A Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong, Study Suggests
Inflammation is a natural immune response that protects the body from injury or infection. Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as 'inflammaging' — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead.
The study, which was published today, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.
Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University.
'Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions,' he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.
'How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.,' said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there's much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added.
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National Geographic
41 minutes ago
- National Geographic
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Ticks long occupied the land where cities now stand, but were displaced in the 1800s as forests were knocked down for agricultural purposes—forced to go wherever trees were lush and leaves were moist. But as farming declined in the U.S. in the 1900s and people abandoned their pastures, areas near cities were reforested—and many towns and cities on the East Coast and up in the Great Lakes were built smack in the middle of those forests, says Nick Takacs, a Northeastern University biology professor who studies ticks. In the years that followed, wildlife—including deer and white-legged mice—returned, ticks in tow. 'We densely colonized a lot of their environments, so they had no choice but to adapt and live in the environments we shared,' Takacs says. Many of the animals that make for ideal tick hosts actually prefer to hunt and live near what's called "the edge"—the space where two habitats like the woods (that offer protection) and grasslands (rich with edible vegetation) collide. 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National Geographic
5 hours ago
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A tree fell in the Amazon—and revealed mysterious urns of ancient human remains
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Archaeologists from the Mamirauá Institute worked alongside community members to excavate the urns. Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute (Bottom) (Right) The first known human occupations of the Amazon region created ceramics in the Pocó-Açutuba tradition, dating between 1500 B.C. and A.D. 200. Ceramic containers in this tradition are richly decorated with different types of carved patterns. Next, came the Borda Incisa tradition, mainly characterized by cuts along the edges of ceramic vases and containers. Finally, from the fifth to the 16th centuries, the Polychrome ceramic tradition incorporated dyes in different colors, especially brown, red, black, and orange over a white or gray background. The urns do not seem to belong to any of the ceramic traditions known in the Middle Solimões or in the broader Brazilian Amazon. 'This is a type we haven't got records of yet,' Amaral says. The absence of ceramic lids set the new discoveries apart artistically. These funerary urns are also rounder than those produced in known styles, notes Anne Rapp Py-Daniel, an archaeologist with UFOPA who did not take part in the research. How did ancient Indigenous people bury their dead? The richness of the craft that turns these urns into pieces of art says much about how ancient Indigenous communities related to death in the Amazon. To these groups, 'death is a process, not a moment,' Py-Daniel observes. It is another rite of passage that involves effort and dedication from the whole group, especially if the deceased member had an important role in it. Some of the urns were up to three feet wide and required extra effort to remove them from the tree's root system. Here the team works to remove one of the urns. Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute Putting bones within ceramic containers, Py-Daniel explains, would have been part of a second step in the funerary process. First, the departed must undergo a ritual to remove flesh, through burial, cremation, or submersion in a river—where the body is wrapped in a woven net that allows fish to feed on it. Then the bones are carefully collected and arranged to, in another ritual, be placed inside the urn. 'Indigenous groups who did not have their traditions obliterated by the presence of missionaries still [entirely or in part] follow this ritual,' Py-Daniel says. Throughout the Amazon, many groups once buried such vases with their dead beneath their houses (and some still do), says archaeologist Geórgea Holanda, who led the excavations with Amaral. 'On social media, many people ask us how a tree could have grown on top of the urns,' she says. 'The tree probably grew after the people who used to live in that region were gone.' As the tree grew, its roots made their way into the pots possibly drawn to nutrients in the bones, Holanda adds. While the tree's exact age remains unknown, its size suggests it could be centuries old, and the researchers suspect that the vases are even older. (Here's why a once isolated tribe took up cell phones and social media.) For now, the exact age and origin of the urns remains a mystery. The presence of fish and turtle bones around some of the ceramic fragments also raises questions. 'We still have to… find out what these leftovers are—whether they were part of an associated ritual,' Amaral says. Researchers at Mamirauá are currently cleaning and excavating sediments from within the urns while they look for funding to study the material. Ultimately, they hope to carbon-date fragments of bone and coal to get a more precise age estimate. 'It will all depend on funding and the partnerships we can get,' Holanda stresses. Even with these unknowns, Amaral and Holanda both feel that the most important aspect of the discovery was the deep involvement of locals from the Arumandubinha and Arará villages, who helped the archaeologists plan every single step of the process. 'The demand came from them, as they wanted to know what these artifacts were—otherwise we'd never know about the urns,' says Amaral. Community members helped build special scaffolding to remove the urns without doing further damage and guided the researchers on the best time to excavate. 'It all would have been impossible without them,' Holanda says.
