A research team co-led by Griffith University archaeologists has discovered DNA in the remains of a hunter-gatherer woman who died 7200 years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Nicknamed Bessé’, she is the first known skeleton from an early foraging culture called the Toaleans.
Genomic analysis shows that this ancient individual was a distant relative of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. But it also revealed that Bessé’ is a rare ‘genetic fossil’, in the sense that she belonged to a group with an ancestral history that was unlike that of any previously known human population.
Excavations at Leang Panninge cave. Credit: Leang Panninge Research Project.
This surprising find, published in the journal Nature, is the first time ancient human DNA has been reported from ‘Wallacea’, the vast group of islands between Borneo and New Guinea and the gateway to the continent of Australia.
The Sulawesi remains were excavated in 2015 from a cave called Leang Panninge (‘Bat Cave’). They belong to a young female hunter-gatherer who was about 17-18 years old at time of death. She was buried in a foetal position and partially covered by rocks. Stone tools and red ochre (iron-rich rock used to make pigment) were found in her grave, along with bones of hunted wild animals.
The University of Hasanuddin archaeologists who discovered the woman affectionately dubbed her Bessé’, following a custom among Bugis royal families of bestowing this nickname on newly born princesses before they were formally named.
“The Toaleans were early hunter-gatherers who lived a secluded existence in the forests of South Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until 1,500 years ago, hunting wild pigs and collecting edible shellfish from rivers,” Professor Brumm said.
Professor Brumm’s team re-excavated Leang Panninge in 2019 to clarify the context of the burial and collect more samples for dating. Through radiocarbon dating the team was able to constrain the age of Bessé’ to between about 7300 to 7200 years old.
Toalean artefacts have only been found in one small part of Sulawesi, encompassing about 6% of the total land area of the island, the world’s eleventh largest.
“This suggests that this past culture had limited contact with other early Sulawesi communities or people in nearby islands, existing for thousands of years in isolation,” said study co-author Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher in Indonesia’s national archaeological research institute (Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional) and a doctoral candidate in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research.
Archaeologists have long debated the origins of the Toaleans. But now analyses of ancient DNA from the inner ear bone of Bessé’ partly confirm existing assertions that Toalean foragers were related to the first modern humans to enter Wallacea some 65,000 years ago, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans.
“These seafaring hunter-gatherers were the earliest inhabitants of Sahul, the supercontinent that emerged during the Pleistocene (Ice Age) when global sea levels fell, exposing a land bridge between Australia and New Guinea,” Professor Brumm said.
Professor Adam Brumm.
“To reach Sahul, these pioneering humans made ocean crossings through Wallacea, but little about their journeys is known.”
The genomic analyses were led by Selina Carlhoff from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History at Jena, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Cosimo Posth (University of Tübingen) and Professor Johannes Krause (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig).
The results show that Bessé’ shares about half of her genetic makeup with present-day Indigenous Australians and people in New Guinea and the Western Pacific islands. This includes DNA inherited from the now-extinct Denisovans, distant cousins of Neanderthals whose fossils have only been found in Siberia and Tibet.
“In fact, the proportion of Denisovan DNA in Bessé’ relative to other ancient as well as present-day groups in the region may indicate that the crucial meeting point between our species and Denisovans was in Sulawesi or another Wallacean island,” Professor Posth said.
The research could suggest that ancestors of Bessé’ were among the first modern humans to reach Wallacea, but instead of island hopping eastward to Sahul they remained in Sulawesi.
If so, it may have been the forebears of Bessé’ who created the very old cave paintings found in South Sulawesi. As recently shown by Griffith University researchers, this rock art dates to at least 45,500 years ago and includes what may be the earliest known human representations of animals.
But analyses also revealed something unexpected in the genome of Bessé’: a deep ancestral signature from an early modern human population of Asian origin. This group did not intermix with the predecessors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans, suggesting it may have entered the region after the initial peopling of Sahul.
