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<Molecular clock for estimating ages of ancient genomes
Mon, May 02, 2016
Researchers report a genetic method for estimating the age of ancient human remains.
Accurate estimation of the ages of ancient human specimens is crucial for interpreting ancient DNA analyses. Though radiocarbon dating, a standard tool for estimating the ages of specimens, is remarkably precise, it can be biased by contamination. Priya Moorjani and colleagues developed a complementary approach for dating ancient genomes by comparing the cumulative numbers of genetic recombination events between ancient and present-day non-Africans since the time of Neanderthal introgression into their common ancestors. Most non-Africans have around 2% Neanderthal ancestry resulting from human and Neanderthal interbreeding that occurred around 50,000 years ago. Assuming an approximately constant recombination rate per generation, the amount of recombination that has occurred since the initial introduction of Neanderthal DNA can be used as a molecular clock to infer the number of missing generations between an ancient genome and present-day genomes. The authors tested their method on five ancient human specimens from North America, Europe, and Siberia with sequenced genomes and radiocarbon dates between 12,000 and 45,000 years ago and obtained age estimates that were consistent with radiocarbon dates. Using correlation between radiocarbon dates, measured in years, and Neanderthal introgression dates, measured in generations, the authors estimated the historic generation interval to be approximately 28 years per generation. According to the authors, the estimate is consistent with those for present-day West Eurasians.
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Working in a clean room, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, took extensive precautions to avoid contaminating Neanderthal DNA samples - extracted from bones like this one - with DNA from any other source, including modern humans. NHGRI researchers are part of the international team that sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal, Homo neanderthalensis.
The Leonardo Project: Illuminating the art, life, characteristics, talents, and brilliance of one of humanity's most extraordinary figures.
HUMAN EVOLUTION—A team of eminent specialists from a variety of academic disciplines has coalesced around a goal of creating new insight into the life and genius of Leonardo da Vinci by means of authoritative new research and modern detective technologies, including DNA science.
The Leonardo Project is in pursuit of several possible physical connections to Leonardo, beaming radar, for example, at an ancient Italian church floor to help corroborate extensive research to pinpoint the likely location of the tomb of his father and other relatives. A collaborating scholar also recently announced the successful tracing of several likely DNA relatives of Leonardo living today in Italy.
If granted the necessary approvals, the Project will compare DNA from Leonardo's relatives past and present with physical remnants—hair, bones, fingerprints and skin cells—associated with the Renaissance figure whose life marked the rebirth of Western civilization.
The Project's objectives, motives, methods, and work to date are detailed in a special issue of the journal Human Evolution, published coincident with a meeting of the group hosted in Florence this week under the patronage of Eugenio Giani, President of the Tuscan Regional Council (Consiglio Regionale della Toscana).
Born in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo died in 1519, age 67, and was buried in Amboise, southwest of Paris. His creative imagination foresaw and described innovations hundreds of years before their invention, such as the helicopter and armored tank. His artistic legacy includes the iconic Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
The idea behind the Project, founded in 2014, has inspired and united anthropologists, art historians, genealogists, microbiologists, and other experts from leading universities and institutes in France, Italy, Spain, Canada and the USA, including specialists from the J. Craig Venter Institute of California, which pioneered the sequencing of the human genome.
The work underway resembles in complexity recent projects such as the successful search for the tomb of historic author Miguel de Cervantes and, in March 2015, the identification of England's King Richard III from remains exhumed from beneath a UK parking lot, fittingly re-interred 500 years after his death.
Like Richard, Leonardo was born in 1452, and was buried in a setting that underwent changes in subsequent years such that the exact location of the grave was lost.
If DNA and other analyses yield a definitive identification, conventional and computerized techniques might reconstruct the face of Leonardo from models of the skull."
In addition to Leonardo's physical appearance, information potentially revealed from the work includes his ancestry and additional insight into his diet, state of health, personal habits, and places of residence.
Beyond those questions, and the verification of Leonardo's "presumed remains" in the chapel of Saint-Hubert at the Château d'Amboise, the Project aims to develop a genetic profile extensive enough to understand better his abilities and visual acuity, which could provide insights into other individuals with remarkable qualities.
It may also make a lasting contribution to the art world, within which forgery is a multi-billion dollar industry, by advancing a technique for extracting and sequencing DNA from other centuries-old works of art, and associated methods of attribution.
Says Jesse Ausubel, Vice Chairman of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, sponsor of the Project's meetings in 2015 and 2016: "I think everyone in the group believes that Leonardo, who devoted himself to advancing art and science, who delighted in puzzles, and whose diverse talents and insights continue to enrich society five centuries after his passing, would welcome the initiative of this team—indeed would likely wish to lead it were he alive today."
