Category: Historic

How fossilization preserved a 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab’s brain

Researchers have uncovered a never-before-seen fossilized brain from a 310 million-year-old horseshoe crab, revealing some surprises about the evolution of these wannabe crustaceans, according to a new study.

The fossilized brain, which belongs to the extinct species Euproops Danae, was discovered at Mazon Creek in Illinois, where the conditions were just right to perfectly preserve the animal’s delicate soft tissue.

There are four species of horseshoe crabs alive today — all of which sport hard exoskeletons, 10 legs and a U-shaped head. Despite their name, these “crabs” are actually arachnids that are closely related to scorpions and spiders, according to The National Wildlife Federation.

Although horseshoe crab fossils are relatively common, nothing was previously known about their ancient brains, the researchers said.

“This is the first and only evidence for a brain in a fossil horseshoe crab,” lead author Russell Bicknell, a palaeontologist at the University of New England in Maine, told Live Science. The chances of finding a fossilized brain are “one in a million,” he added. “Although, even then, chances are they are even rarer.”

Soft tissues that makeup brains are very prone to rapid decay, Bicknell said. “In order for them to be preserved, either very special geological conditions, or amber, are needed.”

In this case, geology helped to keep the soft tissue in tip-top condition over the years and preserve the brain — or at least a copy of the brain. “We have a mould of the brain, not the brain itself, so to speak,” Bicknell said.

The deposits at Mazon Creek are made of an iron carbonate mineral called siderite, which forms concretions — mineral precipitations — that can quickly encase a dead body and fossilize it.

Although such concretions preserved the horseshoe crab’s body, the brain tissue still decomposed and eventually disappeared. However, as the brain rotted away it was replaced by a clay mineral called kaolinite, which created a cast of the brain.

Kaolite is white in colour, whereas siderite is dark grey. This colour contrast meant the brain fossil “stood out more than it would have normally” from the rest of the fossil, Bicknell said.

The hunt is now on for more ancient brains that might have been fossilized in the unique geological conditions that preserved this horseshoe crab.

“The Mazon Creek deposit is exceptional,” Bicknell said. “If we started looking, we may be lucky enough to find more [brain fossils].”

The discovery provided researchers with the unique opportunity to study how the arachnids’ brains evolved over time. But to the researchers’ surprise, they found that the ancient brain, which dates to the Carboniferous period (359 million to 299 million years ago), was remarkably similar to that of a modern horseshoe crab.

“Despite 300 million years of evolution, the fossil horseshoe crab brain is pretty much the same as modern forms,” Bicknell said.

Remains of 90 million-year-old rainforest discovered under Antarctic ice

When dinosaurs roamed the Earth 90 million years ago, the planet was much warmer, including Antarctica at the South Pole. But in a surprising twist, researchers have discovered evidence that Antarctica also supported a swampy rainforest at the time, according to a new study.

Researchers captured a slice of the seafloor using a drill rig aboard a polar research vessel on West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea between February and March in 2017. The sediment core sample was taken near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.

CT scans of the sediment core revealed pristine samples of forest soil, pollen, spores and even root systems so well preserved that they could identify cell structures. The soil included examples of pollen from the first flowering plants found this close to the South Pole.

They dated the soil, its fine-grained clay and silt to 90 million years ago. Their study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“During the initial shipboard assessments, the unusual colouration of the sediment layer quickly caught our attention; it clearly differed from the layers above it,” said Johann Klages, study author and geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. “We had found a layer originally formed on land, not in the ocean.”

Scientists know that during the age of the dinosaurs, conditions were warmer. The mid-Cretaceous era, from 80 million to 115 million years ago, was the warmest period for Earth in the past 140 million years, the researchers said. The surface of the sea likely reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in tropical areas. And the sea level was 558 feet higher than it is now.

But there has been no evidence about what conditions were like at the South Pole. This is the southernmost sample of the Cretaceous period collected so far, revealing what Antarctica was like between 83 and 93 million years ago.

“The preservation of this 90-million-year-old forest is exceptional, but even more surprising is the world it reveals,” said Tina van de Flierdt, study co-author and professor in the Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering. “Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”

Sediment cores can record a lot of information about climate, acting as a time capsule for average temperature, rainfall and vegetation.

