>Curse of the Pharaoh’s DNA

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Mummies found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb are at the centre of a dispute over DNA analysis.

Jo Marchant  – Some researchers claim to have analysed DNA from Egyptian mummies. Others say that’s impossible. Could new sequencing methods bridge the divide?

Cameras roll as ancient-DNA experts Carsten Pusch and Albert Zink scrutinize a row of coloured peaks on their computer screen. There is a dramatic pause. “My god!” whispers Pusch, the words muffled by his surgical mask. Then the two hug and shake hands, accompanied by the laughter and applause of their Egyptian colleagues. They have every right to be pleased with themselves. After months of painstaking work, they have finally completed their analysis of 3,300-year-old DNA from the mummy of King Tutankhamun.

Featured in the Discovery Channel documentary King Tut Unwrapped last year and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1, their analysis — of Tutankhamun and ten of his relatives — was the latest in a string of studies reporting the analysis of DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies. Apparently revealing the mummies’ family relationships as well as their afflictions, such as tuberculosis and malaria, the work seems to be providing unprecedented insight into the lives and health of ancient Egyptians and is ushering in a new era of ‘molecular Egyptology’. Except that half of the researchers in the field challenge every word of it.

Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world’s foremost ancient-DNA labs.

Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’ — when, that is, they’re not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most others, the results can be explained by contamination. Next-generation sequencing techniques, however, may soon be able to resolve the split once and for all by making it easier to sequence ancient, degraded DNA. But for now, Zink says, “It’s like a religious thing. If our papers are reviewed by one of the other groups, you get revisions like ‘I don’t believe it’s possible’. It’s hard to argue with that.” …

The disagreement stems from the dawn of ancient-DNA research. In the 1980s, a young PhD student called Svante Pääbo worked behind his supervisor’s back at the University of Uppsala in Sweden to claim he had done what no one else had thought was possible: clone nuclear DNA from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy². Soon researchers realized that they could use a new technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify tiny amounts of DNA from ancient samples. There was a burst of excitement as DNA was reported from a range of ancient sources, including insects preserved in amber and even an 80 million-year-old dinosaur³.

Then came the fall. It turned out that PCR, susceptible to contamination at the best of times, is particularly risky when working with tiny amounts of old, broken-up DNA. Just a trace of modern DNA — say from an archaeologist who had handled a sample — could scupper a result. The ‘dinosaur’ DNA belonged to a modern human, as did Pääbo’s pioneering clone. Once researchers began to adopt rigorous precautions⁴, including replicating results in independent labs, attempts to retrieve DNA from Egyptian mummies met with little success⁵.

That’s no surprise, say sceptics. DNA breaks up over time, at a rate that increases with temperature. After thousands of years in Egypt’s hot climate, they say, mummies are extremely unlikely to contain DNA fragments large enough to be amplified by PCR. “Preservation in most Egyptian mummies is clearly bad,” says Pääbo, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthroplogy in Leipzig and a leader in the field. Ancient-DNA researcher Franco Rollo of the University of Camerino in Italy went so far as to test how long mummy DNA might survive. He checked a series of papyrus fragments of various ages, preserved in the similar conditions to the mummies. He estimated that DNA fragments large enough to be identified by PCR — around 90 base pairs long — would have vanished after only around 600 years⁶.

Yet all the while, rival researchers have published a steady stream of papers on DNA extracted from Egyptian mummies up to 5,000 years old. …
via Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharaoh’s DNA : Nature News.

>Escaped Egyptian tycoon attempts to smuggle out tons of antiques

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Airport Customs stopped yesterday evening 100 parcels allegedly belonging to Egyptian tycoon Hussein Salem, which were headed to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The parcels weighed three tons together and included paintings, antiques, carpets, gold plated trays, gold statues, expensive watches, clocks, clothes and items that may be subject to the Egyptian Law for the Protection of Antiquities.

Sayed Ibrahim, the head of customs, said that airport officials became suspicious when they realised how heavy the packages were and decided to check their contents. He added that the parcels belong to an export company and included papers associated with a Saudi Prince and were heading to Jeddah. The bags were being smuggled by a person holding a Palestinian passport.

