in hearing underwater. Early whales also had distinctive double-pulley ankle bones seen only in even-toed hoofed mammals, like camels and cows, which are now understood to be whales’ closest relatives.

As cetaceans evolved, forelimbs became flippers, nostrils shifted back to become blowholes, and legs eventually disappeared. It took whales about 10 million years to transition from land to sea, and they may have done so for a variety of reasons, which include escaping predation on land and capitalizing on abundant marine prey. But once whales were completely aquatic, they spent the next 40 million years adapting fully to life in the ocean. For much of this time, most cetaceans were little bigger than a humpback whale. Then, beginning around 4.5 million years ago, whales underwent another remarkable transformation. Many began bulking up dramatically, eventually reaching their current extreme sizes. That allowed them to bump up the amount of prey they consumed in one gulp, swim vast distances to reach places with abundant food sources, and fight off most marine predators.

That’s the basic, broad trajectory, but huge gaps remain in our knowledge of whales—including how baleen evolved in some species. And that’s where whale fossils come in. Fossil bones preserve enormous amounts of information, and whale fossils from the Oligocene era are particularly valuable, given the many changes that cetaceans went through at that time. The trouble is that marine fossils from that era are exceedingly difficult to find in most parts of the world. Sea levels during the Oligocene were much lower than today, so fossilized marine life from that time tends to lie deep beneath the ocean—beyond the reach of paleontologists.

- More Here

A Single Tooth Can Change Human History

A single, broken molar found buried within a windswept rock shelter in southeastern France could push back the first evidence of modern humans in Europe by nearly 10,000 years.

According to an international team, the tooth and dozens of stone tools from the same sedimentary layer belonged to a member of Homo sapiens who lived some 54,000 years ago, a time when Neanderthals were thought to have been the sole occupants of Europe. The findings also paint a remarkable picture of the intimacy of modern humans and their Neanderthal neighbors, suggesting they may have traded occupancy of the cave several times—once in as little as a year.

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The paper’s findings could be revolutionary for our understanding of the transition between the last Neanderthals and the first moderns in Europe, says Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist also at the University of Bordeaux. But he and others want far more evidence. “If the pattern proposed is confirmed by future discoveries, we will certainly need to change our view of this transition,” he says. “Such a paradigm shift is entirely possible but requires … more sites and more unequivocal evidence.”

- More Here (full paper here)

A single tooth can crumble millenniums of "beliefs", "tradition" and "culture". Ideologies cement in if the mind is incapable of absorbing these realities as they unveil. So, prepare constantly to change your mind. Always.

Dogs, Wolves, & Human Domestication

• Domestication is thought to alter the temperament of a species, making it less fearful and aggressive and more social, thereby promoting their sociocognitive abilities. Some authors suggest that humans are ‘domesticated’ apes.
• The wolf–dog comparison has been used to support the idea of the human self-domestication hypothesis, but more recent results are not in line with this claim.
• Genetic and behavioral studies of free-ranging, pet, and captive pack-living dogs, as well as different subspecies of wolves, can further our understanding of the dog domestication process.
• Current dog domestication hypotheses focus on explaining specific dog–human interactions rather than trying to understand dogs as a social species.
• Dog domestication is best understood as an adaptation to a new, human-dominated niche, which included selective pressures by humans.

Based on claims that dogs are less aggressive and show more sophisticated socio-cognitive skills compared with wolves, dog domestication has been invoked to support the idea that humans underwent a similar ‘self-domestication’ process. Here, we review studies on wolf–dog differences and conclude that results do not support such claims: dogs do not show increased socio-cognitive skills and they are not less aggressive than wolves. Rather, compared with wolves, dogs seek to avoid conflicts, specifically with higher ranking conspecifics and humans, and might have an increased inclination to follow rules, making them amenable social partners. These conclusions challenge the suitability of dog domestication as a model for human social evolution and suggest that dogs need to be acknowledged as animals adapted to a specific socio-ecological niche as well as being shaped by human selection for specific traits.