“To get a better idea of what the climate was like in this warmest phase of the Cretaceous, we first assessed the climatic conditions under which the plants’ modern descendants live,” Klages said.

The findings paint an unusual portrait of the South Pole, where West Antarctica’s coast was free of the ice caps that cover it now and swampy rainforests covered the area instead.

The average daytime temperature was 53 degrees Fahrenheit. While that sounds mild to us, this is incredibly warm for a location near the South Pole, where current daytime temperatures hover between negative 76 degrees to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. And, as the researchers point out, it’s only two degrees warmer than Germany at the moment in March.

The Antarctic ice sheet didn’t exist at the time. River and swamp temperatures were likely around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And the Antarctic summer temperature was likely around 66 degrees Fahrenheit. They estimate rainfall reached about 97 inches per year — about the same as Wales today.

The forests were similar to those now found on New Zealand’s South Island, the researchers said.

But how did Antarctica sustain temperate rainforests without year-round sunlight? Even millions of years ago, the South Pole endured what’s known as a four-month polar night when no sunlight can be seen.
The researchers investigated the levels of carbon dioxide that would have been in the atmosphere at the time.

They found atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher than expected based on existing climate models. Carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the atmosphere and the planet, creating a greenhouse effect by trapping heat from the sun.

The high amount of carbon dioxide, combined with an ice sheet-less Antarctica covered in vegetation created the right conditions for a rainforest environment.

“We now know that there could easily be four straight months without sunlight in the Cretaceous. But because the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the climate around the South Pole was nevertheless temperate, without ice masses,” said Torsten Bickert, study co-author and geoscientist at the University of Bremen’s MARUM research centre.

But the scientists still don’t know what caused Antarctica to cool off enough to form ice sheets, which leads them to their next challenge.

A mummy discovered in a vast burial ground of Egypt’s pharaohs could change how ancient history is understood

A new analysis of an ancient Egyptian mummy suggests that advanced mummification techniques were used 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, rewriting the understood history of ancient Egyptian funerary practices.

The discovery centres around a mummy, known as Khuwy, believed to have been a high-ranking nobleman. He was excavated at the necropolis, a vast ancient burial ground of Egyptian pharaohs and royals near Cairo, in 2019.

Scientists now believe that Khuwy is much older than previously thought, dating back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, which would make him one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever to be discovered, The Observer reported.

The Old Kingdom spanned 2,700 to 2,200 B.C.E and was known as the “Age of the Pyramid Builders.”

Khuwy was embalmed using advanced techniques thought to have been developed much later. His skin was preserved using expensive resins made from tree sap, and his body was impregnated with resins and bound with high-quality linen dressings.

The new analysis suggests that ancient Egyptians living around 4,000 years ago were carrying out sophisticated burials.

“This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head,” Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told The Observer.

“If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.”

“Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation – not always successful – no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs,” Ikram told The Observer. Ikram was surprised by the amount of resin used to preserve the mummy, which is not often recorded in mummies from the Old Kingdom.

She added that typically more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior.

“This mummy is awash with resins and textiles and gives a completely different impression of mummification. In fact, it is more like mummies found 1,000 years later,” she said.

Ikram told The National that the resin used would have been imported from the Near East, most likely Lebanon, demonstrating that trade with neighbouring empires around that time was more extensive than previously thought.

The discovery has been documented in National Geographic’s new series, Lost Treasures of Egypt, which starts airing on 7 November. Tom Cook, who produced the series for Windfall Films, told The Observer that Ikram initially could not believe that Khuwy dated back to the Old Kingdom because of the advanced mummification techniques.

“They knew the pottery in the tomb was the Old Kingdom but [Ikram] didn’t think that the mummy was from [that period] because it was preserved too well,” Cook told the outlet.

“But over the course of the investigation, she started to come round [to the idea].”

Khuwy’s ornate tomb featured hieroglyphics that suggested the burial took place during the Fifth Dynasty period, spanning the early 25th to mid-24th century B.C.E, The Smithsonian said.

Archaeologists also found pottery and jars used to store body parts during the mummification process that dated back to that time.

Ikram’s team will conduct more tests to confirm that the remains do belong to Khuwy.

She told The National that one possibility was that another person could have been mummified and buried centuries later in a re-purposing of the tomb.

“I remain hesitant until we can conduct carbon-14 dating,” Ikram told the outlet, adding that it would likely take six to eight months.

