Recently the papers have been filled with news about a creature brought back to life out of ancient history. The “Dire Wolf” was an enormous canine carnivore found in the Americas from about 125,000 years ago, dying out only 10,000 years before the present day. Firstly, let’s get some misapprehensions about this ancient creature out of the way. It was nowhere near as enormous as most people think, nothing like the huge animals seen in Game of Thrones for example. Dire wolves were about as large as American timber wolves, the largest barely reaching 70 kg or 150 lb. What did make the dire wolf unusual was its enormous jaw and powerful bite, akin to a modern-day hyena but thought to be even stronger. This makes sense for a predator in the late Pleistocene, facing off against the giant herbivores of that era. It needed a strong bite to stand any chance of bringing down a mastodon, or a giant ground sloth. With the loss of these herbivores due to climate change and hunting by humans, the dire wolf also died out. But now, a new claim has been made that the dire wolf is back! A team from Colossal Biosciences has claimed that, using cloning and gene editing, they have produced three dire wolf pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi (we were rolling our eyes, too). Is this the first successful resurrection of an extinct species? Well, not really. The puppies look cute, but these are not in any way connected to the original, American dire wolves. Nor does it seem that any actual cloning was involved. Cloning is a process whereby the existing genetic material is harvested from one creature, transferred into (usually) stem cells or other suitable material, and then grown into an identical copy of the original organism. This has been done before, but only with extant species, and an extinct animal has never been cloned before. Nor have these dire wolves been cloned, they are not exact genetic copies of a long-dead dire wolves. These pups are gray wolves which have had their genes manipulated. Using genetic “references” from a 13,000 year old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000 year old dire wolf ear bone, Colossal Biosciences have modified 14 gray wolf genes to try to make these pups resemble the ancient dire wolf. The pups, born from domestic dogs which were used as surrogate mothers, are therefore genetically modified hybrid gray wolves (Canis lupus), not dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus). They are not in any way related to the original dire wolf, which is form an entirely separate evolutionary genus. Nor are gray wolves themselves descended from dire wolves, the two separating from a shared common ancestor as much as 6 million years ago. So what we have here are a dire wolf “inspired” creature which was made from extant wolves and domestic dogs. These dog/wolf hybrids are a genetic cosplay, an exercise in genetic engineering which appears to come from the “wouldn’t it be cool if” school of scientific research. Of course, this hasn’t stopped the headline grabbing claims and publicity of this kind never hurt anyone. But to call these dire wolves, as in the apex predator from ancient America, is untrue. Header Image: The skeleton of an actual dire wolf from the La Brea Tar Pits, very different from whatever these new “dire wolves” are. Source: Jonathan Chen / CC BY-SA 4.0.
Study of Ancient Genes Reveals a Dark Skinned Europe Until 3,000 Years Ago
A new study of ancient DNA has completely changed our understanding of the peoples who lived in Stone Age and Bronze Age Europe. It was only about 1000 BC, well into the Iron Age, that we first saw light skinned individuals emerge on the continent. The study, published in BiorXiv, concludes that lighter skin and associated features such as green or blue eyes probably evolved several times over the course of human history, in response to migration from African into areas with lower UV radiation such as Europe. The study reaches back as far as 45,000 years ago and concludes that, for the vast majority of that time, this evolutionary change had not occurred and Europeans shared the same skin tone as their African ancestors. Absorption of UV radiation is essential for the production of Vitamin D and, all things being equal, paler skin is better at absorbing it. This would suggest that paler skins in more northern regions with less UV radiation would be a key advantage. The previous theoretical consensus was that lightening pigmentation would evolve gradually and in a linear fashion in response to the different conditions in Europe, but this was not the case. However there were other changes during the period which shed an interesting light on the evolution of Europeans. While the skin remained dark, eye color changed in a less predictable fashion. Eyes got paler until the Mesolithic, the middle Stone Age between roughly 15,000 and 5,000 years ago. At this point Europeans were predominantly dark skinned and blue eyed (as were the Neanderthals of the region, an interesting bit of convergent evolution). However from this point the number of dark eyes in the population began to increase again, for an unknown reason. Similarly, the team also saw evidence of localized variations suggesting that specific circumstances (and smaller, more isolated gene pools) could result in faster or more radical changes. Take for example the Neolithic farmers of Western Eurasia. These populations were faced with a wildly different lifestyle to their ancestors, and the pace of change for these peoples was accordingly a swift one. Gone were the semi-nocturnal hunter gatherer communities of forests and grasslands, adapted to long distance aerobic exercise and with their diet of meats and wild vegetables. In their place there was a people used to long daylight hours spent on heavy labor in a single place, tied to the land they cultivated. These farmers, in isolated communities, slowly developed paler skin at varying rates, but all generally faster than the Stone Age predecessors. This suggests a change in behavioral habits was also key to developing lighter skin, and that the environment alone was not a genetic disadvantage of darker skinned Neolithic humans. The changes to the diet of the Neolithic farmer resulted in less Vitamin D being taken in from foodstuffs. This meant that a paler skin was necessary for such communities to survive in health, and this is indeed what appears to have happened. And of course the study is far from conclusive. There may well have been isolated populations in the early Stone Age with paler skin, but only more research can tell us for sure. Header Image: Reconstruction of an early (between 37,000 and 42,000 years old) European Homo sapiens based on bones found in the cave Peştera cu Oase (Romania). Source: Daniela Hitzemann (photograph) / CC BY-SA 4.0.
Armenian Genome Mapping Proves Herodotus was Wrong, Again
A new study has analyzed a large whole genome dataset of the Armenian population. The study, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, has caught out at least one ancient historian. The Armenians, an ancient peoples of West Asia, can be dated back thousands of years. Darius the Great of Persia spoke of them in the 6th century BC, as did the Greeks, both talking as if of a long-established culture. They were one peoples among many, and the tangled web of their origins was not always clear. It’s always nice to know how things came to be as they are, and happily the Armenians had an answer: they called themselves the Hay, they were descended from Hayk, and Hayk was descended from Noah. As ethnic origin stories go this is all great stuff, but somewhat light on actual facts. Other theories existed alongside this one, and the ancient Greek historian Herodotus had his own ideas. He saw the Armenians as “colonists” of the Phrygians, settlers from the Balkans and the major culture in western Anatolia following the Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th century BC. Herodotus likely claimed this because he knew of Armenians in the Phrygian army, decked out in Phrygian gear and looking straightforwardly like more Phrygians. But, as the new study shows, in this case he was completely wrong. The study includes both newly generated Armenian genomes alongside genetic information from ancient Armenians. Both are compared to both modern and ancient genetic data from the Balkans, and the results show no link between the populations. The study also unraveled another misconception regarding the Sasun population, a genetically distinct population of Armenians. It was thought throughout both ancient and modern history that this was because the Sasun were part Assyrian, the “sons of [Assyrian king] Sennacherib” as one source from the 5th century AD has it. But analysis of Sasun genetic data shows they were distinct not because they gained Assyrian genes, but because they lost Armenian ones. The distinctiveness of the Sasun comes from a bottleneck in their genetic past which eliminated many genes found in the wider population. So, who are the Armenians if not Phrygians? It seems the Armenians were locals who show some influence from Greek presumed refugees from the Bronze Age Collapse, but further work needs to be done to understand who they originally were. For now we just know who Armenians are not. Original Study: Demographic history and genetic variation of the Armenian population Header Image: Armenians depicted in Persepolis. Gene analysis has disproven theories of their Balkan origin held since antiquity. Source: Phillip Maiwald (Nikopol) / CC BY-SA 3.0.
