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Daily Archives: March 9, 2017
Bitcoin Is A Chaotic Bedlam Of Manipulation And Deceit And That’s Just The Way We Like It – Dealbreaker
Posted: March 9, 2017 at 2:55 am
One of the recurring themes in the socio-political experiment that is bitcoin is how the cryptocurrency community has slowly accepted norms and strictures that govern the fiat money system bitcoin was invented to supersede. As traders slowly grasp the scope of manipulation and grift that accompanies such an anarchic, anything-goes market, some have clamored for rules that might make the world of bitcoin as fair as it is free, from anti-money laundering safeguards to deposit insurance. Innovation recapitulates regulation.
FT Alphavilles Izabella Kaminska highlights the most recent such episodeof this sagain the travails of Daniel Masters, founder of the Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Program. In Masterslatest investor bulletin, he recounts how his fund got knocked ten percent from its benchmark by a competitor practicing textbook price manipulation. He writes:
The matters set out above highlighted another issue with bitcoin trading, which up until this point we had not considered. After the price drop, one player emerged as totally dominant in the open interest of the futures contract. It seemed pretty clear to us as a result that this event was not just a normal version of a large liquidation, with which we are familiar, but was a premeditated attack. When the dust settled, one unidentified player was short well over half the open interest.
In a typicallyregulated market like, say, lean hog futures, position limits established voluntarily by exchanges (and later mandated by Dodd-Frank) would keep a market participant from amassing such a dominant, price-shifting position. But the techno-utopia of bitcoin trading refuses to shackle its citizens with these kinds of outdated contrivances. And for Masters, thats kind of a bummer:
We would therefore class this episode as clear market manipulation, and in fact it was not just momentary: for many days thereafter the basis was so weak that it seemed that the one attack was being followed up by periodic smaller attacks. As such we approached the exchange. They confirmed to us that there were no position limits whatsoever and that people were free to do whatever they wanted in their happy trading environment (yes, they used those actual words). We made it very clear that such activity, whether in a regulated environment or not, might amount to criminality in Hong Kong and would certainly do so in many other jurisdictions. Following a number of discussions, the exchange encouraged the rogue player to withdraw and things have now normalized.
Clearly, one mans happy trading environment is another mans viper pit, which is the ultimate tradeoff with bitcoin investing. You get all the excitement and arbitrage opportunity of a relativelyprehistoric market without the safeguards of the current one.
Of course, were talking bitcoin exchanges here, not bitcoins central coding community. Though exchange operators seem to have some of the same libertarian leanings as the currencys diehard core (see above), they also have incentives like making money and staying out of jail. Regulators tend to treat bitcoin trading as a commodity, which subjects it to a basic set of rules and safeguards that exchanges must follow. But regulatory pressures are less interesting that those stemming fromthe bitcoin community itself.
When OTC markets backfire, bitcoin edition [FT Alphaville]
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Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis for 03/09/2017 Last Line of Defense! – newsBTC
Posted: at 2:54 am
Bitcoin price seems to be down to its line in the sand for the uptrend, as a break below this area could lead to a longer-term selloff.
Bitcoin Price Key Highlights
Bitcoin price seems to be down to its line in the sand for the uptrend, as a break below this area could lead to a longer-term selloff.
Technical Indicators Signals
The 100 SMA is still above the longer-term 200 SMA on the 4-hour time frame, confirming that the path of least resistance is to the upside and that the climb is likely to continue. Also, the gap between the moving averages is widening to indicate that bullish pressure is strengthening.
Price broke below the 100 SMA to show that sellers are trying to push it lower, but the 200 SMA appears to be holding as dynamic support so far. This coincides with the channel support and a former resistance level, which suggest that there could be plenty of orders waiting right here.
Stochastic is on the move down to show that sellers are in control of price action. However, this particular oscillator is already dipping into oversold territory to indicate seller exhaustion. If buyers are able to take over and stochastic heads back up, bitcoin price could follow suit. RSI is also heading south and has a ways to go before hitting the oversold area.
Market Events
Dollar strength has been in play over the past few days as traders continue to build up expectations for a Fed rate hike in the next meeting. Not only have most policymakers affirmed their hawkish bias but data has been mostly upbeat so far.
For one, the ADP figure for February printed a huge gain of 298K versus the projected 185K rise. To top it off, the January reading was upgraded so market watchers are expecting the same results for the official NFP report due on on Friday, sealing the deal for a March hike.
Charts from SimpleFX
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21 Adds List Feature to Bitcoin ‘LinkedIn’ Alternative – CoinDesk
Posted: at 2:54 am
Bitcoin startup 21 Inc has released an update to its previously announced paid messaging platform, soft launched earlier this year.
In a Medium post today, the San Francisco-based startup debuted '21 Lists', a new function that enables 21 users to offer bitcoin as a way to incentivize VCs, CEOs and angel investors to answer email messages from unknown senders.In advertisements, the startup has sought to position the offering as "better than LinkedIn".