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"Vitruvian Man", by Leonardo da Vinci. This work done by the artist is used to illustrate the cover of the special issue of Human Evolution that features the Leonardo Project. Wikimedia Commons
In the journal, group members underline the highly conservative, precautionary approach required at every phase of the Project, which they aim to conclude in 2019 to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death.
For example, one objective is to verify whether fingerprints on Leonardo's paintings, drawings, and notebooks can yield DNA consistent with that extracted from identified remains.
Early last year, Project collaborators from the International Institute for Humankind Studies in Florence opened discussions with the laboratory in that city where Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi has been undergoing restoration for nearly two years, to explore the possibility of analyzing dust from the painting for possible DNA traces. A crucial question is whether traces of DNA remain or whether restoration measures and the passage of time have obliterated all evidence of Leonardo's touch.
In preparation for such analysis, a team from the J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of Florence is examining privately owned paintings believed to be of comparable age to develop and calibrate techniques for DNA extraction and analysis. At this year's meeting in Florence, the researchers also described a pioneering effort to analyze the microbiome of a painting thought to be about five centuries old.
If human DNA can one day be obtained from Leonardo's work and sequenced, the genetic material could then be compared with genetic information from skeletal or other remains that may be exhumed in the future.
Says Eugenio Giani, President of the Regional Council of Tuscany: "The fact that a team of eminent scholars from different academic disciplines and parts of the world has united with the common objective of furthering investigation into one of the greatest geniuses is positive and very important."
"As President of the Tuscan Regional Council, I am pleased to host in our headquarters a meeting that shows key aspects our current state of knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci. My hope, as a Florentine and Tuscan, is that all this will help outline a portrait of Leonardo as faithful as possible to reality, bringing out the true bond that he had with Florence, starting from the properties of his family in the city. Scientifically, the chance to create, through new research and technology, a new vision of the life of Leonardo starting from a study of DNA is very important."
Compiled by Project collaborator Claire Stypulkowski, the collection of five journal articles trace the path Leonardo took from his Italian birthplace to his final days serving the King of France. They outline the efforts to date, detailing the history and evidence regarding Leonardo's life and his remains in Amboise, the research and high-tech investigation of his father's tomb in Florence, and the tracing of family descendants.
Says Brunetto Chiarelli of the International Institute for Humankind Studies and editor of Human Evolution: "We are proud to share with the public the details of this exciting endeavor."
And he underlined this message from the Project's introductory paper: "The search for Leonardo's remains at Amboise Castle, for the remains or traces of his family members in Florence, Vinci, and Milan, and for traces of his DNA in his works is fraught with difficulty."
"Matching Leonardo's DNA to that of his family presents puzzles that are minutely specific to their history and circumstances, but the tools the investigators use are generic and broadly applicable. We stand to gain not only greater historical knowledge of Leonardo but possibly a reconstruction of his genetic profile, which could provide insights into other individuals with remarkable qualities."
"The last Plantagenet King of England and the author who gave us Don Quixote are two whose places in history are somewhat better documented now through recent anthropological study. Is Leonardo the next?"
Organizations participating in the Leonardo Project include:
The Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, ParisThe International Institute for Humankind Studies, FlorenceThe Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology and Paleogenetics, Biology Department, University of FlorenceMuseo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, in Vinci, ItalyJ. Craig Venter Institute, La Jolla, CaliforniaLaboratory of Genetic Identification, University of Granada, SpainThe Rockefeller University, New York City Initial support comes from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Washington D.C.>
Radar scans suggest a hidden tomb sits behind Egyptian pharoah King Tutankhamun's tomb.
Some doubt has been raised over the existence of the secret chambers. (Photo: Kenneth Garrett).
ARCHAEOLOGISTS can’t seem to agree on the possible existence of a secret chamber in King Tut’s tomb, in a mystery that has piqued national interest in Egypt.
Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani said on Sunday new technology is needed to determine whether Tutankhamun’s tomb contained hidden chambers which a British archeologist believes may hide queen Nefertiti’s remains.
Anani spoke to archaeologists and reporters at a conference in Cairo dedicated to King Tutankhamun and his world-famous golden funerary mask.
The mood at Sunday’s conference was sceptical months after former minister Mamduh Damati said the secret chambers probably existed, raising expectations of another historical find.
Damati inspected the tomb last September with the theory’s proponent, British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves.
His theory and the attention paid to it came as Egypt struggles to revive its key tourism industry after years of political turmoil.
Queen Nefertiti is believed by some to be King Tutankhamun’s mother.
However, experts disagreed on Sunday over how the search for the chambers was handled.
“Handling the project wasn’t done scientifically at all,” said former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass.
Damati himself said more tests were needed.
“The infra-red scan said we need to repeat it because we have something that we cannot be sure what it is exactly,” he said.
Damati had said in March that there was a “90 per cent chance” that the tomb had two hidden chambers containing organic material.
