Now, a new study by a team of scholars from Germany, Italy, USA, Denmark and the UK, sheds light on the origin and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscans with genome-wide data from 82 ancient individuals from central and southern Italy, spanning 800 BCE to 1000 CE. Their results show that the Etruscans, despite their unique cultural expressions, were closely related to their italic neighbors, and reveal major genetic transformations associated with historical events.

An intriguing phenomenon

With an extinct language that is only partly understood, much of what was initially known about Etruscan civilization comes from the commentary of later Greek and Roman writers. One hypothesis about their origins, the one favored by Herodotus, points to the influence of ancient Greek cultural elements to argue that the Etruscans descended from migrating Anatolian or Aegean groups. Another, championed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, proposes that the Etruscans originated and developed locally from the Bronze Age Villanovan culture and were therefore an autochthonous population.

Although the current consensus among archaeologists supports a local origin for the Etruscans, a lack of ancient DNA from the region has made genetic investigations inconsistent. The current study, with a time transect of ancient genomic information spanning almost 2000 years collected from 12 archaeological sites, resolves lingering questions about Etruscan origins, showing no evidence for a recent population movement from Anatolia. In fact, the Etruscans shared the genetic profile of the Latins living in nearby Rome, with a large proportion of their genetic profiles coming from steppe-related ancestry that arrived in the region during the Bronze Age.

Considering that steppe-related groups were likely responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages, now spoken around the world by billions of people, the persistence of a non-Indo-European Etruscan language is an intriguing and still unexplained phenomenon that will require further archaeological, historical, linguistic and genetic investigation.

“This linguistic persistence, combined with a genetic turnover, challenges simple assumptions that genes equal languages and suggests a more complex scenario that may have involved the assimilation of early Italic speakers by the Etruscan speech community, possibly during a prolonged period of admixture over the second millennium BCE,” says David Caramelli, Professor at the University of Florence.

Periods of change

Despite a few individuals of eastern Mediterranean, northern African, and central Europeanorigins, the Etruscan-related gene pool remained stable for at least 800 years, spanning the Iron Age and Roman Republic period. The study finds, however, that during the subsequent Roman Imperial period, central Italy experienced a large scale genetic shift, resulting from admixture with eastern Mediterranean populations, which likely included slaves and soldiers relocated across the Roman Empire.

“This genetic shift clearly depicts the role of the Roman Empire in the large-scale displacement of people in a time of enhanced upward or downward socioeconomic and geographic mobility,” says Johannes Krause, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Looking at the more recent Early Middle Ages, the researchers identified northern European ancestries spreading across the Italian peninsula following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. These results suggest that Germanic migrants, including individuals associated with the newly established Longobard Kingdom, might have left a traceable impact on the genetic landscape of central Italy.

In the regions of Tuscany, Lazio, and Basilicata the population’s ancestry remained largely continuous between the Early Medieval times and today, suggesting that the main gene pool of present-day people from central and southern Italy was largely formed at least 1000 years ago.

Although more ancient DNA from across Italy is needed to support the above conclusions, ancestry shifts in Tuscany and northern Lazio similar to those reported for the city of Rome and its surroundings suggests that historical events during the first millennium CE had a major impact on the genetic transformations over much of the Italian peninsula.

“The Roman Empire appears to have left a long-lasting contribution to the genetic profile of southern Europeans, bridging the gap between European and eastern Mediterranean populations on the genetic map of western Eurasia,” says Cosimo Posth, Professor at the University of Tübingen and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.

The research shows, through multiple avenues, that a shortened version of the gene — a variant known as GHRd3 — may help people survive in situations where resources are scarce or unpredictable.

Findings will be published on Sept. 24 in Science Advances.

Here’s the story the study tells: GHRd3 emerged about 1-2 million years ago, and was likely the overwhelmingly predominant version of the gene in the ancestors of modern humans, as well as in Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Then, “In the last 50,000 years or so, this variant becomes less prevalent, and you have a massive decrease in the frequency of this variant among East Asian populations we studied, where we see the estimated allele frequency drop from 85% to 15% during the last 30,000 years,” says University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist Omer Gokcumen. “So the question becomes: Why? Was this variant favored in the past, and it fell out of evolutionary favor recently? Or is what we are observing just a blip among the complexity of genomes?”

