Another video to share with you, this time the trailer to Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This is a 3D film shot inside Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France. These are some of the oldest cave paintings known. The film seems to have good reviews on IMDB and is set to be released on March 25th, 2011 in the UK.
What do you think?
Can we be sure which mummy was the daddy? When a state-of-the-art DNA analysis of Tutankhamun and other ancient Egyptian royals was published last year, its authors hailed it as 'the final word' on the pharaoh's family tree. But others are now voicing doubts.
The analysis of 11 royal mummies dating from around 1300 BC was carried out by an Egyptian team led by Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass. The project was overseen by two foreign consultants, Albert Zink of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, and Carsten Pusch of the University of Tübingen, Germany.
The researchers used the DNA data to construct a family tree of Tutankhamun and his immediate relatives. The study, published last February in the Journal of the American Medical Association (vol 303, p 638), concluded that Tutankhamun's father was the pharaoh Akhenaten, that his parents were brother and sister, and that two mummified foetuses found in Tutankhamun's tomb were probably his stillborn daughters – conclusions that have since become received wisdom.
But many geneticists complain that the team used inappropriate analysis techniques. Far from being definitive, the study is 'not seen as rigorous or convincing', says Eline Lorenzen of the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. 'Many of us in the DNA community are surprised that this has been published.'
...
To judge the quality of the team's results, Lorenzen and others are asking for access to raw data not included in the Journal of the American Medical Association paper – but Zink is reluctant to oblige, fearing the data would spark 'a lot of arguing' over technicalities.
However, Zink, Pusch and colleagues insist that they will soon be able to put any doubts to rest. They say they have also extracted the mtDNA that Lorenzen and others consider necessary for rigorous genetic analysis and are still working on the data. They hope to publish the results this year.
But the critics are still advising caution. 'When working with samples that are so well-known, it is important to convince readers that you have the right data,' says Lorenzen. 'I am not convinced.'
Map of Grape Domestication
I got some archaeobotany for you to start your weekend off right with — a new open access study in PNAS announces a genome wide association of 8,000 years of grape domestication, spanning the Eastern Caucasus to Western Europe. Lead author Sean Myles of Cornell University wrote in the abstract,
“support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East. Grape growing and winemaking then expanded westward toward Europe, but the degree to which local wild sylvestris from Western Europe contributed genetically to Western European viniferacultivars remains a contentious issue. Our results … all support a model in which modern Western European cultivars experienced introgression from local wildsylvestris.”
In related wine archaeology, earlier this week, UCLA archaeologist Hans Barnard published the findings of a 6,000 year old uncorked wine barrel in Armenia. The barrel was discovered in the Areni-1 cave near the Iranian border. The results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, but you can read a bit more about it here.
Hope you found these two tidbits as interesting as I did. Cheers to a good weekend!
Cracked.com features '8 Famous Fictional Archaeologists Who Suck At Their Job'.
OK, yes, this is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, what with Lara Croft, Brendan Fraser and the like. The list is so packed that they don't even find space for Allan Quatermain. Or maybe Alan Moore has successfully rehabilitated Quatermain's geek cred.
Anyway, the whole list is a hoot. Here's a snippet from the inevitable Indiana Jones entry:
We have lots of gold, Indy! We have people and machines whose entire job is to make holes in mountains until gold comes out, and you're collapsing a priceless trove of ancient machinery to recover something we could dig up in 10 minutes. Most archaeologists consider themselves lucky to find all the shards of the same destroyed vase, because they'll be able to put it back together in only a few months. That pressure-plate-triggered arrow-launcher? That was worth more than the gold. That shouldn't be that difficult for Indy, an archeologist, to comprehend. Yet he destroys ruins so intact they're actively trying to protect themselves from him. In other words, they weren't ruins until he arrived.
I think that real archaeology has a shortage of suitable MacGuffins. Of course, those silly 'power stones' in Temple of Doom set the bar pretty low...
Archaeological evidence suggests that grape domestication took place in the South Caucasus between the Caspian and Black Seas and that cultivated vinifera then spread south to the western side of the Fertile Crescent, the Jordan Valley, and Egypt by 5,000 y ago (1, 21). Our analyses of relatedness between vinifera and sylvestris populations are consistent with archaeological data and support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East (Fig. 4 and Table 1).
