Team closes in on Amelia Earhart

Ric Gillespie may be closer than anyone ever thought possible to solving one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

But he still struggles to understand the complicated woman at the heart of it all.

Recently, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined Gillespie -- head of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) -- in announcing a new expedition to solve the disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart.

A worldwide celebrity and American heroine, Earhart, along with her navigator Fred Noonan, vanished in 1937 as they were trying to fly around the world.

There have been countless theories, but Gillespie and his team of researchers, archaeologists and crash investigators -- his own specialty -- believe they are close to solving the riddle.

"I'm a horseman, so we're on the back straight and coming to the wire," Gillespie reasons.

Even oceanographer Robert Ballard, who discovered the remains of the Titanic in 1985, says TIGHAR's research looks promising.

In July, Gillespie's team will set out on a 220-foot research vessel from Honolulu, and head toward the Phoenix Islands in Kiribati.

They believe there's compelling evidence Earhart may have landed in shallow waters near Nikumarro island, and an analysis of a photo taken in 1937 -- showing what could be a piece of mangled landing gear sticking from the surf -- could be the best spot to search.

During past searches, they've found other clues, including an eye-witness account of someone who saw wreckage as a little girl, bones that seem to be those of a woman castaway, bits of makeup and a camp site littered with the bones of countless birds, turtles and fish.

But the newly enhanced picture may lead them to the remains of the plane.

What they're looking for is an "any idiot artifact" -- the thing you hold up and any idiot will say, 'mystery solved'.

Gillespie has been chasing Earhart for decades -- at first not wanting any part of the search, because so many others had already tried.

But clue by clue, he and his team have built a case.

Around his office in Delaware, there are pictures of Earhart and Noonan that sit near a photo of Gillespie's granddaughter.

The flyer has become a part of his life.

But he seems surer of the trail they follow than the pilot they're searching for.

"I have struggled to understand this woman, " he says. "I still don't know who she was, but she's not the Amelia Earhart of legend.

"She's someone else."

The adventurer was among the biggest celebrities of her day. And she used that as currency.

During times when Americans had very little, she offered the clouds - an ambitious woman, Gillespie reasons, who mass-marketed the dream of flight.

"I don't know if I would have liked her very much," he admits, saying that's something he's never come out and said before.

But he knows she did well for aviation.

And he's found a certain connection, beyond the search.

Earhart knew headlines were the way to move forward onto the next great quest.

Standing with Clinton during the recent announcement - happy to have the attention on a project that demands a lot of money -- something came to mind.

"The uncomfortable realization that I do the same thing (as Earhart)," he says. "It gives new perspective on Amelia."

Though it doesn't help to know what her last moments were like -- some suggesting Noonan could have died during the crash.

If only she made it onto the island, with no antibiotics and in 37 C heat amid coconut crabs and isolation, experts say she could have lasted months. But drinkable water would have been limited and death certain.

Now a man who doesn't quite understand her may be the one to finally locate her.

But like the aviator, he knows no course is certain until you actually get there. 

New research suggests European Neandertals were almost extinct long before humans showed up

Western Europe has long been held to be the "cradle" of Neandertal evolution since many of the earliest discoveries were from sites in this region. But when Neandertals started disappearing around 30,000 years ago, anthropologists figured that climactic factors or competition from modern humans were the likely causes. Intriguingly, new research suggests that Western European Neandertals were on the verge of extinction long before modern humans showed up. This new perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA carried out by an international research team. Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist, was a co-author of the study led by Anders Götherström at Uppsala University and Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

"The Neandertals are our closest fossil relatives and abundant evidence of their lifeways and skeletal remains have been found at many sites across Europe and western Asia," said Quam, assistant professor of anthropology. "Until modern humans arrived on the scene, it was widely thought that Europe had been populated by a relatively stable Neandertal population for hundreds of thousands of years. Our research suggests otherwise and in light of these new results, this long-held theory now faces scrutiny."

