Neandertals drew on cave walls and made personal ornaments long before encountering Homo sapiens, two new studies find. These discoveries paint bulky, jut-jawed Neandertals as the mental equals of ancient humans, scientists say.

Rock art depicting abstract shapes and hand stencils in three Spanish caves dates back to at least 64,800 years ago, researchers report in the Feb. 23 Science. If these new estimates hold up, the Spanish finds become the world’s oldest known examples of cave art, preceding evidence of humans’ arrival in Europe by at least 20,000 years (SN Online: 11/2/11).
The finds raise the possibility that “Neandertals took modern humans into caves and showed them how to paint,” says archaeologist Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France.

Personal ornaments previously found at a coastal cave in southeastern Spain are older than the cave art, dating to around 120,000 to 115,000 years ago, scientists report February 22 in Science Advances. Only Neandertals inhabited Europe at that time. Those artifacts consist of pigment-stained seashells with artificial holes, presumably for use as necklaces, and seashells containing remnants of pigment mixtures, say geochronologist Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues. Hoffmann is also an author of the cave art study. The new findings join previous reports of potentially symbolic Neandertal artifacts, such as a possible necklace made from eagle claws (SN: 4/18/15, p. 7) and bird-feather decorations.
If Neandertals did have the capacity for symbolic thinking — crucial for using drawings or language to represent ideas and objects — that ability may have developed at least 500,000 years ago in an ancestor shared with humans, the two research teams propose.
“Neandertal social life was as complex as that of [contemporaneous] humans in Africa,” says archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona, an author of both papers.

But some scientists view the new findings cautiously. Neandertals communicated in sophisticated ways, but few clearly symbolic artifacts have been linked to them, says archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany. “If Neandertals regularly produced paintings or similar kinds of symbolic artifacts, researchers will eventually demonstrate it at multiple sites,” he says.

Analyses of thin mineral deposits partly covering painted cave areas provided minimum age estimates for the art, based on known decay rates of radioactive uranium in the rock. One red, rectangular painting dates to at least 64,800 years ago. One of several hand stencils in a second cave dates to at least 66,700 years ago. And in a third cave, patches of red paint were applied to the walls at least 65,500 years ago, with more paintings added over a period of 25,000 years or more — signaling a long Neandertal tradition of cave art, the researchers say.
Many dated deposits at the Spanish cave art sites contain rock particles from external sources that can throw off age estimates. The researchers statistically corrected for such contamination, “but whether that is sufficient enough remains to be seen,” says archaeologist Katerina Douka of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

At the coastal cave, dating relied on a one-two punch: uranium analyses of rock partly covering shell-bearing sediment and geologic estimates of when ancient sea levels declined enough to allow entry into the chamber.

Still, it is “nearly impossible” to generate accurate age estimates of rock art based on uranium measures alone, researchers concluded in 2017 in Quaternary International. Depending on shifting cave conditions and varying amounts of uranium drainage from mineral deposits, this method can over- or underestimate when rock art was created, the scientists argued. Other researchers defend this technique as providing valuable minimum and maximum age estimates for rock art.

If the new dates for the Spanish cave art are confirmed, they could indicate that Neandertals and H. sapiens exchanged artistic traditions earlier than previously thought, says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the studies. Members of both species may have reached western Asia and intermingled during rainy periods between 244,000 and 190,000 years ago, Stringer proposes (SN: 2/17/18, p. 6).

A pair of dark loners wander a distant cluster of galaxies. The two small gas clouds have been roaming the Virgo cluster, some 55 million light-years away, for at least a billion years. Such small, isolated clouds of gas shouldn’t be able to form stars on their own — and yet they are doing just that.

Astronomer Michele Bellazzini of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Bologna and his colleagues found the small, dim clouds in 2014 in the SECCO survey, which looks for the building blocks of galaxies. The two are moving at the same speed and have the same chemical composition, so the researchers think they have the same origin story.
Together, the clouds, called SECCO 1, have just 160,000 solar masses’ worth of stars, but 20 million solar masses of hydrogen gas—a lot more hydrogen than found in other small starry bodies. Dwarf galaxies typically have 10 times more hydrogen than stars; SECCO 1 has more than 100 times more. And the duo is abnormally isolated: the nearest potential parent galaxies are about 815,000 light-years away. “This is a novelty,” Bellazzini says.

