Tracing the hum

Posted on 06 May 2015 by Barbara Kiser

{credit}Rob Flynn/USDA{/credit}

Consider the honeybee. Not as an automaton in a honey factory, but as a remarkable social insect and pollinator indissolubly tied to food security — and to the artistic imagination. So asks the poet John Burnside in his incisive essay on the bee in culture in this week’s Books and Arts.

Burnside points out how, as colony collapse disorder decimates hives worldwide, poets and artists are revealing anew the multifaceted relationship of the bee and us. The subtly beautiful limited-edition artbook Melissographia, a collaboration between Burnside and British multimedia artist Amy Shelton, for instance, interweaves poems, pollen maps, botanical samples and illustrations.

Detail of Amy Shelton’s Florilegium: Honey Flow. Spring, 2014. {credit}John Melville{/credit}

Shelton notes on her website that she works in the “strong artistic tradition in England of ‘unseen landscapes’” by focusing on the beehive — “a locus of wildness fusing with human culture”. The lightbox installations of Shelton’s Florilegium: Honeyflow illuminate scores of nectar-rich wildflower specimens in the order they bloom through the bee season — in the process spotlighting the loss of 97% of Britain’s wildflower meadows in the past 75 years.

Shelton also runs Honeyscribe, an educational project offering children the chance to learn about our dependence on pollinators and the wonders of the hive. (One eight-year-old attendee, Shelton tells me, said of standing near the beehives that “it was like it was snowing bees. It was beautiful.”)

In ancient Egypt, honeyscribes monitored the harvests of the hives. But the bee, fierce as well as beneficent, was also symbolically tied to royalty. As the emblem of lower Egypt, the insect became part of the iconography of governance: that region’s crown, the deshret, sports a spring-like protuberance resembling a bee’s proboscis.

Epithet on limestone plaque from the temple of Ramesses II at Abydos, 13th century BC, in the British Museum, London. The bee symbolises lower Egypt.

Epithet on limestone plaque from the temple of Ramesses II at Abydos, 13th century BC (British Museum, London). The bee symbolises lower Egypt.{credit}Barbara Kiser{/credit}

The bee had meanwhile ascended to divine status in preclassical Aegean civilisations. Some islands seem to have buzzed with bee-goddess cults, as seventh-century BC finds from Crete and Rhodes hint.

Underneath these lofty goings-on, the honeybee remained knitted in to quotidian existence round the world, as Eva Crane (1912-2007) documented in classics such as the World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (1999; reprinted 2011). (Crane, a quantum mathematician, directed the International Bee Research Association for 35 years and worked on apian science in more than 60 countries.)

Crane’s research points to the Aegean as a fountainhead of beekeeping. I recently had a visceral reminder of the region’s elemental and ongoing link to bees in Mani, one of the tattered ribbons of land that blow south from the Peloponnese. As I walked the flank of the rock-strewn Sangias range among wild orchids, scabious and euphorbia, the earth itself seemed to reverberate. It was the hum of millions of honeybees at work round the wooden hives of village cooperatives. Apis mellifera, still only half-tamed, remains at home in this ferocious landscape.

Amy Shelton’s lightbox artworks, Florilegium: Honey Flow, can be seen at the Wellcome Kitchen, the Wellcome Collection’s new restaurant at 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

ICARDA saves gene bank

Posted on 23 Mar 2015 by Mohammed Yahia

The gene bank in Tel Hadya, Syria{credit}ICARDA{/credit}

Shortly after the uprising in Syria deteriorated into civil war, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) started facing major problems that threatened the survival of the research centre. Looters repeatedly attacked the main facility in Aleppo and stole computers and equipment before staff had to be evacuated to other ICARDA facilities in neighbouring countries.

Last week, ICARDA received the Gregor Mendel Innovation Prize for managing to save all the samples that were stored in its gene bank, one of the most important agricultural gene banks in the world.