"Each list is a mini-directory organized by profession or skill," the post explained.
It went on to detail six lists that group participants into categories including 'VCs', 'CEOs', 'angels', 'founders' and 'blockchain'.
The update is the latest that finds 21 moving away from a former bitcoin mining hardware product play and toward software solutions it believes will spur consumer use of the digital currency.
In statements to CoinDesk earlier this month, 21 CEO Balaji Srinivasan pushed back on claims that the new product marks a pivot, indicating that its main goal is to increase bitcoin adoption.
He went on to compare the bitcoin network favorably to other forms of payment.
"[Bitcoin] allows instant receipt of funds without linking a bank account, it works across borders and it can scale up and down to very small and large payments alike," he said.
Email visualization via Shutterstock
21Balaji Srinivasan
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New Plant Habitat Will Increase Harvest on International Space Station – Space Daily
Posted: at 2:54 am
A new, nearly self-sufficient plant growth system by NASA is headed to the International Space Station soon and will help researchers better understand how plants grow in space. The Advanced Plant Habitat will be used to conduct plant bioscience research on the space station, and help NASA prepare crew to grow their own food in space during deep-space exploration missions.
Some of the components of this new system have arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and are being prepared for delivery to the station on Orbital ATK's seventh commercial resupply mission to the station. The new plant system will join Veggie - NASA's first fresh food growth system already active on station.
Dr. Howard Levine, the project scientist overseeing the development of the advanced system, along with Dr. Gioia Massa, a life science project scientist and deputy project scientist, were two of the researchers who helped design the science requirements for the hardware and the test plan to validate it when it was tested at ORBITEC in Madison, Wisconsin.
"A team of scientists here at Kennedy Space Center have been developing the procedures for the first experiment using a prototype, or engineering development unit, of the plant habitat in the Space Station Processing Facility," Levine said.
Arabidopsis seeds, small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard, have been growing in the prototype habitat, and will be the first plant experiment, called PH-01, grown in the chamber aboard the space station.
Bryan Onate is the NASA APH project manager in the Exploration Research and Technology Directorate at Kennedy. He described the new plant habitat as a fully enclosed, closed-loop system with an environmentally controlled growth chamber. It uses red, blue and green LED lights, and broad spectrum white LED lights. The system's more than 180 sensors will relay real-time information, including temperature, oxygen content and moisture levels (in the air and soil, near the plant roots, and at the stem and leaf level), back to the team at Kennedy.
"A big difference in this system, compared to Veggie, is that it requires minimal crew involvement to install the science, add water, and perform other maintenance activities," Onate said. "We are learning how plants grow in space and what levels of commodities, such as light and water, are required so we can maximize our growth with the least resources."
The large, enclosed chamber measures 18 inches square, with two inches for the root system and 16 inches available for growth height. It is designed to support commercial and fundamental plant research or other bioscience research aboard the space station for up to a 135-day science investigation, and for at least one year of continuous operation without maintenance.
"I think that the new plant growth habitat will provide tremendous capabilities to do high quality plant physiology research with a variety of plant types on the space station," Massa said. "The plant habitat will enable much more controlled and detailed studies of plant growth in spaceflight."
The advanced system will be activated by astronauts aboard the space station but controlled by the team at Kennedy, minimizing the amount of crew time needed to grow the plants. The space station crew will still perform plant thinning and harvesting.
"Before PH-01 is initiated, there will be a short grow out of Dwarf Wheat and Arabidopsis as part of the post-installation checkout on the space station," Onate said.
The system's Plant Habitat Avionics Real-Time Manager in EXPRESS Rack, or PHARMER, will provide real-time data telemetry, remote commanding and photo downlink to the Kennedy team. An active watering system with sensors will detect when the plants need water and keep water flowing as needed.
Massa said having Veggie and the advanced system on the station will allow studies of food production in space, from the very simple to the complex and controlled.
When all parts are delivered to the station, the habitat will be installed in a standard EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to Space Station (EXPRESS) rack in the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo.
Read more about the APH here
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NASA proposes shield around Mars to aid human colonization – RT
Posted: at 2:53 am
Published time: 7 Mar, 2017 09:01Edited time: 7 Mar, 2017 11:20
NASA has announced a bold plan to terraform Mars for future human colonization by deploying a massive magnetic shield that would orbit our nearest neighbor, protecting it from the elements while allowing a new atmosphere to form.
The shield would act as a de facto magnetosphere, shielding Mars from the ravages of solar winds and debris, with the ultimate aim of allowing liquid water to flow across the surface of the planet, according to scientists.
This proposal, if implemented, would certainly be preferable to Elon Musks proposed nuclear bombardment of the Martian ice caps.
NASA's Planetary Science Division director, Jim Green, told the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop last week that placing a magnetic shield between Mars and the sun would allow a magnetosphere to form which would be a precursor to a fully-fledged atmosphere.
