Archaeologists uncover 4,500-year-old baby rattles that reveal ancient parenting techniques
The National Museum of Denmark recently announced the discovery of 4,500-year-old baby rattles from Syria.
The research, which also involved historians from Archéorient CNRS in France and the University of Milan, was recently published in the journal Childhood in the Past.
In the May 19 press release, the Danish museum said the rattles were mass-produced by professional potters in the ancient city of Hama. A total of 19 rattles were found in a residential quarter of the city, making the discovery the largest of its kind in the Near East.
The rattles contained small pebbles or pieces of clay.
5 The National Museum of Denmark recently announced the discovery of 4,500-year-old baby rattles from Syria.
John Fhær Engedal Nissen, the National Museum of Denmark.
They were made from the same mixture of clay as professionally made pottery in Hama, which suggests the rattles 'were part of the potters' professional range alongside other ceramic wares,' the museum said.
'They were probably sold at the market to parents who wanted to entertain – or distract – their children,' the press release noted.
How do archaeologists know the toys were designed for children? For one, the rattlers make such a low noise it's unlikely that they were used as musical instruments.
5 The Danish museum said the rattles were mass-produced by professional potters in the ancient city of Hama.
John Fhær Engedal Nissen, the National Museum of Denmark.
Experts also observed that the handles are 'very small and not suitable for adults, but they fit exactly into a small child's hand,' the release said.
National Museum of Denmark researcher Mette Marie Hald, one of the co-authors of the study, said the material culture of children is often overlooked in archaeology.
'When you find items such as these, the tendency in archaeology has been to interpret them as musical instruments or even cultic objects when, really, they are something much more down-to-earth and relatable such as toys for children,' Hald said.
5 A total of 19 rattles were found in a residential quarter of the city, making the discovery the largest of its kind in the Near East.
Jacob Hald, the National Museum of Denmark.
She said that the millennia-old toys aided the sensory and motor development of young ones, just as rattles do today.
'It shows us that parents in the past loved their children and invested in their well-being and their sensorimotor development, just as we do today,' she said.
'Perhaps parents also needed to distract their children now and then so that they could have a bit of peace and quiet to themselves. Today, we use screens. Back then, it was rattles.'
5 Experts observed that the handles are 'very small and not suitable for adults, but they fit exactly into a small child's hand.'
National Museum of Denmark, drawing and photos: G Mouamar
Hald said she hopes the discovery 'provide[s] us with a greater insight into the world of children in the past … From an economic point of view, it is fascinating that already 4,500 years ago, there was an actual market for commercial toys.'
'At the same time, it is touching to get a glimpse of a family's everyday life – perhaps a parent stopped at a market stand on their way home and bought a rattle as a present for their child.'
'This scenario is entirely recognizable to us today.'
5 The millennia-old toys aided the sensory and motor development of young ones, just as rattles do today.
National Museum of Denmark, drawing and photos: G Mouamar
Many remnants of the Bronze Age still survive after thousands of years.
Earlier this year, a Bronze Age settlement was uncovered by archaeologists in the United Kingdom amid highway construction.
In Turkey, a well-preserved loaf of 5,000-year-old bread was recently discovered, inspiring local bakers to develop a copycat recipe.