Meet ‘Dragon Man,’ the latest addition to the human family tree

A cranium hidden at the bottom of a well in northeastern China for more than 80 years may belong to a new species of early human that researchers have called “dragon man.”

The exciting discovery is the latest addition to a human family tree that is rapidly growing and shifting, thanks to new fossil finds and analysis of ancient DNA preserved in teeth, bones and cave dirt.

The well-preserved skullcap, found in the Chinese city of Harbin, is between 138,000 and 309,000 years old, according to geochemical analysis, and it combines primitive features, such as a broad nose and low brow and braincase, with those that are more similar to Homo sapiens, including flat and delicate cheekbones.

The ancient hominin – which researchers said was “probably” a 50-year-old man – would have had an “extremely wide” face, deep eyes with large eye sockets, big teeth and a brain similar in size to modern humans.

Three papers detailing the find were published in the journal The Innovation on Friday.

“The Harbin skull is the most important fossil I’ve seen in 50 years. It shows how important East Asia and China is in telling the human story,” said Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at The Natural History Museum in London and coauthor of the research.

Researchers named the new hominin Homo longi, which is derived from Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, the province where the cranium was found. The team plans to see if it’s possible to extract ancient proteins or DNA from the cranium, which included one tooth, and will begin a more detailed study of the skull’s interior, looking at sinuses and both ear and brain shape, using CT scans.

We are family

It’s easy to think of Homo sapiens as unique, but there was a time when we weren’t the only humans on the block. In the millennia since Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, we have shared the planet with Neanderthals, the enigmatic Denisovans, the “hobbit” Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and Homo naledi, as well as several other ancient hominins. We had sex with some of them and produced babies. Some of these ancestors are well represented in the fossil record, but most of what we know about Denisovans comes from genetic information in our DNA. The story of human evolution is changing all the time in what is a particularly exciting period for paleoanthropology, Stringer said.

The announcement of dragon man’s discovery comes a day after a different group researchers published a paper in the journal Science on fossils found in Israel, which they said also could represent another new type of early human. The jaw bone and skull fragment suggested a group of people lived in the Middle East 120,000 to 420,000 years ago with anatomical features more primitive than early modern humans and Neanderthals.

While the team of researchers stopped short of calling the group a new hominin species based on the fossil fragments they studied, they said the fossils resembled pre-Neanderthal human populations in Europe and challenged the view that Neanderthals originated there.

“This is a complicated story, but what we are learning is that the interactions between different human species in the past were much more convoluted than we had previously appreciated,” Rolf Quam, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University and a coauthor of the study on the Israeli fossils, said in a news release

Stringer, who was not involved in the Science research, said the fossils were less complete than the Harbin skull, but it was definitely plausible that different types of humans co-existed in the Levant, which was a geographical crossroads between Africa, Asia and Europe that today includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan and other countries in the Middle East.

Concealed treasure

The Harbin cranium was discovered in 1933 by an anonymous Chinese man when a bridge was built over the Songhua River in Harbin, according to one of the studies in The Innovation. At the time, that part of China was under Japanese occupation, and the man who found it took it home and stored it at the bottom of a well for safekeeping.

“Instead of passing the cranium to his Japanese boss, he buried it in an abandoned well, a traditional Chinese method of concealing treasures,” according to the study.

After the war, the man returned to farming during a tumultuous time in Chinese history and never re-excavated his treasure. The skull remained unknown to science for decades, surviving the Japanese invasion, civil war, the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, rampant commercial fossil trading in China, the researchers said.

The third generation of the man’s family only learned about his secret discovery before his death and recovered the fossil from the well in 2018. Qiang Ji, one of the authors of the research, heard about the skull and convinced the family to donate it to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University.

‘Sister lineage’

The so-called dragon man likely belonged to a lineage that may be our closest relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals, the study found. His large size and where the fossil was found, in one of China’s coldest places, could mean the species had adapted to harsh environments.

“We are human beings. It is always a fascinating question about where we were from and how we evolved,” said coauthor Xijun Ni, a research professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the vice director of the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins.

“We found our long-lost sister lineage.”

The study suggested that other puzzling Chinese fossils that paleoanthropologists have found hard to classify – such as those found in Dali in Yunnan in southwestern China and a jawbone from the Tibetan plateau, thought by some to be Denisovan – could belong to the Homo longi species.