Simulations suggest SECCO 1 was stripped from a trio of interacting dwarf galaxies, the researchers report online at arXiv.org on February 16 . Weirdly, it started forming stars long after it wandered away, which researchers didn’t think was possible. Its latest bout of star formation started only 4 million years ago. How did the tiny clouds compress enough gas to form stars?

Bellazzini thinks the key could be the clouds’ home within the Virgo cluster. Hot gas there could surround the clouds and compress them enough to make them light up.

Editor’s note: This story was updated March 7, 2018, to correct the photo credit and mention where the simulations were reported. On March 9, 2018, the distance to nearest potential parent galaxies was corrected.

At a small eatery in Seville, Spain, Alan Jasanoff had his first experience with brains — wrapped in eggs and served with potatoes. At the time, he was more interested in finding a good, affordable meal than contemplating the sheer awesomeness of the organ he was eating. Years later, Jasanoff began studying the brain as part of his training as a neuroscientist, and he went on, like so many others, to revere it. It is said, after all, to be the root of our soul and consciousness. But today, Jasanoff has yet another view: He has come to see our awe of the organ as a seriously flawed way of thinking, and even a danger to society.
In The Biological Mind, Jasanoff, now a neuroscientist at MIT, refers to the romanticized view of the brain — its separateness and superiority to the body and its depiction as almost supernatural — as the “cerebral mystique.” Such an attitude has been fueled, in part, by images that depict the brain without any connection to the body or by analogies that compare the brain to a computer. Admittedly, the brain does have tremendous computing power. But Jasanoff’s goal is to show that the brain doesn’t work as a distinct, mystical entity, but as a ball of flesh awash with fluids and innately in tune with the rest of the body and the environment. “Self” doesn’t just come from the brain, he explains, but also from the interactions of chemicals from our bodies with everything else around us.

To make his case, Jasanoff offers an extensive yet entertaining review of the schools of thought and representations of the brain in the media that led to the rise of the cerebral mystique, especially during the last few decades. He then tears down those ideas using contrary examples from recent research, along with engaging anecdotes. For instance, his clear, lively writing reveals how our emotions, such as the fight-or-flight response and the suite of thoughts and actions associated with stress, provide strong evidence for a brain-body connection. Exercise’s effect on the brain also supports this notion. Even creativity isn’t sacred, often stemming from repeated interactions with those around us.

Jasanoff is critical of how the cerebral mystique reduces problems of human behavior, such as drug addiction or eating disorders, to problems of the brain. Such problems are no longer viewed as “moral failings” but as a result of “broken brains.” This shifting view, its advocates argue, reduces the stigma associated with psychiatric disorders. But it also leads to other problems, Jasanoff notes: Society views broken brains as harder to fix than moral flaws, making life even more challenging for individuals already struggling with mental illness. People could benefit from a more comprehensive view of the brain, one that includes how biology, environment and culture shape behavior.

When mental processes are seen as transcending the body, society perceives people as “more independent and self-motivated than they truly are,” and that minimizes “the connections that bind us to each other and to the environment around us,” Jasanoff writes. As a result, he argues, we’re living in an age of self-absorption and self-centeredness, driven in part by our fascination with the brain.
In reality, the brain isn’t a miraculous machine, but instead a prism refracting countless internal and external influences. A few more specifics on how this prism works — details of what is going on at the cellular or molecular level, for instance — might have helped support Jasanoff’s arguments.

But he does leave readers with a thought-provoking idea: “You are not only your brain.” Grapple with that, he contends, and we could move toward communities that are much more socially minded and accepting of our interconnectedness.

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As mice plumped up on a high-fat diet, some of their taste buds vanished. This disappearing act could explain why some people with obesity seem to have a weakened sense of taste, which may compel them to eat more.

Compared with siblings that were fed normal mouse chow, mice given high-fat meals lost about 25 percent of their taste buds over eight weeks. Buds went missing because mature taste bud cells died off more quickly, and fewer new cells developed to take their place. Chronic, low-level inflammation associated with obesity appears to be behind the loss, researchers report March 20 in PLOS Biology.
Taste buds, each a collection of 50 to 100 cells, sense whether a food is sweet, sour, bitter, salty or umami (savory). These cells help identify safe and nourishing food, and stimulate reward centers in the brain. The tongue’s taste bud population is renewed regularly; each bud lasts about 10 days. Special cells called progenitor cells give rise to new taste bud cells that replace old ones.