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USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
Medical journal rejects RFK Jr.'s call for retraction of vaccine study
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Los Angeles Times
3 hours ago
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RFK Jr.'s cancellation of mRNA vaccine research is even worse than it first seemed
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They concern the consequences of COVID-19 infection, not the shots. Many of the papers that do reference the vaccines are studies not of human subjects, but laboratory mice; in some of these studies the mice received the vaccines via injections directly into the brain or intravenously, which is not how people receive the vaccines. What's also important is the lack of evidence supporting the agency's claims. The data packet fails to include well-researched studies attesting to the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, including some published very recently. Among those is an exhaustive study by Danish researchers of more than 1 million recipients of the latest mRNA COVID booster, published July 28. That study investigated the incidence of 29 potential adverse side effects from the vaccine, including heart, liver and kidney failure; neurological conditions; diabetes; and arthritis. It found 'no statistically significant risk' of any of them from the vaccine. That includes myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that is often cited by anti-vaccine agitators as a dangerous side effect of the mRNA vaccines. That condition was most commonly seen among young men, particularly if they had received two shots within a short time span. But for the most part it was mild and short-term; once the booster was reformulated after 2022, the effect appeared to disappear. No deaths from the condition were known to have occurred, and myocarditis effects were more common and serious among unvaccinated people infected with COVID. Nor did the agency's data packet include an estimate of lives saved by the COVID vaccines, led by Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis and published July 25. That study calculated that from the beginning of the global vaccination campaign in 2020 through September 2024 as many as 4 million lives were saved by the vaccines. Ioannidis acknowledged that his estimate is 'conservative.' 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The mismatch between the data packet cited by Kennedy and the established facts of the vaccines' safety and efficacy explain why Kennedy's cancellation of 22 contracts supporting mRNA vaccine research has been greeted by experts as a senseless and devastating blow against science and public health. 'I have have been in this business for over 50 years on the front lines of public health,...and I can say unequivocally that this was the most dangerous public health decision I have ever seen made by a government body,' Michael Osterholm, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota, told PBS. At the very least, if Kennedy is so convinced that the effects mRNA vaccines are not sufficiently well-understood, the solution is more research, not less. I asked Kennedy's department to respond to criticism of his decision, but received no response. A few words about the mRNA technology. Using messenger RNA as an intermediary in their actions, the vaccines instruct the body how to manufacture parts of a pathogen that its immune system can recognize and fight. For immunologists, the virtues of the new technology are manifest. Vaccines to combat new pathogens or new versions of existing pathogens can be engineered quickly, allowing them to be rolled out to stifle pandemics before they even emerge. The potential utility of mRNA vaccines is unprecedentedly broad. The possible targets under study today — including in some of the research contracts Kennedy cancelled — include flu, HIV, hepatitis C, malaria, tuberculosis, and cancer, Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania and other scientists told Nature in 2021. Weissman shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Katalin Karikó in 2023 for their work on mRNA vaccines. 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The compilation originated as material for a book titled 'TOXIC SHOT: Facing the Dangers of the COVID 'Vaccines',' an anthology of essays by prominent anti-vaxxers. The compilation doesn't make the case for canceling the research. A paper listed as support for the myocarditis threat, for example, states, 'no causality can be assumed or established' linking the condition to the vaccine because of the lack of a control group for comparison. 'There is no direct evidence of a vaccine-induced inflammatory response' to the vaccine. Kennedy's action is almost certain to hamstring American science for years, possibly decades, to come. It's the antithesis of Trump's claim to put 'America First,' for it cedes the development of a life-saving medical technology to Europe and China. And it's not limited to the development of vaccines for respiratory diseases. During a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by the right-wing influencer Steve Bannon, the newly-appointed commissioner of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, declared, 'As far as public health goes for vaccines, the mRNA platform is no longer viable.' Bhattacharya justified this statement by noting a rise in public skepticism about mRNA technology. What he didn't say was that the skepticism was promoted by Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers denigrating the technology; a competent and responsible NIH chief would be defending a technological innovation, not magnifying disinformation about it. The truth is that the mRNA platform is likely to be seen in retrospect as a historic advance in healthcare ... everywhere but in the United States.
