Photo by Satya Murthy

Millions of people across the United States will sit down Nov. 27 to a traditional Thanksgiving meal, including turkey, potatoes, squash, corn and cranberries. These foods have become synonymous with Thanksgiving, but how did they end up on tables from Maine to California?

According to Bruce Smith, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, much of what is eaten at Thanksgiving today came from Mexico and South America. “We can trace many of these foods up through the southwestern United States into other parts of the country,” he said. “Most likely this diffusion happened as a result of trading or other contact among American Indian tribes in this country.”

So, where did these Thanksgiving favorites come from? Smith shares some facts about the origins of the food on this holiday menu:

Turkey

• The turkey was domesticated twice, in central Mexico and in the southwestern United States. This domestication happened at the same time about 2,000 years ago. The southwestern domesticate disappeared, and the turkeys eaten today are derived from the Mexican domesticate.
• Wild turkeys were eaten at the first Thanksgiving. Domesticated turkeys made quite a journey to tables in the United States. They were most likely brought from Mexico to Europe and came to the eastern United States by Europeans when they settled the colonies.

Large white turkey male. (Photo by Keith Weller)

Potatoes

• Potatoes were domesticated in South America (likely Peru) about 10,000 years ago. The Spanish probably took the potato from South America to Europe where it slowly became a staple crop.
• Like turkeys, potatoes also had quite a journey to the dinner table. Europeans likely introduced potatoes to the eastern United States when they settled there.

On average, Americans devour about 142 pounds of potatoes per year. (Photo by Scott Bauer)

Squash and pumpkins

• There are many species of squash and pumpkins grown today in the United States; the most common species (Cucurbita pepo) was also, like the turkey, domesticated twice—in Mexico and the eastern United States. Some common members of the species C. pepo include acorn squash, pattypan squash and spaghetti squash.
• The orange-skinned “pumpkin” lineage of C. pepo (what is carved as a jack-o-lantern) was the first plant to be domesticated in the Americas, about 10,000 years ago in Mexico.
• There was a second domestication of C. pepo squash in the eastern United States about 5,000 years ago. All of the yellow- and green-skinned summer squashes in the U.S., such as zucchini and acorn squash, were derived from a wild gourd that is still found in the Ozarks.

Pumpkin pie and various squashes. (Photo by Peggy Greb.)

Corn

• Corn (maize) was domesticated in Mexico more than 8,000 years ago. This important crop plant arrived in the southwestern United States by 4,000 years ago, and reached eastern North America at about 200 B.C.
• Maize is derived from teosinte, a large wild grass that has five species growing in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Corn (Photo by Doug Wilson)

Cranberries

• Cranberries are native to the United States, most likely coming from the New England area.
• The name is derived from “craneberry.” European settlers gave the berry this name because they thought the plant looked like a crane. In the 1600s, cranberries also were called “bearberries” because it was common to see bears snacking on them.
• American Indians were the first to use cranberries as food. They also used the berries as medicine and dye.

Cranberries (Photo by Keith Weller–All photos courtesy USDA Agricultural Research Service )

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Left-handed snails, giant wombats, spiny trilobites, zombie ants, glyptodonts…these are a few of the fascinating animals and plants whose fossils spring to life across the pages of A History of Life in 100 Fossils, a new offering from Smithsonian Books.

Selected from the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and the Natural History Museum in London, each fossil is beautifully photographed and explored in-depth with a captivating description of its importance to the story of evolution and life on Earth. Organized chronologically from the Precambrian through the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, the book reveals the remarkable and persistent unfolding of fantastic life forms across the Earth as revealed in the fossil record.

Co-authors Aaron O’Dea of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Paul Taylor of the Natural History Museum in London carefully compiled the images in this book from hundreds of possibilities.

One of the first and oldest entries, a 3.5 billion-year-old rusty red stromatolite fossil, is arguably the most important. Dominating the world’s oceans for a staggering 3 billion years, stromatolites eventually filled the atmosphere with enough oxygen to enable the rise of complex oxygen-breathing organisms.

Aaron O’Dea

The oddest entry is a spiral bezoar (fossilized feces) recovered from ancient sea sediments and which once was imbedded in the intestine of a prehistoric shark.

Most touching: The Laetoli footprints from Tanzania, left in a matter of seconds some 3.5 million years ago, appear to show the path of a small family of early hominins, Australopithecus afarensis, wandering through a volcano’s devastation.

Steller’s sea cow wins as the saddest entry, “a sad tale of a once magnificent beast driven to extinction by hunting,” O’Dea, a paleobiologist, says. “Without its fossil record we would have had no idea that the animal was naturally widely abundant until a few thousand years of hunting whittled them away to almost nothing.”

“Onychonycteris finneyi,” a remarkably complete bat fossil found in 52-million-year-old lake sediments in Wyoming.

Other fossils examined include Cambrian worms from China that provide a window on early animal life in the sea, ancient insects encapsulated in amber, the first fossil bird Archaeopteryx and the last ancestor of humankind.

Writing A History of Life in 100 Fossils with Taylor “was a fantastic experience,” O’Dea observes in his blog. “Researching in detail about fossil groups I had previously paid little attention to, spinning evolutionary tales with a single slab of rock and crafting them in a way that could be accessible to all. As I wrote I tried to weave all the big biological themes into the book; natural selection, convergent evolution, sexual selection, extinction, the origin of life and even parasitism.”

