A woman who lived near the Pyrenees around 30,000 years ago carried evidence of connections reaching far beyond her region. Most of her ancestry resembled that of western European hunter-gatherers. Another component linked her to populations associated with central and eastern Europe, revealing a more connected Ice Age landscape than earlier genetic evidence suggested.

An international team led by the University of Vienna reported the findings in Science Advances. Researchers combined new genetic data from three people with previously published genomes and human DNA recovered from Spanish cave sediment. Together, those sources show that long-distance genetic exchange could occur without replacing a region’s existing population ancestry.

The study concerns people associated with the Gravettian, an archaeological culture widespread across Europe roughly 34,000 to 25,000 years ago. Similar tools, artworks and burial practices had already suggested extensive contacts. The new evidence helps connect that cultural picture with the biological histories of people who lived through the period.

Study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joa.70236

People tend to think of our bones as solid, unchanging support structures inside our bodies, but a recent study from the University of Chicago shows just how much they can change depending on how we use them.

Using detailed CT scanning, researchers compared ankle bones from modern people who usually wear shoes and those of Indigenous people who go barefoot and saw significant differences in their internal structures.

The study offers a new way of understanding the evolution of walking in our fossil ancestors by providing reference points for how behaviors shape our skeletons.

" A lot of people think the skeleton is a fixed thing, but it's constantly changing during your life in response to your behavior " said Zewdi Tsegai, an assistant professor of organismal biology and anatomy at UChicago and senior author of the study. " So, we're using this plasticity of the skeleton to try to understand how living people vary and then taking that back to fossils to reconstruct behavior. "

Hannah Farrell, Ph.D. '24, who is now on the faculty at UNT Health Fort Worth, led the study, which was published in the Journal of Anatomy. She and her colleagues focused on trabecular bone, the spongy latticework of tissue inside the ends of bones.

Trabecular bone provides structural support and shock absorption while keeping the skeleton lightweight. Importantly for this study, it also changes in response to physical forces from behaviors like walking, running, jumping or climbing to realign its internal struts and offer more support.

" You can think of it like the Eiffel Tower, where it has all these struts and lattices to provide a very rigid structure " Farrell said. " But the trabeculae are also preferentially reoriented throughout life to continue to provide that same support as the individual faces loading from different behaviors. "

Farrell and her teammates used high-resolution micro-CT scanning to analyze ankle bones from collections of skeletons. The first group consisted of 40 individuals who regularly wore shoes.

A second group included 13 skeletons of habitually unshod Indigenous people from the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, two individuals from southern Africa and one individual from Central Africa, provided by the Natural History Museum in London.

The researchers focused on the talus bone—a central, weight-bearing bone in the ankle that connects the lower leg to the foot. The modern, shod individuals had more trabecular bone in the back of the talus, suggesting that people wearing shoes tend to put more weight on the back of this bone, perhaps from the higher angle of the heel created by shoes.

Modern shoe-wearers also had more trabecular bone on the inside of the talus toward the big toe, hinting at how shoes redistribute weight.

Southern Africa has one of the most detailed and elaborate bodies of rock art anywhere in the world, from herds of running antelope to dancing men and humanoid beings with wings, hooves and horns. All are painted with fine brushstrokes or fingers. One thing this art lacks is stencils.

Now, a new study has identified the first-ever stenciled rock art in all of southern Africa. What makes it doubly unusual is that it was made from a template rather than an existing object, which is rare even on a global scale.

" I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at for a while " said David Pearce, a rock art researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand. " Then they popped into focus, a bit like optical illusions do. "

The study, by Pearce and Cambridge archaeologist Kiah Johnson, is published in the South African Archaeological Bulletin.