- Full paper here (via MR)

More On First Dogs in America

“Even if you can’t imagine anything about the life of people 10,000 years ago, you can still understand the relationship between people and their dogs” 

Early this month, there was big discovery on first domestication of dogs in Americas and now, more on the same

While this is the oldest physical evidence for domesticated dogs in the Americas, the femur fragment doesn’t necessarily belong to one of the first dogs to make it over from northeast Asia. Back in 2018, the burial sites of several dogs in Illinois were found to be around 9,910 years old. With a difference of a mere couple centuries, the title of “oldest” now just barely belongs to the Alaskan pup PP-00128. But archaeologists are more interested in the fact that we now have very similarly aged dogs in two very different parts of North America. That means that dogs were coming to America much earlier than this—but when did they first arrive?

According to recently unveiled genetic evidence, around the time when a third of North America was buried beneath ice during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, people had increasing encounters with gray wolves in Siberia, where comparatively temperate refuges provided prey both could hunt down and eat. These wolves gradually became domesticated dogs sometime between about 40,000 and 19,000 years ago. (Ancient wolves that played with humans likely evolved into today's friendly dogs.)

As part of a multidisciplinary research project looking into the stories of the animals, climate, and environment of the region as the ice cover invaded and retreated, scientists are unspooling the genetics of bones excavated in the region, including those kept at the University of Alaska museum. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo and co-author of the new study, was interested in what bears were up to back then. One bone, specimen PP-00128, originally excavated from the site of Lawyer’s Cave on Alaska’s Blake Channel, was thought to belong to one.

While genetic analysis proved that PP-00128 did not belong to a bear, extraction of the dog’s complete nuclear DNA profile wasn’t possible from the tiny bone fragment. But its mitochondrial DNA—a small fraction of the entire genome inherited only from the maternal line—was retrieved. The multidisciplinary team’s analysis suggested the dog belonged to a lineage that split with its Siberian canine cousins no earlier than 16,700 years ago—roughly the time humans may have been traveling into North America along the coast.

[---]

Given enough time, the vast wilderness of Alaska, through careful archaeological work, will also give up its secrets about the first arrivals of both humans and their canine companions.

“The answers to everything are sitting there just waiting,” says Perri. “There’s no animal that has the relationship with humans in the way dogs do, right?”

“The story of dogs is the story of humans,” she adds. 

 

Oldest Ever (13,100 Years) Evidence Of Domestic Dogs In The Americas

By far the most striking of the animal remains, though, was a tooth. Using DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating, the team determined it came from a domestic dog that lived 13,100 years ago—the oldest evidence of domestic dogs ever reported in the Americas. What’s more, dogs are “a proxy for the presence of humans,” Mackie says. This find extends the length of human occupation of Haida Gwaii as recorded by archaeological evidence by 2,000 years—though Fedje expects more searching will reveal artifacts that push this back even further.

Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study, says these findings are exciting. The dog tooth, in particular, “was a massive discovery.” Haida Gwaii and coastal British Columbia lie at the doorstep to the Americas, he says, so learning more about the early cultural and environmental record of the region has significant implications for understanding what life was like for the earliest inhabitants.

Skil Hiilans Allan Davidson, a Haida hereditary chief and archaeologist who took part in the excavations at all three caves, emphasizes that artifacts and animal remains are more than just ancient discoveries. Whether it’s a bear mandible or a fossilized human footprint, archaeological and paleontological findings have meaning for Indigenous people. Haida people have lived on and cared for Haida Gwaii for thousands of years, Davidson explains. His nation’s oral histories recount Haida people’s deep history in this region, and Western archaeology is just now starting to catch up.

- More Here

The Dawn of Everything - New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

I preordered this book few months ago and it arrived early this week. 

And I started reading it today...

I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This is a once in life time book. It's so sad that David Graeber passed away two months ago. Thank you, thank you, thank you Graeber and Wengrow for spending 10 years of your lives researching and writing this book. 

This is a rare gem; it overturns everything we were "taught" and "learned" about human history. 