A History of Life in 100 Fossils is brimming with epic tales of survival and migration, evolution and destruction once concealed in the buried remains of animals and plants that lived long ago.

Available from Smithsonian Books October 14.

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(Photo: Patrick Kelley/U.S. Coast Guard)

Archived feed of this symposium »

The world is changing at a rapid pace. Scientists have documented significant changes during the past century in climate, land-use and biodiversity that are unprecedented over the past thousand years. To examine this phenomenon through the lenses of science, society and culture, the Smithsonian is hosting a symposium “The Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Age of Humans,” was held Thursday, Oct. 11, from 9:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

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Today the Smithsonian launches its Transcription Center website to the public. The website is designed to leverage the power of crowds to help the Smithsonian unlock the content inside thousands of digitized images of documents, such as handwritten Civil War journals, personal letters from famous artists, 100-year-old botany specimen labels and examples of early American currency.

A tray of bumble bees from the National Museum of Natural History’s bee collection awaits digitization. The museum is digitizing all 45,000 specimens in its collection and using virtual volunteers to help transcribe important data found on each specimen’s tag. This data will help scientists studying declining bee populations in North America

The Smithsonian has already produced digital images for millions of objects, specimens and documents in its collection. Many of the digitized documents are handwritten or have text that computers cannot easily decipher. Transcription by humans is the only way to make the text of these items searchable, which will open them up for endless opportunities for research and discovery.

“We are thrilled to invite the public to be our partners in the creation of knowledge to help open our resources for professional and casual researchers to make new discoveries,” said Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough. “For years, the vast resources of the Smithsonian were powered by the pen; they can now be powered by the pixel.”

The Smithsonian’s collection is so vast that transcribing its content using its own staff could take decades. By harnessing the power of online volunteers that goal can become a reality. During the past year of beta testing with nearly 1,000 volunteers, the Transcription Center completed more than 13,000 pages of transcription. In one instance—transcribing the personal correspondence of members of the Monuments Men held in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art collection—49 volunteers finished the 200-page project in just one week. By some estimates, the volunteers are completing in a couple of days what it would take the Smithsonian months to complete without their help. Once a document is done, the work is reviewed by another volunteer before it is certified for accuracy by a Smithsonian expert.

Projects selected for transcription during the beta-test phase were chosen due to high demand from scientists, researchers and enthusiasts for certain items that presented accessibility challenges. For example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has one of the world’s largest bumble bee collections—nearly 45,000 specimens. Information about each bee, such as where it was collected and when it was collected, is extremely valuable to scientists studying the rapid decline of bee populations during the past few decades. The only way to obtain this information before digitization and transcription would be for a scientist to come to the museum and read each tiny, handwritten label (often as small as 3 millimeters by 7 millimeters) and record the information. Now, with the information digitized and transcribed, scientists anywhere in the world can understand more about the population history of the bumble bee and its recent population decline. The bumble bee transcription project is currently one of the highlighted projects on the site.

Curators at the Archives Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History chose to contribute the diary of Earl Shaffer, the first man to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. Hiking enthusiasts, naturalists and other researchers frequently consult this now fragile document. Once the diary was digitized and uploaded to the Transcription Center, members of the online Reddit community devoted to the trail promoted the project. As a result, all 121 pages were transcribed in two weeks. The diary is now available for download, allowing the public to read, study and search for key words or landmarks and reducing the need for researchers to handle the delicate artifact.

How to Volunteer

Volunteers can register online today to help the Smithsonian transcribe a variety of projects relating to art, history, culture and science, including:

For art lovers: Handwritten personal letters of artists from the Archives of American Art
Read and transcribe personal letters from artists such as Mary Cassatt, Grandma Moses and Claes Oldenburg. Transcriptions of these letters will be part of the Archives forthcoming book The Art of Handwriting. In an age of emails, texts and tweets, when handwritten letters have ceased to be a primary mode of person-to-person communication, this book will explore what can be learned from the handwriting of artists.

For armchair archeologists: Field reports from Langdon Warner
Langdon Warner was an American archeologist and art historian who specialized in East Asian art. He was also one of the Monuments Men who worked to protect monuments and cultural treasures in Japan during World War II. A professor at Harvard and Curator of Oriental Art at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, he is reputed to be one of the models for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones.

For bird lovers: Observation notebooks of James Eike
James Eike was a Virginia bird watcher who kept impeccably detailed field observations of birds and the weather nearly every day from 1960 to 1983 near his home in Northern Virginia. In addition to being an important resource for ecologists, it also includes tidbits of cultural events from that time, including the 1969 moon landing.

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Investigators from Rock County, Wisconsin, are one step closer to solving the mystery surrounding the death of an unknown teenager thanks to Smithsonian scientists.

Artist’s sketch issued by the Rock County Coroner’s Office showing what John Clinton Doe may have looked like at age 16.

Christine France, a physical scientist at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, was asked to help pinpoint the region where a white male whose skeletal remains were discovered in 1995 on the bank of Turtle Creek near Clinton, Wis., may have grown up. Police estimate John Clinton Doe, so named because he was found near Clinton, was about 18 years old and had been dead for about one year before his remains were discovered by hunters. He was wearing only one Nike Air sneaker and a T-shirt bearing the logo from the English rock band Venom. France was asked by Wisconsin police “to analyze the stable isotope values in the femur bone from the unidentified individual,” she says.