READ MORE: Incredible high-def images show ancient flooding remnants on Mars (PHOTOS)
This situation then eliminates many of the solar wind erosion processes that occur with the planets ionosphere and upper atmosphere allowing the Martian atmosphere to grow in pressure and temperature over time, Green and his team of researchers explained in an supplementary paper.
While it may sound far-fetched, the team points to similar systems already in place in orbit around the Earth to protect astronauts from solar radiation. They also believe that were such a magnetic shield deployed to protect Mars, the planet could regenerate atmospheric pressure up to half that of Earth in a matter of a few years.
This is not terraforming as you may think of it where we actually artificially change the climate, but we let nature do it, and we do that based on the physics we know today, Green said.
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Venter discusses genetic engineering, human longevity – The Daily Princetonian
Posted: at 2:53 am
In a quote written on a chalkboard in the Caltech archives, Richard Feynman said, What I cannot create, I do not understand.
This quote is the root of inspiration for geneticist J. Craig Venters research and scientific mission. Genomics is at an exciting stage today where what we understand about the genome can be applied directly to human health, Venter said in a lecture titled From Synthetic Life to Human Longevity on Wednesday.
Venter explained that there was no point in increasing lifespan alone, but the challenge was to increase an individuals healthspan. He stated that 40 percent of men and 24 percent of women between the ages of 50-74 in the United States do not reach the age of 74. A third of this population dies of cardiovascular disease and another third of cancer, leaving all other causes of death to just a third of the overall percentage, he said.
Venter, co-founder of Human Longevity, Inc., said that his goal was to change medicines approach to being proactive, predictive, personalized, and preventative by using whole genome sequencing and cutting-edge imaging and measurement technology. Early detection is literally lifesaving, he said, explaining that over 40 percent of people who entered his lab thinking they were healthy turned out not to be.
He said that his own genome showed an increased risk for prostate cancer, which he corroborated with a measure of his testosterone levels. While men with over 22 triplet repeats of a certain sequence on their X chromosome have very low incidences of prostate cancer, Venter said he only had six, which placed him on the extremely low end of the spectrum. He said that based on his genome sequence and testosterone readings, he underwent a prostatectomy a few months ago.
Early prediction of diseases like Alzheimers, which can be predicted 20 years in advance of the first symptoms by using whole-genome sequencing and neuro-quant data, can be prevented with the right drugs, Venter noted. He added that the same could be done with cancer tumors, and there was the potential to move to entirely preventative cancer vaccines, something that already exists for some forms of the disease.
Venter said that genotype could predict not only disease but also other phenotypes. His Face Project uses machine learning to reconstruct a three-dimensional human face from the genome alone, he noted. Venter also said that recordings of a voice could be used to predict the speakers age, sex, and height.
All of this information comes from about 40,000 genome sequences that has produced over 20 petabytes of data, Venter explained. He added that the sequencing of one million human genomes could produce one quintillion bytes of data, an amount that nobody in the world knows how to handle, yet the government could not be convinced that genomics was a big data problem. Sequencing the first human genome, a project whose private arm was spearheaded by Venter, took over nine years, cost more than a billion dollars, and, in 1999, had the third largest computer in the world built solely for that purpose, he explained.
Venters other major project was the synthesis of a living organism from scratch, which he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute accomplished in 2008 by converting digital binary bits into an organism that could live on its own.
The day we announced this, both the President and the Pope released statements, with the President calling for this to be the number one priority of the bioethics committee, and the Pope reassuring people that we had not actually created life, but just changed one of lifes motors, he said.
Venters team also discovered that the genome could be modularized so that entire sets of genes could be classified as metabolism, for example, and inserted into the genome. He said that to distinguish this synthetic life from existing organisms, into the genome of the organism was coded the names of the forty scientists that worked on the project, and quotations from James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Feynman.
Venter explained that despite having created an entirely new organism, scientists still do not understand the functions of a third of the genes, only that they appear throughout the biological tree and are necessary for the organisms survival.
Like any good science, we found out how little we know rather than how much we know, Venter said.
The event, part of the Princeton Public Lectures Vanuxem Lecture Series, was attended by members of the community in addition to Princeton students and faculty. The lecture took place in McCosh 50 at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
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The world is running out of water. But genetic engineering can help – CityMetric
Posted: at 2:53 am
Moscows Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished in December 1931. In its place now stands a new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
The intermittent period saw a stupendous construction planned for the site: the Palace of the Soviets, a 400-metre futuristic clash of neoclassicism and the avant garde, topped with a 100-metre-tall statue of Vladimir Lenin was set to occupy the area. If realised, it would have been the worlds tallest building for its time, topping the Empire State Building with its base alone. Lenins authoritative gaze and outstretched arm would have disappeared into the clouds.
An international design competition took place to establish what the vast congressional temple, communicating communisms triumph, might look like. It saw some 160 Soviet and foreign architects and their teams among them Walter Gropius, Moisei Ginzburg and Le Corbusier engage their efforts to establish an image that could conquer the spot. Jewish-Soviet architect Boris Iofan won.