Ibrahim informed the airport’s prosecution office who revealed that the items belong to a businessman who is trying to smuggle them out of the country. Ibrahim adds that the items included photos of Salem with Arab leaders and kings, as well as with ousted president Hosni Mubarak and his former chief of staff Zakaria Azmi, along with a carpet with Salem’s name written on it. This led airport officials to believe that they belonged to the businessman, and a committee was formed to investigate the matter.

Salem is one of the closest friends of Mubarak and owns a significant number of touristic sites in Sharm El-Sheikh and shares in the East Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG) which exports gas to Israel. On 10 March, the Cairo Criminal Court confirmed a decision to freeze all his personal and family assets. Salem fled the country on 26 January, one a day after the revolution began.

via Escaped Egyptian tycoon attempts to smuggle out tons of antiques – Politics – Egypt – Ahram Online.

>Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth

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Archaeologist Brigitte Kovacevich in a looters’ tunnel inside the pyramid at the Head of Stone site.

Hidden for centuries, the ancient Maya city of Holtun, or Head of Stone, is finally coming into focus.

Three-dimensional mapping has “erased” centuries of jungle growth, revealing the rough contours of nearly a hundred buildings, according to research presented earlier this month.

Though it’s long been known to locals that something—something big—is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it’s only now that archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone was.

Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year, the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, several stone residences, and other structures. …

From about 600 B.C. to A.D. 900, Head of Stone—which is about three-quarters of a mile (1 kilometer) long and a third of a mile (0.5 kilometer) wide—was a bustling midsize Maya center, home to about 2,000 permanent residents.

But today its structures are buried under several feet of earth and plant material and are nearly invisible to the untrained eyed.

Even Head of Stone’s three-pointed pyramid—once one of the city’s most impressive buildings—”just looks like a mountain enveloped in forest,” said study leader Kovacevich, who presented the findings at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento, California. …

via Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth.

>Enormous statue of powerful pharaoh unearthed

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Archaeologists unearthed one of the largest statues found to date of a powerful ancient Egyptian pharaoh at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, the country’s antiquities authority announced Tuesday.

The 13 meter (42 foot) tall statue of Amenhotep III was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation.

The statue consists of seven large quartzite blocks and still lacks a head and was actually first discovered in the 1928 and then rehidden, according to the press release from the country’s antiquities authority. Archaeologists expect to find its twin in the next digging season.

Excavation supervisor Abdel-Ghaffar Wagdi said two other statues were also unearthed, one of the god Thoth with a baboon’s head and a six foot (1.85 meter) tall one of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet.

Archaeologists working on the temple over the past few years have issued a flood of announcements about new discoveries of statues. The 3,400-year-old temple is one of the largest on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, where the powerful pharaohs of Egypt’s New Kingdom built their tombs.

Amenhotep III, who was the grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, ruled in the 14th century B.C. at the height of Egypt’s New Kingdom and presided over a vast empire stretching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north.

The pharaoh’s temple was largely destroyed, possibly by floods, and little remains of its walls. It was also devastated by an earthquake in 27 B.C. But archaeologists have been able to unearth a wealth of artifacts and statuary in the buried ruins, including two statues of Amenhotep made of black granite found at the site in March 2009. …

via Enormous statue of powerful pharaoh unearthed – Yahoo! News.

>Tiny church finds original King James Bible

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A little English village church has just made a remarkable discovery.

The ornate old Bible that had been sitting in plain view on a table near the last row of pews for longer than anyone could remember is an original King James Bible – one of perhaps 200 surviving 400-year-old original editions of arguably the most important book ever printed in English.

In fact, the Bible at St. Laurence Church in Hilmarton, England, was sitting right under a hand-lettered sign saying it was an original.

The sign said it had been found in “the parish chest” in 1857, that the cover had been added, and that it was the second of the two impressions published in 1611 – the year of first publication.

But no one knew whether to believe it, parish council member Geoff Procter said. As the anniversary of publication in 1611 approached, they decided it was worth investigating.

“We had no way of knowing whether it really was a 1611 Bible so we had to get it verified somehow,” he said.

He and two other church members took it to a specialist, the Rev. David Smith at the Museum of the Book in London.

Smith knew immediately what he was looking at, Procter said.

“We put it on his table and he opened it and immediately he said, ‘Yes, this is a 1611 Bible,'” Procter remembered. …

via Tiny church finds original King James Bible – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs.

>Easter Island mystery solved?

