Latest news with #UniversityOfHelsinki
BBC News
4 days ago
- Science
- BBC News
Slow cooking used to extract animal teeth for Stone Age jewellery
Prehistoric people used a culinary method similar to modern slow cooking to extract animal teeth for jewellery, archaeologists have found. Researchers from the University of York and University of Helsinki said the discovery showed Stone Age societies treated animal remains with "care". They said their findings suggested tooth extraction was a social activity and probably involved children. The researchers carried out experiments at a cemetery in eastern Latvia, where more than 2,000 animal teeth from 7,500 to 2,500 BC had been excavated. Dr Andrew Needham, experimental archaeologist, said: "By testing different methods, it became clear that methods like cutting, hammering or pulling the teeth out of a fresh jaw is extremely difficult and often damages the teeth in the process. "But what we see in these thousands of animal teeth at grave sites is that they are usually complete and undamaged by any extraction method." The teeth, most commonly derived from elk, wild boar and red deer, would be made into ornaments for the body and researchers noted that this practice of cooking gives an insight into the relationship between humans and animals at the time, with Stone Age people leaving little waste behind from animal Aimée Little, from the University of York's department of archaeology, said: "Making personal ornaments from teeth was likely to have been a social activity linked to everyday cooking activities."It is easy to imagine that different members of Stone Age societies, including small children, were involved in their making, with the first stage of extracting teeth from mandibles happening as meals were being prepared." Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Stone Age animal teeth pulling a 'social activity'
Prehistoric people used a culinary method similar to modern slow cooking to extract animal teeth for jewellery, archaeologists have found. Researchers from the University of York and University of Helsinki said the discovery showed Stone Age societies treated animal remains with "care". They said their findings suggested tooth extraction was a social activity and probably involved children. The researchers carried out experiments at a cemetery in eastern Latvia, where more than 2,000 animal teeth from 7,500 to 2,500 BC had been excavated. Dr Andrew Needham, experimental archaeologist, said: "By testing different methods, it became clear that methods like cutting, hammering or pulling the teeth out of a fresh jaw is extremely difficult and often damages the teeth in the process. "But what we see in these thousands of animal teeth at grave sites is that they are usually complete and undamaged by any extraction method." The teeth, most commonly derived from elk, wild boar and red deer, would be made into ornaments for the body and clothing. The researchers noted that this practice of cooking gives an insight into the relationship between humans and animals at the time, with Stone Age people leaving little waste behind from animal remains. Dr Aimée Little, from the University of York's department of archaeology, said: "Making personal ornaments from teeth was likely to have been a social activity linked to everyday cooking activities. "It is easy to imagine that different members of Stone Age societies, including small children, were involved in their making, with the first stage of extracting teeth from mandibles happening as meals were being prepared." Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North. University of York
Gizmodo
4 days ago
- Science
- Gizmodo
This Prehistoric Trick Shows How Ice Age People Harvested Teeth for Jewelry
When piecing together the cultural practices of ancient humans, traditional archaeologists rely on clues from artifacts such as tools, bones, and pottery. Experimental archaeologists, however, go a step further—recreating past behaviors to experience how people once lived. That's precisely what a team of researchers recently did to investigate how Stone Age communities in northeastern Europe extracted animal teeth to produce accessories. Led by Aija Macāne, a visiting scholar in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, the archaeologists personally tested seven different extraction methods to determine which were most effective and efficient. Their findings, published June 20 in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, offer new insights into the lives of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. 'Our experiments show that tooth extraction was a deliberate, time-sensitive process embedded in daily life, especially cooking practices,' Macāne said in a university statement. 'This challenges the assumption that teeth used for ornaments were simply scavenged or easily available.' According to the researchers, animal teeth were among the most common materials used to make jewelry, accessories, and other personal adornments during the Stone Age, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Experts know this thanks to sites like Zvejnieki, a burial ground in northern Latvia where hunter-gatherers laid people to rest for about five millennia—from 7,500 to 2,600 BCE. More than 2,000 animal teeth have been excavated from the graves at Zvejnieki, making it a prime location to study how ancient humans interacted with these materials. Archaeologists have extensively studied animal tooth pendants from this site, investigating which species they came from, how they were used, where they were placed inside graves, and how they were made. Far fewer studies, however, have looked into the process of extracting teeth and the physical traces this leaves behind, the researchers note. To fill that knowledge gap, Macāne and her colleagues got their hands dirty—literally. The team carried out a series of experiments to test seven different prehistoric methods for extracting teeth: cutting, percussion (or striking), air drying, soaking, direct heat, and two cooking techniques. They chose these techniques based on previous archaeological and ethnographic research. 