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August 03, 2007

INQUA: But did they have a sense of fashion?

Sometimes you just have to wonder how PhD students come up with their thesis topic. Take Ian Gilligan of the Australian National University: he studies ice age climates and … clothing.

Turns out that clothing can actually tell you a lot about prehistoric humans. If you aren’t very advanced, you wear simple clothing: a cape or a robe made basically by scraping a piece of animal hide. If you’re smarter, you develop complex clothing: something sewn together and tailored to fit the body, which means you can wear multiple layers and better fend off the cold.

Gilligan has spent a lot of time thinking about the Neanderthals - the prehistoric humans who lived side-by-side with Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years - and what they did when the winters got really cold. At the INQUA meeting, he even speculated that some of the famous European cave paintings show fingertips missing on the handprints because … they had been lost to frostbite.

It’s an interesting theory, and since no one else has a much better idea of what happened to the Neanderthals, being driven extinct by the cold has about as much credence as any other idea. So next time you slip into a couple of warm fleecy layers followed by a windstopping Goretex – be glad you weren’t a Neanderthal.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 09:30 AM |

August 02, 2007

INQUA: How to get ancient DNA

It ain’t easy working in the field of ancient DNA, as Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide will tell you. His lab works on cool specimens such as Neanderthal teeth, bison bones, and moa poo, trying to extract signs of long-gone life.

But getting DNA out of old specimens is subject to many whims of fate, Cooper told the meeting in a plenary lecture today. One time his team tried to run sequences on a Viking skull from Greenland – and got 23 sequences from 23 separate individuals. “Probably 23 archaeologists,” Cooper jokes.

Technicians in ancient DNA laboratories have to take special care not to contaminate the material they’re working with. They suit up in clean suits, wear surgical gloves that they change regularly, and work in rooms with negative air pressure to blow contaminants out. Lab equipment has to be sterilized with ultraviolet radiation because it can be contaminated with mouse droppings. Visitors have to wear visors because the fluttering of eyelashes can spread DNA everywhere.

But if it’s done right, ancient DNA can reveal a lot about long-lost worlds – like the fact that different-sized moas can be just different sexes and not different species, or that bison in North America may have been starting to crash before human hunters ever showed up on the plains.

Findings like that are probably worth all the tidying up around the lab.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 02:16 PM |

INQUA: How fossils can help conservationists

Conservationists usually like their species of interest to be alive, not dead. But a couple of presentations here at INQUA suggest that the past has much to teach the present.

Nick Porch of the Australian National University calls his field 'invasion paleoecology'. Basically, it's looking in the fossil record to see what animals lived where at certain times. And it can help modern conservationists get a better handle on whether species are truly 'native' to a particular area or not, he told the meeting today.

Take ants. The kingpin of all ant studies, E.O. Wilson, has apparently said that ants are invasive species in the Pacific islands east of Samoa, and that they show up only after European ships arrived some 400 years ago. But Porch has looked at the ant record on the island of Rimatara in French Polynesia. And it turns out that there are plenty of ants in the fossil record there: They showed up about 900 years ago, when Polynesians first populated the islands. So ants came with people, but with the Polynesians (not the Europeans) first.

You might not care about ants in the South Pacific, but how about agricultural pests in Hawaii? An insect known as the nigra scale (Parasaissetia nigra) supposedly was introduced to Hawaii from Africa within the past few centuries. But it wasn't, says Porch - his studies suggest it's one of the most common creatures in the fossil record of the islands.

And what about birds in Britain? John Stewart of University College London has looked at whether birds such as eagle owls - the largest owl in Western Europe - actually used to live in Britain. Some pairs have been seen there breeding in the past decade, but no one is sure whether they are new to the island or have simply come back after having been gone for many generations.

See here (subscription required) for an earlier story on this topic -- and one that ruffled Stewart's feathers! At the meeting he said he was unhappy at how he had been quoted in the piece...read it yourself and see if you think it's over the top.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 09:46 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

August 01, 2007

INQUA: Footprints from the past

There's something inherently fascinating about trackways. Whether they come from dinosaurs, humans, or some other creature, footprints convey a linkage to the past in ways that bones or tools just can't match.

As just one example, Steve Webb of Bond University presented here some findings about the Ice Age footprints in the Willandra Lakes area of southeastern Australia. This is a World Heritage site with the biggest collection of fossil footprints -- more than 700 of them! -- anywhere in the world. They show aboriginal children, teenagers, and adults walking around in what was once a wetland swamp but now is a dried-up lakebed.