The palace was part of a 1930s master plan to reconstruct Moscow. An offensive against the old city, it would have included new monuments, large-scale housing plans and elite residences, as well as attempts to straighten roadways and establish public parks.
The Soviets utopian ideals, and their commitment to the vision of socialism and its accompanying aesthetics, were a double-edged sword: Stalins state was viciously territorial over them, often at the expense of inhabitants, and many plans never saw fruition. Utopia often stayed mired in the realm of utopia.
And the vision of the Palace of the Soviets remained just that: a vision. Despite this, it is still one of the most notorious buildings in Moscow, and along with Tatlins Tower (1919), one of the nations most famous imagined projects.
But the city envisaged several more that could have permanently changed the face of Moscow as we know it today. An exhibit opening at the Design Museum on 15 March is set to document the architectural plans of the 1920s and 30s, as well as the propaganda surrounding them.
Narkomtiazhprom (NKTP) or the Peoples Commissariat of Heavy Industry was one such projected symbol for the new city. The subject of a 1934 architectural competition (Stalin seemed to enjoy these), it was set to stand on the north east edge of Red Square, and its realisation would have led to the destruction of both the Gum Shopping Centre and Moscow State Historical Museum, completely changing the geography of the landmark area.
Ivan Fomin's plan for theNarkomtiazhprom.
Some 12 designers in total competed for the project, among them, Ivan Fomin and Konstantin Melnikov. To one architect, Ivan Leonidov, this change was fundamental to the project. His design put forward three towers sharing a plinth: one rectangular, one circular, and one simple and strong. It was to be flanked by a staircase from which the proletariat could observe events on the square. He proclaimed that Red Squares landmarks should be subordinate to the structure.
The architecture of Red Square and the Kremlin is a delicate and majestic piece of music. The introduction into this symphony of an instrument so strong in its sound and so huge in scale is permissible only on condition that the new instrument will lead the orchestra, he wrote in his explanatory notes. The project fizzled out after a third round, and Leonidov only ever managed to construct a hillside staircase as part of a sanatorium in the southern city of Kislovodsk, in the north Caucasus.
A city for the people also needed people to venerate: heroes of communism. In 1934, Soviet architect and city planner Dmitry Chechulin intended to build a symbol honouring Soviet pilots on Belorusskaya Ploshchad, where one of Moscows main metro stations now stands.
The unrealised Aeroflot building was a tribute to those who helped to rescue the crew of steam ship Chelyuskin. In 1933 the steamer set sail from Murmansk to traverse the Northern Sea Route with the intention of reaching the Pacific Ocean. En route, it became mired in ice fields in the Chukchi Sea and was crushed and sank the following February.
All but one crew member survived and escaped onto the ice, and a complex aerial mission was required to ensure the success of the rescue operation, given the absence of landing space. Its success led to the pilots glory.
The Aeroflot building was never constructed. However, the design in strikingly similar to that of the present-day Russian White House, for which Chechulin was also a co-architect as the project took off in the 1960s.
An Arch of Heroes to stand as a monument to the war dead was also put forward by Soviet starchitect Leonid Pavlov in the early 1940s. A much smaller wooden recreation of the design was displayed among other temporary arches, on one of the citys main thoroughfares on City Day in 2015.
The Communal House of the Textile Institute in 2013. Image: Panoramio/Wikimedia Commons.
Ideas for communal housing projects were fundamental to the Soviet regime; the pinnacle of socialism saw different families sharing buildings, and facilities, having only their rooms as private space. Some key structures remain in place today in various conditions although the Narkomfin experiment for workers from the Peoples Commisariat of Finance and the Communal House of the Textile Institute envisaged in the late 1920s have both seen better days.
And some never made it. One of the first projected communal housing projects was put forward by Nikolai Ladovsky, who rejected a focus on sheer technicality and function for a focus on space and form he was a rationalist rather than a constructivist. Most important in them will be the amount of intelligence, he reportedly said.
One such idea, conceived in 1920, was a conglomeration of residences spiralling upwards, not unlike Tatlins Tower. Ladovsky was drawn towards a trend in contemporary psychology called psychotechnics, creating a laboratory for students in 1926 to research visual perception and architecture and how it could contribute to organising the psychology of the masses. Such ideas fell out of favour in the late 1930s, but before then, he also managed to put forward a proposal for a new industrial town of 25,000 called Kostino.
The Design Museum exhibit will touch on the psychological elements of Soviet architecture too, documenting El Lissitzkys plans for Cloud Irons in 1925. A contemporary of Ladovsky, he developed designs for eight such structures horizontal skyscrapers but with vertical supports as he deemed moving vertically unnatural for humankind.