Oxygen isotope values embedded in bones can indicate the geographical region where a person lived. Harnessing the power of stable isotope analysis, France was able to help police narrow their search to a teenager who likely once lived in Wisconsin, Michigan or Minnesota. While the cause of his death remains undetermined, investigators believe this new information will greatly assist in identifying the boy and hopefully resolving the case. Police have already assembled a long list of missing persons who have been ruled out as this individual.

Finding clues in the isotopes

Isotopes are variants of a particular chemical element. While all the isotopes of a given element, like oxygen, have the same number of protons in each atom, the number of neutrons differs between them. This changing number of neutrons alters the atom weight of each isotope allowing France to calculate an isotope ratio value based on the combinations of atoms of differing weight. “We created a fine powder from a sample of the individual’s femur bone. This allowed us to extract the oxygen isotopes from the bone by separating them into their different weights using our stable isotope mass spectrometer,” France said.

Christine France analyzing samples on a mass spectrometer at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute in Suitland, Md. (Photo by Melvin Wachowiak, Jr.)

Many different combinations of oxygen isotopes exist in our environment and our bodies. These variations found in the bones can help scientists identify a likely geographic location from which the individual came, based on known variations in oxygen isotopes found in drinking water.

“Water from different parts of the world, including regions within North America, have distinct oxygen isotope signatures,” France explains. “When humans drink, the water is directly incorporated into their bones. By comparing the oxygen isotope value found within the bones with an iso-map–an online website database that contains drinking water values from around the world–we can estimate the most likely geographical area the individual has been in the last 10 to 20 years.”

Jack Friess, Rock County Deputy Coroner, inspects a femur at the Rock County Coroner’s Office from which samples were taken and sent to the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute for analysis. (Image courtesy Rock County Coroner’s Office)

Oxygen isotopes are not the only elemental tools in France’s scientific toolbox when it comes to discovering the historic background of human remains. Isotopes of carbon and nitrogen also can reveal information about the diet and demographics of an individual. These indicators, however, are not as useful for modern forensic cases.

Carbon, nitrogen

“We have found that carbon and nitrogen are good predictors of race and social class in historic populations, such as those from the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries” France explains. “The types of food people ate back then were much more tightly correlated with their location and culture. Now we eat a very global diet and buy products made from all over the world, which lessens the strength of these signals in modern cases.”

Christine France working with bone samples in her laboratory at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute. (Photo by Melvin Wachowiak, Jr.)

Although called upon every now and then to help police with modern mysteries, France and her colleagues specialize in developing techniques to assist archeological investigations. In their work to find the best bone isotope indicators for region of origin, racial identity and social class, France and her colleague Douglas Owsley found that these techniques can give us insight into key moments of our history. Owsley is a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

For example, “In studying military populations from the U.S. Civil War,” France explains, “we found groups of individuals who fought for the Union with isotopes that indicate they originated from the South. These were likely people who moved away from their home and decided to fight for the other side. We also saw the same for groups of Confederate soldiers. We have always known that this did occur, but where there is little or no record of these foot soldiers, isotope values can give us a hint of who these people may have been and where they might have come from.”

While investigators may never be able to put a name to some historic or modern day human remains, scientific techniques like stable isotope analysis now allows them to get a better understanding of a person’s background, which could result in a better chance of solving the mystery.

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Many traits unique to humans were long thought to have originated in the genus Homo between 2.4 and 1.8 million years ago in Africa. A large brain, long legs and the ability to craft tools along with prolonged maturation periods were all thought to have evolved together at the start of the Homo lineage as African grasslands expanded and Earth’s climate became cooler and drier. Now a paper published in Science today outlines a new theory that the traits that have allowed humans to adapt and thrive in a variety of varying climate conditions evolved in Africa in a piecemeal fashion and at separate times.

These fossil skulls, representing pre-erectus Homo and Homo erectus, exhibit diverse traits and indicate that the early diversification of the human genus was a period of morphological experimentation. (Photos: Kenyan fossil casts – Chip Clark, Smithsonian Human Origins Program; Dmanisi Skull 5 – Guram, Bumbiashvili, Georgian National Museum)

New climate and fossil evidence analyzed by a team of researchers suggests that these traits did not arise as previously thought, in a single package in response to one specific climatic trend. Rather, these defining Homo traits developed over a much wider time span in response to a much more climatically variable environment, with some traits evolving in earlier Australopithecus ancestors between 3 and 4 million years ago and others emerging in Homo significantly later. The research team includes Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Richard Potts, Susan Antón, professor of anthropology at New York University, and Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

“The traits that typify our own species Homo sapiens weren’t there right at the beginning of the evolution of the Homo genus; instead, humanness evolved in much more of a mosaic pattern,” explains Potts, curator of anthropology and director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

“Climate instability we have found would have translated to major shifts in resource availability including fresh water and food. This instability favored genetic traits and behaviors that promoted the evolution of flexibility in how well early humans responded to change. This is quite different from the idea of adaptation to a particular ancestral habitat and is a very important change in our thinking” Potts added.