Focusing on mitochondrial DNA sequences from 13 Neandertal individuals, including a new sequence from the site of Valdegoba cave in northern Spain, the research team found some surprising results. When they first started looking at the DNA, a clear pattern emerged. Neandertal individuals from western Europe that were older than 50,000 years and individuals from sites in western Asia and the Middle East showed a high degree of genetic variation, on par with what might be expected from a species that had been abundant in an area for a long period of time. In fact, the amount of genetic variation was similar to what characterizes modern humans as a species. In contrast, Neandertal individuals that come from Western Europe and are younger than 50,000 years show an extremely reduced amount of genetic variation, less even than the present-day population of remote Iceland.

These results suggest that western European Neandertals went through a demographic crisis, a population bottleneck that severely reduced their numbers, leaving Western Europe largely empty of humans for a period of time. The demographic crisis seems to coincide with a period of extreme cold in Western Europe. Subsequently, this region was repopulated by a small group of individuals from a surrounding area. The geographic origin of this source population is currently not clear, but it may be possible to pinpoint it further with more Neandertal sequences in the future.

"The fact that Neandertals in western Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us," said Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. "This indicates that the Neandertals may have been more sensitive to the dramatic climate changes that took place in the last Ice Age than was previously thought."

Quam concurs and suggests that this discovery calls for a major rethink of the idea of cold adaptation in Neandertals.

"At the very least, this tells us that without the aid of material culture or technology, there is a limit to our biological adaptation," said Quam. "It may very well have been the case that the European Neandertal populations were already demographically stressed when modern humans showed up on the scene."

The results presented in the study are based entirely on severely degraded ancient DNA, and the analyses have therefore required both advanced laboratory and computational methods. The research team has involved experts from a number of countries, including statisticians, experts on modern DNA sequencing and paleoanthropologists from Sweden, Denmark, Spain and the United States.

"This is just the latest example of how studies of ancient DNA are providing new insights into an important and previously unknown part of Neandertal history, "said Quam. "Ancient DNA is complementary to anthropological studies focusing on the bony anatomy of the skeleton, and these kinds of results are only possible with ancient DNA studies. It's exciting to think about what will turn up next."

Were Some Neandertals Brown-Eyed Girls?

In museums around the world, reproductions of Neandertals sport striking blue or green eyes, pale skin, and gingery hair. Now new DNA analysis suggests that two of the most closely studied Neandertals—a pair of females from Croatia—were actually brown-eyed girls, with brunette tresses and tawny skin to match. The results could help shed new light on the evolution of the family that includes both modern humans and Neandertals, who died out some 30,000 years ago.

The study has provoked deep skepticism among several outside researchers, however, who criticize numerous aspects of its methodology. The results also run contrary to other genetic evidence and to a long-held hypothesis that Neandertals, who lived mostly in northern latitudes, must've had light skin to get enough vitamin D.

But even scientists who have doubts about the new research say it still provides food for thought. "Neandertals occupied a wide geographical range," says John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the study and who is also studying the physical traits of ancient humans, so "it's likely that they were variable in pigmentation. ... We are really at the first step."

The new study, to be published in the American Journal of Human Biology later this spring, looks at the genomes of three female Neandertals from Croatia. Their DNA was the basis of the first effort to compile a complete Neandertal genetic sequence, which was published in 2010.

The researchers focused their attention on 40 well-studied stretches of genetic material that help determine pigmentation in living people. A particular form of the gene known as TPCN2, for example, bestows brown hair in modern humans; any other form means hair that's another color.

One complication is that traits such as hair color are controlled by multiple genes. To determine the cumulative impact of multiple genes on one trait, the authors assumed they could simply add together the impact of individual genes. The female Neandertal known as Vi33.26, for example, had seven genes for brown eyes, one for "not-brown" eyes, three for blue eyes, and four for "not-blue eyes." By the researchers' reckoning, that means a six-gene balance in favor of brown and a negative balance for blue, so Vi33.26's eyes were probably brown. According to this method, all three Neandertals had a dark complexion and brown eyes, and although one was red-haired, two sported brown locks.