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…In their new book, The Statues that Walked: Unravelling the Mystery of Easter Island, to be published in June, Dr Lipo and Professor Hunt present their evidence that Polynesian colonists arrived in 1200, up to 800 years later than the conventional theory claims, and immediately modified the environment with slash-and-burn agriculture.

The effect this had on the giant palm forest was magnified by the rats that arrived with them. The rodent population, feeding extensively on palm seeds, exploded.

Dr Lipo argues that deforestation didn’t make things much worse for humans. Rapa Nui was no tropical paradise. It’s an old volcanic island and many of the nutrients in the soil had already been washed away. Burning the giant palms actually helped, but the settlers soon turned to a technique called stone mulching, in which freshly broken volcanic rocks are planted in the poor soil to add nutrients and cut down on erosion.

The same people who used rock mulching and greeted the Dutch could have moved the moai from Rano Raraku, the quarry where they were carved, to the shore, he says. The statues seem designed to allow small groups of men to move them by rocking them, as you would a refrigerator.

Similar suggestions have been made in the past, but experiments indicated that the moai would have been worn away by the time they got to the coast. Dr Lipo, aided by anthropologist Sergio Rapu, the island’s first native governor under Chilean rule, thinks he has found a way around this, with more rocking and less shuffling.

Defenders of the old theory are not taking this lying down. The British archaeologist Paul Bahn and his co-author John Flenley are bringing out a third edition of The Enigmas of Easter Island with a response to the upstarts. “They’re ignoring the oral tradition and just cherry-picking the data they like,” he said …

via Has the mystery of Easter Island finally been solved? – Science, News – The Independent.

>Gigantic New SuperOrganism with ‘Social Intelligence’ is Devouring the Titanic

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In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic –which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years ago — was being devoured by a monster microbial industrial complex of extremophiles as alien we might expect to find on Jupiter’s ocean-bound Europa. What they discovered is the largest, strangest cooperative microorganism on Earth.

Scientists believe that this strange super-organism is using a common microbial language that could be either chemical or electrical -a phenomenon called “quorum sensing” by which whole communities “sense” each other’s presence and activities aiding and abetting the organization, cooperation, and growth.

The microbes are consuming the wreck’s metal, creating mats of rust bigger than a dozen four-story brownstones that are creeping slowly along the hull harvesting iron from the rivets and burrowing into layers of steel plating. The creatures also leave behind “rusticles,” 30-foot icicle-like deposits of rust dangling from the sides of the ship’s bow. Structurally, rusticles contain channels to allow water to flow through, and they seem to be built up in a ring structure similar to the growth rings of a tree. They are very delicate and can easily disintegrate into fine powder on even the slightest touch.

These live mats and rusticles form a communicating super-organism funneling iron-rich fluids, sulfur, and electrical charges through the collective of archea, fungi, and bacteria that thrives in the icy dark, low oxygen waters. Using DNA technology, researchers discovered that the rusticles were formed by a combination of 27 different strains of bacteria. Among the bacteria feasting on the Titanic, there was a brand new member of the salt-loving Halomonas genus. …

via Gigantic New SuperOrganism with ‘Social Intelligence’ is Devouring the Titanic (Today’s Most Popular).

>1/2 foot long fossilised spider ‘biggest on record’

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The legs would have spanned up to 15cm, front to back (scale-bar: 5mm)

Scientists say a fossilised spider from the Inner Mongolian region of China is the biggest yet found.

The female, which lived about 165 million years ago, belongs to a collection of spiders well known today – the golden orb weavers.

These creatures make webs from a very tough and distinctively golden silk.

The researchers tell the journal Biology Letters that Nephila jurassica, as they have called their specimen, would have had a leg span of some 15cm.

“She is the largest known fossil spider,” said Professor Paul Selden from the University of Kansas, US.

“Her body is not the biggest, but if you add in her long legs then she’s the largest,” he told BBC News.

Today’s Nephila species are found around the globe in tropical and sub-tropical regions.

Until this new fossil turned up in Inner Mongolia, the most ancient example from this grouping, or genus, was about 35 million years old.

So, this discovery pushes the existence of the Nephila back to the Jurassic Period, making them the longest ranging spider genus known.

No-one can say for sure how this particular arachnid met her end, but she may have succumbed to a natural catastrophe.

The spider was encased in volcanic ash at the bottom of what would have been a lake.

via BBC News – Fossilised spider ‘biggest on record’.

