A new study finds that atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, was common in ancient Egyptians, challenging a belief that vascular disease is a modern affliction caused by current-day risk factors such as stress and sedentary lifestyles. Michael Miyamoto, MD, a graduate of the UC San Diego School of Medicine and assistant clinical professor, recently returned to the US following an expedition to Egypt to evaluate the prevalence of cardiovascular disease in 3,500-year-old mummies. Results of his work were presented during the American Heart Associate 2009 Scientific Sessions and published simultaneously in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Miyamoto and team carefully examined 22 mummies from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities using a six-slice CT scanner (UCSD)

“Our findings show that atherosclerosis is not strictly a disease of modern humans caused by unhealthy lifestyles,” said Miyamoto, a cardiologist and co-investigator of the study. “In fact, it is possible that humans have a genetic predisposition to the development of atherosclerosis. Our findings remind us of the value of preventive medicine in eliminating or controlling manifestations of heart and vascular disease.”

In 2009, Miyamoto and a team of cardiologists and Egyptologists, carefully examined 22 mummies from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities using a six-slice CT scanner.  In the mummies with identifiable arteries, more than half had calcifications in the walls of their arteries. Those who died after the age of 45 showed the highest degree of calcification. Vascular disease was observed in both male and female mummies.

“As the mummy CT images appeared on the monitor, we were struck by the fact that our project was made possible by combining the advanced technologies of two different eras – the science of mummification in ancient Egypt and modern imaging,” said Miyamoto. “In a real sense, this was a scientific collaboration that spanned great time and distance.”

A UCSD School of Medicine graduate finds that atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, was common in ancient Egyptians (UCSD)

The oldest mummified Egyptian exhibiting the greatest degree of atherosclerosis was Lady Rai. The nursemaid to Queen Ahmose Nefertiti, Lady Rai lived to an age between 30 and 40 years old circa 1530 B.C. To put this in context, Lady Rai lived approximately 300 years prior to the time of Moses and two hundred years prior to King Tutankhamun.

Surprised by their results, the cardiologists asked the Egyptian preservation team to share information about the lifestyle of ancient Egypt. In general, all who were later mummified, served in the court of the Pharaoh or as priests or priestesses. Diet-wise, eating beef, duck and other poultry was not uncommon. Since refrigeration was unavailable, salt was widely used for meat preservation. Tobacco was not available and without mechanical transportation, they were likely physically active.

This study was funded by Siemens Healthcare and the Bank of Egypt.

The authors of the paper are Michael I. Miyamoto, MD, MS, UC San Diego; L. Samuel Wann, MD Wisconsin Heart Hosp; Randall C Thompson, MD, Mid America Heart Institute; Adel H Allam, MD, Al Azhar Medical School; Abd el-Halim Nur el-Din, PhD and Gomma Ab el-Maksoud, PhD, Cairo Univ; Ibrahem Badr, PhD, Institute of Restoration; Hany Abd el-Amer, Natl Res Ctr, Dokki; Jennifer J Thomas, Massachusetts General Hospital and Gregory S Thomas, UC Irvine.

– UCSD Medical Center -

Already 40,000 years ago people fed themselves to a large degree on fish.

The isotopic analysis of a bone from one of the earliest modern humans in Asia, the 40,000 year old skeleton from Tianyuan Cave in the Zhoukoudian region of China (near Beijing), by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Washington University in Saint Louis has shown that this individual was a regular fish consumer (PNAS, 07.07.2009).

Fig.: Lower mandible of the 40 000 year old human skeleton, found in the Tianyuan Cave near Beijing. Analyses of collagen extracted from this bone prove that this individual was a regular consumer of fish. Image: Hong Shang / Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing

Freshwater fish are a major part of the diet of many peoples around the world, but it has been unclear when fish became a significant part of the year-round diet for early humans. Chemical analysis of the protein collagen, using ratios of the isotopes of nitrogen and sulphur in particular, can show whether such fish consumption was an occasional treat or part of the staple diet.