““Over the years, ICARDA had managed to safety-duplicate most of its gene bank collections outside Syria. When the conflict there escalated, we sped up the duplication and now have secured 100% of the germplasm collection outside Syria,” said Mahmoud Solh, the director of ICARDA, in a statement released.

The gene bank at ICARDA’s Syrian research centre were particularly important because they carried samples of wild relatives of many of the crops that are widely cultivated today, such as bread wheat, barley, lentil and faba beans. These wild crops carry important genes that have allowed them to adapt to different habitats and challenges, such as droughts, pests and diseases. Domesticated plants may have lost these genes throughout the years, so the gene banks acts as reservoirs that breeders can use to breed new strains to combat new challenges as they arise.

The Fertile Crescent, where agriculture is thought to have originated, is rich with these unique wild crops. Scientists are worried these may be lost in the conflicts across the region. ICARDA had previously rescued and safety-duplicated germplasm collections from Afghanistan and Iraq when the wars there erupted. Now, along with the samples collected in Syria, these are being duplicated elsewhere, with 80% of ICARDA’s collection already duplicated in Svalbard Seed Vault in Norway.

“The efforts of Mahmoud Solh and his teams are valuable not only for plant breeders who are highly dependent on diversity to improve agricultural varieties but also for following generations who benefit from drought tolerant and disease and pest resistant crops” justifies Peter Harry Carstensen, president of the Gregor Mendel Foundation.

Libya’s fossil discovery illuminates an interval of evolutionary history

Posted on 18 Mar 2015 by Pakinam Amer

A team of scientists, led by Christopher Beard, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas, shed light on an otherwise poorly documented interval of evolutionary history through fossils discovered in the Libyan desert.

Beard’s work focuses on the origin and evolution of primates and anthropoids — the precursors to humans. His paper unveils a discovery of mammal fossils uncovered in the Zallah Oasis in the Sirt Basin of central Libya. The fossils date back to between 30 and 31 million years ago.

The paper is available online but has yet to be published in the April edition of the Journal of African Earth Sciences, and documents the findings of a 2013 expedition.

According to the University of Kansas’ official press release of said research, the study demonstrates how climate and environmental change can alter a local ecosystem.

The team’s worked in a rock unit called the Zallah Oasis in Libya’s Sirt Basin — an area that has “sporadically” produced fossil vertebrates since the 1960s. According to the paper, the team discovered a highly diverse and unique group of fossil mammals dating to the Oligocene, a time marked by a broad diversity of animals and development of species critical to human evolution.

Beard has also discovered several new species of fauna, including a new species of the primate Apidium, which the team considers to be the most exciting of the fossils uncovered so far.

Additionally, Beard says that the fossil species his team discovered in Libya were surprisingly different from previous fossils tied to the same geologic epoch discovered in Egypt.

“The fact that we are finding different species in Libya suggests that ancient environments in northern Africa were becoming very patchy at this time, probably because of global cooling and drying which began a short time earlier,” he’s quoted in the university’s press release as saying. “That environmental patchiness seems to have promoted what we call ‘allopatric speciation.’ That is, when populations of the same species become isolated because of habitat fragmentation or some other barrier to free gene flow, given enough time, different species will emerge. We are still exploring how this new evolutionary dynamic may have impacted the evolution of primates and other mammals in Africa at this time.”

The Zallah Incision local fauna from Libya appears to be close in age to Fayum quarries in the Jebel Qatrani Formation of Egypt and the Taqah locality in the Ashawq Formation of Oman.

“These are the first anthropoid primate fossils known from the Oligocene of Libya and the only anthropoid fossils of this age known from Africa outside of Egypt,” says the researcher. “Earlier hypotheses suggested that anthropoids as a group may have evolved in response to the global cooling and drying that occurred at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. Our new research indicates this was certainly not the case, because anthropoids had already been around for several million years in Africa prior to that boundary.

“But the climate change still had a deep impact on anthropoid evolution, because habitat fragmentation and an increased level of allopatric speciation took place as a result. Anthropoids, being forest dwellers, would have been particularly impacted by forest fragmentation during the Oligocene,” he adds.

