Origins of multicellularity: All in the family

One of the most pivotal steps in evolution-the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms-may not have required as much retooling as commonly believed, found a globe-spanning collaboration of scientists led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute.

Provided by Salk Institute

Fish talk to each other, researcher finds

The undersea world isn’t as quiet as we thought, according to a New Zealand researcher who found fish can “talk” to each other.

Lucys great grandfather found

MSNBC

Anthropologists say they have discovered the 3.6 million year old partial skeleton of a creature that came from the same species as Lucy, but was 400,000 years older and at least as good at walking upright. Their analysis suggests that upright walking, the trademark trait for humans and their extinct kin, goes back further in time than some might have assumed.

This skeleton, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has a much longer name than Lucy: It was dubbed Kadanuumuu, which means “big man” in Ethiopia’s Afar language. Like the 3.3 million-year-old Lucy skeleton, Kadanuumuu was found in the East African country’s Afar region, and shares the species name Australopithecus afarensis.

Australopiths are fossil species that share some traits with chimpanzees – for instance, protruding faces and small brains – but share other traits with humans. Most importantly, their skeletons appear to have been built for upright walking. Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered Lucy back in 1974, said the latest discovery adds to a “treasure trove” of hundreds of australopith fossils from East Africa.

“It’s like the El Dorado of paleoanthropology,” he told me.

Piecing together the evidence

The first bone of Kadanuumuu’s skeleton was found in 2005 in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region, about 30 miles north of where Lucy was discovered. Over the three years that followed, more than 30 additional bones were unearthed and pieced together for analysis.

The head of the research team, Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told me that Kadanuumuu’s skeleton was clearly made for walking, based on measurements of bones including the limbs, clavicle and shoulder blade, the rib cage and the pelvis. In fact, its arrangement was better-suited for upright walking than Lucy’s, even though it came from an earlier time in evolutionary history. The key measurement indicated that Kadanuumuu’s lower limbs were more elongated than Lucy’s – which would make walking easier.

When Lucy was found, scientists thought her species was in the midst of a transition from tree-climbing to upright walking, but Kadanuumuu’s larger skeleton suggests that the transition was already made hundreds of thousands of years earlier. (Haile-Selassie and his colleagues assume that Kadanuumuu was male, based on his size as well as the configuration of his pelvis.)

“There is good grounds that advanced humanlike walking actually evolved long before people thought,” Haile-Selassie said.

So why did Lucy seem less-suited for upright walking? Haile-Selassie says it’s because she was exceptionally small. Over the past 35 years, other specimens of Australopithecus afarensis have been found that suggested a body size larger than Lucy, and even larger than Kadanuumuu. “This individual is among the largest, but not the largest of all the specimens that we’ve found so far,” Haile-Selassie said.

Kadanuumuu is thought to have stood 5 to 5½ feet tall, while Lucy stood only 3½ feet tall. That’s not unusual: Anthropologists have found that A. afarensis exhibited significant size differences between the male and the female of the species, a quality known as sexual dimorphism. The diminutive stature of Lucy, which is still the most complete australopith skeleton found to date, may have initially led some scientists down the wrong path, Haile-Selassie said. “Most of the misinterpretations were largely based on the size of Lucy and her sex,” he told me.

Findings fit in with ancient footprints

If the conclusions made by Haile-Selassie and his colleagues are correct, the saga of how we became human is much more ancient than some might have thought. But in fact, the conclusions are consistent with another famous find, the 1976 discovery of the Laetoli footprints in Tanzania. Those prints, which were preserved in volcanic ash 3.6 million years ago, led scientists to suggest that upright walking was mastered well before Lucy’s time. “What we have now is the skeletal evidence to complement those footprints,” Haile-Selassie said.

Johanson agreed. “This supports much of what we’ve known before” about the ability of australopiths to walk upright, he told me. He’s not fully convinced, however, that Kadanuumuu was significantly better-built for walking than Lucy was. “I’m not quite sure they really have enough to say that the lower limb is elongated,” he said.