The isotopic analysis of the diet of one of the earliest modern humans in Asia, the 40,000 year old skeleton from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, has shown that at least this individual was a regular fish consumer. Michael Richards of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explains “Carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of the human and associated faunal remains indicate a diet high in animal protein, and the high nitrogen isotope values suggest the consumption of freshwater fish.” To confirm this inference the researchers measured the sulphur isotope values of terrestrial and freshwater animals around the Zhoukoudian area and of the Tianyuan human.

Since fish appeared on the menu of modern humans before consistent evidence for effective fishing gear appeared, fishing at this level must have involved considerable effort. This shift to more fish in the diet likely reflects greater pressure from an expanding population at the time of modern human emergence across Eurasia. “This analysis provides the first direct evidence for the consumption of aquatic resources by early modern humans in China and has implications for early modern human subsistence and demography”, says Richards.

Original work:

Yaowu Hu, Hong Shang, Haowen Tong, Olaf Nehlich, Wu Liu, Chaohong Zhao, Jincheng Yu, Changsui Wang, Erik Trinkaus, Michael P. Richards
Stable Isotope Dietary Analysis of the Tianyuan 1 Early Modern Human
PNAS. July 7, 2009. Vol. 106, No. 27

Max Planck Society

Thanks to the skills of artists who work on cold case investigations, people have a chance to see what the Oriental Institute’s mummy Meresamun may have looked like in real life.

Chicago Artist Josh Harker used a digital version of traditional forensic reconstruction to create this image of the face of the mummy Meresamun (Josh Harker)

A Chicago forensic artist and a police artist in Maryland prepared the images, which depict an engaging woman in her late 20s as she would have looked in 800 B.C. Both artists, though working independently, produced strikingly similar images. The drawings are on display at the Oriental Institute Museum, and have been placed on the institute’s Web site (http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/special/meresamun/), on Meresamun’s Facebook page, her Wikipedia listing and on YouTube.

Dr. Michael Vannier, Professor of Radiology, began the process of restoring the mummy’s facial features with two exhaustive CT examinations of Meresamun in 2008 at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“A huge number of CT scans of the skull were used to create a 3-D digital model of Meresamun’s skull,” said Emily Teeter, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute an curator of a museum exhibition about the mummy. “Those files were given to forensic artists who use methods employed in cold case investigations where skeletal remains need to be identified.”

The Oriental Institute wanted to compare multiple reconstructions, in order to obtain a trustworthy image of Meresamun’s face. Both a digital version of the traditional forensic reconstruction and a missing person-type sketch were submitted.

In the traditional forensic method, layers of fat, muscle and flesh are built up upon the skull. Starting with a three-dimensional image of the skull created from multiple CT scans, Chicago artist Joshua Harker used a technique known as the Gatliff-Snow American Tissue Depth Marker Method to calculate the contours of the face to digitally recreate Meresamun’s appearance.

Police sketch artist Michael Brassel used produced a missing persons type rendering of how Meresamun may have looked. (Michael Brassel)

“The skull is the driving architecture of the face—all the proportions and placements are there, if know how to read it,” Harker explained. “Even the shapes of the lips, nose and eyebrows can be determined if you know what to look for,”

The American Tissue Depth Marker method has been shown to be effective in accurately reconstructing a face, both in identifying victims and as admissible evidence in court.

“I try not to make any assumptions without expert direction, whether that be from an anthropologist regarding the race, gender or age, or from and expert like Emily Teeter who can give me an accurate description about details based on historical evidence,” Harker said. “I am ecstatic that my reconstruction of Meresamun has been so well received by the community who knows the most about her.”

Michael Brassell, who works with the Department of Justice/Maryland State Police Missing Persons Unit, used his skills as a trained sketch artist to produce a second, more traditional reconstruction.

“The project was no different then any of the postmortems drawings I have worked on for cold case homicides. The CT scans were very clear, making my job easy,” he said. “If this was a homicide case, I would almost go as far to guarantee a hit on the profile drawing.”

Meresamun lived in Thebes (ancient Luxor) about 800 B.C. and died of undetermined causes about age 29-30. An exhibit, “The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt,” features her mummy and coffin and will be featured through Dec. 6 at the Oriental Institute Museum. A video display allows visitors to view features of Meresamun’s physical state and perform a “virtual unwrapping” of the mummy, enabling them to see how it was prepared. Advanced digital techniques have made it possible to recreate Meresamun’s appearance.