A large brain, long legs, the ability to craft tools and prolonged maturation periods were all thought to have evolved together at the start of the Homo lineage in response to the Earth’s changing climate; however, scientists now have evidence that these traits arose separately rather than as a single package. (Image courtesy Rick Potts, Susan Antón and Leslie Aiello)

To reach these conclusions, the team took an innovative research approach, including developing a new climate framework based on the Earth’s astronomical cycles from 2.5 million to 1.5 million years ago. This paleoclimatic data was integrated with new fossils and understandings of the genus Homo, archaeological remains and biological studies of a wide range of mammals (including humans). However, it was the recently discovered skeletons of Australopithecus sediba (~1.98 Ma) from Malapa, South Africa, that really cemented the idea for Potts that the evolution of the Homo genus involved a period of evolutionary experimentation and mixing of traits.

“A. sediba possesses a bizarre combination of features. It has a really small brain, the size of a chimpanzee’s, but also a human-like hand. It also has aspects of the face that resemble the genus Homo but has a foot that doesn’t look anything like the genus” Potts explains. “This makes sense from the standpoint of the environment at the time, where habitats were fluctuating between more wooded and more open grassland landscapes due to shifting intensity of wet and dry periods. Small populations would have become isolated at times and later merged, which would have lead to a novel evolutionary combinations of traits.”

This chart depicts hominin evolution from 3.0-1.5 million years ago and reflects the diversity of early human species and behaviors that were critical to how early Homo adapted to variable habitats, a trait that allows people today to occupy diverse habitats around the world. (Image courtesy Rick Potts, Susan Antón and Leslie Aiello)

We live today in a very unusual period where there is only one species that exists in our evolutionary tree. Multiple species of Homo are known to have lived concurrently during the earlier time of morphological experimentation. Along with the climate and fossil data, evidence from ancient stone tools, isotopes found in teeth and cut marks found on animal bones came together in this research to depict how these species may have coexisted.

“Taken together, these data suggest that species of early Homo were more flexible in their dietary choices than other species,” Aiello said. “Their flexible diet—probably containing meat—was aided by stone tool-assisted foraging that allowed our ancestors to exploit a range of resources.”

Evolutionary and historic climate studies not only shed light on how we came to be, says Potts, but also give us a broader view of current climate change problems.

“These kinds of studies show that we do live on an unstable Earth in terms of its climate, however, humans are adding totally new influences to the environment in ways perhaps more precarious than we even thought.”

“Human features were selected for adaptability, but our earlier ancestors show there have always been limits to that. Our astonishing ability to adjust to new and changing circumstances is something that I think gives us some hope for the future,” Potts says.

“The question ahead for human beings is whether we can use our capacity for technology, culture and social interaction to a sufficient extent to avoid the kinds of precarious situations even members of our own evolutionary history faced in their past,” he added.

The team concluded that the flexibility demonstrated by our ancestors to adjust to changing conditions ultimately enabled the earliest species of Homo to vary, survive and begin spreading from Africa to Eurasia 1.85 million years ago. This flexibility continues to be a hallmark of human biology today, and one that ultimately underpins the ability to occupy diverse habitats throughout the world.

Future research on new fossil and archaeological finds will need to focus on identifying specific adaptive features that originated with early Homo, which will yield a deeper understanding of human evolution.

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Termites and ants are not something you’re likely to pour into a cereal bowl for breakfast or munch with toast and tea, but your ancient ancestors almost certainly enjoyed eating them—alive! In fact, new research on the insect-eating behavior of chimpanzees reveals termites and ants are a highly nutritious food that is easily accessible to chimps in the bush. Faced with the same conditions millions of years earlier, researchers say, our hominid ancestors may have gobbled down insects to ease the cravings of an empty stomach.

As a Ph.D. student, Robert O’Malley spent months following a chimpanzee troop in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, recording the insects that they ate and collecting samples to be analyzed at the National Zoo’s Nutrition Laboratory, a part of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI). His findings further our understanding of chimpanzee diets and also give us strong insights into the diet of early hominids.

Dr. Goodall, I presume?

Made famous by the research of Dr. Jane Goodall, the Gombe chimpanzees have been studied by scientists for more than 50 years, spanning several chimp generations. By watching these chimpanzee families Goodall not only noted that they often eat insects but also made the discovery that they use tools to reach them.

“Chimpanzees go ‘fishing’ for termites and ants by using sticks or leaves to prod insect mounds. Termite soldiers attack the probe and the chimps pull it out and eat them,” says O’Malley, who works at the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology at George Washington University. “Many studies have focused on the use of tools by chimpanzees to eat insects but very little has been done on the nutritional benefit of this behavior. We had so many questions: How do they decide which insects to eat…perhaps by observing others in their group? Just how many insects are they eating? Do they eat insects only because they taste good, or is there any real nutritional benefit that has made this a part of their feeding behavior?”

To answer these questions O’Malley spent months constantly following the troop through the Tanzanian jungle.

“My research was done in the rainy season, which can be quite unpleasant due to the occasional torrential rain. I spent many hours each day going up and down these huge hills following the chimps and trying to stay with them,” O’Malley says. “If they were doing something like eating termites or ants then I would video record it. This would allow me to score, hopefully with great accuracy, the volume and type of insects they were eating. I also collected samples of the insects they ate to test back at the laboratory.”

Robert O’Malley videotapes a chimpanzee troop in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, “fishing” for termites on a termite mound. (Photo courtesy Robert O’Malley)

Small, delicious and definitely nutritious

Back at the National Zoo’s Nutrition Laboratory, O’Malley and his co-author SCBI biologist Michael Power ground the insects up to measure their nutritional content. Although the different insects the chimpanzees ate differed in nutritional composition, their favorites were routinely those with the greatest nutritional return.