The research provides new insights into the function of GHRd3 that may help explain why these evolutionary changes occurred, demonstrating that the variant may be useful in coping with nutritional stress.

“We think that this variant is beneficial where there are periods of starvation, which was the case for most of human evolution,” says Gokcumen, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. With regard to GHRd3’s waning prominence in recent human history, he speculates that, “Maybe the rapid technological and cultural advances over the past 50,000 years have created a buffer against some of the fluctuations in resources that made GHRd3 so advantageous in the past.”

“GHRd3 is interesting because it is a very common deletion that is variable between you and me among humans,” says Marie Saitou, PhD, tenure-track investigator at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and a former postdoctoral researcher in Gokcumen’s lab at UB. “Normally, these kinds of important fundamental genes do not change between human to human, and are highly conserved in other animals even.”

The work was led by Saitou; Skyler Resendez, PhD, a recent UB graduate in biological sciences who is now a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB; Xiuqian Mu, MD, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology in the Jacobs School at UB and at the Ross Eye Institute; and Gokcumen. An international team of collaborators contributed perspectives in this study, which integrated advanced population genetics methods with research in a mouse model to understand the complicated history and function of a genetic variant.

A close look at possible functions of GHRd3

The growth hormone receptor gene plays a major role in controlling the body’s response to growth hormone, helping to activate processes that lead to growth.

To study the gene’s evolutionary history, scientists looked at the genomes of many modern humans, as well as those of four archaic hominins — three Neanderthals from different parts of the world, and one Denisovan. (All four had the GHRd3 variant.)

The team also investigated GHRd3’s modern functions. For example, the researchers found that the GHRd3 variant was associated with better outcomes in a group of children who had endured and survived severe malnutrition.

Additionally, studies on mice supported the idea that GHRd3 helps to regulate the body’s response to food scarcity. Male mice with the variant had some biological similarities to mice that had reduced access to food — traits that may be beneficial in surviving nutritional stress, the study found.

And when scientists placed male mice with GHRd3 on a low-calorie diet, the animals were smaller at 2 months old than counterparts without the variant. This may be beneficial in times of nutritional stress, as smaller bodies need less food. Because the effects of GHRd3 were not as prominent in females, male and female mice carrying the variant ended up being the same size when they were on a low-calorie diet (usually, males are significantly larger than females).

“Our study points to sex- and environment-specific effects of a common genetic variant. In the mice, we observed that Ghrd3 leads to a ‘female-like’ expression pattern of dozens of genes in male livers under calorie restriction, which potentially leads to the observed size reduction,” Saitou says.

“Females, already smaller in size, may suffer from negative evolutionary consequences if they lose body weight. Thus, it is a reasonable and also very interesting hypothesis that a genetic variant that may affect response to nutritional stress has evolved in a sex-specific manner,” Mu says.

“Despite its prevalence in human populations, this unique genetic deletion has not been observed in any other living species,” Resendez says. “This makes it difficult to study. However, scientific advancements now give us the ability to edit genomes in a targeted fashion. This allowed us to generate a mouse model containing the deletion so that we could observe its effects closely in a controlled manner.”

“It is an exciting time for doing research on human evolution, where it is now possible to integrate data from ancient genomes, gene editing technologies, and advanced mathematical approaches to tell the human story in all its messy glory,” Gokcumen says.

In addition to Gokcumen, Mu, Resendez and Saitou, the study’s authors included G. Ekin Atilla-Gokcumen and Apoorva Pradhan in the UB Department of Chemistry; Fuguo Wu in the UB Department of Ophthalmology; Natasha Lie and Nancy Hall at the Baylor College of Medicine; Qihui Zhu at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine; Charles Lee at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University; Laura Reinholdt and Gary Churchill at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor; Yoko Satta at SOKENDAI; Leo Speidel at University College London and the Francis Crick Institute; Shigeki Nakagome at Trinity College Dublin; and Neil Hanchard at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the BrightFocus Foundation; the National Eye Institute and National Institute on Aging, both part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health; the Collaborative Learning and Integrated Mentoring in the Biosciences (CLIMB) program at UB; the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service; the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University; and the Sir Henry Wellcome fellowship.