Study author Tábita Hünemeier of Brazil's Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul says she's not surprised by the results. "There was a large population of Neandertals in Europe," she says. "It's impossible that an entire population has red hair or blue eyes."

She and her colleagues validated their technique, in part by applying to it the genomes of 11 modern humans whose photos and DNA are publicly available. Nearly 60% of the formula's predictions matched the subjects' actual physical appearance, the authors say. The team considers that accuracy rate satisfactory, given the complexity of the genetics behind skin color and other physical traits.

But experts caution against giving those museum exhibits a makeover just yet. The problem with the additive technique is that different genes have different levels of impact, says Carles Lalueza-Fox of Spain's Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. In 2007, he authored a paper showing that two Neandertals, one from Italy and one from Spain, carried a genetic variation likely to bestow pale skin and red hair. He argues that some pigmentation genes have such a powerful effect that they override the combined contributions of many weaker genes—a phenomenon that would render the new study's simple gene addition inaccurate. The lighter skin color seen in Europeans, for instance, is due almost entirely to a single gene, he says. "We know that there are some genes that have a very strong effect" on physical appearance, he says.

Another problem, Hawks says, is that the study focuses on the effects of genetic variations found in modern humans. But Neandertals' hair and skin tones were almost certainly influenced by genetic variations unique to Neandertals, who were a species different from modern humans. So the study doesn't, and can't, consider many of the factors that would've influenced how Neandertals looked.

Hünemeier responds that her team looked for new genetic variations unique to Neandertals and other ancient humans and came up empty-handed. She also says that other recent work confirms that it's possible to compute the impact of large numbers of genes using simple arithmetic.

Although Hünemeier and her critics differ on the methods her team used, they agree that the stereotypical view of Neandertals is too narrow. Lalueza-Fox says Neandertals probably had brown eyes and a variety of hair colors, and Hawks thinks Neandertals living in places such as Israel may have had darker skin than their European counterparts.

The uncertainty may not last much longer. Hünemeier and her critics alike think the growing trove of information about the DNA of ancient humans will soon reveal Neandertals' true colors. New genetic information is being generated on "hundreds of individual paleopopulations," Hünemeier says. "In 5 years we will have an ocean of information to study."

Report from Former U.S. Marine Hints at Whereabouts of Long-Lost Peking Man Fossils

In the 1930s archaeologists working at the site of Zhoukoudian near Beijing recovered an incredible trove of partial skulls and other bones representing some 40 individuals that would eventually be assigned to the early human species Homo erectus. The bones, which recent estimates put at around 770,000 years old, constitute the largest collection of H. erectus fossils ever found. They were China’s paleoanthropological pride and joy. And then they vanished.

According to historical accounts, in 1941 the most important fossils in the collection were packed in large wooden footlockers or crates to be turned over to the U.S. military for transport to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for safekeeping during World War II. But the fossils never made it to the U.S. Today, all scientists have are copies of the bones. The disappearance of the originals stands as one of the biggest mysteries in paleoanthropology.

Researchers have found a new lead, however. In a paper published today in the South African Journal of Science, Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Wu Liu and Xiujie Wu of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing detail their investigation into a recent report concerning the location of the missing bones. Former U.S. Marine Richard M. Bowen, now in his 80s, claimed that in 1947, when he was stationed at Camp Holcomb in the port city of Qinhaungdao during China’s Nationalist-Communist Civil War, he came across a box full of bones while digging foxholes one night. Spooked, he reburied the box. Soon thereafter his company evacuated Qinhaungdao.

Because the most credible accounts of what happened to the fossils have them reaching Camp Holcomb, the researchers thought Bowen’s report worthy of further investigation. Perhaps the officer in charge of the fossils in 1941, seeing that the fossils were not going to make it on board the ship amid the wartime chaos, had chosen to bury them for later retrieval—only to never make it back.

Working with information from Bowen and a local expert on the harbor, the team formulated three best guesses as to the location of the stone barracks where Bowen said he dug up the box of bones. All three sit within an area of about 200 meters by 200 meters. “One possible location sits underneath a large warehouse, but the remaining locations all fall under a large parking area and roadway” the researchers note.