On Beard’s research team is Libyan professor Mustafa J. Salem, of the Geology department at Tripoli University – an expert on the Sahara Desert, and the one who gave Beard et al the greenlight to return to the country in 2013 “despite State Department warnings against travel to Libya,” says Beard.

The lead author of the research, however, says that another return to the field in Libya to continue the work is practically problematic, and currently impossible until the country is stable and the security of researchers can be assured.

Mainz University Egyptologist to create massive digital inventory of hieroglyphic characters

Posted on 07 Dec 2014 by Pakinam Amer

An Egyptian boy writing. Scribe, hieroglyphs, symbols denoting meaning. Carving in stone or painting. System of sign language. Ancient Egypt.

{credit}Macmillan South Africa{/credit}

Mainz University was given the go-ahead to start a long-term project to study ancient Egyptian cursive scripts – and make all the data accessible and searchable in digital format.

Cursive scripts were used in day-to-day interactions in ancient Egypt – written using rush stems and black or red ink on materials such as papyrus, linen, leather, wood, ceramics, plaster, and even stone, explains the press release by Mainz University. The style of writing was a modification of the detailed hieroglyphs – often seen carved on temple walls and ancient artifacts – and by studying it, the evolution and adaptation of handwriting to suit daily needs can perhaps be traced.

There are two types of scripts: hieratic and cursive. “Hieratic script was used for every stage of the ancient Egyptian language during 3,000 years and was only displaced in some contexts by demotic cursive script in the middle of the first millennium BC,” says the release.

The researchers will continue previous decades-long analysis of both scripts and their relation to hieroglyphs and to demotic script, but for the first time, they’re attempting to “compile a systematic and digital inventory of hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic characters from selected and significant sources, whereby different eras, regions, textual genres, and writing mediums for the documentation period from around 2700 BC to 300 AD will be taken into account.”

The analysis will also focus on the scripts’ emergence and development, the context of their use in additions to aspects such as the economy, the layout of manuscripts and the identification of individual scribes’ hands.

The project is expected to create a “digital paleography database,” a repertoire of characters, that will be available online, could be searched and inspected by international experts. Extensive metadata on all relevant sources will be provided, the project promises. Partial or special paleographies will be downloadable.

The project, titled “Ancient Egyptian Cursive Scripts: Digital Paleography and Systematic Analysis of Hieratic and Cursive Hieroglyphs,” is partly funded by the German government. It will be supervised by Egyptology Professor Ursula Verhoeven-van Elsbergen of the Department of Ancient Studies of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and will be spread over 23 years, receiving an annual grant of a little over $325,500.

Although the project is centered on the study of ancient Egypt, the actual work will take place in the Egyptology section at Mainz University and in the Computer Philology section at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Roman Egypt was home to “a good citizenship” youth organisation 2,000 years ago

Posted on 25 Nov 2014 by Pakinam Amer

{credit}© GOODSHOOT{/credit}

Following a study of over 7,500 ancient documents on papyrus, originating from Oxyrhynchos in Egypt and discovered over a hundred years back in a rubbish dump, University of Oslo and the University of Newcastle presented what is perhaps the most systematic research of childhood in Roman Egypt, according to the university’s website.

Among their discoveries? Some 2,000 years ago, Oxyrhynchos, a town of around 25,000 inhabitants, had a youth organisation, called a “gymnasium,” in which any free-born child could enroll – slaves and girls not allowed.

Somewhere between 10 and 25% of local Egyptian boys, in addition to Greek and Roman residents of Egypt would have qualified, but typically members of affluent families and higher tax classes enrolled, according to an overview of the study released earlier this month by social historian Ville Vuolanto of the University of Oslo and April Pudsey of the University of Newcastle.

Enrollment in the gymnasium marked the transition to adulthood.

“It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. By examining papyri, pottery fragments with writing on, toys and other objects, we are trying to form a picture of how children lived in Roman Egypt,” explains Vuolanto.