The curvature determines the flux

Surprisingly, the microbe was found not to move randomly though the open space. Instead, the average movement pattern was both highly organized and symmetrical: the map of movement patterns showed a defined distribution of probability fluxes. “In particular, the strength of the flux was found to depend on the curvature of the adjacent solid interface: a higher degree of curvature resulted in a stronger flux” explain Jan Cammann and Fabian Schwarzendahl, the lead authors of the study. For practical reasons, all measurements were done in a quasi 2-dimensional environment, meaning that the microbe was confined from the top and bottom to better monitor its movement and avoid defocusing. Observing its movement pattern, the group of Marco Mazza (University of Loughborough and MPIDS) created a model to predicts the probabilities to flow in a certain direction. This model was then applied to compartments with more complex interface curvatures and experimentally verified by the lab of Oliver Bäumchen (MPIDS and University of Bayreuth). “It turns out that the curvature of the interface is the dominating factor which directly determines the flux of the self-propelling microbe.,” Bäumchen summarizes.

A technological implication for the future

As this discovery constitutes a fundamental observation, the model might as well be applied to other areas of active matter physics. “With our model, we can basically statistically predict where the object of interest will be in the next moment,” Mazza reports. “This could not only significantly improve our understanding of the organization of life, but also help to engineer technical devices.”

Understanding the principles behind the organization of active matter therefore can have direct implications on our future technologies. Potential applications of the model could be directing the movement of photosynthetic microorganisms in such a way so their flux can propel a generator, which would be a direct way to convert sunlight into mechanical energy. But also, in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector, the findings of the scientists might be applied: “A potential application in the medical sector is the development of micro-robots delivering drugs to their specific destination in an efficient manner,” Bäumchen concludes.

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However, to visualize a quantum object or phenomenon where the illumination is weak, or emanating from nonvisible infrared or far infrared wavelengths, scientists need far more sensitive tools. For example, they have developed single-pixel imaging in the spatial domain as a way to pack and spatially structure as many photons as possible onto a single pixel detector and then create an image using computational algorithms.

Similarly, in the time domain, when an unknown ultrafast signal is either weak, or in the infrared or far infrared wavelengths, the ability of single-pixel imaging to visualize it is reduced. Based on the spatio-temporal duality of light pulses, University of Rochester researchers have developed a time-domain single-pixel imaging technique, described in Optica, that solves this problem, detecting 5 femtojoule ultrafast light pulses with a temporal sampling size down to 16 femtoseconds. This time-domain analogy of the single-pixel imaging shows similar advantages to its spatial counterparts: a good measurement efficiency, a high sensitivity, robustness against temporal distortions and the compatibility at multiple wavelengths.

Lead author Jiapeng Zhao, a PhD student in optics at the University of Rochester, says possible applications include a highly accurate spectrographic tool, demonstrated to achieve 97.5 percent accuracy in identifying samples using a convolutional neural network with this technique.

The technique can also be combined with single-pixel imaging to create a computational hyperspectral imaging system, says Zhao, who works in the Rochester research group of Robert Boyd, professor of optics. The system can greatly speed up the detection and analysis of images at broad frequency bands. This could be especially useful for medical applications, where detection of nonvisible light emanating from human tissue at different wavelengths can indicate disorders such as high blood pressure.

“By coupling our technique with single pixel imaging in the spatial domain, we can have good hyperspectral image within a few seconds. That’s much faster than what people have done before,” Zhao says.

Other coauthors include Boyd and Xi-Cheng Zhang at Rochester, Jianming Dai at Tianjin University, and Boris Braverman at the University of Ottawa.

This project was supported with funding from the Office of Naval Research, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key Research and Development Program of China.

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Now, a new study of car use in Japan shows that, even with gasoline vehicles, keeping and using cars with good fuel efficiency longer could reduce CO₂ emissions significantly more than an accelerated transition to alternative fuel vehicles.

“The faster you replace a car, the more CO₂ it emits. It’s no different with electric cars, because when the demand for new cars increases, it shoots up manufacturing emissions,” says Shigemi Kagawa, professor of Kyushu University’s Faculty of Economics and leader of the study.

Car replacement is especially rapid in Japan, where people enjoy longevity but cars do not. The average life expectancy of a car, from its birth in a factory to its end in a scrapyard, is around thirteen years. Moreover, the average length of ownership of a new car by its first owner is seven years.

These trends are largely attributed to the island nation’s mass-production, mass-consumption economy and its costly vehicle inspection system. While these might help to get more fuel-efficient vehicles on the road, Kagawa explains that we need to diligently look at the supply chain to maximize carbon reductions.