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Why do shorter men go bald more often? — ScienceDaily – Science Daily
Posted: at 2:52 am
Science Daily | Why do shorter men go bald more often? -- ScienceDaily Science Daily Short men may have an increased risk of becoming bald prematurely. An international genetic study at least points in this direction. During the study, the ... |
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What does it mean to be human? – The Independent
Posted: at 2:52 am
The Rock of Gibraltar appears out of the plane window as an immense limestone monolith sharply rearing up from the base of Spain into the Mediterranean. One of the ancient Pillars of Hercules, it marked the end of the Earth in classical times. Greek sailors didnt go past it. Atlantis, the unknown, lay beyond.
In summer 2016, Gibraltar is in the throes of a 21st-century identity crisis: geographically a part of Spain, politically a part of Britain; now torn, post-Brexit, between its colonial and European Union ties. For such a small area less than seven square kilometres Gibraltar is home to an extraordinarily diverse human population. It has been home to people of all types over the millennia, including early Europeans at the edge of their world, Phoenicians seeking spiritual support before venturing into the Atlantic, and Carthaginians arriving in a new world from Africa.
But Ive come to see who was living here even further back, between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, when sea levels were much lower and the climate was swinging in and out of ice ages. It was a tough time to be alive and the period saw the species that could, such as birds, migrate south to warmer climes, amid plenty of local extinctions. Among the large mammal species struggling to survive were lions, wolves and at least two types of human: our own modern human ancestors, and the last remaining populations of our cousins, the Neanderthals.
By understanding more about these prehistoric people, we can learn about who we are as a species today. Our ancestors experiences shaped us, and they may still hold answers to some of our current health problems, from diabetes to depression.
Im picked up outside my hotel by archaeologists Clive and Geraldine Finlayson, in a car that itself looks fairly ancient. Typical for this crowded little peninsula, they are of diverse origins he, pale-skinned and sandy-haired, can trace his ancestry back to Scotland; she, olive-skinned and dark-haired, from the Genoese refugees escaping Napoleons purges. How different we humans can look from each other. And yet the people whose home I am about to visit truly were of a different race.
We dont know how many species of humans there have been, how many different races of people, but the evidence suggests that around 600,000 years ago one species emerged in Africa that used fire, made simple tools from stones and animal bones, and hunted big animals in large cooperative groups. And 500,000 years ago, these humans, known as Homo heidelbergensis, began to take advantage of fluctuating climate changes that regularly greened the African continent, and spread into Europe and beyond.
The use of tools could be part of a wider breadth of survival adaptations, including resistance to plague and HIV ( Tom Sewell)
By 300,000 years ago, though, migration into Europe had stopped, perhaps because a severe ice age had created an impenetrable desert across the Sahara, sealing off the Africans from the other tribes. This geographic separation enabled genetic differences to evolve, eventually resulting in different races, although they were still the same species and would prove able to have fertile offspring together. The race left behind in Africa would become Homo sapiens sapiens, or modern humans; those who evolved adaptations to the cooler European north would become Neanderthals, Denisovans and others whom we can now only get a glimpse of with genetics.
Neanderthals were thriving from Siberia to southern Spain by the time a few families of modern humans made it out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. These Africans encountered Neanderthals and, on several occasions, had children with them. We know this because human DNA has been found in the genomes of Neanderthals, and because everyone alive today of European descent including me has some Neanderthal DNA in their genetic makeup. Could it be that their genes, adapted to the northerly environment, provided a selective advantage to our ancestors as well?
After driving through narrow tunnels on a road that skirts the cliff face, we pull up at a military checkpoint. Clive shows the guard our accreditation and were waved through to park inside. Safety helmets on to protect from rockslides, we leave the car and continue on foot under a low rock arch. A series of metal steps leads steeply down the cliff to a narrow shingle beach, 60 metres below. The tide is lapping the pebbles and our feet must negotiate the unstable larger rocks to find a dry path.
Ive been concentrating so hard on keeping my footing that it is something of a shock to look up and suddenly face a gaping absence in the rock wall. We have reached Gorhams Cave, a great teardrop-shaped cavern that disappears into the white cliff face and, upon entering, seems to grow in height and space. This vast, cathedral-like structure, with a roof that soars high into the interior, was used by Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years. Scientists believe it was their last refuge. When Neanderthals disappeared from here, some 32,000 years ago, we became the sole inheritors of our continent.
I pause, perched on a rock inside the entrance, in order to consider this people not so different from myself once sat here, facing the Mediterranean and Africa beyond. Before I arrived in Gibraltar, I used a commercial genome-testing service to analyse my ancestry. From the vial of saliva I sent them, they determined that 1 per cent of my DNA is Neanderthal. I dont know what health advantages or risks these genes have given me testing companies are no longer allowed to provide this level of detail but it is an extraordinary experience to be so close to the intelligent, resourceful people who bequeathed me some of their genes. Sitting in this ancient home, knowing none of them survived to today, is a poignant reminder of how vulnerable we are it could so easily have been a Neanderthal woman sitting here wondering about her extinct human cousins.