“Chimpanzees prefer eusocial insects like termites and it was these insects that most consistently met our estimates for recommended dietary intake of minerals, and non-trivial amounts of fat and protein,” O’Malley explains. “The termite soldiers that they eat supply them with several dietary minerals while the winged “alate” termite caste, which fly out to start new nests, are very high in fat—about 25 percent, which is extraordinary for an insect.”

Robert O’Malley, right, and colleague collect insects in the jungle. These specimens were later taken to a laboratory to measure their nutritional value as a chimpanzee food source. (Photo courtesy Robert O’Malley)

Though most of their diet is ripe fruit, chimpanzees are omnivores like humans, not only eating insects but also meat, hunting animals such as monkeys and piglets. So why would chimpanzees spend so much time, more than four hours on some days, collecting and eating such a tiny food when they could be hunting?

“Going after insects is much safer, especially if mothers have their young with them,” Power explains. “The females are a lot more patient and often more skilled at termite fishing than the males. Males often don’t stay around if they don’t quickly get a good return. The females, however, stick it out, maybe because they realize they have a guaranteed source of food.” 

Could our ancestors have spent time eating termites?

Several million years ago, our human ancestors lived in similar sub-Saharan habitats in Africa. These extinct hominids were approximately the same size as a chimpanzee and quite possibly used similar tools and strategies to harvest insects.

A chimpanzee troop in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, dining on termites that they pull from the mound using long sticks. (Photo by Robert O’Malley)

“Chimpanzees represent a useful referential model which we use to make inferences about the diet and behavior of extinct hominids,” O’Malley explains. “We will never be able to go back and observe what our ancestors were doing directly, but by studying chimpanzees we can infer how an omnivorous ape would deal with similar challenges. We can also look to the archeological records for supporting evidence for what we see in the field.”

Archaeologists Lucinda Backwell from University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Francesco d’Errico from du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France, have found evidence, which suggests that bones were used as digging tools in termite mound soil by hominids in South Africa between 1.8 and 1 million years ago. Furthermore, all the insect genera that O’Malley witnessed the apes eating in Gombe are likely to have been available to hominids living in sub-Saharan East Africa for most of the last several million years

“We humans use tools, and many cultures around the world today still eat insects,” O’Malley says. “One of the implications of this study is that we show chimpanzees, using very simple technology, can use termites and ants as a viable source of fat, high-quality protein and minerals. This was also probably true for extinct hominids.”

Journal Link: “The energetic and nutritional yields from insectivory for Kasekela chimpanzees,” by Robert C. O’Malley and Michael L. Power, Journal of Human Evolution, April 2014.

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Matthew C. Larsen, associate director for climate and land-use change at the U.S. Geological Survey, has been appointed the Director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, effective Aug. 11.

Matthew Larsen

Larsen is responsible for USGS climate-change research, adaptation and mitigation programs as well as land-change science programs. He currently leads a team of 750 scientific and operational staff that conducts scientific research, habitat monitoring, remote sensing and environmental forecasting to address the effects of climate and land-use change on U.S. resources.

“Matt is a respected scientist and a talented and experienced leader who has demonstrated the ability to bring out the best in those working around him,” said Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian. “His deep appreciation of the issues facing society and his commitment to public service make him the right choice to build on the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s legacy of more than a century of biodiversity research and launch it into an exciting future.”

Larsen will oversee approximately 300 employees, an annual budget of $23 million and STRI’s research facilities throughout Panama and field sites in 14 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. In addition to its resident scientists, STRI’s facilities are used by some 1,400 visiting scientists and 800 pre- and postdoctoral fellows and interns from academic and research institutions around the world annually.

“Matt has extensive experience in climate-change scientific research and monitoring, long-term field work in Puerto Rico and Venezuela,” said John Kress, Smithsonian’s interim Under Secretary for Science. “He is a proven leader of large collaborative projects—an essential asset for directing scientific endeavors at STRI over the next decade. I look forward to working with him to build STRI’s capacity for high-quality science.”

Since 2010, Larsen has led a large team of scientific and operational staff in research to address improved understanding of climate change and land-use change. The scientific programs Larsen currently oversees at USGS are supported by annual congressional appropriations of approximately $160 million.

From 2008 to 2010, Larsen was the associate director for water at USGS, where he led water-resources research and federally funded programs to collect and disseminate information needed to understand the nation’s water resources. He was USGS’s chief scientist for hydrology from 2005 to 2008, and he was the staff assistant to the chief scientist for hydrology from 2003 to 2005. Larsen worked for more than a decade in Puerto Rico as a research hydrologist before becoming USGS’s Caribbean district chief in 2000 in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, where he led water resource programs there and in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“STRI is a world-class research entity that facilitates some of the top science in the humid tropics, a region whose unique natural resources are under tremendous developmental pressure,” Larsen said. “It will be a privilege and an honor to work with such dedicated and talented scientists and staff in support of this remarkable institution.”

Concurrent to his present role at USGS, Larsen has chaired the U.S. National Committee for the UNESCO International Hydrological Program since 2005. He has co-chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force Water Resources Workgroup since 2009 and the Department of the Interior’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science since 2011.