According to the authors, the odds are high that the box Bowen claims to have found would have been destroyed during development of the area. But if it wasn’t, science may yet recover the missing Peking Man fossils. The team concludes:

“We established that the area in question is due to undergo development in the near future and that ‘large buildings’ are to be erected on the site. This development of course offers the opportunity that the roads and warehouses will be excavated and that if the footlocker noted by Richard Bowen has somehow miraculously survived, it or its contents might be uncovered during the course of excavation. Local authorities of the Cultural Heritage Office have committed to monitor any excavations in the area for remnants of the footlockers or fossils, and it is on this slim chance that the recovery of the bones Richard Bowen observed in 1947 rests.”

Human fossils hint at new species

The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China.

The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago.

But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed.

The team has told the PLoS One journal that far more detailed analysis of the fossils is required before they can be ascribed to a new human lineage.

"We're trying to be very careful at this stage about definitely classifying them," said study co-leader Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

"One of the reasons for that is that in the science of human evolution or palaeoanthropology, we presently don't have a generally agreed, biological definition for our own species (Homo sapiens), believe it or not. And so this is a highly contentious area," he told BBC News.

Much of the material has been in Chinese collections for some time but has only recently been subjected to intense investigation.

The remains of some of the individuals come from Maludong (or Red Deer Cave), near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan Province. A further skeleton was discovered at Longlin, in neighbouring Guangxi Province.

The skulls and teeth from the two locations are very similar to each other, suggesting they are from the same population.

But their features are quite distinct from what you might call a fully modern human, says the team. Instead, the Red Deer Cave people have a mix of archaic and modern characteristics.

In general, the individuals had rounded brain cases with prominent brow ridges. Their skull bones were quite thick. Their faces were quite short and flat and tucked under the brain, and they had broad noses.

Their jaws jutted forward but they lacked a modern-human-like chin. Computed Tomography (X-ray) scans of their brain cavities indicate they had modern-looking frontal lobes but quite archaic-looking anterior, or parietal, lobes. They also had large molar teeth.

Dr Curnoe and colleagues put forward two possible scenarios in their PLoS One paper for the origin of the Red Deer Cave population.

One posits that they represent a very early migration of a primitive-looking Homo sapiens that lived separately from other forms in Asia before dying out.

Another possibility contends that they were indeed a distinct Homo species that evolved in Asia and lived alongside our own kind until remarkably recently.

A third scenario being suggested by scientists not connected with the research is that the Red Deer Cave people could be hybrids.

"It's possible these were modern humans who inter-mixed or bred with archaic humans that were around at the time," explained Dr Isabelle De Groote, a palaeoanthropologist from London's Natural History Museum.

"The other option is that they evolved these more primitive features independently because of genetic drift or isolation, or in a response to an environmental pressure such as climate."

Dr Curnoe agreed all this was "certainly possible".

Attempts are being made to extract DNA from the remains. This could yield information about interbreeding, just as genetic studies have on the closely related human species - the Neanderthals and an enigmatic group of people from Siberia known as the Denisovans.

Whatever their true place in the Homo family tree, the Red Deer People are an important find simply because of the dearth of well dated, well described specimens from this part of the world.

And their unearthing all adds to the fascinating and increasingly complex story of human migration and development.

"The Red Deer People were living at what was a really interesting time in China, during what we call the epipalaeolithic or the end of the Stone Age," says Dr Curnoe.

"Not far from Longlin, there are quite well known archaeological sites where some of the very earliest evidence for the epipalaeolithic in East Asia has been found.

"These were occupied by very modern looking people who are already starting to make ceramics - pottery - to store food. And they're already harvesting from the landscape wild rice. There was an economic transition going on from full-blown foraging and gathering towards agriculture."

Quite how the Red Deer People fit into this picture is unclear. The research team is promising to report further investigations into some of the stone tools and cultural artefacts discovered at the dig sites.

The co-leader on the project is Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

---

Thanks to open access you can read the paper for yourself here.