>Explanation of the Court Trial Against Me

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I have to tell the world right now, there is a story going around that I am going to be in jail, which is a complete misunderstanding.

Last year, we were taking bids from different companies to run a book store inside the Egyptian Museum. There is a person, who was renting a bookstore inside the Museum. He wanted to stop the bidding process, because he thought he should keep his contract. This person filed a case with the Misdemeanor Court in Agouza, Cairo, in order to stop the bidding process. This case was filed against the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), not against me personally, but against the role I was holding at that time.

However, before the case came to trial, the bidding process ended at the end of May 2010, and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (now the Ministry of State for Antiquities) chose a company, the Egyptian Sound and Light Company, to run the bookstore. Shortly after this decision was made, the court trial happened, at the beginning of June, so the SCA representatives did not have time to present evidence that the bidding had finished. Therefore, the court made a ruling that the bidding should stop. However, it was too late to do anything.

He still wanted to get his way, so this person continued to bring action against me in the court. In November 2010, the court made a ruling, that I was innocent, because as the Secretary General of the SCA, I was not in charge of legal affairs at the SCA, this was under the control of the Ministry of Culture at that time. But this was not enough for this person, he brought the case to the court again, claiming he had evidence that I was in fact in charge of legal affairs, and this time, the SCA did not have a legal representative present at the court. The court made the current ruling that I, as head of the SCA, was sentenced to a year in jail. This is how the court in Egypt works, and this is not an uncommon thing that the head of an organization gets sentenced like this. When a ruling like this is made, the defendant (in this case myself as Secretary General of the SCA at that time) has a certain amount of time to appeal the decision of the court.

Tomorrow, the head of the Legal Affairs Department at the Ministry of Antiquities will go to the court to file our appeal. He will present evidence that the bid for the bookstore contract was finished before the original court ruling, so therefore we could not follow the ruling to stop the bidding. We already had completed the bidding! I have every confidence that this matter will be cleared up very soon, so I want to tell everyone not to worry. I respect the laws of my country very highly, and the rulings of our courts. I intend to handle this matter entirely within our legal system. Nothing will cause me to lose focus from my goal of protecting the sites of Egypt.

via Explanation of the Court Trial Against Me | drhawass.com – Zahi Hawass.

I’ve liked him ever since I got the chance to talk to him in person about carbon dating the great pyramid. I think I caught him off guard by asking for a specific detail about the dating process he used, but he answered and gave me some advice I could use as well. I do hope he gets this resolved soon and, obviously, that he doesn’t have to go to jail. His statement is very clear.

>One billion-year-old life form fossils found on edge of Scottish loch

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Fossils of some of the first life forms to make the pivotal jump from the oceans to land have been found on the edge of a remote Scottish loch.

Rocks around Loch Torridon, on Scotland’s west coast, contain the preserved remains of organisms that once lived at the bottom of lakes a billion years ago.

They mark a key moment in evolution when simple bacteria started to become more complex collections of cells capable of photosynthesis and sexual reproduction.

Professor Martin Brasier, from Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, said: ‘These new fossils show that the move toward complex algal cells living in lakes on land had started over a billion years ago, much earlier than had been thought.’

His research is reported in the journal Nature.

Unlike their bacterial ancestors, the cells had specialised structures including a nucleus, as well as machinery vital for photosynthesis.

They also reproduced sexually, which helped to speed up evolution.

Experts believe the organisms ultimately gave rise to green algae and land plants. …

‘We have discovered evidence for complex life on land from one-billion-year-old deposits from Scotland.

‘This suggests that life on land at this time was more abundant and complex than anticipated.

‘It also opens the intriguing possibility that some of the major events in the early history of life may have taken place on land and not entirely within the marine realm.’

Around 500million years after the appearance of the life forms, the land surface began to be colonised by simple vegetation such as lichens, mosses and liverworts, said the scientists.

At about the same time the first simple animal organisms began to migrate out of the sea.

They were followed by the emergence of fish, reptiles, mammals, ferns, conifers and flowering plants.

Professor Brasier added: ‘None of this would have been possible without advances long ago made by these little microbes, now entombed within phosphate from the Torridon lakes.

‘It was arguably these organisms that helped to turn our landscape from a harsh and rocky desert into a green and pleasant place.’

via One billion-year-old life form fossils found on edge of Scottish loch | Mail Online.

Long live the Horta.