Gorhams Cave seems an oddly inaccessible place for a home. But Clive, who has been meticulously exploring the cave for 25 years, explains that the view was very different back then. With the sea levels so much lower, vast hunting plains stretched far out to sea, letting people higher on the rock spot prey and signal to each other. In front of me would have been fields of grassy dunes and lakes wetlands that were home to birds, grazing deer and other animals. Further around the peninsula to my right, where the dunes gave way to shoreline, would have been clam colonies and mounds of flint. It was idyllic, Clive says. The line of neighbouring caves here probably had the highest concentration of Neanderthals living anywhere on Earth. It was like Neanderthal City, he adds.
Deep inside the cave, Clives team of archaeologists have found the remains of fires. Further back are chambers where the inhabitants could have slept protected from hyenas, lions, leopards and other predators. They ate shellfish, pine seeds, plants and olives. They hunted big game and also birds. There was plenty of fresh water from the springs that still exist under what is now seabed, Clive says. They had spare time to sit and think they werent just surviving.
Solid writing: Neanderthal engravings might be the first examples of text ( Tom Sewell)
He and Geraldine have uncovered remarkable evidence of Neanderthal culture in the cave, including the first example of Neanderthal artwork. The hashtag, a deliberately carved rock engraving, is possibly evidence of the first steps towards writing. Other signs of symbolic or ritualistic behaviour, such as the indication that Neanderthals were making and wearing black feather capes or headdresses as well as warm clothes, all point to a social life not so different to the one our African ancestors were experiencing.
Clive shows me a variety of worked stones, bone and antler. I pick up a flint blade and hold it in my hand, marvelling at how the same technology is being passed between people biologically and culturally linked but separated by tens of thousands of years. Other sites in Europe have uncovered Neanderthal-made necklaces of strung eagle talons dating back 130,000 years, little ochre clamshell compacts presumably for adornment, and burial sites for their dead.
These people evolved outside of Africa but clearly had advanced culture and the capability to survive in a hostile environment. Consider modern humans were in the Middle East perhaps 70,000 years ago, and reached Australia more than 50,000 years ago, says Clive. Why did it take them so much longer to reach Europe? I think it was because Neanderthals were doing very well and keeping modern humans out.
But by 39,000 years ago, Neanderthals were struggling. Genetically they had low diversity because of inbreeding and they were reduced to very low numbers, partly because an extreme and rapid change of climate was pushing them out of many of their former habitats. A lot of the forested areas they depended on were disappearing and, while they were intelligent enough to adapt their tools and technology, their bodies were unable to adapt to the hunting techniques required for the new climate and landscapes.
In parts of Europe, the landscape changed in a generation from thick forest to a plain without a single tree, Clive says. Our ancestors, who were used to hunting in bigger groups on the plains, could adapt easily: instead of wildebeest they had reindeer, but effectively the way of capturing them was the same. But Neanderthals were forest people.
It couldve gone the other way if instead the climate had got wetter and warmer, we might be Neanderthals today discussing the demise of modern humans.
Although the Neanderthals, like the Denisovans and other races we are yet to identify, died out, their genetic legacy lives on in people of European and Asian descent. Between 1 and 4 per cent of our DNA is of Neanderthal origins, but we dont all carry the same genes, so across the population around 20 per cent of the Neanderthal genome is still being passed on. Thats an extraordinary amount, leading researchers to suspect that Neanderthal genes must be advantageous for survival in Europe.
Interbreeding across different races of human would have helped accelerate the accumulation of useful genes for the environment, a process that would have taken much longer to occur through evolution by natural selection. Neanderthal tweaks to our immune system, for example, may have boosted our survival in new lands, just as we prime our immune system with travel vaccines today. Many of the genes are associated with keratin, the protein in skin and hair, including some that are linked to corns and others that play a role in pigmentation Neanderthals were redheads, apparently. Perhaps these visible variants were considered appealing by our ancestors and sexually selected for, or perhaps a tougher skin offered some advantage in the colder, darker European environment.
Some Neanderthal genes, however, appear to be a disadvantage, for instance making us more prone to diseases like Crohns, urinary tract disorders and type 2 diabetes, and to depression. Others change the way we metabolise fats, risking obesity, or even make us more likely to become addicted to smoking. None of these genes are a direct cause of these complicated conditions, but they are contributory risk factors, so how did they survive selection for a thousand generations?
Its likely that for much of the time since our sexual encounters with Neanderthals, these genes were useful. When we lived as hunter-gatherers, for example, or early farmers, we would have faced times of near starvation interspersed with periods of gorging. Genes that now pose a risk of diabetes may have helped us to cope with starvation, but our new lifestyles of continual gorging on plentiful, high-calorie food now reveal harmful side effects. Perhaps it is because of such latent disadvantages that Neanderthal DNA is very slowly now being deselected from the human genome.
