Previous research has suggested that a sexual division of labor existed in Europe during the transition to the Neolithic period, when farming practices spread across the continent. However, many questions remain as to how different tasks became culturally associated with women, men, and perhaps other genders at this time.

To provide further insights, Masclans and colleagues analyzed over 400 stone tools buried in graves in various cemeteries in central Europe about 5,000 years ago during the Early Neolithic. They examined the tools’ physical characteristics, including microscopic patterns of wear, in order to determine how the tools were used. Then, they analyzed these clues in the context of isotopic and osteological data from the graves.

The analysis showed that people of male biological sex were buried with stone tools that had previously been used for woodwork, butchery, hunting, or interpersonal violence. Meanwhile, those of female biological sex were buried with stone tools used on animal hides or leather.

The researchers also found geographic variations in these results, hinting that as agricultural practices spread westwards, sexual division of labor may have shifted. The authors note that the analyzed tools were not necessarily used by the specific people they were buried with, but could have been chosen to represent activities typically carried out by different genders.

These findings provide new support for the existence of sexual division of labor in the early Neolithic in Europe. The authors hope their study will contribute to better understanding of the complex factors involved in the rise of gender inequalities in the Neolithic, which may be heavily rooted in the division of labor during the transition to farming.

The authors add: “Our study points towards a complex and dynamic gendered social organisation rooted in a sexed division of labour from the earliest Neolithic.”

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The absence of such data led to LandCover6k, a project now in its sixth year that includes more than 200 archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and climate modelers around the world.

Led by archeologists Kathleen Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania, Marco Madella of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Nicki Whitehouse of the University of Glasgow, with data expertise from Penn landscape archaeologist Emily Hammer and others, LandCover6k’s goal is to aggregate archaeological and historical evidence of land-use systems from four slices of time — 12,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, and around the year 1500 — into a single database that anyone can comprehend and use.

The project offers what the researchers hope will become a tool to improve predictions about the planet’s future, plus fill in gaps about its past. “Understanding the human impact on the Earth is more than looking at past vegetation. It’s also important to understand how humans used the land and in particular, the relationship between human land use and vegetation,” Morrison says.

Though current Earth system models suggest that human activity during the past 12,000 years influenced regional and global climate, Madella says, “the models do not capture the diversity and intensity of human activities that affected past land cover, nor do they capture carbon and water cycles.”

Archaeology provides important information around land use that “helps reveal how humans have affected past land cover at a global scale,” adds Whitehouse, “including the crops and animals being farmed, how they were being farmed, and how much land was needed to feed growing populations.”

In a new PLOS ONE paper, the team provides a detailed introduction to LandCover6k’s land-use classification system and global database.

Creating a common language, system

To share such data meant first creating a common language that scientists across disciplines could understand. It’s a task more fraught than it might sound, Morrison says. “Classification means putting hard edges on something. That’s very challenging, as archaeologists are often much more comfortable with narrative.”

Partially because of a lack of shared terminology, archaeologists have not tried to aggregate and compare data on a global scale, something the project’s paleoecologists and modelers had already been doing, she adds. “We spent years consulting with colleagues around the world, discussing all the different types of land use and developing a communication system — the same language, the same terminology — that could be used anywhere.”

Because such categories historically have had different meaning depending on place, context, and time period, some archaeologists initially balked at committing to single definitions for each. Hammer offers the concept of “farming” as an example. “The line between what is called ‘farming’ and what is considered small-scale food production by hunter-gatherers really varies across the world,” she says. So, how could the field fairly judge when the actions of hunter-gatherers managing wild plant and animal resources became “farming”?

Questions like these prompted the LandCover6k team to create a hierarchy within the classification system, with an upper-level category capturing an idea at its broadest and several distinct sub-categories funneling down from there. In the farming example, the research team created a sub-group — low-level food production — which could include the work of the hunter-gatherers. The hope was to offer enough nuance for the archeological community yet still make the data accessible to climate modelers.

In addition to this flexible hierarchy and the uniform terminology, the final classification has three other principal features. It is scale- and source-independent, meaning it accounts for the myriad ways something can be studied. It “takes the perspective of land rather than people,” as the researchers write in PLOS ONE, and it employs a consistent 8×8 kilometer grid scale. “That’s quite large, from an archaeological perspective,” Hammer says, “but we did that so that one person isn’t drawing something very small and another person very large.”