Stringer said also it was definitely plausible that dragon man could be a representative of Denisovans, a little-known and enigmatic human population that hasn’t yet been officially classified as a hominin species according to taxonomic rules.

They are named after a Siberian cave where the only definitive Denisovan bone fragments have been found, but genetic evidence from modern human DNA suggests they once lived throughout Asia.

Denisovans is a general name, Stringer said, and they haven’t officially been recognized as a new species – in part because the five Denisovan fossils that exist are so tiny they don’t fulfill the requirements for a “designated type specimen” that would make it a name-bearing representative.

Denisovans and Homo longi both had large, similar molars, the study noted, but, given the small number of fossils available for comparison, it was impossible to say for sure, said Ni, who hoped that DNA experiments might reveal whether they are the same species.

“We’ve only just begun what will be years of studying this fascinating fossil,” Stringer said.

2,000-year-old Flower Bouquet in ‘Very Good Condition’ Found Under Mexican Pyramid

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the ancient people of Teotihuacan wrapped bunches of flowers into beautiful bouquets, laid them beneath a jumble of wood and set the pile ablaze.

Now, archaeologists have found the remains of those surprisingly well-preserved flowers in a tunnel snaking beneath a pyramid of the ancient city, located northeast of what is now Mexico City.

The pyramid itself is immense and would have stood 75 feet (23 meters) tall when it was first built, making it taller than the Sphinx of Giza from ancient Egypt.

The Teotihuacan pyramid is part of the “Temple of the Feathered Serpent,” which was built in honour of Quetzalcoatl, a serpent god who was worshipped in Mesoamerica.

Archaeologists found the bouquets 59 feet (18 m)  below ground in the deepest part of the tunnel, said Sergio Gómez-Chávez, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) who is leading the excavation of the tunnel.

Numerous pieces of pottery, along with a sculpture depicting Tlaloc, a god associated with rainfall and fertility, were found beside the bouquets, he added.

The bouquets were likely part of rituals, possibly associated with fertility, that Indigenous people performed in the tunnel, Gómez-Chávez told Live Science in a translated email.

The team hopes that by determining the identity of the flowers, they can learn more about the rituals.

The team discovered the bouquets just a few weeks ago. The number of flowers in each bouquet varies, Gómez-Chávez said, noting that one bouquet has 40 flowers tied together while another has 60 flowers.

Archaeologists found evidence of a large bonfire with numerous pieces of burnt wood where the bouquets were laid down, Gómez-Chávez said.

It seems that people placed the bouquets on the ground first and then covered them with a vast amount of wood. The sheer amount of wood seems to have protected the bouquets from the bonfire’s flames.

The tunnel that Gómez-Chávez’s team is excavating was found in 2003 and has yielded thousands of artefacts including pottery, sculptures, cocoa beans, obsidian, animal remains and even a miniature landscape with pools of liquid mercury.

Archaeologists are still trying to understand why ancient people created the tunnel and how they used it.

Teotihuacan contains several pyramids and flourished between roughly 100 B.C. and A.D. 600. It had an urban core that covered 8 square miles (20 square kilometres) and may have had a population of 100,000 people.

1,800-Year-Old Offering to the Gods Discovered Beneath Pyramid of Teotihuacan

Several bouquets of offering flowers have been discovered 59 feet below the temple of the god Quetzalcóatl – a pyramid that still stands in the Mexican ruined city of Teotihuacan.

Quetzalcóatl, or ‘Plumed Serpent’ was an important god during ancient Mesoamerica, a historical region that included central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and northern Costa Rica.

This deity was said to have given maize to humanity and was responsible for the creation of mankind, which may be why offering flowers were uncovered under the god’s temple.

Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the stems are in good condition and still tied with the original cotton-made cords.

‘In total there are four bouquets of flowers in very good condition, they are still tied with ropes, probably cotton,’ Gómez told Mexican news outlet La Jornada.

‘This is a very important find because it speaks of the rituals that were carried out in this place.’

Gómez says it is too early to determine what kind they are – but he hopes to solve that mystery soon.

‘Although we do not know the exact date of when they were deposited, because we just took them out this week, they must be very old and correspond to the first phases of Teotihuacan, between 1,800 and 2,000 years ago,’ Gómez explained.