“The carbon footprint of a car goes far beyond just the fuel it uses. To produce alternative fuel cars intended to reduce emissions from driving, you need iron, nuts, and bolts for construction, factories for assembly, and mega-containerships for transport. All these points in the supply chain produce CO₂.”

Of the about nine percent of Japan’s total greenhouse gas emissions attributed to cars, about forty percent is due to gasoline combustion from driving new cars and twenty-four percent due to their manufacturing.

“Our hypothesis is that driving current internal combustion engine vehicles a little longer during the transition to green vehicles is a viable strategy to help the environment,” says Kagawa.

Using economic statistics, Kagawa’s group conducted a case study of newly registered and used cars in Japan between 1990 and 2016. The group modeled how replacement behavior of car owners affects their carbon footprint.

Their modeling shows that, if cars had been kept on the road ten percent longer before being scrapped, the cumulative carbon footprint from cars would have decreased by 30.7 million tonnes, or one percent, during this period.

This is because the decrease in manufacturing emissions more than offsets additional emissions produced by existing cars.

Moreover, the study finds a similar one percent decrease in carbon footprint would be realized if owners of new cars had used their cars ten percent longer.

In this case, by keeping more cars in the hands of their original owners longer, the number of used cars on the road decreases. Accordingly, emissions from the driving of new, relatively fuel-efficient cars increase while those of used, relatively fuel-inefficient cars decrease.

“What this means is that we can reduce CO₂ emissions just by keeping and driving cars longer,” concludes Kagawa. “Moreover, if the car we keep is relatively new and fuel-efficient, the effect is greater. So the next time you are thinking of getting a new car, perhaps consider if your current car has a few more kilometers left in it.”

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Based at WSU Vancouver, lead author Deepti Singh, assistant professor in the School of the Environment, drew on hundreds of studies of climate change, air quality, agriculture, and public health to propose a “systems lens,” or scientific approach, that connects health risks with simultaneous environmental changes driven by human practices.

“The health consequences of air pollution, climate change, and transformations in agriculture are often discussed separately,” Singh said. “But these issues are all related — they have similar sources, and each one affects the others. Agricultural activities contribute to air pollution and affect regional climate patterns, while farm production and quality of crops are sensitive to air quality and climate conditions.”

Collaborating with researchers at Columbia University, the Indian School of Business, Boston University, and the University of Delaware, Singh studied the situation in South Asia, where rapid industrialization and modern farming practices have aided economic development and increased food production, but also compromised multiple dimensions of human health.

“We’re offering a framework to assess the overall health impacts from multiple parts of Earth’s natural systems, which are all changing simultaneously because of human activities,” Singh said. “The research could help identify policies and solutions that will have multiple co-benefits for the environment and human health.”

“Our work sheds new light on the ways that food systems affect, and are affected by, climate change and air pollution,” said Kyle Davis, co-author and assistant professor at the University of Delaware.

The scientists reviewed multiple examples of health impacts from changes in climate, air quality, and agricultural output, as well as co-benefits and unintended consequences of efforts to curb emissions and save water, for example. They found these examples share the need for better tools and local, high-resolution data on health, weather, emissions, air pollution, and land use to better measure human and environmental impacts.

“This study points out how useful and effective policy responses need to take multiple factors and interactions into account, and highlights the problem with simplistic explanations,” said Ashwini Chhatre, co-author and associate professor of public policy at the Indian School of Business.

Use of fossil fuels, burning of crop residue, and changes to the landscape from expansion and intensification of agriculture have contributed to extremely poor air quality in South Asia, changed the main source of rainfall, the summer monsoon, and also increased health risks for nearly a quarter of the world’s population living in the region.

“Late autumn is ‘pollution season’ in north India, and also brings vicious debates in our society about who and what are contributing to it,” Chhatre said.

Additionally, more frequent and intense heat waves and floods have killed thousands, displaced millions, lowered labor productivity, and caused disease outbreaks. Severe air pollution has contributed to increased heart and lung diseases as well as millions of premature deaths and weakened monsoonal rains. At the same time, air pollution and climate change have reduced yields of important food crops.

“While the climate benefits of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions we make today may not be felt for decades, our approach shines a light on some of the immediate health benefits, as well as unintended consequences, of policies that aim to minimize human impacts on climate and the environment,” Singh said.