Larsen has a bachelor’s degree in geology from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and a doctorate in geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Clough made the appointment based on the recommendations of a search committee co-chaired by Kress and Eva Pell, then Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for Science. Committee members included STRI board member Frank Levinson; board chair of the Smithsonian Foundation of Panama Pedro Heilbron; Smithsonian Environmental Research Center director Anson Hines; Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute director Steven Monfort; Smithsonian’s Sant Chair of Marine Science Nancy Knowlton; STRI staff members Rachel Page, Mark Torchin, Richard Cook, Mireya Correa, Joe Wright and Mariechen Lang; and Office of Human Resources associate director Greg Bettwy.

William Wcislo, evolutionary biologist at STRI, will continue to serve as acting director until Larsen’s arrival in August.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. Website: www.stri.si.edu.

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The largest fully preserved great ape collection in the world is about to make its online debut. Scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have been working during the last few weeks to CT scan all 38 specimens in the museum’s “wet” great ape collection, including chimpanzees, orangutans and even a full-grown western lowland gorilla. Once completed, the thousands of high-resolution scans of the animal’s insides will be made publicly available on the Internet, giving scientists from around the world access to a once largely inaccessible collection.

Our collection is more than just bones
Beyond just the bones contained in the Natural History Museum’s dry collections, with which the public is most familiar, the museum’s “fluid” collection preserves the entire animal in an alcohol solution.

“Our fluid specimens are an invaluable resource as the entire animal is preserved intact,” says Darrin Lunde, Mammals Collection Manager for the museum. “We have the muscles, we have the internal organs, we have blood vessels – nothing is lost. These specimens are invaluable for researchers wishing to study tissues and internal organs that the dry collections cannot provide”.

Scientists from around the world  seeking to answer questions in biomedical, environmental and evolutionary fields have vied for access to this fluid collection for years but have been restricted by the difficulties in handling the preserved great apes.

Bruno Frohlich and Sabrina Sholts guide a great ape specimen, wrapped in plastic for protection, through a CT scanner at the National Museum of Natural History. (Photos by Micaela Jemison)

“Wet specimens are difficult to work with,” Lunde says. “These new high-definition scans will enable researchers to non-invasively study tissues, organs and bone structure from our specimens from the comfort of their computer screens anywhere in the world.”

Speed, care & alcohol fumes
While the  final product will mean endless possibilities for research, getting the apes scanned is a mammoth undertaking. Preserved in alcohol tanks the size of small compact cars, fishing out the apes is no small feat. Transporting the animals also must be done with the utmost speed and care due to their fragile condition.

An orangutan, part of the the great ape wet collection maintained by the National Museum of Natural History’s Division of Mammals.

Well aware of the medical insights the great apes could provide, Smithsonian Biological Anthropologist Bruno Frohlich, along with other museum staff, has spent weeks scanning the specimens in often smelly and certainly challenging conditions. A round-the-clock cycle “ape shuttle” has transported the great apes from their tanks at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Md. to the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. for scanning.

Placing the great apes in the CT scanner comes with its own risks, not only to the specimens but to the scientists themselves.

“To ensure the specimens remain in pristine condition, they must be kept moist in their alcohol solution” Frohlich says. “The alcohol fumes, however, are highly flammable and an explosive hazard should any electrical sparks from the equipment come in contact with them. To protect both us, the apes and the scanner, we place the apes in specialized bags that keep them wet and the fumes inside.”

Bruno Frohlich and Sabrina Sholts retrieve a specimen from its storage container at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Md.

Will the king of jungle fit through the scanner?
The scanning of the great ape collection is nearly complete but the final hurdle is proving to be quite the challenge. All that remains is to scan the centerpiece of the collection, a full-grown male western lowland gorilla known as “Hercules.”  Weighing in at roughly 400 pounds, his gigantic size may prove to be too much for the museum’s CT scanner to handle.

If scanning the gorilla can be achieved, it and the other 37 specimens will provide research insights for scientists all over the world. “To my knowledge this is the first time a large collection of great ape anatomical specimens is being made available online,” Lunde says. “Having these scans not only means we can try to answer many of the research questions we have now, but also the many more to come in the future.”

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See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche’s realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins. “The human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself,” says Gurche.

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Between the world wars of the early Twentieth Century, an age of adventure travel and cultural exploration flourished when newly developed transport and recording technologies–particularly airplanes, automobiles and small, portable still and motion picture cameras–allowed travelers to document “untouched” places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. Expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters, and they enchanted popular imagination.

Recreating First Contact traces the complex relationships among adventure travel, anthropology and cinematic imagination that grew out of these expeditions and the resulting articles, books, films, exhibitions and lecture tours, all of which fed into pre-existing stereotypes about “exotic” cultures–and helped create them anew in popular Western culture of the 1920s and 1930s.

Through lenses of cinema, anthropology and cultural history, the essays in this book from Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press provide nuanced international perspectives on how expeditions became a global phenomenon. (To order click the photo at left.)

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Maintaining natural movement of animals that live in the tropical rainforest canopy in South America is important for the health of the ecosystem. As development and resource extraction encroach on remote areas of the Amazon, the forest is becoming increasingly fragmented, limiting where animals that cannot fly and only live in trees can go. To find a solution, scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute convinced a development company to leave behind a number of canopy bridges for animals to cross. This video highlights the work of Tremie Gregory, research scientist at SCBI, and her camera-trap study of the fascinating and secretive animals that use these natural canopy bridges.

