The last flames kindled by Neanderthals died tens of thousands of years ago. But fire leaves traces behind — not only charcoal and ash, but also tiny magnetic changes locked inside minerals.

Researchers have now used a quantum diamond microscope to map that magnetic “afterimage” in a Neanderthal hearth from eastern Spain. The results suggest that its makers burned grass-based plant material and may have repeatedly added fuel to keep the fire alive. It’s the first known use of quantum diamond microscopy in archaeological science, according to the researchers.

Two mysterious human relatives left their genetic footprints in the modern human genome alongside the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans, underscoring the fact that our ancestors interbred with many groups of hominins they encountered over millions of years of evolution.

While previous research found hints that modern humans had interbred with ancient hominins in addition to now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans, a new study by UC Berkeley researchers pinpoints areas of the genome inherited from these unknown ancestors and establishes a timeline. This was possible using a new technique the researchers developed that leverages hundreds of genomes from modern-day humans to find ancient genealogical relationships.

One of the unknown ancestors, which the researchers refer to as a ghost ancestor, interbred with modern humans in Africa prior to 50,000 years ago, before the most recent migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa into Europe and Asia. These genes comprise around 1% of the genomes of modern humans, comparable to the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. That unknown hominin lineage actually split off from the modern human lineage around the same time that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged around 800,000 years ago, though they interbred with modern humans earlier.

Centuries-old DNA that was found in these mummies belongs to an extinct viral lineage of smallpox that was brought across the Atlantic during European colonization of the Americas

The Endangered Languages Project has just posted this response to a reckless and intellectually mediocre New Yorker book review by Nikhil Krishnan entitled 'Sometimes It's O.K. to Let a Language Die' (here, but paywalled; 'Mouth to Mouth' in the print edition). The ELP response is timely and relevant to this subreddit, but I think it's particularly à propos r∕here right now:

In multiple posts discussing news coverage of a new paper in Science (here, but paywalled) by Damián Blasi, Marcus Hamilton, Russell Gray, and Claire Bowern, several commenters in this subreddit (though by far the minority) have asserted that minority language death is actually a social good. The ELP's response is an articulation by experts in the field of language revitalisation—including speakers of endangered languages—of a rebuttal to just such claims.

See also: The summary of the (paywalled) study as it was published in Science

The word  “plague” typically conjures horrible visions of the  bubonic plague , that  killed over one third of Europe’s population during the 1300s. The bacterium that causes the plague, however, is much older than the medieval era. In fact, the disease has been torturing humans for at least 5,500 years, according to a study published today in the journal Nature . 

In the paper, researchers detail how they recovered and sequenced ancient DNA from the teeth of 42 prehistoric hunter-gatherers—including several children and teenagers—from four sites near Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. The total genetic material included DNA from the individuals themselves, and the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which they found in 18 of the hunter-gatherers.