While well-off boys were part of the prestigious gymnasium, learning to be good citizens, others worked or landed what is termed “apprenticeship contracts,” mainly in the weaving industry. Either way, boys in ancient Egypt were not considered fully adult until they got married, usually in their early twenties. Most girls remained or worked at home, according to the study.

Slave children could also become apprentices, however, unlike “free-born” citizens they lived with their owners or “masters” not their parents during. Vuolanto says that children as young as two were separated from kin and sold as slaves.

“Little is known about the lives of children until they turn up in official documents, which is usually not before they are in their early teens,” says University of Oslo’s press release.

Digital mapping uncovers ‘super henge’ that dwarfed Stonehenge

Posted on 10 Sep 2014 by Ewen Callaway

{credit}Ludwig Boltzmann Institute{/credit}

Every summer solstice, tens of thousands of people throng to Stonehenge, creating a festival-like atmosphere at the 4,400-year-old stone monument. For the 2015 solstice, they will have a bit more room to spread out. A just-completed four-year project to map the vicinity of Stonehenge reveals a sprawling complex that includes 17 newly discovered monuments and signs of a 1.5-kilometre-around ‘super henge’.

The digital map — made from high-resolution radar and magnetic and laser scans that accumulated several terabytes of data — shatters the picture of Stonehenge as a desolate and exclusive site that was visited by few, says Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, UK, who co-led the effort.

Take the cursus, a 3-kilometre-long, 100-metre-wide ditch north of Stonehenge that was thought to act as barrier. The team’s mapping uncovered gaps in the cursus leading to Stonehenge, as well as several large pits, one of which would have been perfectly aligned with the setting solstice Sun. New magnetic and radar surveys of the Durrington Walls (which had been excavated before) uncovered more than 60 now-buried holes in which stones would have sat, and a few stones still buried.

“They look as they may have been pushed over. That’s a big prehistoric monument which we never knew anything about,” says Gaffney, who calls the structure a ‘super henge.’ His team will discuss the work at the British Science Festival this week, and they plan to present it to the institutions that manage the site. “I’m sure it will guide future excavations,” Gaffney says.

Arctic archaeologists find Franklin expedition ship

Posted on 09 Sep 2014 by Alexandra Witze

Canadian archaeologists have found one of the Franklin expedition’s ships — lost since the Arctic explorers famously disappeared in 1846 — off of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. The ship is either the HMS Erebus or the HMS Terror, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on 9 September.

The HMS Terror was lost in the Arctic during the Franklin expedition.{credit}National Archives of Canada{/credit}

The discovery comes in the sixth year of expeditions led by Parks Canada, which has scoured hundreds of square kilometres of ocean bottom in search of the Franklin ships. A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) deployed from Parks Canada’s 10-metre survey vessel Investigator made the discovery on 7 September.

Days earlier, archaeologists working on land reported finding an iron fitting from a Royal Navy ship. It was a major clue that the search team was in the right area, farther south than some had expected but in line with where Inuit had reported seeing a shipwreck in the nineteenth century.

The team found the ship’s remains using underwater sonar, controlled from on board the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfred Laurier. A Toronto Star journalist aboard the vessel reported that when archaeologist Ryan Harris saw the sonar feed, he raised two open hands “like a winning sprinter”.

This iron fitting could be a clue to the location of the lost Franklin Expedition. {credit}Government of Nunavut{/credit}

The ROV, a Saab Seaeye Falcon, carries a high-definition video camera that captured the wreck, resting with its bottom on the sea floor. Parks Canada says it is certain the ship belongs to the Franklin expedition, given its design.

John Franklin left England in May 1845 with 128 other men in the Erebus and Terror, aiming to find and explore a Northwest Passage. Both ships vanished. In 1859, searchers found a message in a cairn on King William Island reporting that Franklin and some of the crew had died while the ships were trapped in ice. The remaining men eventually abandoned ship and began walking south. Studies of bodies of various crew members, found in graves scattered across several islands, suggest that lead poisoning may have contributed to their deaths. Cut marks on some bones suggest cannibalism, again supporting Inuit accounts.