'While other methods could be tested, we argue that these seven are the most likely given the technologies available at this time,' the researchers state in their report. Over the course of one year, they experienced what it was like to be Stone Age humans in need of some toothy bling. The researchers conducted their experiments at the Īdeņa Experimental Centre in eastern Latvia, which allowed them to source the necessary raw materials from licensed local hunters. In total, they used seven skulls or mandibles from Eurasian elk, two from wild boar, and two from roe deer. Of all the methods they tested, the two cooking techniques proved most effective. Boiling a mandible in a ceramic pot not only poached the meat, but caused soft tissues to detach from the bone, making it easy to manually extract the teeth. Placing entire skulls inside an earth oven—a dug-out pit used to trap heat and, in this case, steam food—had the same effect. Both methods allowed for high extraction rates without damaging the teeth, with the added bonus of making a meal and rendering the rest of the bones suitable for tool-making. These findings suggest that tooth extraction may have been integrated into broader cultural practices, merging food preparation, the making of personal adornments, and funerary rituals. As for the other techniques, soaking proved successful, but did not offer additional benefits. Cutting or striking the teeth to remove them also worked, but that often cause damage. The last two methods—air drying and applying direct heat—did not yield successful results. 'While this study focused principally on the tooth pendant assemblage from the Zvejnieki cemetery, our results have broader implications for understanding tooth extraction and pendant production across prehistory,' the researchers state. 'By examining techniques used for tooth extraction, we have gained valuable insights into human behavior and cultural practices during the Stone Age.' Still, questions remain. The researchers hope their study will inspire other archaeologists to look for physical traces of the extraction process on animal teeth artifacts. They also emphasize the importance of investigating teeth from other species, including humans and dogs. Such work, they argue, would shed 'a critical light on the complexity and significance of these practices.'
Reuters
02-06-2025
- General
- Reuters
Study sees lower chances of Milky Way crashing into Andromeda galaxy
WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) - The Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy are currently hurtling through space toward each other at a speed of about 250,000 miles per hour (400,000 kph), setting up a possible future galactic collision that would wreck both of them. But how likely is this cosmic crash? While previous research forecast it to occur roughly 4-4.5 billion years from now, a new study that uses recent observational data and adds fresh variables indicates that a collision is far from certain. It puts the likelihood of a collision in the next 5 billion years at less than 2% and one in the next 10 billion years at about 50%. Galactic mergers are not like a demolition derby, with stars and planets crashing into each other, but rather a complicated blending on an immense scale. "The future collision - if it happens - would be the end of both the Milky Way and Andromeda," said University of Helsinki astrophysicist Till Sawala, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, opens new tab, with the structure of both being destroyed and a new galaxy with an elliptical shape arising from the merger. "If a merger happens, it is more likely to occur 7-8 billion years in the future. But we find that based on the current data, we cannot predict the time of a merger, if it happens at all," Sawala said. The two galaxies currently are around 2.5 billion light-years from each other. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). The potential collision is so far in the future that Earth by that time is forecast to become a completely different kind of place. Our planet is expected to be rendered uninhabitable roughly a billion years from now, with the sun becoming so hot that it will boil away our planet's oceans. The sun is one of the Milky Way's many billions of stars. The total mass of our spiral-shaped galaxy - including its stars and interstellar gas as well as its dark matter, which is invisible material whose presence is revealed by its gravitational effects - is estimated at approximately one trillion times the mass of the sun. The Andromeda galaxy has a shape and total mass similar to the Milky Way's. The researchers simulated the Milky Way's movement over the next 10 billion years using updated data from the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes and various ground-based telescopes as well as revised galactic mass estimates. Other nearby galaxies are forecast to factor into whether a collision occurs. Previous research accounted for the gravitational influence of the Triangulum galaxy, also called Messier 33 or M33, which is about half the size of the Milky Way and Andromeda, but did consider the Large Magellanic Cloud, a smaller satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, as this study does. "We find that if only M33 is added to the two-body system, the chance of a Milky Way-Andromeda merger actually increases, but the inclusion of the Large Magellanic Cloud has the opposite effect," Sawala said. The researchers concluded that a merger between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud is almost certain within the next 2 billion years, long before a potential collision with Andromeda. One noteworthy difference between the Milky Way and Andromeda is the mass of the supermassive black holes at their centers. The Milky Way's Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is about 4 million times the mass of the sun. Its Andromeda counterpart is about 100 million the sun's mass. "Collisions between stars are very unlikely, but the two supermassive black holes would sink to the center of the newly formed galaxy, where they would eventually merge," Sawala said. Galactic mergers have occurred since the universe's early stages and are particularly common in areas of the universe where galaxies are clustered together. "In the early universe, galaxy mergers were much more frequent, so the first mergers would have occurred very shortly after the first galaxies had formed," Sawala said. "Minor mergers - with much smaller galaxies - happen more frequently. Indeed, the Milky Way is currently merging with several dwarf galaxies," Sawala said.