She was tall by ancient standards—5-and-a-half feet—her features were regular with wide-spaced eyes and she had an overbite. “Meresamun was, until the time of her death at about 30, a very healthy woman,” Vannier said. “The lack of arrest lines on her bones indicates good nutrition through her lifetime and her well-mineralized bones suggest that she lived an active lifestyle.”

Become a Facebook friend to Mummy Meresamun: http://www.facebook.com/people/Mummy-Meresamun/1132595122

The University of Chicago

A research team from the Geological Survey Institute (GSI) and the University of Wollongong (UOW) recently excavated an almost complete 200,000-year-old elephant skeleton from a terrace adjacent to the Solo River in East Java, Indonesia.

Close-up of some of the elephant bones excavated from the site in Indonesia Photo courtesy of Iwan Kurniawan from the Geological Survey Institute

It was first exposed in the walls of a sand quarry but took the researchers almost four weeks to remove the overlying sand, excavate the bones, and encase them in plaster for transport back to the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java.

When properly conserved and assembled, the skeleton will later be displayed in the museum. The find has already triggered widespread interest among the Indonesian media and general public.

“This is a really significant find”, said Dr Gert van den Bergh, a UOW palaeontologist who helped with the excavation and will analyse the remains.

“It is one of the most complete elephant skeletons ever recovered in Indonesia, is of an extinct species and is of enormous size — much bigger than modern-day Asian elephants with the femur alone being 1.2 metres long,” Dr van den Bergh said.

“Normally, such dead animals would have been ripped apart and eaten by carnivores. Last year, for instance, the same team found the skull of an enormous tiger in the same general area. But it appears that the elephant became bogged in the river shallows, perished and was quickly covered by sands – about 200,000 years ago.  Parts of the skeleton were still articulated when found,” he said.

The excavation was part of collaborative research project between Indonesian and Australian researchers led by institutional counterparts Professor Mike Morwood (UOW) and Professor Fachroel Aziz (GSI). The project is funded by the Australian Research Council.

University of Wollongong

BERKELEY — In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, Calif., shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.

A fossil sea lion, Allodesmus, exposed in the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed during excavations in 1960 by UC Berkeley's Jere Lipps and Edward Mitchell, now at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The entire skeleton (skull is at bottom center) was collected by Lipps and Mitchell and was on display in the museum for decades. For scale, the pick is three feet long. (Jere Lipps/UC Berkeley photo)

Yet, new research by a team of paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Utah paints a less catastrophic picture. Instead of a sudden die-off, the researchers say that the bone bed is a 700,000-year record of normal life and death, kept free of sediment by unusual climatic conditions between 15 million and 16 million years ago.

The team’s interpretation of the fossils and the geology to establish the origins of the bone bed, the richest and most extensive marine deposit of bones in the world, are presented in the June 2009 issue of the journal Geology.

The mix of shark bones and teeth, turtle shells three times the size of today’s leatherbacks, and ancient whale, seal, dolphin and fish skeletons, comprise a unique six-to-20-inch-thick layer of fossil bones, 10 miles of it exposed, that covers nearly 50 square miles just outside and northeast of Bakersfield.

Since the bed’s discovery in the 1850s, paleontologists have battled over an obvious question: How did the bones get there? Was this a killing ground for megalodon, a 40-foot version of today’s great white shark? Was it a long-term breeding area for seals and other marine mammals, like Mexico’s Scammon’s lagoon is for the California gray whale? Did a widespread catastrophe, like a red tide or volcanic eruption, lead to a massive die-off?

The new and extensive study of the fossils and the geology of Sharktooth Hill tells a less dramatic story, but an important one, for understanding the origin of rich fossil accumulations, said Nicholas Pyenson, a former UC Berkeley graduate student who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.

“If you look at the geology of this fossil bed, it’s not intuitive how it formed,” Pyenson said. “We really put together all lines of evidence, with the fossil evidence being a big part of it, to obtain a snapshot of that period of time.”