Reeves theorised that Tutankhamun’s tomb was in fact Nefertiti’s, and when the boy king died unexpectedly at a young age, he was rushed into her tomb’s outer chamber in Luxor’s Valley of Kings in southern Egypt.
Hawass suggested that the current antiquities minister hire an autonomous committee of experts to handle the investigation.
“We have to stop this media presence, because there is nothing to publish,” he said.
To reassure archaeologists at the conference, Anani said: “I will not make any drills (in the tomb walls) until I am sure 100 per cent that there is a cavity behind the wall ... I’m very satisfied with the warm scientific debate.”
Nefertiti was famed for her beauty as depicted in the famous bust now in Berlin. She, Tutankhamun and Akhenaten ruled during a turbulent time, and were one of ancient Egypt’s most controversial ruling families.
Nefertiti was married to Akhenaten, who tried and failed to force Egypt to convert to monotheism.
DNA evidence has shown that Akhenaten was Tutankhamun’s father, but Egyptologists do not agree on who his mother was.
Egyptologists rely on a mix of DNA evidence as well as information documented in ruins and historical calculations to map the pharaohs’ family tree.
Most tombs contain more information about the passage to the afterlife rather than solid information about the deceased’s biological lineage.
Some doubt has been raised over the existence of the secret chambers. Picture: Kenneth GarrettSource:Supplied
Joanna Lumley follows the Nile through Egypt capturing the spirit of Agatha Christie in Cairo and later on a Nile cruise. She travels along the Nile by train, road and Felucca barge, discovering life as it is today along one of the world's greatest rivers.
Although little is known about the prehistory of the Basques before the period of Roman occupation owing to the difficulty in identifying evidence for specific cultural traits, the mainstream view today is that the Basque area shows signs of archaeological continuity since the Aurignacian period.
It doesn't take much to stimulate the human body's electro-magnetic circuitry, in fact a small change in the local environment is enough to create a change in awareness. People who visit ancient temples and megalithic sites often describe such a sensation. The standard explanation is that such feelings are nothing more than a 'wow' factor: the result of visual stimuli from the overwhelming impression generated by megalithic constructions such as stone circles, ancient temples and pyramids.
But the cumulative evidence proves otherwise: that megaliths and other ancient sacred places are actually attracting, storing, even generating their own energy field, creating the kind of environment where one can enter an altered state of consciousness.
Generating Energy FieldsIn 1983 a comprehensive study was undertaken by engineer Charles Brooker to locate magnetism in sacred sites. The test subject was the Rollright stone circle in England. A magnetometer survey of the site revealed how a band of magnetic force is attracted into the stone circle through a narrow gap of stones that act as the entrance. The band then spirals towards the center of the circle as though descending down a rabbit hole.
Two of the circle’s western stones were also found to pulsate with concentric rings of alternating current, resembling ripples in a pond.
[Magnetomer survey image of the Rollright Stones. Adapted from Charles Brooker. Magnetism and Standing Stones, New Scientist, January 13, 1983]
The analysis led Brooker to state how, “the average intensity of the [geomagnetic] field within the circle was significantly lower than that measured outside, as if the stones acted as a shield.”
Such discoveries help us decipher what the ancients were up to when they built megalithic structures. At the Temple of Edfu in Egypt there is a wall featuring what amounts to a recipe for establishing a space that differs energetically from its surrounding landscape — a temple. The instructions describe how certain creator gods first established a mound and 'pierced a snake' to the spot, whereupon a special force of nature impregnated the mound, which led to the construction of the physical temple.
The symbol of the serpent has always been a culturally shared metaphor of the earth's meandering lines of force, what scientists refer to as telluric currents.
[Egyptian goddess harnessing the serpent energy.]
Controlling the Laws of Nature: It seems ancient architects had a fine degree of control of the laws of nature, because a recent study of energy fields in and around Avebury, the world's largest stone circle, shows how its megaliths are designed to attract a ground current into the site.
Electrodes planted at Avebury reveal how its circular ditch breaks the transmission of telluric ground current and conducts electricity into the ditch, in effect concentrating energy and releasing it at the entrance to the site, sometimes at double the rate of the surrounding land.
Magnetic readings at Avebury die away at night to a far greater level than can be accounted for under natural circumstances. They charge back at sunrise, with the ground telluric current from the surrounding land attracted to the henge just as magnetic fluctuations of the site reach their maximum.
Studies conducted by the late physicist John Burke also discovered how the stones of Avebury are deliberately placed and aligned so as to focus electro-magnetic currents to flow in a premeditated direction using an identical principle to modern atomic particle colliders, in which airborne ions are steered in one direction.
[Avebury stone circle. Image by Freddy Silva]
The effect of sacred sites behaving like concentrators of electromagnetic energy is enhanced by the choice of stone. Often moved across enormous distance, the stone used in megalithic sites contains substantial amounts of magnetite. The combination makes temples behave like weak, albeit huge, magnets.
