Category Archives: featured

Fossil Finder – the next stage. April 2018 Update

Following the great success of the early stages of the Fossil Finder online project, we are asking for further help from the existing and new citizen scientists. We need your assistance to help us to evaluate the quality and precision of the initial data classifications.

Through the new classification workflow on the Fossil Finder website, we are asking citizen scientists to assess the images identified as most likely to contain artefacts of interest. The initial evaluation of the data has highlighted hotspots of consensus amongst the citizen scientists’ classification data. We are asking volunteers to evaluate if these clusters have correctly identified and labelled objects of interest to the Fossil Finder project – primarily objects that might be fossilised bone or teeth.

We hope you are willing to get involved with this effort and help us fulfil this next stage of the project.

Convergent Adaptation of Noses in Neanderthals and Modern Humans

An international team of researchers has found that Neanderthals and modern humans both evolved in ways that allowed for better breathing through the nose in a cold climate. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group also notes that there were similarities in the ways that both adapted to the cold.

In order to breathe through the nose when it is really cold outside, the air that is inhaled must be both warmed and humidified to prevent damaging sensitive lung tissue. We humans have evolved to allow this. And as it turns out, Neanderthals did, too. But, it took some roundabout research to make this discovery because much of the internal nasal configuration is made of soft tissue, which does not appear in the fossil record. To overcome that problem and to learn more about the ways both groups evolved to deal with the cold Eurasian climate, the researchers studied the nasal cavities of 38 modern Argentinians, 26 Southwestern Europeans, 12 Northeastern Asians and two Neanderthal. The team then used data from the modern humans and software to digitally reconstruct the soft nasal tissue inside the Neanderthal nasal cavity and compared it to the modern human nose.

The researchers report that though the two groups had different nose shapes (Neanderthal noses were shorter and broader than modern human noses) there were internal similarities between them that their research showed evolved independently. They also compared air warming and humidifying efficiencies between the groups. They report that they found Northeastern Asians were the best at breathing in cold air and that the Neanderthal came in second. Those of Southwestern European descent were the worst.

Both groups also evolved other adaptions to deal with the cold, such as growing more hair and becoming wider in the thoracic area. Some have suggested that the Neanderthal may have adapted too well to the cold and that might have been part of the reason the group went extinct—they could not handle the warmer temperatures that came later. This new research suggests if that was the case, it was not likely due to an inability to breathe warmer air.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-cold-temperatures-nasal-similarities-neanderthal.html#jCp

New mini-project – August 2016

This field season we are trying something new. We have identified a small area and created a mini-project. We have also revised the identification workflow on fossilfinder to make the questions more relevant to the problems we have. While we are in the field we will be surveying along this small area and interacting with the fossilfinder forum by visiting and identifying problem objects along with the interesting things that are being found.

Hopefully you will join in and help classify this area while we are still here in the field.

Our aim is to be able to directly compare very diligent field survey with the new virtual survey methods that are created through citizen science