Concrete examples

To showcase how the classification works, the researchers offer the example of the Middle East 6,000 years ago. This region, the area represented by modern day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen, was home to some of the earliest agriculture in the world. Using the new classification and database, project participants built a regional land-use map, despite data availability differing from one spot to the next.

“Mesopotamia has been studied since the mid-19th century so there’s a lot of data and a lot of syntheses to rely on,” Hammer explains. “Arabia has not been nearly as well-studied. There are only a couple of data points, particularly for this period, and because of climatic events, the data are even rarer than for other periods. We wanted to illustrate the approach you would take in a situation where you have a lot of data versus a place with just a little.” The new map of Middle Eastern land is proof of concept for the project, showing the contrast between the settled farms of Mesopotamia and the more sparsely settled lands of Arabia.

The researchers don’t see information gaps, like those of Arabia, as problematic. Rather because the land-use database also records data coverage and quality, it can highlight areas needing more research. “Humans have transformed landscapes for thousands of years,” Morrison says. “But we can’t just say that. We have to demonstrate it.”

And that’s just what LandCover6k aims to do, merging what archaeologists have gleaned about human land use from different times and places into a single, accessible database for climate modelers — and each other. “This project is really about translating what we do,” Hammer says, “not only about the standardization of the terminology so we can talk at a global scale, but also about weaving together the narratives of the past.”

“One of our most important findings is the arrangement of cross-struts within the vertebral centrum,” says Dave Martill of the University of Portsmouth, UK. “It is unlike anything seen previously in a vertebra of any animal. The neural tube is placed centrally within the vertebra and is connected to the external wall via a number of thin rod-like trabeculae, radially arranged like the spokes of a bicycle wheel and helically arranged along the length of the vertebra. They even cross over like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Evolution shaped these creatures into awesome, breathtakingly efficient flyers.”

Scientists previously thought the pterosaur’s neck had a simpler tube-within-a-tube structure, he explains. But it raised an important question: how could their thin-walled bones, needed to reduce weight in the flying reptiles, still support their bodies and allow them to capture and eat heavy prey animals?

Cariad Williams, the study’s first author, hadn’t set out to answer that question. She wanted to examine the degree of movement between each vertebra of the pterosaur’s neck.

“These animals have ridiculously long necks,” Williams says, adding that, in some species, the fifth vertebra of the neck from the head end is as long as the animal’s body. “It makes a giraffe look perfectly normal. We wanted to know a bit about how this incredibly long neck functioned, as it seems to have very little mobility between each vertebra.”

While the Moroccan pterosaur bones they study are well preserved in three dimensions, the researchers still hadn’t expected the scans to offer such a clear view of the vertebra’s intricate internal structure.

“We did not originally CT scan it to learn about the inside; we wanted a very detailed image of the outside surface,” Martill says. “We could have got this by ordinary surface scanning, but we had an opportunity to put some specimens in a CT scanner, and it seemed churlish to turn the offer down. We were simply trying to model the degree of movement between all the vertebrae to see how the neck might perform in life.”

He adds, “What was utterly remarkable was that the internal structure was perfectly preserved — so too was the microhistology when we made some petrographic sections through the bone. As soon as we saw the intricate pattern of radial trabeculae, we realized there was something special going on. As we looked closer, we could see that they were arranged in a helix traveling up and down the vertebral tube and crossing each other like bicycle wheel spokes.”

His team realized immediately that they needed to bring in engineers to understand how the biomechanics of this unusual neck would have worked. Those analyses suggest that as few as 50 of the spoke-like trabeculae increased the amount of weight their necks could carry without buckling by 90%. Together with the basic tube-within-a-tube structure, it explains how the relatively light-weight animals could capture and carry heavy prey items without breaking their necks.

“It appears that this structure of extremely thin cervical vertebrae and added helically arranged cross-struts resolved many concerns about the biomechanics of how these creatures were able to support massive heads — longer than 1.5 meters — on necks longer than the modern-day giraffe, all whilst retaining the ability of powered flight,” Martill says.

While pterosaurs are sometimes thought of as evolutionary dead ends, Martill and colleagues say the new findings reveal them as “fantastically complex and sophisticated.” Their bones and skeletons were marvels of biology — extremely light yet strong and durable.