The Canadian government funded the bulk of the search along with several private partners. In recent years, oceanographers from Arctic nations have been mapping assiduously in the far north to help establish sovereignty over possible future oil and gas exploration in the region.

Even today, ships can run into trouble in the area. On 3 September, the Arctic Research Foundation’s vessel Martin Bergmann, which was taking part in the search, hit a previously unknown shoal and became grounded for about two-and-a-half hours.

‘End of world plague’ remains uncovered in Egypt

Posted on 18 Jun 2014 by Pakinam Amer

Two skulls, two bricks and a third century AD jug found inside the remains of the bonfire

The remains of one of the most notorious epidemics to have hit the region—one so bad that it killed two Roman emperors and was labeled “the end of the world” plague—were uncovered in Luxor, archaeologists announced earlier this week.

According to Live Science, the team of scientists were working at the Funerary Complex of Harwa and Akhimenru between 1997 and 2012 in the west bank of the ancient city of Thebes (now known as Luxor) when they came across a body-disposal factory and a large bonfire with human remains. Nearby, the remains of what used to be kilns where lime—an ancient disinfectant—was produced were also found.

The site appears to be where bodies infected with the plague—whose nature remains mysterious but could very well be either smallpox or measles—were destroyed. The bodies, when they were found, were covered in thick layers of lime, and are believed to belong to plague victims.

The discovery was made by the Italian Archaeological Mission to Luxor, otherwise known as MAIL, and was made public this week.

Pottery remains found in the kilns allowed the researchers to date the grisly body-disposal operation to the third century, says Live Science, a time when a series of epidemics historically named the “Plague of Cyprian” had ravaged the Roman Empire, which Egypt was part of at the time.

The science news hub quoted Francesco Tiradritti, director of the MAIL, as saying that the plague had occurred roughly between A.D. 250-271 and was said to have offed more than 5,000 people a day in Rome alone.

In Egypt, the bodies of victims of the epidemic were apparently burnt at a seventh century B.C. complex that was originally built for a grand steward named Hawra but after its use during the plague, it gained a bad reputation. Back then, Saint Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage, gave a graphic description of how the disease ravaged its victims, believing that the world was coming to an end.

“It killed two Emperors, Hostilian in A.D. 251 and Claudius II Gothicus in A.D. 270,” Live Science quoted Tiradritti as saying. It is “a generally held opinion that the ‘Plague of Cyprian’ seriously weakened the Roman Empire, hastening its fall.”

Bronze age weather report solves some ancient mysteries

Posted on 28 Apr 2014 by Pakinam Amer

A revised translation of a Bronze Age Egyptian stela corrects the timeline of Ahmose’s reign and offers a more precise geological and political map of the old region.

The world’s oldest weather report is here in Egypt – and it describes the devastation of the entire country due to an atypical “tempest”; a thorough and detailed description that finally helped scholars determine the precise timeline of Ahmose’s rule, and in turn shed light on the chronology of ancient events in this region.

The record of the sweeping rains and thunder described in the 3,500-year-old 6-foot block of stone, otherwise known as Tempest Stela, is not metaphor, explain the two scholars in their new translation of the record, published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Robert K. Ritner and Nadine Moeller, of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, wrote that the weather events described on the block appear to be the aftermath of a very real geological event: the famous volcano eruption at Thera (present-day Santorini, an island in the Mediterranean) whose effects reverberated across the region.

Ahmose I of Dynasty 18{credit}The Metropolitan Museum of Art{/credit}

Ahmose I was the founder of the 18th dynasty and a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, famous for military campaigns that saw him drive the Hyksos out of Lower Egypt, clinch their stronghold in modern-day Gaza and take over lands in Syria and Nubia—heralding the birth of the New Kingdom. The stela was written down during his reign.