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Roses, carnations and lilies are today among the most popular flowers people use to express sympathy and condolence. The simple act of sending flowers to a funeral is a deeply felt tradition that now a new discovery reveals dates as far back as the Stone Age. In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a team of scientists, led by Dani Nadel of the University of Haifa, report finding graves in Israel some 13,700 to 11,700 years old that were lined with flowers. The graves are from a prehistoric people—the Natufians—who lived at Mt. Carmel, Israel. Anthropologist Reuven Yeshurun, co-author of the paper and researcher in the Program in Human Ecology and Archaeology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, answers a few questions about this intriguing new floral discovery.

Judean sage growing near Raqefet Cave in Northern Israel. (Photo by Gideon Pisanty)

Q: Who were the Natufians?

Yeshurun: “Natufian” is an archaeological term for a prehistoric culture that was first defined in a valley called Natuf in central Israel, more than 80 years ago. Since then many Natufian sites were discovered throughout the Levant, with the largest and richest sites in northern Israel. They were hunter-gatherers and lived at the end of the Paleolithic, the Old Stone Age, and just before the emergence of agriculture in the Neolithic, the New Stone Age. They were actually the last hunter-gatherers in the this region and were the forefathers of the world’s first farmers.

Q: They lined graves with flowers?

Human remains from a Natufian burial inside Raqefet cave in Northern Israel. (Photo by Dani Nadel)

Yeshurun: Yes. They set-up specialized cave cemeteries to bury their dead, placing the bodies in natural dips and crevasses in the rock that they sometimes chiseled to make smooth. The graves that are the subject of our paper are in Raqefet Cave and before a burial were first lined with a thin mud veneer, a kind of primitive plaster. Upon this wet veneer a layer of flowering plants was laid down and the corpse was placed on top of the flowers. One of the graves we studied was a double burial—a 12-15 year old adolescent and a 30-year-old man.

Although there were no flower fragments remaining in the grave, we found many impressions left by the plants in the wet mud veneer. One of our paper’s co-authors (Avinoam Danin) was even able to identify some impressions as belonging to the plant Judean sage (Salvia judica). Other impressions were from another sage plant related to the mint or figwort family and leaves from the Judas tree (Cercis silliquastrum L).  These fragrant plants still grow in abundance just outside the mouth of Raqefet Cave and flower each spring. Judging from the impressions of these plants and their flowers we believe the burials must have occurred somewhere before midsummer.

Usually this kind of activity leaves no trace at all. We just find a pit and the human skeletons inside. But at this site the flower impressions were actually preserved in the mud so we have firm evidence of exactly how the Natufians used these plants.

Q: Were other items found in the graves?

Yeshurun: Yes, there were a lot of flint chips left from stone tool making and also animal bones. Because the lining of plants was thick and continuous covering the entire floor and sides of the graves, it prevented any of these other objects from leaving impressions in the mud veneer.

We can only speculate that the animal bones in the grave might be evidence of a funeral meal of some kind, because the animal bones are contemporaneous with the burial. So, maybe after they made all these preparations for the burial they used to have a little feast or commemoration meal where they would butcher animals, roast them and eat them and throw the remains inside the graves just like the corpse.

Q: What was the purpose of the mud veneer?

Yeshurun: We don’t know. We think the most probable explanation is that these people were largely like us, the mud veneer and flowers are some kind of attempt to protect the dead or try to cheer-up the members of the group. A really nice decorative grave with a mud lining and on top of it fragrant, flowering plants could be very cheerful. But who knows, until we have a time machine we will never know.

Archaeologists at work inside Raqefet Cave (Dani Nadel photo)

Q: Was is the significance of this discovery during this period?

Yeshurun: What we think is that all these relatively elaborate burial habits in the Natufian culture came at a period of transition; it’s just before the invention of agriculture, and for the first time humans are settling down into semi-permanent villages. Human groups are suddenly not moving periodically as they did earlier, you can see it in many aspects of their economy, personal life and behavior. There are lots of new economic and social innovations. With the transition is the beginning of a new lifestyle that is to become the agriculture lifestyle and the beginning of civilization. People are looking for something that can unite them, can comfort and or can increase group cohesion. What’s better to do this than a nice burial ceremony for a group member? Flowers, a ritual meal during which they sit together and who knows, maybe they were drinking and having music, we don’t know that as well, but it really fits the period. The end of the Pleistocene is a period of great change and growing human population with humans coming to live together in little villages.

Q: Did the Natufians use gravestones?

Yeshurun:  In some graves natural stone objects were used perhaps as markers or symbols. They would also collect some fairly large stones outside the cave and put them on top of the corpses and on top of a grave maybe to prevent hyenas and other carnivores from digging it up. There were no inscriptions, of course, because this was the Stone Age

“Earliest floral grave lining from 13,700-11,700-y-old Natufian burials at Raqefet Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Dani Nadel, Avinoam Danin, Robert C. Power, Arlene M. Rosen, Fanny Bocquentin, Alexander Tsatskin, Danny Rosenberg, Reuven Yeshurun, Lior Weissbrod, Noemi R. Rebollo, Ormy Barzilai, and Elisabetta Boaretto.