The researchers say there’s still much to learn in future work about pterosaurs, including seemingly basic questions about their flight abilities and feeding ecology.

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Honeybees are an iconic species, being the world’s most important pollinator of food crops. Honeybee hive products, including beeswax, honey and pollen, used both for food and medicinal purposes, support livelihoods and provide sources of income for local communities across much of Africa, through both beekeeping and wild harvest.

Today, honey is collected from wild bee nests in many African countries. In the West African tropical rain forest, hunting for wild honey, found in natural hollows in tree trunks and on the underside of thick branches, is a common subsistence activity.

It is not known how long humans have been exploiting bee products. Honey would certainly have been a rare source of sweetener for ancient people and was probably highly sought after. However, there is very little surviving evidence for ancient human exploitation of the honeybee, except for palaeolithic rock art which shows bees and honeycombs, spanning the period 40,000 to 8,000 years ago, the majority of which is found in Africa.

Historical and ethnographic literature from across Africa also suggests that bee products, honey and larvae, were important both as a food source and in the making of honey-based drinks, such as beer and wine.

The Bristol team were carrying out chemical analysis of more than 450 prehistoric potsherds from the Central Nigerian Nok culture to investigate what foods they were cooking in their pots. The Nok people are known for their remarkable large-scale terracotta figurines and early iron production in West Africa, around the first millennium BC. Acidic soils at Nok archaeological sites meant that organic remains such as animal bones and plants did not survive very well so what Nok people were eating was somewhat of a mystery.

To the team’s great surprise, their findings, published today in the journal Nature Communications, revealed that around one third of the pottery vessels used by the ancient Nok people were used to process or store beeswax. The presence of beeswax in ancient pottery is identified through a complex series of lipids, the fats, oils and waxes of the natural world. The beeswax is probably present as a consequence either of the processing (melting) of wax combs through gentle heating, leading to its absorption within the vessel walls, or, alternatively, beeswax is assumed to act as a proxy for the cooking or storage of honey itself.

Honey is often an important food source for hunter-gatherers and there are several groups in Africa, such as the Efe foragers of the Ituri Forest, Eastern Zaire, who have historically relied on honey as their main source of food, collecting all parts of the hive, including honey, pollen and bee larvae, from tree hollows which can be up to 30 m from the ground, using smoke to distract the stinging bees.

Honey may also have been used as a preservative to store other products. Among the Okiek people of Kenya, who rely on the trapping and hunting of a wide variety of game, smoked meat is preserved with honey, being kept for up to three years, A number of the Nok pots contained chemical evidence for the presence of both beeswax and meat products.

As well as using honey as a food source, it may have been used to make honey-based drinks, wine, beer and non-alcoholic beverages, which are commonplace across Africa today, although it should be noted that the chemical identification of ancient fermentation is notoriously difficult. The writings of ancient explorers provide insights into the antiquity of these practices. For example, Ibn Battuta, the Muslim Berber scholar and explorer, whilst visiting Mauritania in 1352, tells of a sour drink made from ground millet mixed with honey and sour milk. A further account of the preparation of wine from honey is found in a record of a Portuguese visit to the west coast of Africa (1506-1510).

Honey and beeswax may also have been used for medicinal, cosmetic and technological purposes. Beeswax has also variously been used from prehistoric times as a sealant or waterproofing agent on Early Neolithic collared flasks in northern Europe, as a lamp illuminant in Minoan Crete and mixed with tallow, possibly for making candles, in medieval vessels at West Cotton, Northamptonshire. Lead author, Dr Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry, said: “This is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted from prehistoric pottery, combined with ethnographic data, has provided the first insights into ancient honey hunting in West Africa, 3,500 years ago.”

Professor Richard Evershed FRS who heads up Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit and is a co-author of the study, added: “The association of prehistoric people with the honey bee is a recurring theme across the ancient world, however, the discovery of the chemical components of beeswax in the pottery of the Nok people provides a unique window on this relationship, when all other sources of evidence are lacking.”

Professor Peter Breunig from Goethe University who is the archaeological director of the Nok project and co-author of the study, said: “We originally started the study of chemical residues in pottery sherds because of the lack of animal bones at Nok sites, hoping to find evidence for meat processing in the pots. That the Nok people exploited honey 3,500 years ago, was completely unexpected and is unique in West African prehistory.”