‘We have found complete objects that were placed in this shot; the ceramics are also from the Zacuali and Miccaotli phases, from the beginning of our era, between years zero and 200 after Christ.’

Gómez has been working in the ruined city for nearly 12 years, sifting through ancient soil, rocks and pyramids looking for clues about those who once called the area home.

Some 30 miles (50km) north of Mexico City, Teotihuacan, with its huge pyramids of the sun and moon, is made up of a labyrinth of palaces, temples, homes, workshops, markets and avenues.

The city is thought to have been built in 100BC and existed until the 8th century. Archaeologists consider it one of the most influential in pre-Hispanic North America, with a population of 200,000 at its peak.

However, only 5 per cent of Teotihuacan has been excavated despite more than 100 years of exploration. During excavations, Gómez as recovered more than 100,000 artifacts within the ancient city and specifically under the three pyramids that are still standing.

However, the offering flowers are the first intact botanical materials every to be found at the site.

‘It is very relevant because it will give us indications of the flora that was used for ritual purposes,’ Gómez said.

‘In this same context, while sifting the earth, several kilos of charcoal were found as a result of a ritual ceremony that included the burning of seeds and fruits.’

In 2011, archaeologists uncovered other offerings at the base of the pyramid, including animal remains three human figurines and a haunting, green mask that was used in rituals 2,000 years ago.

Perez Cortez, an investigator with the Zacatecas INAH Center, said in a statement when the mask was discovered: ‘We know [the offerings were] deposited as part of a dedication ceremony.’

The mask was carved from a single jade stone and is the only one of its kind to be discovered in the ancient city.

A coffin that was found in a golf course pond contains a 4,000-year-old man buried with an axe

Archaeologists in England have analyzed a half-ton coffin dating to the early Bronze Age that was found under a golf course in Lincolnshire county. The coffin, cut from a single oak tree and thought to be about 4,000 years old, contained human remains, a hafted axe, and a bed of plant material meant to cushion the body in its eternal slumber.

Maintenance workers discovered the burial in July 2019 while tending to a water hazard at the Tetney Golf Club in Grimsby. The coffin was under a gravel mound, a special situation that indicates a certain amount of community involvement in the burial.

As is standard for objects of historical significance found in England and Wales, the find was reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which processes such reports and ensures that the objects are properly handed.

Objects made of old wood (think shipwrecks, coffins, and even ship burials) are prone to disintegration when they are removed from water or soil after millennia and exposed to sunlight and air.

To prevent that from happening to the find, the excavated objects were immediately put in bags filled with groundwater, and the coffin was put in cold storage for a year. Afterwards, the coffin was moved to the York Archaeological Trust, where conservators have been working on it and the associated artefacts, including an axe.

“The man buried at Tetney lived in a very different world to ours but like ours, it was a changing environment, rising sea levels and coastal flooding ultimately covered his grave and burial mound in a deep layer of silt that aided its preservation,” said Tim Allen, a Sheffield-based archaeologist for Historic England, in a York Archaeological Trust press release.

An interesting component of the work was the environmental analysis of the plant bedding. Hugh Willmott, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield who participated in the excavations, said on Twitter that moss, yew or juniper, hazelnuts, and leaf buds were found in the coffin.

The types of floral remains indicated that the burial likely took place toward the end of spring some four millennia ago when a few woolly mammoths still survived. Willmott said in an email to Gizmodo that the hazelnuts may have been a food offering, while the moss could have been a sort of bed for the deceased.

Not much is currently known about the human remains, though the archaeological team suspects it was an individual of some social importance. Willmott said that initial attempts to extract DNA have been unsuccessful.

Dating the coffin is still ongoing—the archaeologists need to do a combination of dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating, which they can cross-reference to find out the year the tree was felled, give or take a couple of years.

A shockingly well-preserved axe was found with the person; the handle looks like it could have been varnished yesterday. The axe head is a combination of stone and fossilized coral.

Based on the object’s shape and size—the axe head is less than 4 inches across—the team believes it was a symbol of authority rather than a practical tool. There are very few of such axes known in Britain, perhaps only 12, according to York Archaeological Trust, making this one of the most eye-catching elements of the discovery.