Fast Company
23-05-2025
- Science
- Fast Company
Why penguin poop might be protecting Antarctica from rising temperatures
In December 2022, Matthew Boyer hopped on an Argentine military plane to one of the more remote habitations on Earth: Marambio Station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where the icy continent stretches toward South America. Months before that, Boyer had to ship expensive, delicate instruments that might get busted by the time he landed. 'When you arrive, you have boxes that have been sometimes sitting outside in Antarctica for a month or two in a cold warehouse,' said Boyer, a PhD student in atmospheric science at the University of Helsinki. 'And we're talking about sensitive instrumentation.' But the effort paid off, because Boyer and his colleagues found something peculiar about penguin guano. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, they describe how ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. Some penguin populations, however, are under serious threat because of climate change. Losing them and their guano could mean fewer clouds and more heating in an already fragile ecosystem, one so full of ice that it will significantly raise sea levels worldwide as it melts. A better understanding of this dynamic could help scientists hone their models of how Antarctica will transform as the world warms. They can now investigate, for instance, if some penguin species produce more ammonia and, therefore, more of a cooling effect. 'That's the impact of this paper,' said Tamara Russell, a marine ornithologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who studies penguins but wasn't involved in the research. 'That will inform the models better, because we know that some species are decreasing, some are increasing, and that's going to change a lot down there in many different ways.' With their expensive instruments, Boyer and his research team measured atmospheric ammonia between January and March 2023, summertime in the southern hemisphere. They found that when the wind was blowing from an Adelie penguin colony 5 miles away from the detectors, concentrations of the gas shot up to 1,000 times higher than the baseline. Even when the penguins had moved out of the colony after breeding, ammonia concentrations remained elevated for at least a month, as the guano continued emitting the gas. That atmospheric ammonia could have been helping cool the area. The researchers further demonstrated that the ammonia kicks off an atmospheric chain reaction. Out at sea, tiny plantlike organisms known as phytoplankton release the gas dimethyl sulfide, which transforms into sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. Because ammonia is a base, it reacts readily with this acid. This coupling results in the rapid formation of aerosol particles. Clouds form when water vapor gloms onto any number of different aerosols, like soot and pollen, floating around in the atmosphere. In populated places, these particles are more abundant, because industries and vehicles emit so many of them as pollutants. Trees and other vegetation spew aerosols, too. But because Antarctica lacks trees and doesn't have much vegetation at all, the aerosols from penguin guano and phytoplankton can make quite an impact. In February 2023, Boyer and the other researchers measured a particularly strong burst of particles associated with guano, sampled a resulting fog a few hours later, and found particles created by the interaction of ammonia from the guano and sulphuric acid from the plankton. 'There is a deep connection between these ecosystem processes, between penguins and phytoplankton at the ocean surface,' Boyer said. 'Their gas is all interacting to form these particles and clouds.' But here's where the climate impacts get a bit trickier. Scientists know that in general, clouds cool Earth's climate by reflecting some of the sun's energy back into space. Although Boyer and his team hypothesize that clouds enhanced with penguin ammonia are probably helping cool this part of Antarctica, they note that they didn't quantify that climate effect, which would require further research. That's a critical bit of information because of the potential for the warming climate to create a feedback loop. As oceans heat up, penguins are losing access to some of their prey, and colonies are shrinking or disappearing as a result. Fewer penguins producing guano means less ammonia and fewer clouds, which means more warming and more disruptions to the animals, and on and on in a self-reinforcing cycle. 'If this paper is correct—and it really seems to be a nice piece of work to me—[there's going to be] a feedback effect, where it's going to accelerate the changes that are already pushing change in the penguins,' said Peter Roopnarine, curator of geology at the California Academy of Sciences. Scientists might now look elsewhere, Roopnarine adds, to find other bird colonies that could also be providing cloud cover. Protecting those species from pollution and hunting would be a natural way to engineer Earth systems to offset some planetary warming. 'We think it's for the sake of the birds,' Roopnarine said. 'Well, obviously it goes well beyond that.' —By Matt Simon, Grist