Some studies have suggested that taste becomes duller in people with obesity, although why that is has remained unclear. But if taste becomes less intense, “then maybe you don’t get the positive feeling that you should,” which could give way to more overeating, says study coauthor Robin Dando, who studies the biology of taste at Cornell University. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults have obesity, determined by a person’s body mass index, a ratio of weight to height. The condition is linked to a number of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

The study’s finding that obesity-induced inflammation impacts the presence of taste buds “provides a possible link between obesity and taste,” says Kathryn Medler, a taste physiologist at the University at Buffalo in New York, who was not involved with the research.

Obesity triggers low-level, ongoing inflammation in the body, which can harm cells. The taste tissues of the obese mice had a higher amount of a type of protein called a cytokine, which regulates inflammation, than their normal-weight kin, the researchers found.
This particular cytokine, called tumor necrosis factor alpha, seems to be damaging to taste buds, the researchers found. In a test with mice that couldn’t make the cytokine, the obese mice didn’t have missing taste buds. Another experiment showed that mice engineered not to gain excess weight on the high-fat diet — and that therefore didn’t have obesity-related inflammation — also had the regular amount of taste buds.

Along with learning more about how taste buds are damaged by inflammation, Dando is interested in working toward new treatments for obesity, perhaps by countering the dulled sense of taste. “These mice lose taste buds,” he says. “Can we bring them back?”

Groove patterns on the surface of modern chimpanzee brains throw a monkey wrench into proposals that some ancient southern African hominids evolved humanlike brain characteristics, a new study suggests.

MRIs of eight living chimps reveal substantial variability in the shape and location of certain features on the brain surface. Some of these brains showed surface creases similar to ones that were thought to have signaled a turn toward humanlike brain organization in ancient hominids hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. Paleoanthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee and colleagues report their findings online March 13 in Brain, Behavior and Evolution.
The study casts doubt on a 2014 paper by Falk that was based on casts of the inside of fossil braincases, called endocasts, which preserve impressions of these surface features. At the time, Falk argued that four endocasts from southern African hominids — three Australopithecus africanus and one Australopithecus sediba — showed folding patterns that suggested that brain reorganization was underway as early as 3 million years ago in a frontal area involved in human speech production.

But MRIs of three of the chimp brains reveal comparable creases, the researchers found. Two other chimps display other frontal tissue furrows that Falk had also previously described as distinctly humanlike.
“I was really wrong about the handful of Australopithecus endocasts,” Falk says. The endocasts were made from A. africanus and A. sediba fossils dating to between roughly 2 million to 3 million years ago (SN: 8/10/13, p. 26).
And in one chimp, the new study finds, a pair of grooves correspond with those on a Homo naledi endocast that were described in 2017 as humanlike (SN Online: 4/25/17). H. naledi, a small-brained species with many humanlike skeletal features, inhabited southern Africa close to 300,000 years ago (SN: 6/10/17, p. 6).

Still, researchers have spent decades debating the implications of partially preserved brain surface features on hominid endocasts. And the new findings based on MRIs are also controversial.

Nothing in the new chimp study undermines the original finding of humanlike folds in H. naledi’s frontal brain, says biological anthropologist Shawn Hurst of Indiana University Bloomington. The frontal brain grooves on a H. naledi endocast, like those in modern humans, lie farther back than the grooves seen in the chimp MRI scan, Hurst contends. Expanded tissue folds around those grooves also follow a distinctly humanlike pattern not observed chimps, he argues. Those features indicate H. naledi had a humanlike capacity for pride and other complex social emotions and possibly verbal communication of some type, Hurst says. What’s more, the new study fails to consider that the A. sediba endocast shows furrows and folding patterns found in humans but not chimps, he says.

Endocast researchers need to study the range of brain surface characteristics in a larger sample of living chimps and other apes to make more accurate comparisons, Falk says. Until now, line drawings published in 1950 of only five chimp brain hemispheres, she notes, have provided the most accurate and comprehensive look at furrow patterns on chimps’ brains.

How specific folds and creases on the brain’s surface relate to inner structures, such as those involved in speech and language, also remains poorly understood, Falk says.

Californians will soon be taking their coffee with cream and a cancer warning, after a court ruled that the state’s retailers must label coffee as containing a carcinogen. The decision followed an eight-year legal battle, which boiled down to a question that has plagued coffee drinkers and scientists alike: Is drinking coffee healthy, or not?