Scholars previously believed that the records of thunder and rain described on the stela were figurative –perhaps analogical references to Ahmose’s political conquests. But Ritner and Moeller beg to differ. The stela’s reports are not only literal, but are “further proof that the scholars under Ahmose paid close and particular attention to matters of weather,” they say.

The natural catastrophe lasted for an extended period, and was “unparalleled in intensity and extent,” as per the stela. Although the precise number of days is lost, the storm could have lasted for up to a month, according to some estimates, suggested the scholars.

The Egyptian stela mentions vivid imagery from the resulting chaos: “construction debris, household furnishings and […] human victims are washed by the driving rains into the river.” And it clearly states that the devastation extended into the “Two lands” a reference to north and south of Egypt.

“What Ahmose experienced and recorded was neither a typical storm, nor a masked reference to Hyksos destruction and royal defeat of primordial chaos,” say the researchers. “Whether the Tempest Stela records the actual events of Thera or later after-effects cannot be proved conclusively since the text cannot be expected to state that the storm ‘originated in Santorini’ or ‘among the Aegean islanders’.”

“The events described need not be testimony of the initial explosion, but rather of climactic after-effects that would have continued for some years,” the researchers added in their paper. “The Ahmose text’s further statement that those on the east and west lacked “clothing” … proves that this is a reference to the specific rain event, not a general metaphor for long term Hyksos domination.”

The researchers suggest that other scholars may have been reluctant to link the eruption at Thera to the Tempest Stela not because of the text itself, but because of chronological implications of such a link. “With newer and better dates for the eruption, there yet remains another possibility for reconciliation […] If Thera cannot be moved to Ahmose, it is becoming clearer that Ahmose might be moved toward Thera.”

The link between Ahmose’s reign plus the stela on one hand and Thera on the other has meant that scholars have now accurately placed his reign 30 to 50 years earlier than the previously recorded dating.

David Schloen, associate professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations on ancient cultures in the Middle East told EurekAlert!, science news agency, that Ritner and Moeller’s revised translation and their new conclusions helps “realign the dates of important events such as the fall of the power of the Canaanites and the collapse of the Babylonian Empire” in the ancient Near East, fitting the dates of other events more logically.

“This new information would provide a better understanding of the role of the environment in the development and destruction of empires in the ancient Middle East,” he said.

Tomb of ancient Egypt chief physician unearthed in Giza

Posted on 07 Nov 2013 by Pakinam Amer

The massive tomb carries the mark of elevated status.{credit}Arab Republic of Egypt Ministry of State for Antiquities Affairs{/credit}

The tomb of a top ancient Egyptian physician, who treated royals, was discovered in the Abusir necropolis, a site of excavations just 25 kilometres south of Cairo. A Czech archaeological mission unearthed the limestone tomb last week, confirming through press interviews and on its Facebook page that the tomb does indeed belong to the head of the physicians of the north and south of Egypt some 4,400 years ago.

Shepseskaf-Ankh, which translates to “Shepseskaf is living,” was associated with royalty, including a ruler of Egypt named Niuserre. The same site, which shelters the remains of 14 pyramids, served as the resting place of two other physicians from the fifth dynasty, as well as Old Kingdom rulers and a number of high temple priests close to the kings.

The architecture of the tomb, and its size, stretching across 21 by 14 meters and rising up 4 meters in height as well as housing an open court and eight burial chambers, gives away the high and noble status of the chief physician—who is believed to come from an elite Egyptian family, according to Ali Al-Asfar, deputy head of the ancient Egyptian section of the Ministry of State of Antiquities.

In one section of the tomb, a false door carries some of the ancient doctor’s prestigious titles, including Priest of Ra—the sun god—and Priest of Magic.

Miroslav Bárta, director of the archaeological team from the Czech Institute of Egyptology, told the National Geographic that he is pleased with the historical details contained in the tomb. “This microcosmos illustrates general trends that ruled the society of the day,” he said. “This is exactly the moment when the empire starts to break down due to rising expenses and increasing independence of powerful families.”

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