Brian Switek reviews the American Experience program, Dinosaur Wars, which covered the scientific rivalry between paleontologists Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. We watched it this week, I love it when AE takes a science-related subject. It does this way too rarely considering the importance of science and technology to American history.
Without doing a full review, it was a good show. I liked it when Thomas Henry Huxley showed up to visit.
I just wish I knew someone with the middle name of 'Drinker.'
Mummies are always trouble. I hate to say it. You see, in my line of work we can do an awful lot with a skeleton. We're usually down to a few pieces of bone, so that a skeleton is an unimaginable luxury.
The typical mummified body carries so much more information than a skeleton. I mean, you've got soft tissue there, whole organs. Food left in the mummy's tummy. With Egyptian mummies, you had a whole crew of embalmers using special techniques to preserve the body. They could not possibly have done more to give us time capsules of human biology from the dawn of history.
So why does it seem like every study of a mummy ends up in a fight?
I think that mummies give too much to chew on. With a bone, it's sort of likely that you only have one indicator of pathology. One symptom makes for a pretty simple diagnostic problem. Sure, you're likely to be wrong, but with one symptom where's the argument?
Now, a whole body -- well, there you'll probably have several symptoms. Or you'll have things you would expect to see with a pathology, but they're just not there. So every armchair paleopathologist ends up with his own theory about what the mummy's got.
The mummies in the news this week are thought to be Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, and their relatives. Last year, Zahi Hawass and colleagues [1] published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reporting on their Discovery Channel-funded research on these mummies. They ran a series of tests to assess the paleopathology of these mummies, including some work demonstrating the presence of falciparum malaria. They also extracted DNA from the mummies and constructed a pedigree connecting them based on shared microsatellite alleles.
I wouldn't ordinarily write about mummies. They're really not my thing. If there were a Neandertal mummy, well, I'd be all over that. Ain't gonna happen.
But if you follow ancient DNA, that last detail probably gave you a bit of a hiccup. Can we really amplify STR alleles from mummies with any accuracy?
Well, that's why the story is in the news this week. For example, Jo Marchant in New Scientist writes 'Royal rumpus over King Tutankhamun's ancestry', quoting geneticists who question the results. Eline Lorenzen and Eske Willerslev wrote a letter to JAMA pointing out the literature on the topic [2]. There are just so many problems with contamination and DNA degradation, even if you have a large tissue sample to work with. The idea that you could extract DNA and do straight-up PCR amplification to identify microsatellite alleles seems, well, optimistic.
The geneticists involved in the study, Albert Zink and Carsten Pusch, defend their approach in a published reply, as well as in the New Scientist piece.
I'm skeptical. In 2000, Pusch was involved in a study that claimed to extract DNA from Neandertal and early modern human remains, testing their similarity by means of Southern hybridization [3]. That's an even simpler technique, and the published result surprised a lot of people. Cooper and Poinar [4] immediately criticized the study for lacking the proper controls. Shortly afterward, Geigl [5] challenged the result by demonstrating the strength of results could not have emerged among closely-related primate species and likely reflected the presence of soil microorganisms. Considering what we now know about the low endogenous DNA content of ancient skeletal remains, DNA-DNA hybridization just couldn't possibly have gotten any result that wasn't noise.
That's the kind of problem that emerges regularly with ancient DNA studies. When someone is taking an approach outside of the ordinary, they'd better document extremely well their attempts to quantify contamination and present many different approaches to validate their results. At a minimum it is very surprising that mtDNA sequence data were not available with the initial results. The lack of adequate documentation in the Hawass study is why a controversy is arising now.
Can we accurately type STR alleles from mummies? I wouldn't rule it out given the quantity of tissue available, but there should be many more controls for a high-profile study like this one. The work took place over several years, so it's a bit unrealistic to expect the latest sequencing methods. But JAMA and the Discovery Channel presented the results as important science. They should have ensured that solid answers for the obvious questions were at hand.