The judge’s ruling, issued Wednesday, says that Starbucks and other coffee sellers failed to show that the health benefits of the brew, which include lowering heart disease, outweigh its cancer risk. But do the new warnings mean you should put your mug down? Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about coffee’s health effects, both good and bad.
What’s in coffee that has raised cancer concerns?
When coffee beans are roasted, the compound acrylamide is produced as a by-product. “Acrylamide is ubiquitous in our food chain. It’s a product of high heat and prolonged cooking, particularly with carbohydrates,” says Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. It’s found in fried potatoes, for example, as well as in cigarette smoke and some products such as adhesives. “It’s a chemical to which we have frequent exposure.”

Is there enough acrylamide in coffee to cause cancer in humans?
Some studies have found an increased cancer risk in mice and rats who were fed acrylamide, but those studies used doses between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than levels that people would be exposed to in food. There have not been strong studies in humans to demonstrate the carcinogenicity of acrylamide.
While some research has linked acrylamide to kidney, endometrial and ovarian cancer, the American Cancer Society website notes that the results have been mixed and have relied on questionnaires that may not accurately reflect people’s diets.

“Most experts are going to look at the risk of acrylamide in coffee and conclude that this is not something that’s going to have a meaningful impact on human health,” Lichtenfeld says.

Is there any evidence of higher cancer rates among coffee drinkers?
A review of more than 1,000 studies found no consistent link between drinking coffee and more than 20 types of cancer, according to a working group of scientists who met in 2016 at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health Organization group. These studies examined the epidemiological evidence, meaning they looked for increased risk across populations of coffee drinkers and non-drinkers.

Are there other health problems linked to coffee?
There’s always been a concern about the caffeine in coffee, particularly for heavy consumers. “Caffeine can certainly have an impact on cardiac function, for example, and nervous system function,” Lichtenfeld notes.

The increasing popularity of French press coffee has also raised concern about its higher levels of cholesterol-raising diterpenes.

“But in general,” Lichtenfeld says, “it’s a beverage that, when consumed in reasonable quantities, is thought to be safe for most people.”

As for how much coffee is too much, research suggests that a few cups a day may be perfectly fine, and even better for long-term health than not drinking any coffee. One study of long-term mortality in more than 90,000 people in Japan found that three to four cups a day was optimal. Others have found no increase in mortality with up to six cups a day.

Are there health benefits of drinking coffee?
Studies have found evidence for various health benefits of drinking coffee in recent years, from helping to fend off diabetes, heart disease and stroke to protecting against depression and Alzheimer’s disease —and even, ironically, liver cancer (SN: 10/3/15, p. 16).

“My personal opinion is that I’m not telling people to give up their coffee,” Lichtenfeld says.

Dark matter is still the shyest particle in physics. New observations show that dark matter in galaxy cluster Abell 3827 stubbornly ignores all other kinds of matter — including itself, astronomers reported April 6 at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool, England.

The research, also posted online at arXiv.org, negates an earlier finding that stars were separated from their dark matter in Abell 3827, a cluster including four colliding galaxies about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth (SN: 5/16/15, p. 10). At the time, cosmologist Richard Massey and colleagues suggested the dark matter may have lagged behind its galaxy because it was interacting with another clump of dark matter — something dark matter is not supposed to do, according to standard theory. Dark matter, which makes up most of the mass of the universe, is only known to interact with ordinary, visible matter via gravity.
But more recent observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile show that the dark matter was actually behaving exactly as expected.

“We looked for longer and found the dark matter was hiding just where it ought to be,” says Massey, of Durham University in England. “It’s a sort of eating humble pie on some level.”

It’s still possible that other galaxy clusters will reveal lagging clouds of dark matter, Massey says. His team has designed a balloon-borne telescope called SuperBIT, which they hope to use to check hundreds of galaxy clusters for misbehaving dark matter.

“We just know embarrassingly little about it,” says Massey. “We keep trying to take a step forward, and find ourselves going back to the beginning.”

Emperor penguins are known to huddle for warmth, but their regal relatives prefer personal space.

Aerial photos of two king penguin breeding colonies show that individuals and couples keep their distance from neighbors but still stay together as a group. That arrangement resembles a simulated 2-D liquid in which molecules on a flat plane simultaneously attract and repel one another, researchers report April 4 in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

“Simple physics models are elegant and can explain a lot,” says study coauthor Dan Zitterbart, a physicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
King penguins are forced together by lack of space on the small South Atlantic islands that the birds primarily inhabit, while also being pushed apart by their territorial tendency to peck one another. This push and pull creates a consistent but dynamic distance, like that between molecules of a liquid.