The wooden coffin joins some 65-odd objects as it found around England. Preservationists said in the same release that the axe should be fully preserved within the year, but the coffin will take at least two years to fully treat, due to the object’s size.

This research comes on the heels of the University of Sheffield’s decision to close its archaeology department, as reported by the BBC in July, and the University of Worcester announcing the closure of its archaeology department, also reported by the BBC.

The Campaign to Save British Archaeology was launched in response to the closures. This trend is a troubling one. Had the Sheffield archaeological team not been close by when the Bronze Age coffin was unearthed, the cultural heritage could’ve quickly deteriorated.

Thanks to the quick thinking of the nearby archaeologists, the objects are being preserved and will be displayed at The Collection Museum in Lincolnshire.

Perfectly preserved lion cubs that died 44,000 years ago ‘after being abandoned by mum’ found in Siberia

‘Male siblings born 44,000 years ago’ found ten metres apart in Yakutia but the truth is rather different – amid hopes to bring species back to life. The pair of cubs were believed to be siblings both born 44,000 years ago.

In fact, one of the famous extinct cave lions named Spartak has been found to be female, not male, and will need to be rechristened as Sparta. And she was born 18,000 years after the cub found next to her named Boris, it now emerges.

Complete restoration works on the baby cave lions, preserved superbly in the Siberian permafrost, reveals a sensational level of pelt and hair preservation. Some 26,000 years ago Sparta’s mother either left her in the cave and went hunting, or was killed herself, leaving the tiny cub without food.

‘She starved to death. We wondered why she looked so skinny when she was found, and then tomography of her internal organs showed there was no fat,’ said scientist Dr Albert Protopopov, an expert in frozen remains from the woolly mammoth era.

‘It was the most extreme stage of starvation.’

Sparta was found in the Yakutia region in 2018 by the same mammoth bone hunter who discovered a bigger cave lion cub called Boris a year earlier.

They were just ten metres apart.

The first theory was that the cubs must have been from the same family – but now scientists know that the cubs are separated by 26,000 years.  Boris lived some 44,000 years ago and was aged between two to three weeks when he died.  Most likely his death came when his mother left him inside a cave, went hunting and the cave rock collapsed, burying the cub.

‘We found visible traces of internal injuries which we believe could have been caused by a rock falling on him’, Protopopov said. The most important task of this complex research on the cave lion cubs is to restore their appearance.

‘It is still an enigma, in that on hundreds of published drawings of cave lions they are depicted without manes. Yet we notice spots and stripes of pigmentation in that area… which are not seen in modern-day lions. So we are moving towards re-creating the way the cave lions looked.

‘Their living conditions were very different to modern lions in that cave lions lives in a much colder climate and we believe therefore had to look different.

‘There was less prey in cold climate.

‘If we understand this question about mane we might get an idea of their social hierarchy – for example, we don’t know if they created prides with alpha males and several females alike to modern lions.’

Tests are underway on the lions to extract as much information as possible.  The cave lions were the largest predators after bears in ancient, and in the area where we find skulls of cave lions, there is only a handful of bear skulls.  Lions reigned in ancient Siberia because at the time it was savanna, bears needed more woods.

‘Cave lion cubs are superbly preserved, you can even see their whiskers, and we are hoping to fetch a lot more information from them.’

The scientist predicted: ‘There is a very realistic chance to recreate cave lions and it would be a lot easier than to clone a woolly mammoth.

‘Cave and modern lions separated only 300,000 years ago, in other words, they are different species of the same genus.

‘It means that we can take the DNA of the modern African lion and use it to recreate cave lions.

’It would be a lot easier than the mammoths.

‘But if we find methods to bring back woolly mammoths it would be a revolution and a payback by humans who helped extinguishing of so many species.’

Boris, the older cub, has a severed tail.

This led to speculation he was an ancient lynx, not a cave lion.

‘We were all worried by the lack of a tail on Boris,’ said Dr Protopopov.

‘But the man who found him explained that it got cut off when the cub was taken out of the permafrost.

‘I know it raised suspicion that the lion cub was in fact a lynx, but we know from the very first tests that this was clearly a cave lion cub.’

Archaeologists discover medieval skeleton with his boots still on in London

Archaeologists excavating a site along with the Thames Tideway Tunnel—a massive pipeline nicknamed London’s “super sewer”—have revealed the skeleton of a medieval man who literally died with his boots on.

