Jomon genomes carry UCP1, FTO and APOA5 variants far more often than later populations
DNA from 42 Jomon individuals, 25 newly sequenced, finds UCP1, FTO and APOA5 variants far above today's frequencies. Those gaps describe a population, not what the variants do in one person today.
Science··Night
FTO and APOA5 frequencies in 42 Jomon individuals sit far above today's
DNA from 42 Jomon individuals, 25 of them newly sequenced, places the split from mainland East Eurasians between 27,000 and 19,000 years ago and finds variants of the fat-handling genes UCP1, FTO and APOA5 at frequencies far above today's, a University of Tokyo team reports in Science Advances. Roughly three Jomon in four carried the FTO variants against one in five people in present-day Central Asia and Siberia, and 89 per cent carried the APOA5 variant against 29 per cent of modern East Asians. Yusuke Watanabe and Hiroki Oota tie the pattern to brown fat giving off heat without shivering during the coldest phase of the Ice Age, and report northern Siberian ancestry in the Jomon gene pool with no Denisova component unique to them. Frequency differences of this kind describe a population, and say nothing about what any of these variants does in one person today.[1]
Carbon in a Singhbhum chert layer was dated to 3.497 billion years ago
A folded, carbon-rich chert in the Singhbhum Craton of eastern India preserves microscopic alternating carbonaceous and siliceous laminae that the authors read as a microbial mat remnant; uranium-lead dating of zircon puts the layer at 3.497 billion years, they report in PNAS. Trisrota Chaudhuri and colleagues combine carbon isotope ratios with Raman spectroscopy to argue that the carbon is biological in origin rather than mineral. They state the central difficulty themselves: abiotic chemistry can leave signatures that look like biomarkers, so identification has to be argued carefully. Whether this becomes the oldest accepted trace of life depends on other groups reproducing both the zircon age and the biological reading of the carbon, neither of which has happened yet.[2]
A Theban Tomb 209 side chamber holds 16 mummies placed around bodies already there
Excavation of Side Chamber 3 in Theban Tomb 209 recovered 16 mummified people, 1,444 bones, one mummified dog and a further 1,775 bone fragments from at least four more individuals. The sequence runs from the early Dynasty 25 to the Ptolemaic period. The paper in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reports that the earliest Dynasty 25 burials were individual and coffined, while later depositions were fitted into occupied ground, raising density and stacking bodies vertically. Co-author Jared Carballo-Perez of the University of La Laguna says the arrangement shows a spatial logic in which each new deposition adapted to the bodies already present. The tomb, likely built for a high official of Nubian origin named Nisemro, sits in an active drainage channel of the Wadi Hatasun and flooded repeatedly, which complicates the stratigraphy the reconstruction rests on.[3]