All this could lead anthropologists to look further back for the origins of upright walking. Perhaps Australopithecus anamensis, which lived in East Africa between 4.2 million and 3.9 million years ago, was the species that picked up the trick. Perhaps it all started with Ardipithecus ramidus, which is thought to have split its time between the trees and the ground in Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago (though there’s some controversy over that claim).

That doesn’t mean Australopithecus afarensis is out of the spotlight when it comes to studying human origins. Johanson said Lucy and her kin provide an “important reference for assessing other hominid species,” in large part because so many specimens have been found over such a wide span of evolutionary time. Going forward, paleoanthropologists may well turn to Lucy, Kadanuumuu and other members of the species to unravel the deeper secrets of ancient human development.

“You can begin to look at the minutiae of microevolution over time,” Johanson said, “which is where we’re heading.”

Herald Sun

Scientists have unveiled fossils from west Africa that push back the dawn of multicellular life on Earth by at least 1.5 billion years.

Just how complex the newly discovered organisms are is sure to be hotly debated.

But there can be no doubt that the creatures unearthed from the hills of Gabon, visible to the naked eye, have upended standard evolutionary timelines.

“The cursor on the origin of complex multicellular life is no longer 600 million years ago, as has long been maintained, but more like 2.1 billion years,” said Abderrazak El Albani, a researcher at the University of Poitiers and lead author of the study.

The findings were published in the British journal Nature.

Up to now, conventional scientific wisdom held that the planet was populated only by single-celled microbes until the so-called Cambrian explosion, a major surge of biodiversity that began some 600 million years ago.

Ever-more complex life forms emerged rapidly from there, eventually creating an evolutionary tree with Homo Sapiens atop one of its branches.

But the new organism, which appears to have lived in colonies, shows that the drive toward complexity began much sooner.

Shaped like cookies with ragged edges and a lumpy interior, more than 250 specimens have been found so far, varying in size and different body shapes from one to 12 centimetres.

The fossilised creatures may also have crossed another threshold of evolution far earlier than any other known organism.

Unlike simple bacteria, their cells appear to have membrane-bound nucleus housing and protecting its chromosomes, the genetic blueprints for life.

Geochemical analysis shows that the organisms lived in slightly-oxygenated ocean waters, leading the researchers to speculate that oxygen may have been an essential catalyst for the leap from single- to multi-cell life forms.

Earth’s earliest, primitive life forms are thought to have sparked to life about 3.9 billion years ago after the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment, a 100-million-year fusillade during which our young planet was pummelled by meteorites that blasted craters the size of Thailand and France.

Fossils reveal microscopic life forms 3.5 billion years old, and geochemical clues point to more primitive organisms – thought by some to be the common ancestor to all things living – 300,000 million years before that.

Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution

New York Times

Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness. The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far.

Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.

If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance – the ability to digest milk in adulthood – among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility – Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans.

The Beijing team analyzed the 3 percent of the human genome in which known genes lie in 50 Tibetans from two villages at an altitude of 14,000 feet and in 40 Han Chinese from Beijing, which is 160 feet above sea level. Many genes exist in a population in alternative versions. The biologists found about 30 genes in which a version rare among the Han had become common among the Tibetans. The most striking instance was a version of a gene possessed by 9 percent of Han but 87 percent of Tibetans.

Such an enormous difference indicates that the version typical among Tibetans is being strongly favored by natural selection. In other words, its owners are evidently leaving more children than those with different versions of the gene.

The gene in question is known as hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha, or HIF2a, and the Tibetans with the favored version have fewer red blood cells and hence less hemoglobin in their blood.

The finding explains why Tibetans do not get mountain sickness but raises the question of how they compensate for the lack of oxygen if not by making extra red blood cells.

Two other studies of Tibetans’ adaptation to high altitude have also identified this gene as a target of selection. A team led by Tatum S. Simonson of the University of Utah and RiLi Ge of Qinghai University in China scanned the genomes of 31 Tibetans and reported in Science in May that HIF2a and other genes involved in red blood cell production bore the stamp of natural selection.