“It is unlikely we will know much about the identity of these early ancestors of the Toaleans until more ancient human DNA samples are available from Wallacea,” said Indonesian senior author Professor Akin Duli from the University of Hasanuddin.
“But it would now appear that the population history and genetic diversity of early humans in the region were more complex than previously supposed.”
The researchers could detect no ancestry resembling that of Bessé’ in the DNA of people who live in Sulawesi today, who seem to largely descend from Neolithic farmers (‘Austronesians’) who arrived in the region from Taiwan some 3,500 years ago.
This is not unexpected, given that the last traces of Toalean culture vanished from the archaeological record by the fifth century AD. The scientists do note, however, that more extensive genomic sampling of Sulawesi’s diverse population could reveal evidence for the genetic legacy of Toaleans.
“The discovery of Bessé’ and the implications of her genetic ancestry show just how little we understand about the early human story in our region, and how much more there is left to uncover,” Professor Brumm said.
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NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer’s software code—isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.
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Osoyoos commuters can celebrate Earth Day as the Town joins in on a national commuter challenge known as “Leg Day,” entering a chance to win sustainable transportation prizes.
The challenge, from Earth Day Canada, is to record 10 sustainable commutes taken without a car.
“Cars are one of the biggest contributors to gas emissions in Canada,” reads an Earth Day Canada statement. “That’s why, Earth Day Canada is launching the national Earth Day is Leg Day Challenge.”
So far, over 42.000 people have participated in the Leg Day challenge.
Participants could win an iGo electric bike, public transportation for a year, or a gym membership.
The Town of Osoyoos put out a message Monday promoting joining the national program.
For more information on the Leg Day challenge click here.
Verticillium wilt is a problem for a lot of crops in Manitoba, including canola, sunflowers and alfalfa.
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In potatoes, the fungus Verticillium dahlia is the main cause of potato early die complex. In a 2021 interview with the Co-operator, Mario Tenuta, University of Manitoba soil scientist and main investigator with the Canadian Potato Early Dying Network, suggested the condition can cause yield loss of five to 20 per cent. Other research from the U.S. puts that number as high as 50 per cent.
It also becomes a marketing issue when stunted spuds fall short of processor preferences.
Verticillium in potatoes can significantly reduce yield and, being soil-borne, is difficult to manage.
Preliminary research results suggest earlier planting of risk-prone fields could reduce losses, in part due to colder soil temperatures earlier in the season.
Unlike other potato fungal issues that can be addressed with foliar fungicide, verticillium hides in the soil.
“Commonly we use soil fumigation and that’s very expensive,” said Julie Pasche, plant pathologist with North Dakota State University.
There are options. In 2017, labels expanded for the fungicide Aprovia, Syngenta’s broad-spectrum answer for leaf spots or powdery mildews in various horticulture crops. In-furrow verticillium suppression for potatoes was added to the label.
There has also been interest in biofumigation. Mustard has been tagged as a potential companion crop for potatoes, thanks to its production of glucosinolate and the pathogen- and pest-inhibiting substance isothiocyanate.
Last fall, producers heard that a new, sterile mustard variety specifically designed for biofumigation had been cleared for sale in Canada, although seed supplies for 2024 are expected to be slim. AAC Guard was specifically noted for its effectiveness against verticillium wilt.
Timing is everything
Researchers at NDSU want to study the advantage of natural plant growth patterns.
“What we’d like to look at are other things we can do differently, like verticillium fertility management and water management, as well as some other areas and how they may be affected by planting date,” Pasche said.
The idea is to find a chink in the fungus’s life cycle.
Verticillium infects roots in the spring. From there, it colonizes the plant, moving through the root vascular tissue and into the stem. This is the cause of in-season vegetative wilting, Pasche noted.
As it progresses, plant cells die, leaving behind tell-tale black dots on dead tissue. Magnification of those dots reveals what look like dark bunches of grapes — tiny spheres containing melanized hyphae, a resting form of the fungus called microsclerotia.
The dark colour comes from melanin, the same pigment found in human skin. This pigmentation protects the microsclerotia from ultraviolet light.