While I can (sort of) blame my Neanderthal ancestry for everything from mood disorders to being greedy, another archaic human race passed on genes that help modern Melanesians, such as people in Papua New Guinea, survive different conditions. Around the time that the ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians were getting friendly with Neanderthals, the ancestors of Melanesians were having sex with Denisovans, about whom we know very little. Their surviving genes, however, may help modern-day Melanesians to live at altitude by changing the way their bodies react to low levels of oxygen. Some geneticists suspect that other, yet-to-be-discovered archaic races may have influenced the genes of other human populations across the world.
Interbreeding with Neanderthal and other archaic humans certainly changed our genes, but the story doesnt end there.
I am a Londoner, but Im a little darker than many Englishwomen because my father is originally from Eastern Europe. We are attuned to such slight differences in skin colour, face shape, hair and a host of other less obvious features encountered across different parts of the world. However, there has been no interbreeding with other human races for at least 32,000 years. Even though I look very different from a Han Chinese or Bantu person, we are actually remarkably similar genetically. There is far less genetic difference between any two humans than there is between two chimpanzees, for example.
The reason for our similarity is the population bottlenecks we faced as a species, during which our numbers dropped as low as a few hundred families and we came close to extinction. As a result, we are too homogeneous to have separated into different races. Nevertheless, variety has emerged through populations being separated geographically and culturally, in some cases over thousands of years. The greatest distinctions occur in isolated populations where small genetic and cultural changes become exaggerated, and there have been many of them over the 50,000 years since my ancestors made the journey out of Africa towards Europe.
According to the analysis of my genome, my haplogroup is H4a. Haplogroups describe the mutations on our mitochondrial DNA, passed down through the maternal line, and can theoretically be used to trace a migratory path all the way back to Africa. H4a is a group shared by people in Europe, unsurprisingly, and western Asia. It is, the genome-testing company assures me, the same as Warren Buffets. So what journey did my ancestors take that would result in these mutations and give me typically European features?
I was dumped by helicopter in the wilderness with two other people, a Russian and an indigenous Yukaghir man, with our dogs, our guns, our traps, a little food and a little tea. There we had to survive and get food and furs in the coldest place on Earth where humans live naturally minus 60 degrees.
Eske Willerslev lived for six months as a trapper in Siberia in his 20s. Separately, his identical twin brother Rane did the same. When they were teenagers, their father had regularly left them in Lapland to survive alone in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, fostering a passion for the remote tundra and the people who live there, and they went on increasingly lengthy expeditions. But surviving practically alone was very different. It was a childhood dream, but it was the toughest thing I have ever done, Eske admits.
These experiences affected the twins deeply, and both have been driven towards a deeper understanding of how the challenge of survival has forged us as humans over the past 50,000 years. It led Eske into the science of genetics, and to pioneering the new field of ancient DNA sequencing. Now director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Eske has sequenced the worlds oldest genome (a 700,000-year-old horse) and was the first to sequence the genome of an ancient human, a 4,000-year-old Saqqaq man from Greenland. Since then, he has gone on to sequence yet more ancient humans and, in doing so, has fundamentally changed our understanding of early human migration through Europe and beyond. If anyone can unpick my origins, it is surely Eske.
First, though, I go to meet his twin Rane, who studied humanities, went into cultural anthropology and is now a professor at Aarhus University. Hes not convinced that his brothers genetic approach can reveal all the answers to my questions: There exists an uneasy relationship between biology and culture, he tells me. Natural scientists claim they can reveal what sort of people moved around, and they are not interested in having their models challenged. But this cannot tell you anything about what people thought or what their culture was.
To put this point to Eske, I visit him in his delightful museum office, opposite a petite moated castle and in the grounds of the botanic gardens there could scarcely be a more idyllic place for a scientist to work. Greeting him for the first time, just hours after meeting Rane, is disconcerting. Identical twins are genetically and physically almost exactly the same looking back, many years from now, at DNA left by the brothers, it would be all but impossible to tell them apart or even to realise that there were two of them.
Eske tells me that he is increasingly working with archaeologists to gain additional cultural perspective, but that genetic analysis can answer questions that nothing else can. You find cultural objects in certain places and the fundamental question is: Does that mean people who made it were actually there or that it was traded? And, if you find very similar cultural objects, does that mean there was parallel or convergent cultural evolution in the two places, or does that mean there was contact? he explains.
For example, one theory says the very first people crossing into the Americas were not Native Americans but Europeans crossing the Atlantic, because the stone tools thousands of years ago in America are similar to stone tools in Europe at the same time. Only when we did the genetic testing could we see it was convergent evolution, because the guys carrying and using those tools have nothing to do with Europeans. They were Native Americans. So the genetics, in terms of migrations, is by far the most powerful tool we have available now to determine: was it people moving around or was it culture moving around? And this is really fundamental.
What Eske went on to discover about Native American origins rewrote our understanding completely. It had been thought that they were simply descendants of East Asians who had crossed the Bering Strait. In 2013, however, Eske sequenced the genome of a 24,000-year-old boy discovered in central Siberia, and found a missing link between ancient Europeans and East Asians, the descendants of whom would go on to populate America. Native Americans can thus trace their roots back to Europe as well as East Asia.