Independently, a group led by Cynthia M. Beall, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, and Yong-Tang Zheng of the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China has detected a genetic change in the same gene in Tibetans and found that it correlated with having less hemoglobin in the blood. Their report was published in the June 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Human adaptation to high altitude is a field of obvious interest, but another reason for the appearance of three studies on the same subject in matter of a few weeks may be that the technology to assess which parts of the genome are under selection has only recently become available.

The three new reports agree in finding the Tibetans’ version of the gene has been favored by natural selection. But the Beijing Genome Institute’s calculation that the Tibetan and Han populations split apart only 3,000 years ago is less likely to be accepted. Archaeologists say they believe that the Tibetan plateau has been inhabited for at least 7,000 years and maybe for as long as 21,000 years.

“The separation of Tibetans and Hans at 3,000 years ago is simply not tenable by anything we know from the historical, archaeological or linguistic record,” said Mark Aldenderfer, a Tibetan expert at the University of California, Merced.

Dr. Aldenderfer said that there had probably been many migrations onto the Tibetan plateau, and that there was indirect evidence that pastoralists had entered the plateau from the north-northeast around 6,000 years ago. Earlier genetic studies have found that Tibetans are more similar to northern Han than to those from southern China, and have some admixture of genes from Central Asia, he said.

Geneticists have a more elastic view of dates than do archaeologists, and the estimate of a Han-Tibetan population split at 3,000 years ago could probably have been adjusted to 6,000 if the geneticists had taken any account of any other kind of evidence.

Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, did the statistical calculations for the Beijing study. “We feel fairly confident that something on the order of 3,000 years is correct,” he said. But in a later e-mail message, Dr. Nielsen said, “I cannot with confidence rule out that the divergence time is 6,000 instead of 3,000.”

There is similar flexibility in the estimates of population sizes. The Beijing team calculates that at the time of divergence there were only 288 Han Chinese and 22,642 Tibetans. These estimates have bewildered archaeologists, given that rice cultivation in southern China started 10,000 years ago and that there was an extensive civilization by 3,000 years ago. Dr. Nielsen said that the figure of 288 people was meant simply to indicate a bottleneck in the Han population, meaning a time when it was very small, and that this bottleneck could just as easily have occurred 10,000 years ago.

Genetic differences between Tibetans and Chinese are a potentially delicate issue, given Tibetan aspirations for political autonomy. Dr. Nielsen said he hoped that the Beijing team’s results would carry no political implications, given that it is cultural history and language, not genetics, that constitute a people. There is not much genetic difference between Danes and Swedes, he added, but Denmark and Sweden are separate countries.

Fish out of water: Gene clue to evolutionary step

Two genes controlling a tissue protein may have played a role in the key period when fish shed their fins and became limbed land lovers, a study published by Nature on Thursday said.

Fossil evidence suggests that around 365 million years ago, fish, or fish-like creatures, emerged from shallow seas, moving onto land with the help of primitive, eight-fingered limbs, which later simplified to five digits under evolutionary pressure.

The newly-found genes control proteins called actinotrichia, whose tough, thin fibrils form a scaffold on which pectoral fins develop.

They were spotted by a team led by Marie-Andree Akimenko, from the University of Ottawa in Canada, as it was scanning development in the zebrafish, a highly-studied lab animal.

Neither of the genes are present in four-limbed vertebrates known as tetrapods, which became the basis for terrestrial animals, the researchers realised.

When the two genes were switched off in zebrafish embryos through genetic engineering, the fish developed only truncated fins, without bony rays.

The switchoff also unleashed a pattern of gene activity seen in research elsewhere, in the development of limbs and digits in terrestrial animals.

Further work is needed to confirm the theory, as it is unclear whether the fin genes were knocked out to help make the transition to land — or whether they were eliminated after the transition, as they were no longer needed.

Greeks ‘Borrowed Egyptian Numbers’

The astronomers, physicists and mathematicians of ancient Greece were true innovators.

Ancient Greeks used letters and extra symbols to represent digits

But one thing it seems the ancient Greeks did not invent was the counting system on which many of their greatest thinkers based their pioneering calculations.

New research suggests the Greeks borrowed their system known as alphabetic numerals from the Egyptians, and did not develop it themselves as was long believed.