And why this is important? Because, it opens up possibilities that we haven't even imagined. 

Please stop booking tickets for "space tourism" and stop respecting morons who are chasing empty spaces in space. 

Instead, spend few dollars and read this book. We can use an extra mind to bring insights on how we can make marginal improvements to the quality of life of all sentient beings on this planet. 

This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Is This The World's Oldest Animal Fossil?

Think 890 million years ago! Max and I are spectacles of dust in this grand schema of things. 

I am grateful for being part of this ongoing 890 million plus years and having spent time with Max was and still able to live, experience and cherish this little rock called earth. I cannot ask for more. 

Stateless Civilization Was Probably The Norm In Early Civilizations

David Wengrow's brilliant observation on how we are so biased by the stories we tell but only this time, we seamlessly tweaked even the reality of how our early civilizations worked. 

Read the whole piece here (believe it or not, this changes so much we "believe" about politics and human nature): 

Admittedly much local variation can be found within this Trans-caucasian civilisation. Nevertheless, the features shared throughout it are suggestive of societies that may have defined themselves in conscious opposition to nearby states. Intriguingly, this may even be evident in their modes of cuisine. Among the types of material culture found throughout the network, from the Caucasus to the Jordan Valley, are ceramic hearths decorated with human-like faces, on which food was prepared in highly burnished vessels, topped with purpose-made lids. This method of boiling and stewing food in closed containers stands in contrast to the roasting and baking traditions of the urban lowlands, where the ritual preparation of food was conducted in open containers, or on exposed altars, so that the upward release of fumes from a sacrificial meal could attract the attention of the gods down to their human subjects.

Such culinary contrasts may be the stuff on which civilising missions rise or fall, as Catholic missionaries to the New World discovered, when confronted with the native Tupi, whose aversion to the baked substance we call bread proved an obstacle to their acceptance of the Holy Communion, itself a ritual descendant from the wine and cereal-based rituals of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. In the contrasting distributions of methods for food processing and preparation, we can perhaps detect the kind of conscious differentiation between state and non-state societies discussed by Clastres and Scott for more recent situations. But in the case of the Bronze Age, the tables are turned: this was a ‘world of peripheries’, where cities and state-centres rest like small islands amid a great sea of stateless civilisations.

I have said little as yet about why urban and state-like societies ever emerged in the first place. What I will offer by way of conclusion are some very brief and admittedly broad-brush observations. The first concerns utopian visions. It is striking that each of the earliest centres of urban civilisation presents us with a scaled-up and spectacular version of cultural values that extend back, in the same regions, to much earlier periods of prehistory. I am thinking here of the first monumental precincts at the city of Uruk in southern Iraq – designed as vastly expanded versions of a common household form, found in almost every Mesopotamian village during the pre-urban period; but also of the earliest royal monuments in Egypt – ceremonial versions of personal display items, the use of which (as we saw earlier) has deep Neolithic roots in the Nile Valley. We might think in similar terms of the great bathing facilities at the heart of Mohenjo-Daro, on the plains of the Indus.

In each case, time-honoured and familiar concepts of domesticity, wellbeing, or cleanliness were reproduced on a greatly magnified scale. For all their exclusionary qualities, we can hardly doubt that these early centres offered their dependants an image of cosmological perfection. It was in this fragile world of bread and circuses that the best and the worst of human nature conspired to produce what we now recognise as states. Yet the values of civilisation in which such political projects were grounded were both older and more durable than the projects themselves and were never truly encompassed by them, even at the height of ancient empire. By reducing our definition of ‘early civilisation’ to the formation of states, we risk losing sight of these much longer and more spatially extensive trajectories of cultural change, the roots of which must be sought in the development of prehistoric societies that succeeded – for millennia – in maintaining distinct forms of civilisation, while avoiding the emergence of states.

A Death Of An Entire Species - Sapiens Murdered Dodo's

Dodo's never encountered, humans. So once human entered their territory, they didn't fear humans. Big Mistake!