DNA analysis from 4,600-year-old skeleton uncovers hidden link between Egypt and Mesopotamia
Scientists sequenced the man's full genome from powder extracted from one of his teeth, marking a breakthrough in understanding early human movement in the ancient world.
The research, published in Nature, ties this individual to a pivotal period in Egyptian history - around the time of the Old Kingdom and the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
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While the majority of the man's DNA links to North Africa, around 20% is genetically connected to Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent - an area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where early civilisation flourished.
This supports long-standing archaeological theories of trade and cultural exchange between the two regions. Until now, suspected connections were based on shared pottery styles and similar writing systems, but this is the first direct genetic confirmation of people moving between them.
Scientists say more ancient DNA samples are needed to map the full scale and timeline of early human migration across the region.
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Signs of million-year-old ancient humans found on Australia's doorstep
Over a million years ago, an ancient human ancestor arrived on an island north of Australia, and no one knows how they got there or why they disappeared, but several theories have emerged. All that remains of these mysterious people are stone tools unearthed from a pit beneath a modern-day cornfield that was once a fertile riverbed. Because they lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, it's possible they were small like the now extinct 'Hobbit' people who lived on neighbouring Flores. Until their bones are found, it will be impossible to know what they look like or how they evolved. The discovery was revealed on Thursday, with details published in the prestigious journal Nature by Budianto Hakim from the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia and Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University. A total of seven tools were found in sedimentary layers of a sandstone in the town of Calio, and they've been dated to the early Pleistocene (the last great ice age), making them the oldest signs of hominid activity on the island. Even though it was colder, there weren't glaciers in the region because it was still the tropics, although it was more arid. Large robust pigs with tusks that projected from their mouths, and an extinct species of elephant called stegodon, roamed the island. Although it's unknown what sort of plants grew during the era. Pieces of the puzzle are slowly coming together, but there are a lot that are still Adam Brumm How did these ancient humans cross the ocean? Speaking with Yahoo News Australia, Prof Brumm said it was 'fascinating' that human ancestors arrived on Australia's 'doorstep' but couldn't get any further. He doesn't believe they travelled using boats because they would have lacked the cognitive skills to create them, and they would have been more widely dispersed across the region. 'If they had boats, there's nothing that would have stopped them getting to Australia, and we don't have any evidence of that,' he said. 'I think it's more likely to be some freak geological event, involving hominoids being washed out to sea by a tsunami from mainland Asia, and clinging to floating trees. Other species, including rats, monkeys, and even early elephants, have also conquered new islands by sea. Humans have occupied Australia for at least 65,000 years. The Sulawesi discovery dates from at least 1.04 million years ago. Signs of Flores's Hobbit people are from 1.02 million years ago. Why did these ancient humans vanish? Archaeologists are excavating a second site on Sulawesi that they're hopeful will register the arrival of modern humans. At 174,600 square kilometres, Sulawesi is the eleventh largest island in the world, and so it's possible they co-existed with early hominids for generations. 'There are a lot of places they could have retreated to avoid modern humans. There's a very interesting story waiting to be revealed on that island, but as of yet we just don't have the evidence to tell us what it is,' Professor Brumm said. Sadly, it's easy to guess what eventually happened because whenever humans conquer new territory, extinctions follow. It's believed we played a role in wiping out the Neanderthals, as well as hundreds of thousands of other animal species like the dodo, Steller's sea cow, dodo, thylacine, and giant moa. Solution to Great Barrier Reef problem as new report released Australia greenlights plan to build airport road through rare animal's grassland home Authorities caught unlawfully using 'cruel' devices to catch dingoes Over time, modern humans likely began to dominate Sulawesi, but when the extinction of their predecessor occurred is unknown. 'Humans are not very nice. We seem compelled to do what we do. Our very way of life tends to result in not very good outcomes for the other species we share the planet with,' Prof Brumm said. Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? 🐊🦘😳 Get our new newsletter showcasing the week's best stories.
Washington Post
4 hours ago
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The Los Angeles fires may have killed hundreds more people than official records show
The devastating January fires that consumed entire swaths of Los Angeles, displaced tens of thousands of people and altered parts of the city's iconic landscape, may have been far more deadly than previously recorded. While the official death toll was at least 30 people, the blazes could be linked to hundreds of fatalities in the month after the fires first sparked, according to new research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The scientists compared recorded deaths in Los Angeles County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to those of past years — excluding 2020 through 2023 because of the coronavirus pandemic — and estimated that 440 more deaths this year in that time could be attributed to the fires. In total, 6,371 deaths were recorded, compared to 5,931 expected, according to their models. The findings emphasize how climate-driven disasters can be far deadlier than they initially seem, with ripple effects that extend in the weeks and months after the extreme events. The disasters are linked to lingering environmental damages and social upheaval that result in long-term, dangerous ills for hard-hit communities. The methodology to calculate excess deaths in the wake of a natural disaster is sometimes used to capture the complete toll of these events — scientists catch fatalities that may not be directly linked to the catastrophe, but were a result of circumstances that would not have otherwise occurred. 'These additional deaths likely reflect a combination of factors, including increased exposure to poor air quality and healthcare delays and interruptions,' the authors wrote. The amount of excess deaths linked to the Los Angeles fires stunned one of the paper's authors, Andrew Stokes, an associate professor the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Stokes also worked on conducting excess death studies during the coronavirus pandemic, where he and other researchers found an approximately 16 percent increase in deaths than were recorded, he said. But for the fires, the amount found is more than 10 times the 30 fatalities recorded. 'It highlights that it's very difficult to attribute a death to a natural disaster,' he said. 'Because while some deaths are due to direct exposure others are due to the sustained exposure.' Stokes also noted the time period of the research was small — less than a month — and effects beyond Feb. 1 are entirely likely but would be missed in their count. 'There's certainly a long tail,' he said, adding first-responders and those living in LA County and neighboring areas may face long-term health hazards given their exposure to the smoke and contaminants. Similar studies have been done in the wake of other extreme events including heat waves and hurricanes. Researchers found that a European heat wave this summer may have resulted in nearly three-times as many heat-related deaths. And an analysis published last year found that the average U.S. hurricane leads to as many as 11,000 excess deaths. For the authors, the Los Angeles fires were an opportunity. Often excess death studies linked to disasters are challenging because they rely on robust mortality data that's not always accessible in the rural areas where these events occur. But when the fires razed parts of one of the largest counties in the country, burning homes, cars, storefronts and nature preserves, there was a chance to show the extent of the hazards. The hope, Stokes said, is that their results demonstrate that in other places, where you don't have that data, you could still be aware of the harms. 'I worry, for example, that when it comes to wildfires that have occurred elsewhere that we'll never know the full toll of those because the studies haven't been done and are difficult to do,' Stokes said. 'But here we've been able to show this discrepancy between the official toll versus what we believe to be the the true toll and the the differences are quite staggering.' Brianna Sacks and Kevin Crowe contributed to this report.