Greek alphabetic numerals were favoured by the mathematician and physicist Archimedes, the scientific philosopher Aristotle and the mathematician Euclid, amongst others.

Trade explosion

An analysis by Dr Stephen Chrisomalis of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, showed striking similarities between Greek alphabetic numerals and Egyptian demotic numerals, used in Egypt from the late 8th Century BC until around AD 450.

Both systems use nine signs in each “base” so that individual units are counted 1-9, tens are counted 10-90 and so on. Both systems also lack a symbol for zero.

Dr Chrisomalis proposes that an explosion in trade between Greece and Egypt after 600 BC led to the system being adopted by the Greeks.

Greek merchants may have seen the demotic system in use in Egypt and adapted it for their own purposes.

“We know there was an enormous amount of contact between the Greeks and Egyptians at this time,” Dr Chrisomalis told BBC News Online.

‘Plausible’ theory

Professor David Joyce, a mathematician at Clark University in Worcester, US, said he had not examined Dr Chrisomalis’ research, but thought the link was plausible.

“Egyptians used hieratic and, later, demotic script where the multiple symbols looked more like single symbols,” said Professor Joyce.

“Instead of seven vertical strokes, a particular squiggle was used. That’s the same scheme used in the Greek alphabetic numerals.”

Traditionally, the system is thought to have been developed by Greeks in western Asia Minor, in modern day Turkey.

Between 475 BC and 325 BC, alphabetic numerals fell out of use in favour of a system of written numbers known as acrophonic numerals.

But from the late 4th Century BC onwards, alphabetic numerals became the preferred system throughout the Greek-speaking world.

They were used until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th Century.

The research is to be published in the journal Antiquity.

ALBERT EINSTEIN ON RACISM

Forwarded by Michael Luckett

Here’s something you probably don’t know about Albert Einstein.

In 1946, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks.

At Lincoln, Einstein gave a speech in which he called racism ‘a disease of white people,’ and added, ‘I do not intend to be quiet about it.’ He also received an honorary degree and gave a lecture on relativity to Lincoln students.

The reason Einstein’s visit to Lincoln is not better known is that it was virtually ignored by the mainstream press, which regularly covered Einstein’s speeches and activities. (Only the black press gave extensive coverage to the event.) Nor is there mention of the Lincoln visit in any of the major Einstein biographies or archives.

In fact, many significant details are missing from the numerous studies of Einstein’s life and work, most of them having to do with Einstein’s opposition to racism and his relationships with African Americans.

That these omissions need to be recognized and corrected is the contention of Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, authors of ‘Einstein on Race and Racism’
(Rutgers University Press, 2006). Jerome and Taylor spoke April 3 at an event sponsored by the W.E.B.

Dubois Institute for African and African American Research. The event also featured remarks by Sylvester James Gates Jr., the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, University of Maryland.

According to Jerome and Taylor, Einstein’s statements at Lincoln were by no means an isolated case.

Einstein, who was Jewish, was sensitized to racism by the years of Nazi-inspired threats and harassment he suffered during his tenure at the University of Berlin. Einstein was in the United States when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and, fearful that a return to Germany would place him in mortal danger, he decided to stay, accepting a position at the recently founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He became an American citizen in 1940. But while Einstein may have been grateful to have found a safe haven, his gratitude did not prevent him from criticizing the ethical shortcomings of his new home.

‘Einstein realized that African Americans in Princeton were treated like Jews in Germany,’ said Taylor. ‘The town was strictly segregated.

There was no high school that blacks could go to until the 1940′s.

Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton (Paul Robeson, who was born in Princeton, called it ‘the northernmost town in the
South’) was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children.

One woman remembered that Einstein paid the college tuition of a young man from the community. Another said that he invited Marian Anderson to stay at his home when the singer was refused a room at the Nassau Inn.

Einstein met Paul Robeson when the famous singer and actor came to perform at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1935. The two found they had much in common. Both were concerned about the rise of fascism, and both gave their support to efforts to defend the democratically elected government of Spain against the fascist forces of Francisco Franco. Einstein and Robeson also worked together on the American Crusade to End Lynching, in response to an upsurge in racial murders as black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War II.