Some sets of trackways appear to be converging, as if people were running toward the same point - could it have been a race? In another spot, Webb and his colleagues spent a long time pondering a strange mark which involved a footprint and another sort of hole-like depression. Their conclusion: A one-legged person was helping himself or herself along with a stick.

See some of the pictures of this vanished world in the appendix of the paper available online here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 09:05 PM |

INQUA: A call to arms

In the discussion of dried-up Tibetan lakes and marine isotope excursions here at INQUA, one thing has been noticeably lacking: a sense of the bigger-picture context. In his plenary address today, Peter Barrett of New Zealand brought the crowd back to a sense of reality.

Barrett is one of those grizzled Antarctic geologists who look like they've spent their entire life on the ice sheet. And in fact he's been a key player in Antarctic research for many decades (back from the time when the Beatles and the Grateful Dead were fresh, as he reminded the INQUA audience today). But in the past year or two, Barrett has started to worry more about the future than the past.

As part of a tour through Antarctic climate history, Barrett ran through the various reasons why the southern continent is so important - as a constraint on sea level rise, as a control of global weather, and as a record of deep-time climate history. But then he started whipping out the IPCC graphs, showing carbon dioxide levels rising in the future and what that might mean for the Antarctic ice sheet. The audience began to murmur, and some looked a bit confused. Had they been out to lunch in February when the latest IPCC report came out? Or have they just not spent much time extrapolating from their studies of the Quaternary to what happens next?

Kudos to Barrett for introducing a bit of activism into the normally staid surroundings of a scientific conference.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 09:01 PM |

July 30, 2007

INQUA: Field trips

After a full session of talks today, the conference breaks tomorrow for a set of all-day field trips. I’ll be off to visit the Undara lava tubes – one of the world’s longest such systems – so no news of the Quaternary for 24 hours or so.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:23 PM |

INQUA: Beowulf and the beast

One of the fun things about conferences is stumbling across little gems of presentations – things that may not be earthshattering news, but are just fun to listen to for 15 minutes. Today, Niels Schroeder of Roskilde University in Denmark served up such a little talk, entitled “Tales and Facts: Beowulf and Lejre”.

Danish archaeologists have apparently conducted a couple of excavations over the past decade trying to see whether the city of Lejre, in ancient Denmark, is in fact the site of the royal hall mentioned in the epic medieval poem Beowulf. In just the past couple of years, the archaeologists have uncovered remains of a large hall that they say may be the legendary hall of Heorot. And geologists have tried to pinpoint lakes or swamps that could have been the location for the lair of the monster Grendel.

A medieval research center at Arizona State University has more information about a new book on this topic on its webpage.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:20 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

INQUA: Welcome to Cairns

INQUA organizers have thoughtfully selected the lovely tropical city of Cairns, in the state of Queensland, for this conference. Many attendees seem to be taking the opportunity to bring their families along for some side trips to the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree rainforest. And for those poor souls who have to get stuck at the actual conference, meeting planners have sweetened the deal a bit. So far, the Cairns convention center has just about the best convention food I’ve ever eaten (and I’ve eaten a lot – trust me, eating with the physicists in Minneapolis in March was a definite culinary low point).

Although Cairns is a relatively small city, it’s tried to draw conference traffic with its convention center. The combination of family day trips and tropical setting appears to work – just a few weeks ago, the city also played host to the major stem-cell conference of the year, the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

My colleague who went to that meeting said she though Australian food was quite pedestrian. I’m planning to circumvent that problem tonight by going to a local restaurant that promises smoked kangaroo, crocodile wontons, and emu pate. Bon appetit!

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:18 PM |

INQUA: Welcome to the Quaternary

The first thing you may be wondering, gentle reader, is what exactly is Quaternary research? Simple – it’s anything that addresses the last 1.8 million years or so. ‘Quaternary’ means fourth, and geologists introduced the term to differentiate the period from the earlier Tertiary (third) period of geologic time.

The Quaternary is important, INQUA folks will tell you, because a lot of important things have happened in the last couple of million years. Hominids arose in Africa, became modern humans, and spread around the world. Ice ages came and went. Great animals rose and became extinct. It has been a busy time.

INQUA itself meets only every four years, and topics at the meeting range from paleoclimate (what happened on the Tibet plateau during the last couple of glaciations?) to human evolution (when and how did people colonize Australia, and what effect did they have on the landscape when they did?). Meeting organizers are trying to cram in a lot, and the 1,000 people attending this conference will have all week to try to make sense of things.

And so it’s off to the races…

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:10 PM |

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