Professor Katharina Neumann from Goethe University, Frankfurt, who is the archaeobotanical director of the Nok project and co-author of the study, added: “Plant and animal remains from archaeological sites usually reveal only a small part of what prehistoric people had been eating. Chemical residues of beeswax in potsherds opens up completely new perspectives for the history of resource exploitation and ancient diet.”

Dr. Deanna Gibson, a biochemistry researcher, along with Dr. Sanjoy Ghosh, who studies the biochemical aspects of dietary fats, teamed up with chemistry and molecular biology researcher Dr. Wesley Zandberg. The team, who conducts research in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, explored the role of feeding dietary fat to gestating rodents to determine the generational effects of fat exposure on their offspring.

“The goal was to investigate how maternal dietary habits can impact an offspring’s gut microbial communities and their associated sugar molecule patterns which can be important in immune responses to infectious disease,” says Dr. Gibson, who studies gut health and immunity as well as causes of acute or chronic diseases like inflammatory bowel disease.

Their study suggests that the type of fat consumed during breastfeeding could differentially impact an infant’s intestinal microbial communities, immune development and disease risk.

The three main classes of fatty acids include saturated (SFA), found in meats and dairy products, monounsaturated fats (MUFA), found in plant-based liquid oils, and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), found in some nuts, fish and shellfish. PUFAs are further characterized as either n-3 PUFAs or n-6 PUFAs, based on the number and positions of double bonds in the acyl chain.

Previous research has determined both n-3 PUFAs and n-6 PUFAs can have a negative impact on intestinal infections such as Enteropathogenic E. coli, Clostridium difficile, salmonella and gastrointestinal illnesses from eating poorly prepared or undercooked food or drinking contaminated water. In contrast, diets rich in MUFAs and SFAs have been shown to be largely protective against these infections.

Dr. Gibson’s latest research states the beneficial properties of milk fat, or saturated fats, during the pre-and postnatal period might improve protection against infectious intestinal disease during adulthood particularly when a source of n-3 PUFAs are combined with saturated fats.

“Our findings challenge current dietary recommendations and reveal that maternal intake of fat has transgenerational impacts on their offspring’s susceptibility to intestinal infection, likely enabled through microbe-immune interactions,” says Dr. Gibson.

Global consumption of unsaturated fatty acids has increased significantly between 1990 and 2010, she adds, while people are consuming lower amounts of saturated fats during pregnancy because of recommendations to reduce saturated fat intake.

“Although it has been known for decades that high-fat diets can directly alter inflammatory responses, recent studies have only just begun to appreciate how fatty acid classes may have discrete effects on inflammation, and can shift host responses to an infection,” says Dr. Gibson.

Dietary fatty acids can impact inflammatory processes including defensive inflammatory responses following an intestinal infection. This can affect the severity of disease, making dietary fatty acids an important consideration in predicting disease risk, Dr. Gibson explains.

Researchers believe it’s a combination of dietary fat-host interactions with the intestinal bacteriome that can determine the severity of these infections. The intestinal bacteriome, Dr. Gibson explains, is established during infancy and plays a critical role in aiding immune system maturation and providing a barrier against colonization with potential pathogens.

And Dr. Ghosh notes this latest research suggests current health guidelines should be reevaluated.

“Currently, Canadian dietary guidelines recommend nursing mothers replace foods rich in SFA with dietary PUFAs, with an emphasis on consuming n-6 and n-3 PUFAs,” Dr. Ghosh says. “Given that PUFAs worsened disease outcomes in postnatal diet studies, in our views, these recommendations should be reconsidered.”

While breast milk protein and carbohydrate concentrations remain relatively inert, fatty acid contents vary considerably and are influenced by maternal fat intake.

“Overall, we conclude that maternal consumption of various dietary fat types alters the establishment of their child’s bacteriome and can have lasting consequences on their ability to respond to infection during adulthood,” says Dr. Gibson. “At the same time, we show that maternal diets rich in SFA, provide a host-microbe relationship in their offspring that protects against disease.”

It’s important to understand that the intestinal bacteriome is established during infancy because it plays a critical role in aiding immune system maturation which can provide a barrier to potential pathogens, explains Dr. Zandberg. He also notes a healthy bacteriome is dependent on early-life nutrition.