Washington Post
4 hours ago
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A study predicted huge climate damages. But it had a fatal flaw: Uzbekistan.
A year ago, a paper published in the journal Nature made a sweeping claim: The world economy was already on track to lose 19 percent of global gross domestic product by 2050, compared with what it would have been without climate change. By 2100, under a high emissions scenario, it predicted that global GDP would be roughly 62 percent lower than without climate change. Those numbers were a whopping three times higher than previous estimates — sparking concern that climate change would hinder the global economy much more than expected. The paper made waves across social media; according to one analysis by the U.K.-based outlet CarbonBrief, it was the second-most cited paper in the media in 2024. The paper's analysis and dataset, meanwhile, have been used for financial planning by the U.S. government, World Bank and other institutions. There was just one problem, according to a new analysis: The paper's findings were flawed. A new commentary published Wednesday in Nature found that the massive damages predicted by the paper were predicated on data errors stemming from one country — Uzbekistan. With Uzbekistan removed from the dataset, the predictions dropped substantially — from 62 percent GDP loss in 2100 to 23 percent and from 19 percent by 2050 to 6 percent, said Solomon Hsiang, director of the global policy laboratory at Stanford University and one of the authors of the new commentary. 'Everybody who works with data has some responsibility to look at the data and make sure it's fit for purpose,' Hsiang said. The authors of the original paper, however, argue that their analysis still holds. Karl Ziemelis, chief applied and physical sciences editor at Nature, wrote in an email that the journal was reviewing the study, and 'appropriate editorial action would be taken once the matter was resolved.' 'Science has worked, and always will work, through a process of constant interrogation and review, whether that be during the course of research, in peer review or in post publication assessment,' Ziemelis added. Hsiang and his co-authors, graduate students Tom Bearpark and Dylan Hogan, , discovered the error by removing one country at a time from the dataset. Every other country they removed only slightly changed the GDP predictions. But when Uzbekistan was taken out, the results changed dramatically. They then looked closer at the Uzbekistan data. The paper's dataset showed the country's GDP plummeting dramatically in the year 2000, losing almost 90 percent. Then in 2010, it showed the GDP climbing in some regions by over 90 percent. Other years also showed wild oscillations. According to the World Bank, the country's growth over the past 40 years has actually been quite modest — ranging from a 0.2 percent loss to a 7.7 percent growth. Those swings were so dramatic in the initial paper's data that they dominated the underlying model, which connected temperature and precipitation changes with economic growth. That resulted in a model that showed GDP would take sharp hits from climate change. Hsiang found the results surprising. 'When you have a lot of data points, the idea that a small country could be so influential is not intuitive,' Hsiang said. That's why, he said, it's essential to rigorously test the results and the data. The authors of the original paper, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, have a different take. The error in the Uzbekistan data, they said, was due to problems with how the original data was processed. In an additional analysis, they corrected the Uzbekistan data, and also changed how their model controlled for underlying economic trends. 'We find actually that by doing that, our estimates in general get more robust,' said Maximilian Kotz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute. Using this altered method, they found results that agreed closely with their original findings. Instead of 19 percent damages by 2050, for example, the new analysis shows 17 percent. 'We are grateful, and I think it's a good part of the scientific process that they've pointed out these issues,' said Leonie Wenz, professor of environmental economics at the Technical University of Berlin and another author of the initial study. 'But importantly, the main conclusions of the paper hold, and there are only slight changes to the estimates.' That change, however, required modifying the methodology of the paper, and critics are still skeptical. 'Science doesn't work by changing the setup of an experiment to get the answer you want,' Hsiang said. 'This approach is antithetical to the scientific method.' Concerns about the large magnitude of the GDP changes were already clear in the peer review process. In a peer review document, posted publicly by Nature, one anonymous reviewer wrote, 'I find all of this well explained and fairly convincing, yet, purely subjectively, I have a hard time in believing the results, which seem unintuitively large given damages aren't perfectly persistent.' After some back-and-forth with the authors, the reviewer later approved of the paper going to publication. Hsiang says the study is an important example of how science corrects itself, and that 'The fact that there's one car accident due to driver error doesn't mean that we think cars are fundamentally dysfunctional.' 'If people are at all skeptical about how science functions — the answer is well, our team discovered this issue, and we believe transparency is super important,' he said. 'That's the ethos of science.'