Pyenson and his colleagues, totaling five UC Berkeley Ph.D.s and UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Jere Lipps, hope that the study will draw renewed attention to the bone bed, which Lipps said needs protection even though a small portion of it was added to the National Natural Landmark registry in 1976.

“This deposit, if properly developed, would look just like Dinosaur National Monument,” said Lipps, referring to a popular park in Colorado and Utah. “(Sharktooth Hill) is actually much more extensive, and the top of the bone bed has complete, articulated skeletons of seals and other marine mammals.”

One 12-foot-long fossil seal skeleton that Lipps helped excavate during the 50 years he has visited the bone bed was mounted and displayed for decades at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), which houses thousands of fossils excavated from the Sharktooth Hill deposits during expeditions in the 1960s and 1980s. Other collections are in the California Academy of Sciences, San Diego Natural History Museum, Buena Vista Museum of Natural History in Bakersfield, and UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where students over the years have made studies of the bone bed’s extinct sea turtles, sharks, marine mammals and seabirds. Lipps is a faculty curator in the UCMP.

A reconstructed skeleton of the extinct seal Allodesmus from the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed, now on display at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

The paper’s other coauthors – all of whom obtained their Ph.D.s from UC Berkeley – are Randall B. Irmis, now an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, and Lawrence G. Barnes, Edward D. Mitchell Jr. and Samuel A. McLeod of NHM’s Department of Vertebrate Paleontology.

When the bone bed formed between 15,900,000 and 15,200,000 years ago, the climate was warming, sea level was at a peak, California’s Central Valley was an inland sea dubbed the Temblor Sea and the emerging Sierra Nevada was shoreline. By closely studying the geology of the Sharktooth Hill area, the paleontologists determined that it was part of an underwater shelf in a large embayment, directly opposite a wide opening to the sea.

Pyenson and Irmis examined some 3,000 fossilized bone and teeth specimens in the collections of many museums, including the NHM and UCMP, and they and Lipps also cut out a meter-square section of the bone bed, complete with the rock layers above and below, and transported it to UC Berkeley for study.

Below the bone bed, they found several feet of mudstone interlaced with shrimp burrows, typical of ocean floor sediment several hundred to several thousand feet below the surface. The bone bed itself averaged 200 bones per square meter, most of them larger bones, with almost no sediment. Most were disarticulated, as if the animal carcasses had decayed and their bones had been scattered by currents.

“The bones look a bit rotten,” Lipps said, “as if they lay on the seafloor for a long time and were abraded by water with sand in it.” Many bones had manganese nodules and growths, which form on bones that sit for long periods in sea water before being covered by sediment.

Toward the top of the bone bed, some articulated skeletons of seals and whales were found, while in the layer above the bone bed, most skeletons were articulated and encased in sediment.

The team’s conclusion is that the climatic conditions were such that currents carried sediment around the bone beds for 100,000 to 700,000 years, during which time bones remained exposed on the ocean floor and accumulated in a big and shifting pile.

Teeth such as this from the extinct 40-foot-long shark Carcharocles megalodon are common in the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed because, like modern sharks, these extinct sharks also shed teeth throughout their lives.

Given the rarity of bones marked by shark bites, plus the occurrence of terrestrial animals such as tapirs and horses that must have washed out to sea, predation by sharks like Carcharocles megalodon seems unlikely to have been the major source of the bone bed, the authors wrote. Because of few young or juvenile specimens, the team also discounted the hypothesis that this was a breeding ground for early seals such as Allodesmus. The absence of volcanic ash makes a volcanic catastrophe unlikely, while the presence of land mammal fossils makes red tide an unlikely cause.

“These animals were dying over the whole area, but no sediment deposition was going on, possibly related to rising sea levels that snuffed out silt and sand deposition or restricted it to the very near-shore environment,” Pyenson said. “Once sea level started going down, then more sediment began to erode from near shore.”

Pyenson noted that, while bone beds around the world occur in diverse land and marine environments, the team’s analysis of the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed could have implications for other fossil-rich marine deposits.

The work was funded by UCMP and UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology, as well as by grants from the Geological Society of America and the American Museum of Natural History, and graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation.

By Robert Sanders – University of California, Berkeley