“Sugars decorate important proteins in the gut,” says Dr. Zandberg. “Their patterns are altered in the offspring due to the dietary choices of the mother during gestation and lactation. The change in patterns is associated with changes in the ability of the infant to fight off infectious disease in our model.”

That possibility is looking more and more likely, according to the initial results of an international collaboration — hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory — that involved key contributions by a Cornell team led by Lawrence Gibbons, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The collaboration, which brought together 200 scientists from 35 institutions in seven countries, set out to confirm the findings of a 1998 experiment that startled physicists by indicating that muons’ magnetic field deviates significantly from the Standard Model, which is used to explain the laws that govern fundamental particles.

Digitizer modules undergo testing in the lab of Lawrence Gibbons, professor of physics, before being shipped to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Twenty-eight crates of these modules were installed around the muon g-2 ring.

“The question was, what’s going on? Was the experiment wrong? Or is the theory incomplete?” Gibbons said. “And if the theory is incomplete, then confirming what’s going on becomes the first terrestrial evidence of a totally new kind of fundamental particle or force that we don’t know about. It would be the first experiment on Earth that is sort of the equivalent of the discovery of dark matter in space.”

On April 7, the team confirmed that the original findings were correct, which means there must be more to the physics surrounding the muon than previously known.

Muons are like electrons but are more than 200 times more massive. Both are essentially tiny magnets with their own magnetic field. Muons are far more unstable, though, and decay in a few millionths of a second. They are also notoriously difficult to observe at the quantum mechanical level because the vacuum in which they exist is not a big empty cavity, but rather a bubbling, frothing, dynamic environment.

“It’s your cappuccino foam version of the vacuum, where there’s virtual particles winking in and out of existence all the time,” Gibbons said. “And that turns out to affect the strength of the magnetic field of a muon.”

To figure out why, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory 20 years ago set out to measure the absolute strength of muon’s magnetic field. They did this by firing a beam of muons into a 14-meter-diameter magnetic ring at nearly the speed of light while a series of detectors captured data. The scientists discovered a major discrepancy in the muon’s magnetic field: It was more than 3.5 standard deviations from the Standard Model predicted by theoretical physicists.

A plan was eventually hatched to repeat the Brookhaven experiment with higher precision. In 2013, the Brookhaven magnetic ring was transported to the Fermilab facility in Batavia, Illinois, where it was coupled with an even stronger particle accelerator that could produce more than 20 times the amount of muons. In 2018, the first of several experiment runs was launched.

This muon g-2 experiment — “g” refers to the value of the magnet’s strength caused by its intrinsic spin, which is slightly larger than two — was successful thanks to a system of detectors developed through a joint partnership between Cornell and the University of Washington.

The University of Washington group built a set of 24 calorimeters out of lead fluoride crystals and silicon photomultipliers that measure a blue light, known as Cherenkov radiation, that results when the positrons from muon decay strike the crystals. By measuring the time and amount of light for each of about 8 billion positrons, the researchers can pinpoint the muon’s precession rate, which is the frequency of its rotational wobble. The rate is directly related to the value of g-2.

The Cornell team built the digitizers that could look at the electronic signal coming out of the detectors and create a digitized version of the waveform that could be analyzed offline. The researchers were supported in the effort by the Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics (LEPP), and their digitizers incorporated $200,000 worth of specialized analog-to-digital converter chips donated by Texas Instruments.

Gibbons’ group also built one of the pair of reconstruction packages that helped their collaborators parse and analyze the collected data, and they were assisted in getting the most precise measurements by David Rubin, the Boyce D. McDaniel Emeritus Professor of Physics (A&S), who helped correct for the spread of muon momenta in the stored beam and for the small vertical motion as the beam speeds around the magnetic ring. Two other Cornell faculty, Toichiro “Tom” Kinoshita, professor emeritus of physics, and G. Peter Lepage, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics, both in A&S, contributed to the Standard Model prediction of g-2, to which the project compared its results.

As a fitting final touch, Gibbons chose to make the digitizer faceplate Cornell red.

With so much subatomic information to be sifted through, six different groups worked to separately confirm the muon’s precession frequency. Gibbons helped design blinding software that would ensure the groups made their calculations independently.

Then the time came to compare results.

