River Press

 

Excavation yields no historical data - Kaikoura - The Marlborough Express
One of Kaikoura's historical mysteries has been solved.
The excavation of a concrete structure at the rear of Fyffe House is underway, and although some people believed exciting archeological remains might have been found in its place, so far there has been nothing.
In the 1850s a sea cave containing a skeleton and moa egg was discovered by whalers in the area and although historical ambiguity and debate surrounds where exactly the cave was, it was possible more archeological remains could have existed around the historical homestead.
The cave was found to be an early Maori burial cave or urupa and in case any remains were found during the excavation a local rununga representative was present.
New Zealand Historic Places Trust archeologist for Canterbury and the West Coast Bridget Mosley was also at the excavation and said nothing more than a few animal remains and bits of concrete were found"

 

Pig study forces rethink of Pacific colonisation
A survey of wild and domestic pigs has caused archaeologists to reconsider both the origins of the first Pacific colonists and the migration routes humans travelled to reach the remote Pacific.
Scientists from Durham University and the University of Oxford, studying DNA and tooth shape in modern and ancient pigs, have revealed that, in direct contradiction to longstanding ideas, ancient human colonists may have originated in Vietnam and travelled between numerous islands before first reaching New Guinea, and later landing on Hawaii and French Polynesia.
Using mitochondrial DNA obtained from modern and ancient pigs across East Asia and the Pacific, the researchers demonstrated that a single genetic heritage is shared by modern Vietnamese wild boar, modern feral pigs on the islands of Sumatra, Java, and New Guinea, ancient Lapita pigs in Near Oceania, and modern and ancient domestic pigs on several Pacific Islands.
The study results, published today in the prestigious academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, contradict established models of human migration which assert that the ancestors of Pacific islanders originated in Taiwan or Island Southeast Asia, and travelled along routes that pass through the Philippines as they dispersed into the remote Pacific.
The research was funded by funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Fyssen Foundation.
Research project director, Dr Keith Dobney, a Wellcome Trust senior research fellow with the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, said: "Many archaeologists have assumed that the combined package of domestic animals and cultural artefacts associated with the first Pacific colonizers originated in the same place and was then transported with people as a single unit.
"Our study shows that this assumption may be too simplistic, and that different elements of the package, including pigs, probably took different routes through Island South East Asia, before being transported into the Pacific.

 

Epic of Human Migration Is Carved in Parasites’ DNA
A human body is not the individual organism its proud owner may suppose but rather a walking zoo of microbes and parasites, each exploiting a special ecological niche in its comfortable, temperature-controlled conveyance. Some of these fellow travelers live so intimately with their hosts, biologists are finding, that they accompany them not just in space but also in time, passing from generation to generation for thousands of years.
Josh CochranThe latest organism to be identified as a longtime member of the human biota club is Streptococcus mutans, the bacterium that causes tooth decay. From samples collected around the world, Dr. Page W. Caufield and colleagues at New York University have found that the bacterium can be assigned by its DNA to several distinct lineages. One is found in Africans, one in Asians and a third in Caucasians (the people of Europe, the Near East and India), his team reported in last month’s Journal of Bacteriology."

 

Modern childhood 'is 160,000 years old'
Australian researchers have used an ancient jaw bone to reveal that humans living 160,000 years ago were just like us.
The scientists developed a revolutionary x-ray technique to examine the teeth of an ancient homo sapien child found in the Jebel Irhoud caves in Morocco.
The eight-year-old is the earliest human ever found who developed in the same way as modern humans, the researchers believe.
Examination of the North African remains revealed its childhood would have lasted about the same length of time as a modern child, Australian National University Professor Rainer Grun said."

Sunday, March 04, 2007