The 20-year friendship between Einstein and Robeson is another story that has not been told, Jerome said, but that omission may soon be rectified. A movie is in the works about the relationship, with Danny Glover slated to play Robeson and Ben Kingsley as Einstein. Einstein continued to support progressive causes through the 1950′s, when the pressure of anti-Communist witch hunts made it dangerous to do so. Another example of Einstein using his prestige to help a prominent African American occurred in 1951, when the 83-year-old W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP, was indicted by the federal government for failing to register as a ‘foreign agent’ as a consequence of circulating the pro-Soviet Stockholm Peace Petition.

Einstein offered to appear as a character witness for Dubois, which convinced the judge to drop the case.

Gates, an African-American physicist who has appeared on the PBS show ‘Nova’, said that Einstein had been a hero of his since he learned about the theory of relativity as a teenager, but that he was unaware of Einstein’s ideas on civil rights until fairly recently.

Einstein’s approach to problems in physics was to begin by asking very simple, almost childlike questions, such as, ‘What would the world look like if I could drive along a beam of light?’

Gates said. ‘He must have developed his ideas about race through a similar process. He was capable of asking the question, ‘What would my life be like if I were black?’ Gates said that thinking about Einstein’s involvement with civil rights has prompted him to speculate on the value of affirmative action and the goal of diversity it seeks to bring about. There are many instances in which the presence of strength and resilience in a system can be attributed to diversity.

‘In the natural world, for example, when a population is under the influence of a stressful environment, diversity ensures its survival’, Gates said.

On a cultural level, the global influence of American popular music might be attributed to the fact that it is an amalgam of musical traditions from Europe and Africa. These examples have led him to conclude that ‘diversity actually matters, independent of the moral argument.’ Gates said he believes ‘there is a science of diversity out there waiting for scholars to discover it.’

For more click on Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor.

Tutankhamen killed by sickle-cell disease

Source: New Scientist

King Tutankhamen, Egypt’s boy king, was killed by the inherited blood disorder sickle-cell disease – not malaria. So says a German team in what appears to be the best shot yet at solving the mystery of the pharaoh’s early demise.

From falling off a chariot to murder by poison, the cause of Tutankhamen’s death has been a source of avid speculation since his mummified youthful remains were discovered in 1922. He was 19 when he died around 1324 BC after ruling for just nine years.

The first extensive scientific investigation of the mummy was reported by Egypt’s chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass and colleagues earlier this year (JAMA, vol 303, p 638). After running a battery of tests, including X-rays and genetic analysis, they concluded that an inherited bone disorder weakened the king, before an attack of malaria finished him off.

Key pieces of evidence were severe necrosis in the bones of Tutankhamen’s left foot, and the detection of genes from Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria.

But in a letter to Journal of the American Medical Association this week, Christian Timmann and Christian Meyer of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, suggest that Hawass’s observations can be explained much more elegantly by a diagnosis of sickle cell disease (SCD).

“The radiological signs are compatible with osteopathologic lesions seen in sickle cell disease (SCD), a hematological disorder that occurs at gene carrier rates of nine percent to 22 percent in inhabitants of Egyptian oases.” (Source)

More Interesting Info:

A lot of these diseases/disorders are also found further south in the continent..—————–

Some disease pathogens such as malaria found in ancient DNA (aDNA) seem to point to Nile Valley- Nubian- East African- Sub-Saharan links. For example, the presence of the L. donovani pathogen in Egypt implies trade or population contacts with other African regions since the vector for spreading this pathogen (a particular biting African sandfly) is absent in Nile Valley. Well documented cranial, limb proportion and cultural linkages between ancient Egyptian and other indigenous tropical African populations suggests that the ancient DNA is another indicator of a long standing pattern of such links as well.

quote- bold headings added for clarity:

[Malaria:] “Several attempts were made to identify the DNA of Plasmodium falciparum in the human
remains, one of the parasites responsible for malaria. Rabino Massa et al. (2000) used immunological
tests to screen 80 mummies from the site of Gebelen near Luxor, Egypt dated
to 3200 BCE. Th e Plasmodium antigen (histidine-rich protein PfHRP-2) was found in 43%
of samples (and in 92% of samples with porotic hyperostosis). Such a high frequency of cases
caused doubts concerning the specifi city of the antigen based test (Nerlich et al. 2008).

