DNA Confirms Viking Warrior Woman

Shades of Lagertha Viking skeleton’s DNA test proves historians wrong

The remains of a powerful Viking — long thought to be a man — was in fact a real-life Xena Warrior Princess, a study released Friday reveals.

The lady war boss was buried in the mid-10th century along with deadly weapons and two horses, leading archaeologists and historians to assume she was a man, according to the findings published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Wrong.

“It’s actually a woman, somewhere over the age of 30 and fairly tall, too, measuring around [5 feet 6 inches] tall,” archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University, who conducted the study, told The Local.

And she was likely in charge.

“Aside from the complete warrior equipment buried along with her — a sword, an ax, a spear, armor-piercing arrows, a battle knife, shields, and two horses — she had a board game in her lap, or more of a war-planning game used to try out battle tactics and strategies, which indicates she was a powerful military leader,” Hedenstierna-Jonson said. “She’s most likely planned, led and taken part in battles.”

The discovery marks the first genetic proof that women were Viking warriors, according to science publication Phys.org.

The Viking grave was first found and excavated by Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe in the late 1800s.

But a few years ago, osteologist Anna Kjellström of Stockholm University noticed its skeleton had fine cheekbones and feminine hip bones, researches said.

They conducted DNA analysis and confirmed it was a female.

The old stories score another victory.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Joy Harmon up on time at The Other McCain.

DNA Ties Philistines to the Greeks

Caravaggio - David with the head of Goliath

Scholars say Philistine genes help solve biblical mystery

Goliath the Greek? Human remains from an ancient cemetery in southern Israel have yielded precious bits of DNA that a new study says help prove the European origin of the Philistines — the enigmatic nemeses of the biblical Israelites.

The Philistines mostly resided in five cities along the southern coast of what is today Israel and the Gaza Strip during the early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago. In the Bible, David fought the Philistine giant Goliath in a duel, and Samson slew a thousand of their warriors with the jawbone of an ass.

Many archaeologists have proposed they migrated to the coast of the ancient Near East during a period of upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C.

Rubens - Samson and Delilah

I remember hearing that years ago, probably when, as a teenager, I read all of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization

The Philistines emerged as other societies around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed, possibly because of a cataclysmic intersection of climate change and man-made disasters. Philistine ceramics bear similarities to styles found in the Aegean, but concrete evidence of their geographic origins has remained elusive.

Now, a study of genetic material extracted from skeletons unearthed in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon in 2013 has found a DNA link. It connects the Philistines to populations in southern Europe during the Bronze Age.

Dyck van Antoon - Samson and Delilah 

The study, spearheaded by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute and Wheaton College in Illinois, was published Wednesday in the research journal Science Advances.

The biblical account relates that the Philistines originally hailed from a distant isle. An Egyptian temple built by Rameses III bears reliefs of battles with “Sea Peoples” who appeared on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. One group listed in the Egyptian text is strikingly similar to the Hebrew name for Philistines. Excavations of Philistine sites have found ceramics and architecture that differed from those of their neighbors in ancient Canaan.

Gustav Dore - David and Goliath

But archaeologists can’t be absolutely certain that different pots mean different people.

Eric Cline, an archaeologist from George Washington University specializing in the Late Bronze Age in the Near East, said conclusive evidence has eluded scientists until now — even if the material remains have indicated that the Philistines migrated to the Levant from the Aegean around 1200 B.C.

Cline, who was not involved in the study, is the author of “1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” which examines the period when the Philistines arrived. He called the paper’s findings “extremely exciting and very important” by helping resolve the long-standing mystery about their origins.

Cheap and reliable DNA sequencing is revolutionizing  history.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Cynthia Kirchner up on time and within budget.

Reason #6716 That Trump Was Elected

Rapid DNA testing reveals a THIRD of migrants faked family relationship with children to claim asylum during ICE pilot of the procedure in Texas

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement pilot of new rapid DNA testing at the border has found that nearly a third of those tested were not biologically related to the children in their custody.

So what do they do with the children being used to perpetrate these frauds; try to seek out their true parents and return them, or just put them into the "Obama cells?"

ICE conducted the pilot for a few days earlier this month in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, finding about 30 per cent of those tested were not related to the children they claimed were their own, an official told the Washington Examiner.

The official said that these were not cases of step-fathers or adoptive parents. 'Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members,' the official said.

It is unclear whether every family unit was tested during the pilot, or only those who raised some sort of red flag. An ICE spokesman did not immediately respond to request for comment.