Unlike some penguin species, king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) don’t make a nest — they cradle their eggs on top of their feet. So the birds can move as a whole, similar to a fluid, to avoid disruptions such as a barreling elephant seal before settling back into place.

Understanding this dynamic could allow researchers to extrapolate how many birds are in a colony from just one photo. The technique may help scientists better track population numbers of these penguins, which are threatened by warmer sea temperatures.

If you want to know how a website shares your personal data, you might be tempted to slog through its online privacy policy. Be prepared for disappointment. Website privacy policies explicitly disclose only a fraction of sites’ data-sharing practices, according to new research that casts doubt on whether users can make informed decisions about their online activity.

The research, presented April 25 at the Web Conference in Lyon, France, investigated the data-sharing disclosures of more than 200,000 websites — the Arkansas state government homepage, for instance, and the Country Music Association site. In specific, it looked at how these sites shared data with third parties, such as advertisers and data brokers, as well as how those sites described their privacy policies.
For this analysis, privacy researcher Timothy Libert used a software tool called webXray to trace data transmissions from each website to third-party data collectors. Of 1.8 million data transmissions tracked, only 14.8 percent were sent to third parties specifically mentioned in those sites’ privacy policies. The rest of the data went to third parties that users wouldn’t know about even if they read the sites’ policy statements.

Libert also found that data transfers to widely familiar third parties, like Google, Facebook and Twitter, were more likely to be disclosed than transfers to obscure entities. For instance, while 38.3 percent of data transmissions sent to Google were disclosed, the disclosure rate for the data broker Acxiom was about 0.3 percent.
Even if website privacy policies listed all the third parties they shared data with, users still may not know exactly how their information gets spread around, says Libert, of the University of Oxford. That’s because third parties that receive user information from websites can then share that data with other entities. Getting online is “sort of like tossing confetti in the air,” Libert says. “There’s no way to know where your data ends up.”

Data-sharing relationships between sites and third parties change so rapidly that it’s virtually impossible for privacy policy authors to keep up, says Christo Wilson, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston not involved in the work. “The only true disclosure is, ‘We sell your data, and we don’t know where it goes,’” he says.

Those still inclined to read privacy policies may want to set aside some time; it takes nearly 90 minutes on average to read a website’s privacy statement along with the policies of its known third-party data collectors, Libert found. “The idea that users can keep track of this, read policies, and make decisions is pure fiction,” he says.

Internet users can try to keep their data out of advertisers’ hands “with things like hardcore ad-blocking,” says Wilson. But ad-blocking software may not ward off all advertisers, he adds. “It just gets more and more clear that we need things like GDPR,” or General Data Protection Regulation. This new set of rules that restricts how tech companies can collect and use personal data takes effect across the European Union in May (SN Online: 4/15/18).

Libert says the United States needs an agency to oversee the data-sharing ecosystem, similar to how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration monitors pharmaceutical industry activity. “I can buy medicine at the store and not have to sit down with a chemistry textbook and look up every compound and see its effects — somebody at the FDA does that,” he says.

Stone tools strewn among rhinoceros bones indicate that hominids had reached the Philippines by around 709,000 years ago, scientists report online May 2 in Nature.

Stone Age Homo species who crossed the ocean from mainland Asia to the Philippines — possibly aboard uprooted trees or some kind of watercraft — may also have moved to islands farther south, the team proposes. Evidence of ancient hominids has been found on some Indonesian islands, including individuals’ fossil remains on Flores (SN: 7/9/16, p. 6) and ancient stone tools on Sulawesi (SN: 2/6/16, p. 7).
But researchers hadn’t found old enough evidence of hominids in the Philippines to suggest such a journey — until now. At an excavation site in the landlocked northern region of Kalinga in the Philippines, more than 400 animal bones have been discovered, including much of a rhino skeleton, and 57 stone artifacts. Cuts and pounding marks on 13 of the rhino bones resulted from meat and marrow removal, say bioarchaeologist Thomas Ingicco of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and colleagues. Other fossils came from brown deer, monitor lizards, freshwater turtles and extinct, elephant-like creatures called stegodons.

Measures of the decay and accumulation of radioactive elements in Kalinga sediment and an excavated rhino tooth suggest the fossils are roughly 709,000 years old, give or take about 68,000 years.

Previously, the earliest evidence of hominids in the Philippines came from a roughly 66,700-year-old human toe bone. It’s not known if the ancient individual who unwittingly donated the toe bone to science descended from Kalinga’s roughly 700,000-year-old rhino butchers or from a population that reached the Philippines later.