A positive Plasmodium identifi cation via immunological methods was also reported for a Granville 50 Mateusz Baca, Martyna Molak mummy—a 50 year old woman from the site of Gurna, Egypt dated to 700 BCE (Miller et al. 1994). Reexamination of this specimen using PCR-based methods yielded negative results.
Th ese results could be due to the diff erential preservation of DNA and proteins in
this individual, but serious doubt concerning the reliability of the immunological test arose
(Taylor et al. 1997). A recent survey of Nerlich et al. (2008) yielded more realistic results. 91
specimens were screened for Plasmodium DNA, 7 from the Predynastic to Early Dynastic site
of Abydos (3500–2800 BCE), 42 from a Middle Kingdom tomb in Th ebes West (2050–1650
BCE), and 42 from other tombs also from Th ebes West, dated from the Middle Kingdom
until the Late Period. PCR of a fragment of a pfcrt gene (P. falciparum chloroquine-resistance
transporter gene) was attempted and resulted in two positive amplifi cations. Th e specifi -
city of the obtained PCR products was confi rmed by carrying out the sequencing in two
independent laboratories.

[Diptheria:] Zink et al. (2001c) screened 450 individuals from Th ebes West searching for Corynebacterium
diphtheriae, the pathogenic bacteria responsible for diphtheria. Of the 40 samples that
yielded amplifi able DNA, one positive PCR result was obtained with starters targeting eubacterial
16S rDNA. Th e presence of Corynebacterium spp. DNA was confi rmed in only
one specimen, the head of a woman buried in Dra Abu el Nega (Th ebes West) dated to
1580–1080 BCE. A specifi c identifi cation of Corynebacterium diphtheriae species was not possible.
However, in conjunction with inscriptions found in the tomb describing the treatment
of a disease bearing resemblance to diphtheria, the presence of C. diphtheriae seems likely.
Th e presence of Corynebacterium diphtheriae in the ancient mummy was not surprising, since
diphtheria is common even in contemporary Egypt.

[Leishmaniasis:] Another parasite detected in human remains via aDNA analysis is the Leishmania donovani
complex; the parasite causing leishmaniasis. Zink et al. (2006) searched for L. donovani DNA in
91 bone samples from the above-mentioned Egyptian sites of Th ebes West and Abydos and in
70 samples from Nubian sites at Kulubnarti, Sudan. Th ese sites were early Christian cemeteries
dated from 550 to 750 CE and from 750 to 1500 CE. DNA sequences specifi c to Leishmania spp.
were PCR amplifi ed from 4 Egyptian and 9 Nubian samples. Based on frequencies of bacterial
presence, the authors conclude that leishmaniasis was endemic in Nubia during the 6th–8th centuries
CE. An examination of earlier samples would most likely have led to similar results since
Sudan (or East Africa in general) is considered as a place of origin of visceral leishmaniasis (Zink
et al. 2006). As all the Egyptian samples containing L. donovani DNA came exclusively from
a Middle Kingdom tomb and no samples from earlier periods yielded bacteria-positive results,
the authors suggest that the introduction of leishmaniasis to Egypt may have taken place during
the Middle Kingdom.

Th e presence of L. donovani in Egypt implies close trade contacts
between these countries as the distribution of L. donovani is closely associated with its vector
the phlebotomine sandfl y, which is absent in Nile Valley.
Zink et al. (2000) described a single case of bacteremia discovered when an infant mummy
from the Th ebes West cemetery was studied. Th e mummy was dated to 1000–750 BCE.
Genetic analysis revealed the presence of the DNA of several bacterial species, including Escherichia
coli, Frateuria auranta, and Halobacillus spp. Post mortem spread of E. coli through the
body was ruled out.”

From:
–Bioarchaeology of the Near East, 2:39–61 (2008)
Research on ancient DNA in the Near East
Mateusz Baca*1, Martyna Molak2