Spiritual Technology. This has a profound influence on the human body, particularly the dissolved iron that flows in blood vessels, not to mention the millions of particles of magnetite floating inside the skull, and the pineal gland, which itself is highly sensitive to geomagnetic fields, and whose stimulation begins the production of chemicals such as pinolene and seratonin, which in turn leads to the creation of the hallucinogen DMT. In an environment where geomagnetic field intensity is decreased, people are known to experience psychic and shamanic states.
An exhaustive investigation into the Carnac region of France, where some 80,000 megaliths are concentrated, reveals a similar spiritual technology at work. At first the leading researcher, electrical engineer Pierre Mereux, was skeptical that megalithic sites possessed any special powers.
Mereux’s study of Carnac shows how its dolmens amplify and release telluric energy throughout the day, with the strongest readings occurring at dawn. The voltage and magnetic variations are related, and follow a phenomenon known as electric induction. According to Mereux, “The dolmen behaves as a coil or solenoid, in which currents are induced, provoked by the variations, weaker or stronger, of the surrounding magnetic field. But these phenomena are not produced with any intensity unless the dolmen is constructed with crystalline rocks rich in quartz, such as granite.”
His readings of menhirs reveal an energy that pulsates at regular intervals at the base, positively-and negatively-charged, up to thirty-six feet from these upright monoliths, some of which still show carvings of serpents. Extreme pulsations recycle approximately every 70 minutes, showing that the menhirs charge and discharge regularly.
Mereux also noticed how the voltage of standing stones in the Grand Me´nec alignment diminished the farther away they lay from the stone circle, which itself behaved as a kind of condenser or concentrator of energy.
[Carnac menhir caption: One of the 80,000 menhirs in the Carnac region. Image by Freddy Silva]
The composition of the stones and their ability to conduct energy was not lost on Mereux and others. Being very high in quartz, the specially chosen rocks are piezoelectric, which is to say they generate electricity when compressed or subjected to vibrations. The megaliths of Carnac, positioned as they are upon thirty-one fractures of the most active earthquake zone in France, are in a constant state of vibration, making the stones electromagnetically active.
It demonstrates that the menhirs were not planted on this location by chance, particularly as they were transported from 60 miles (97 km) away, because their presence and orientation is in direct relationship to terrestrial magnetism.
Sacred Sites and Magnetic PortalsAncient Mysteries traditions around the world share one peculiar aspect: they maintain how certain places on the face of the Earth possess a higher concentration of power than others. These sites, named "spots of the fawn" by the Hopi, eventually became the foundation for many sacred sites and temple structures we see today. What is interesting is that each culture maintains that these special places are connected with the heavens by a hollow tube or reed, and by this umbilical connection the soul is capable of engaging with the Otherworld during ritual. However, it also allows a conduit for the spirit world to enter this physical domain.
In 2008 NASA may have unwittingly proved this observation to be true when it published details of an investigation into FTEs, or flux transfer events, in which this organization describes how the Earth is linked to the Sun by a network of magnetic portals which open every eight minutes.
Such discoveries help to validate, in the scientific eye, the long-held belief by sensitives and dowsers since the recording of history that megalithic sites and ancient temples are places set aside from the normal world, where a person can connect with locations far beyond this planetary sphere.
Certainly the ancient Egyptian priests regarded the temple as far more than a conglomerate of dead stones. Every dawn they awakened each room with orations, treating the temple as a living organism that sleeps at night and awakens at dawn.
Featured image: Deriv; Standing stones in Avebury, Whiltshire, England. (CC BY 2.0)
References: Charles Brooker. Magnetism and Standing Stones, New Scientist, January 13, 1983
John Burke and Kaj Halberg. Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty, Council Oak Books, San Francisco, 2005
Pierre Mereaux. Carnac: Des Pierres Pour Les Vivants, Kerwangwenn, Nature & Bretagne, 1992
Studies on the pineal and DMT: Serena Roney-Dougal, The Faery Faith, Green Magic, London, 2002; and E.C. May et al, Review of the psychoenergetic research conducted at SRI International, SRI International Technical Report, March 1988 >
Our recent generations believe they've discovered categories of physics that place us far above any past generations. So, why are there structures and artifacts we can't duplicate or even understand the purpose of if they were all so primitive? Sheer modern hubris is my answer.
Couldn't agree more, Stan. After extensive reading, in the 1970s, visited many megalithic sites in England (1980) and along the western coast of France (1984). What we encountered, experienced, and learned is far beyond what could be covered in even a dozen web posts.
A lot of outstanding physical and metaphysical research has been done by highly competent people from the 1950s to date. I'd put together an annotated book list of the volumes that I found helpful if we weren't up to here with local responsibilities that can't wait. Maybe later in the season.