“It’s extremely rare to discover any boots from the late 15th century, let alone a skeleton still wearing them,” says Beth Richardson of the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).

“And these are very unusual boots for the period—thigh boots, with the tops, turned down. They would have been expensive, and how this man came to own them is a mystery. Were they secondhand? Did he steal them? We don’t know.”

Unearthing skeletons amid major construction projects is not unusual in London, where throughout the centuries land has been reused countless times and many burial grounds have been built over and forgotten. (Learn more about London’s rich history.)

However, archaeologists noticed right away that this skeleton was different.

The position of the body—face down, right arm over the head, left arm bent back on itself—suggests that the man was not deliberately buried. It is also unlikely that he would have been laid to rest in leather boots, which were expensive and highly prized.

In light of those clues, archaeologists believe the man died accidentally and his body was never recuperated, although the cause of death is unclear. Perhaps he fell into the river and could not swim. Or possibly he became trapped in the tidal mud and drowned.

Sailor, fisherman, or “mudlarker”?

500 years ago this stretch of the Thames—2 miles or so downstream from the Tower of London—was a bustling maritime neighbourhood of wharves and warehouses, workshops and taverns.

The river was flanked by the Bermondsey Wall, a medieval earthwork about fifteen feet high built to protect riverbank property from tidal surges.

Given the neighbourhood, the booted man may have been a sailor or a fisherman, a possibility reinforced by physical clues.

Pronounced grooves in his teeth may have been caused by repeatedly clenching a rope. Or perhaps he was a “mudlarker,” a slang term for those who scavenge along the Thames muddy shore at low tide.

The man’s wader-like thigh boots would have been ideal for such work.

“We know he was very powerfully built,” says Niamh Carty, an osteologist, or skeletal specialist, at MOLA.

“The muscle attachments on his chest and shoulder are very noticeable. The muscles were built by doing lots of heavy, repetitive work over a long period of time.”

It was work that took a physical toll. Albeit only in his early thirties, the booted man suffered from osteoarthritis, and vertebrae in his back had already begun to fuse as the result of years of bending and lifting.

Wounds to his left hip suggest he walked with a limp, and his nose had been broken at least once. There is evidence of blunt force trauma on his forehead that had healed before he died.

“He did not have an easy life,” says Carty. “Early thirties was middle age back then, but even so, his biological age was older.”

The examination is continuing. Isotope investigation will shed light on where the man grew up, whether he was an immigrant or a native Londoner, and what kind of diet he had.

“His family never had any answers or a grave,” says Carty. “What we are doing is an act of remembrance. We’re allowing his story to finally be told.”

6,000-year-old baby found cradled in mother’s arm

A 6,000-year-old baby with its teeth still intact and resting in the arms of a woman, believed to be its mother, has been found in a grave in the Netherlands.

Archaeologists said it was the oldest baby grave ever found in the Netherlands. The grave, uncovered at a site in Nieuwegein in the province of Utrecht, dates back to the Stone Age.

The discovery only came to light after four exhumed skeletons were examined by archaeological consultancy RAAP in Leiden.

Scientists noticed that the right arm of the 30-year-old woman’s skeleton was bent at a strange angle. It was crooked instead of straight – the usual posture of other skeletons at the site.

Closer inspection showed bone fragments of an infant by her arm and revealed that the woman was buried cradling a baby.

“The posture of the woman’s body did not conform to what we had found so far, that is, bodies whose limbs are placed parallel to the body. We then made the moving discovery that she was in fact cradling a little baby,” project leader Helle Molthof told Dutch broadcaster NOS.

The bone fragments sent for analysis included a tiny jaw holding several baby teeth. From this, scientists concluded that the infant had died when it was just a couple of months old.

“It really makes an impression when you find little baby teeth buried in clay for 6,000 years and see how similar they are to all those milk teeth that are kept in matchboxes by parents everywhere,” Molthof said.

DNA tests will reveal whether the woman was the infant’s mother as well as the sex of the baby.

Archaeologists hope that the grave will inform them about the burial ceremonies of the hunter-gatherer communities who lived along the banks of the River Vecht.

“We know how they lived, what sort of food they ate, what their houses were like but we don’t know very much yet about how they buried their dead and what happened to the children,” Molthof said.