“I have to say, it was nerve-racking. You go into the room, and there’s all these points scattered all over the place from all the offsets, and you have to decide, OK, are we going to compare results now? And will they agree?” Gibbons said. “We were trying to measure something to 500 parts per billion. The range that we had was plus or minus 25 parts per million on the frequencies that we’re trying to measure. There was a huge sigh of relief when we found everything agreed beautifully.”

And when all the international collaborators came together online for the final unblinding of the magnetic field measurement and checked it against the original Brookhaven result?

“Oh man. It was like hats flying in the air,” Gibbons said. “It was a combination of elation and relief.”

The results from this first experimental run represent only 6% of the data the researchers hope to eventually collect. Additional analysis has already begun on a second and third run, which will generate three to four times as much data. It will be 10 years before all the analysis is complete.

“We landed right on top of this result that really could indicate that there’s something totally new going on. We really want to push the uncertainty, the precision, to make the strongest possible statement that we can experimentally,” said Gibbons, who began work on the project in 2011. “We may be onto something really profound, something we don’t understand. And we still have to figure out what it is.”

“Homo erectus is the first hominin that we know about that has a body plan more like our own and seemed to be on its way to being more human-like,” said Ashley Hammond, an assistant curator in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the new study. “It had longer lower limbs than upper limbs, a torso shaped more like ours, a larger cranial capacity than earlier hominins, and is associated with a tool industry — it’s a faster, smarter hominin than Australopithecus and earliest Homo.”

In 1974, scientists at the East Turkana site in Kenya found one of the oldest pieces of evidence for H. erectus: a small skull fragment that dates to 1.9 million years. The East Turkana specimen is only surpassed in age by a 2-million-year-old skull specimen in South Africa. But there was pushback within the field, with some researchers arguing that the East Turkana specimen could have come from a younger fossil deposit and was possibly moved by water or wind to the spot where it was found. To pinpoint the locality, the researchers relied on archival materials and geological surveys.

“It was 100 percent detective work,” said Dan Palcu, a geoscientist at the University of São Paulo and Utrecht University who coordinated the geological work. “Imagine the reinvestigation of a ‘cold case’ in a detective movie. We had to go through hundreds of pages from old reports and published research, reassessing the initial evidence and searching for new clues. We also had to use satellite data and aerial imagery to find out where the fossils were discovered, recreate the ‘scene,’ and place it in a larger context to find the right clues for determining the age of the fossils.”

Although located in a different East Turkana collection area than initially reported, the skull specimen was found in a location that had no evidence of a younger fossil outcrop that may have washed there. This supports the original age given to the fossil.

Within 50 meters of this reconstructed location, the researchers found two new hominin specimens: a partial pelvis and a foot bone. Although the researchers say they could be from the same individual, there’s no way to prove that after the fossils have been separated for so long. But they might be the earliest postcrania — “below the head” — specimens yet discovered for H. erectus.

The scientists also collected fossilized teeth from other kinds of vertebrates, mostly mammals, from the area. From the enamel, they collected and analyzed isotope data to paint a better picture of the environment in which the H. erectus individual lived.

“Our new carbon isotope data from fossil enamel tell us that the mammals found in association with the Homo fossils in the area were all grazing on grasses,” said Kevin Uno, a paleoecologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The enamel oxygen isotope data suggest it was a relatively arid habitat based on comparisons to other enamel data from this area.”

The work suggests that this early H. erectus was found in a paleoenvironment that included primarily grazers that prefer open environments to forest areas and was near a stable body of water, as documented by freshwater sponges preserved in the rocks.

Key to the field work driving this study were the students and staff from the Koobi Fora Field School, which provides undergraduate and graduate students with on-the-ground experience in paleoanthropology. The school is run through a collaboration between The George Washington University and the National Museums of Kenya, and with instructors from institutions from around North America, Europe, and Africa. “This kind of renewed collaboration not only sheds new light on verifing the age and origin of Homo erectus but also promotes the National Museums of Kenya’s heritage stewardship in research and training,” said Emmanuel Ndiema, the head of archaeology at the National Museums of Kenya.

Support for this study was provided in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, grant no.s REU 1852441, 1358178, and 1624398, Fundac?a?o de Amparo a? Pesquisa do Estado de Sa?o Paulo (FAPESP grant no. 2018/208733-6), and the American Museum of Natural History.