At 30%, I suspect some sort of screening was used to select cases more likely to represent fraud, mostly to find out if this technology is worth the trouble. I hope that once ID fraud of any sort is detected by DNA (or any other positive means for that matter), the perpetrator is put on a list permanently barring them from claiming refugee status.

The official said that some migrants did refuse the test and admit that they were not related to the children they were with, when they learned their claim would be subjected to DNA proof.ICE said the Department of Homeland Security would look at the results of the pilot to determine whether to roll out rapid DNA tests more broadly.

After President Donald Trump's administration backpedaled on 'family separation' in the face of enormous backlash last summer, the number of family units arriving at the southern border has skyrocketed. Current U.S. law and policy means that Central Americans who cross the border illegally with children can claim asylum and avoid any lengthy detention in most cases.

I would advocate for taking DNA samples from all people apprehended at the border as a positive ID. Once border jumpers learn that attempted family unit fraud and multiple fake IDs result in their being flagged for immediate deportation, it should significantly reduce the motivation to attempt it.

Linked by EBL in Bon Jovi: Someday I'll Be Saturday Night, Etta James: Never My Love, Memorial Day 2019, Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini: Dead To Me, Jess Glynne: Thursday, The Bangles: Manic Monday, Arya Sails West and Mia Sabathy 白彌兒.

Need Your DNA Repaired? Have a Cup of Coffee!

Tip: Drink This Much Coffee to Repair DNA

Coffee, it seems, prevents or somehow leads to the repair of damaged DNA, at least according to the findings of some researchers from Bratislava. Their paper, published in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reported that drinking 500 ml of freshly brewed, dark roast coffee every day for 4 weeks resulted in a 23% reduction in DNA "strand breaks".

Their study involved 100 healthy men and women recruited from a general Central European population. The subjects were randomized into a coffee group and a water group. (No double-blind placebo design was necessary because we're all going with the assumption that DNA isn't susceptible to the placebo effect.)

Well maybe, but the ability of people to defeat what appears to be good science with bias is absolutely amazing. At a minimum, scoring the DNA damage should have been scrupulously blind.

The scientists concluded that "...the regular consumption of a dark roast blend has a beneficial protective effect on human DNA integrity in both men and women."

Perhaps that 23% reduction in DNA damage might have been enough to save the Hulk, or at least resulted in him being a couple of shades of green lighter and a little less aggravated.

DNA is the repository of genetic information in the cell, and it's crucial that its integrity remain intact. Unfortunately, because of a relentless attack from the environment (sunlight, chemicals, radiation, working out, and oxidative damage in general), our punch-drunk cells can experience as many as 1,000,000 DNA changes a day. Unrepaired, these changes can result in mutations and possibly disease.

Sucks to get old, but the alternative, is also undesirable.

It's a pretty safe bet these mutations won't turn you into the Hulk, but they may cause you to grow a green, hulking tumor on your liver.

Most of the time, through the action of various enzymes, our body repairs a lot of this damage. Still, it could always use some help. That's why it seems smart to consider drinking about 16 ounces of dark roast coffee (the amount used in the Bratislava study) per day to protect DNA integrity.

Coffee's protective effects on DNA might explain why other studies have shown it to have profound effects on lifespan. Case in point, a 2012 mortality study of 400,000 people published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that coffee drinkers had between 6 and 16 percent fewer deaths.

6 to 16% of who or what? Everybody dies in the end. Nobody gets out alive yet. But I'm still drinking coffee.

Even more impressive was a Japanese study from The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that showed that coffee drinkers were 24% less likely to die during a 19-year follow-up period. The sweet spot, at least in these studies, seems to be between 3 and 4 cups a day of regular or decaf.

Coffee has over 1,000 biologically active compounds, so it'd be one caffeine headache of an investigative task to figure out which, or which combination, of these chemicals was responsible.

 A regular fountain of unknown drugs!

However, two common coffee polyphenols – caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid – have been shown in studies to cause changes in DNA methylation, thus suppressing tumor formation and reducing inflammation in general.

While the Slavic researchers used a dark roast Arabica, studies have shown that there's a higher content of polyphenolic compounds in light or medium roasts. It seems that the more intensely you roast a coffee, the more antioxidant potential you lose (through loss of polyphenols).

So coffee is good for you, but over-roasted Starbucks is less good for you?  Good to know.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Naomi Wu up on time and within budget.

CSI: Chesapeake Bay

Sampling River Herring

eDNA emerges as powerful tool for tracking threatened river herring in Chesapeake Bay

Using environmental DNA (eDNA) to track the presence of fish in waterways is emerging as a powerful tool to detect and understand the abundance of species in aquatic environments. However, relatively few studies have compared the performance of this emerging technology to traditional catch or survey approaches in the field.

Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center field tested using eDNA--tracking the presence of fish by identifying DNA that has been left behind in the water--to detect river herring in tributaries of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. They found that tracking and quantifying herring DNA from the environment corresponded well to more traditional field methods and has great potential to assist future monitoring efforts of river herring abundance and habitat use.

"Sampling a single river, you need a net, crew, permits, it can be expensive," said study author Louis Plough of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "The eDNA approach is an alternative where you just take water and you get an idea of the abundance of fish."

River Herring jumping a small rapid.

Accurate information on how many fish are in a river system and where they travel is essential to understanding their ecology and how to manage the fishery in increasingly human-impacted environments. Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling has recently emerged as a powerful, non-invasive alternative to capture-based techniques to detect the presence of a species in their environment.

"You can scoop up water and know what's been there," said Plough. "It captures a snapshot of the DNA that has been around in the past couple of weeks."

The researchers developed a genetic probe that targeted and identified the DNA of two particular fish species, alewife and blueback herring, collectively known as river herring, in the waterways. As they swim, the fish slough off cells and waste that contain DNA.

"The eDNA method is especially powerful because it can identify whether alewife, blueback herring, or both species are present at each site," said study co-author Matt Ogburn of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. "When we use some traditional methods like collecting fish eggs or larvae, we often aren't able to tell which river herring species they belong to, and they might even be from other local species like hickory shad."

Cool!

Fauxcahontas Refuses to Prove Indian Heritage

Elizabeth Warren: No, I Won’t Take A DNA Test To Settle The Issue Of My Heritage

Asked if she would consider taking a DNA test to settle the issue of her Native American heritage, as one Massachusets paper recommended last week, Warren declined.

The full Meet the Press interview with Warren didn’t air this morning but is available online. Chuck Todd asked Warren if she would take the DNA test as the Berkshire Eagle suggested. She responded by telling the story she has told before about her family history, i.e. her father’s family was opposed to him marrying her mother because she was part Native American.

After telling the story Chuck Todd pointed out that he had a great-grandmother who “swore we were related to Robert E. Lee.” But his grandmother did some genealogical research and found that, while they did have some relations named Lee, they were not related to the general. “What’s wrong with knowing?” Todd asked.

“Look, I do know. I know who I am,” Warren responded. “Never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere,” she added.

Except, of course, she doesn’t know. Warren is sticking to the story she was told, but that doesn’t make it true. The DNA test would settle the issue once and for all. But, as I wrote last month, it’s clear Warren is not looking for the truth. She’s making a cynical political play to have Native Americans back her story whether it’s true or not. If enough of the right voices agree to backstop her, the truth won’t matter.

I'll bet money she took the test anonymously, and didn't get the answer she wanted.

DNA Evidence Less Awesome than Previously Hyped

'Great Pause' Among Prosecutors As DNA Proves Fallible

Over the summer, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which sets standards for physical evidence in state courts, came to an unsettling conclusion: There was something wrong with how state labs were analyzing DNA evidence.

It seemed the labs were using an outdated protocol for calculating the probability of DNA matches in "mixtures"; that is, crime scene samples that contain genetic material from several people. It may have affected thousands of cases going back to 1999.

At first, they assumed the update wouldn't make a big difference — just a refinement of the numbers.

But when a state lab reran the analysis of a DNA match from a murder case about to go to trial in Galveston, Texas, it discovered the numbers changed quite a bit.

Under the old protocol, says defense lawyer Roberto Torres, DNA from the crime scene was matched to his client with a certainty of more than a million to one. That is, you'd have to go through more than a million people to find somebody else who'd match the sample. But when the lab did the analysis again with the new protocol, things looked very different.

"When they retested it, the likelihood that it could be someone else was, I think, one in 30-something, one in 40. So it was a significant probability that it could be someone else," Torres says.

Yeah, that's a big difference, the difference between being essentially definitive, and just being a mildly unlikely coincidence.

Inman has worked with DNA evidence since the 1980s. He says forensic DNA-matching is based on sound science, but sometimes labs can get ahead of themselves. What happened in Texas, he says, is that labs have been using cutting-edge "testing kits" that can extract tiny traces of DNA from crime scenes, but those samples were then analyzed with math that's not suited to "weak" samples that combine DNA from many people.

It's really not clear to me here what the real problem is. Is it contamination from multiple sources and trying to sort out whose DNA is whose?  Is it the DNA technique they're using? Certainly they are completely sequencing someone's DNA from the trace; that would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive for many routine crimes, however useful it is in paleoanthropology.