And what about my ancestors? I show Eske the H4a haplotype analysed by the sequencing company and tell him it means Im European. He laughs derisively. You could be and you could be from somewhere else, he says. The problem with the gene-sequencing tests is that you cant look at a population and work back to see when mutation arose with much accuracy the error bars are huge and it involves lots of assumptions about mutation rates.
This is why ancient genetics and ancient genomics are so powerful you can look at an individual and say, Now we know we are 5,000 years ago, how did it look? Did they have this gene or not?
The things that we thought we understood about Europeans are coming unstuck as we examine the genes of more ancient people. For example, it was generally accepted that pale skin evolved so we could get more vitamin D after moving north to where there was little sun and people had to cover up against the cold. But it turns out that it was the Yamnaya people from much further south, tall and brown-eyed, who brought pale skins to Europe. Northern Europeans before then were dark-skinned and got plenty of vitamin D from eating fish.
It is the same with lactose tolerance. Around 90 per cent of Europeans have a genetic mutation that allows them to digest milk into adulthood, and scientists had assumed that this gene evolved in farmers in northern Europe, giving them an additional food supply to help survive the long winters. But Eskes research using the genomes of hundreds of Bronze Age people, who lived after the advent of farming, has cast doubt on this theory too: We found that the genetic trait was almost non-existent in the European population. This trait only became abundant in the northern European population within the last 2,000 years, he says.
It turns out that lactose tolerance genes were also introduced by the Yamnaya. They had a slightly higher tolerance to milk than the European farmers and must have introduced it to the European gene pool. Maybe there was a disaster around 2,000 years ago that caused a population bottleneck and allowed the gene to take off. The Viking sagas talk about the sun becoming black a major volcanic eruption that could have caused a massive drop in population size, which could have been where some of that stock takes off with lactose.
While ancient genomics can help satisfy curiosity about our origins, its real value may be in trying to unpick some of the different health risks in different populations. Even when lifestyle and social factors are taken into account, some groups are at significantly higher risk of diseases such as diabetes or HIV, while other groups seem more resistant. Understanding why could help us prevent and treat these diseases more effectively.
It had been thought that resistance to infections like measles, influenza and so on arrived once we changed our culture and started farming, living in close proximity with other people and with animals. Farming started earlier in Europe, which was thought to be why we have disease resistance but Native Americans dont, and also why the genetic risks of diabetes and obesity are higher in native Australian and Chinese people than in Europeans.
We sequenced a hunter-gatherer from Spain, and he showed clear genetic resistance to a number of pathogens that he shouldnt have been exposed to, says Eske. Clearly, Europeans and other groups have a resistance that other groups dont have, but is this really a result of the early agricultural revolution in Europe, or is something else going on?
Eskes analysis of people living 5,000 years ago has also revealed massive epidemics of plague in Europe and Central Asia, 3,000 years earlier than previously thought. Around 10 per cent of all skeletons the team analysed had evidence of plague. Scandinavians and some northern Europeans have higher resistance to HIV than anywhere else in the world, Eske notes. Our theory is that their HIV resistance is partly resistance towards plague.
It could be that the cultural changes we have made, such as farming and herding, have had less influence on our genes than we thought. Perhaps it is simply the randomness of genetic mutation that has instead changed our culture. Theres no doubt that where mutations have occurred and spread through our population, they have influenced the way we look, our health risks and what we can eat. My ancestors clearly didnt stop evolving once theyd left Africa were still evolving now and they have left an intriguing trail in our genes.
At the Gibraltar Museum, a pair of Dutch archaeology artists have created life-size replicas of a Neanderthal woman and her grandson, based on finds from nearby. They are naked but for a woven amulet and decorative feathers in their wild hair. The boy, aged about four, is embracing his grandmother, who stands confidently and at ease, smiling at the viewer. Its an unnerving, extraordinarily powerful connection with someone whose genes I may well share, and I recall Clives words from when I asked him if modern humans had simply replaced Neanderthals because of our superior culture.
That replacement theory is a kind of racism. Its a very colonialist mentality, he said. Youre talking almost as if they were another species.
This articlewas first published by Wellcomeon Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence
Professor Eske Willerslev is a research associate at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which is funded by a core grant from the Wellcome Trust, which publishes Mosaic
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New York Times | How Did Aborigines Get to Australia? DNA Helps Solve a Mystery New York Times The DNA used in the new study comes from aboriginal hair collected during a series of expeditions between 1926 and 1963. The Board for Anthropological Research at the University of Adelaide sent researchers to communities across Australia, where they ... Aboriginal DNA study reveals 50000-year story of sacred ties to land Adelaide Uni project uses DNA in hair to scientifically prove 50000 years of Aboriginal history DNA confirms Aboriginal people have a long-lasting connection to country |
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