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
Ancient animal bones unlock clues about Bronze Age plague
Thousands of years before the Black Death killed one-third of Europe's population in the 14th century, a mysterious and prehistoric form of the plague spread throughout Eurasia. This prehistoric pathogen that is only known from ancient DNA samples ran rampant about 5,000 years ago, ultimately vanishing from the archeological record about 2,000 years later. Called the Late Neolithic Bronze Age (LNBA) plague lineage, scientists have long been puzzled about where the strain came from. Now, we are close to an answer. For the first time, archeologists and anthropologists have identified this ancient plague in an animal: a 4,000-year-old domesticated sheep excavated in present-day Russia. The plague appears to have infected both humans and sheep that spread from a wild animal source, just like the bubonic plague. The increased sheep herding in the area during the Bronze Age brought humans into closer contact with the animals and may have led to the spread of this disease. The findings are detailed in a study published August 11 in the journal Cell and reveal that sheep played a role in this disease spillover. Plague origins Most illnesses that infect humans today have a zoonotic origin. At some point in time, they jumped from an animal to a human in a process called a spillover event. For example, migratory birds were the original reservoir for flu and ebola that spilled over from bats. Many of the infectious diseases caused by these pathogens emerged within the last 10,000 years. That timing overlaps with the domestication of livestock and pets. Studying the pathogen that arises from ancient animals using the DNA left behind offers a way for scientists to investigate the emergence of human infectious disease in the past and can inform modern spillover events. Plague is one of the most deadly zoonotic diseases in history. It is spread by the fleas living on rats, and has killed millions of people throughout history. However, the older LNBA lineage that first began to spread 5,000 years ago is genetically distinct from the more well-known Black Death from the 14th century. It infected human populations for close to 3,000 years before it vanished. Interestingly, LNBA lineage lacks the key genetics for fleas to transmit the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis transmission that are found in other historic and modern plague strains. Since it does not spread via fleas like the bubonic plague, another animal was likely involved. But which animal? 'One of the first steps in understanding how a disease spreads and evolves is to find out where it's hiding, but we haven't done that yet in the ancient DNA field,' study co-author and doctoral candidate Ian Light-Maka, said in a statement. 'We have over 200 Y. pestis genomes from ancient humans, but humans aren't a natural host of plague.' Ancient teeth and livestock To figure out how the infection persisted and spread over thousands of years in Eurasia, an international team of researchers studied the bones and teeth of Bronze Age livestock that were uncovered at an archeological site called Arkaim. The site in present-day Russia was once occupied by the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, who were known for innovations in cattle, sheep, and horse husbandry. At the site, they identified a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same LNBA lineage of Y. pestis that was infecting people at the time. 'Arkaim was part of the Sintashta cultural complex and offered us a great place to look for plague clues: they were early pastoralist societies without the kind of grain storage that would attract rats and their fleas – and prior Sintashta individuals have been found with Y. pestis infections. Could their livestock be a missing link?' added study co-author and University of Arkansas anthropologist Taylor Hermes. Back in the lab, the team compared the ancient Y. pestis genome from the sheep with other ancient and modern genomes. The sheep Y. pestis genome was a very close match to one that had infected a human at a nearby site at around the same time. 'If we didn't know it was from a sheep, everyone would have assumed it was just another human infection – it's almost indistinguishable,' said study co-author and Harvard University archeologist Christina Warinner. According to the team, this indicates that both humans and sheep were being with the same population of Y. pestis. But were the sheep infecting humans in some way or vice versa? Archaeological and comparative approaches could provide some answers to that puzzle. In parts of the world where Y. pestis is still endemic, sheep can become infected if they come in direct contact with carcasses of infected animals including rodents. Rats and mice are natural reservoirs of the pathogen and local plague outbreaks can arise in humans if infected sheep are not properly butchered or cooked. This type of scenario could have spread LNBA plague in prehistoric times, linking human and sheep infections. 'The Sintashta-Petrovka culture is famous for their extensive herding over vast pastures aided by innovative horse technologies, and this provided plenty of opportunity for their livestock to come into contact with wild animals infected by Y. pestis,' added Warinner. 'From then on it is just one more short hop into humans.' The speed of spread Despite the new findings, some major questions remain unanswered. It is still unclear exactly how the pathogen traveled hundreds of miles in relatively short periods of time, as this distance was too far for sick humans or terrestrial animals to travel at the time. It is also not clear which wild animal the domesticated sheep caught the bacterium from. 'We can show that the ancient lineage evolved under elevated pressure, which is in contrast to the Y. pestis still found today,' Felix M. Key, a study co-author and genomicist at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology added. 'Moreover, the ancient sheep as well as human infections are likely isolated spillovers from the unknown reservoir, which remains at large. Finding that reservoir would be the next step.' However, the search for pathogens in ancient animal remains is only just beginning. Archaeological digs both past and present can produce tens of thousands of animal bones. Archaeologists could potentially dig into the bones from past excavations to look at what ancient pathogens lurk inside. 'I think there will be more and more interest in analyzing these collections,' said Key. 'They give us insights that no human sample can.' Solve the daily Crossword