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Katie Cramer is a MarineGEO Post-Doctoral Fellow and travels to Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama throughout the year to conduct research. Her recent paper in the Bulletin of Marine Science, “History of human occupation and environmental change in western and central Caribbean Panama,” gathers decades of research on human activity in Caribbean Panama, provides a historical context for the differing levels of coral reef degradation, and serves as a reference for scientists. Here, Cramer answers a few questions about her research for SmithsonianScience.org.

Katie Cramer collects coral skeletons and shells from excavation pit near Bocas del Toro, Panama. (Photo courtesy Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

Q. What is the purpose of your research paper?

Q. What kind of research did you conduct to write the paper?

Q. What kind of problems is the Panamanian coast facing and what has caused these problems?

Cramer: Largely unrestricted fishing and coastal deforestation have significantly degraded the marine ecosystems along Panama’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts. On the Caribbean side, which contains the majority of Panama’s coral reefs, outbreaks of coral disease and coral bleaching have dramatically reduced the extent of corals over the past few decades. This constitutes a massive loss in habitat for millions of reef-associated species. Overfishing, land-based pollution, and climate change are often cited as culprits, but there is very little data about the state of reefs before the 1980s, when reef research really began in earnest. This is why we need historical and paleontological data about reefs – to sort out which human activities are most damaging.

Katie Cramer on the road in Panama transporting coral samples from Bocas del Toro to Panama City.

Q. How has global/climate change played a role in Panama’s history?

Q. Going forward, how can we slow, stop or reverse these effects?

Q. If we do not take any action on the global/climate change effects, what will the Panamanian coast look like in 50 years? 100? 200?

Q. Did anything unexpected come up during your research?

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom for citizen scientists who want to get more involved in coastal ecosystem preservation?

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A team of researchers has for the first time mapped the above ground carbon density of an entire country in high fidelity. They integrated field data with satellite imagery and high-resolution airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data to map the vegetation and to quantify carbon stocks throughout the Republic of Panama. The results are the first maps that report carbon stocks locally in areas as small as a hectare and yet cover millions of hectares in a short time. The system has the lowest demonstrated uncertainty of any carbon-counting approach yet—a carbon estimation uncertainty of about 10% in each hectare overflown with LiDAR as compared to field-based estimates. Importantly, it can be used across a wide range of vegetation types worldwide.

This is the first high-resolution national carbon map. The highest carbon stocks in Panama are in the humid forests on the Caribbean side (red). The lowest carbon stocks are in developed areas (blue). (Image courtesy Carnegie Airborne Observatory)

The new system, described in Carbon Balance and Management, will greatly boost conservation and efforts to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration. It will also inform our understanding of how carbon storage can be used to assess other fundamental ecosystem characteristics such as hydrology, habitat quality, and biodiversity. The approach provides much-needed technical support for carbon-based economic activities such as the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program in developing countries.

Video: Watch the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (http://cao.ciw.edu) make the world’s highest resolution carbon map of a country (Panama) in less than one minute. The CAO Team gratefully acknowledges the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, its collaborators and the R Development Team for scientific and technical support.

Panama has complex landscapes, with variable topography, and diverse ecosystems (ranging from grasslands and mangroves to shrublands and dense forests). As a result, Panama is an ideal laboratory to develop and test a method for quantifying aboveground carbon.

“Three things make this national-scale study unique. First, Panama is an outstanding place for testing carbon mapping approaches due in part to the long-term forest studies that have been undertaken by our partners at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute,” explains Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science, lead author of the study. “Second, we have applied the very latest techniques using high-performance instrumentation, resulting in demonstrably high accuracy at fine spatial resolution. And third the partnership permitted us to estimate our errors in a novel way, and we did so over every point on Panamanian soil.”

“Panama is one of the first United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation partner countries, and these new maps put the country at the forefront of high-resolution ecosystem management.” said co-author and STRI’s director Eldredge Bermingham. “The new carbon mapping approach could be the model for other tropical nations.”

In addition to Carnegie and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute researchers, scientists from McGill University and UC-Berkeley combined measurement methods—an extensive and essential network of ground-based plot sampling, satellite imagery, and LiDAR measurements from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory—to achieve the unprecedented accuracy.

LiDAR uses reflected laser light to image vegetation canopy structure in 3-D. The scientists calibrated the LiDAR measurements, taken at one-meter resolution throughout nearly one million acres (390,000 hectares), to the carbon density in 228 regional field plots, established and sampled by the collaborating scientists. They used 91 other plots to validate the LiDAR’s aboveground carbon density estimates.

“Rarely has such a large number of field plots been available to validate LiDAR calibration independently,” remarked Asner. “Our collaboration with STRI and its partners was vital to assess the accuracy of what we achieved from the air.”

Traditional carbon monitoring has relied upon on-the-ground sampling of field plots, but this approach usually represents just small areas of land and is time-consuming. “There has been growing interest in using satellite imagery to cover larger areas, but it is low resolution both spatially and in terms of the structural information about the vegetation,” described Carnegie author Joseph Mascaro. “In some parts of Panama, different global methods disagree by more than 100% at square-kilometer scale.”

That’s where the airborne LiDAR comes in. It directly probes the ecosystem’s physical structure, which Carnegie scientists have repeatedly proven to be tightly linked to tropical carbon stocks. These measurements are the bedrock for mapping and estimating the amount of carbon locked up in plants from dense forests to shrublands.

The researchers then were able to scale up the plot and LiDAR data with freely available satellite data on topography, rainfall and vegetation to model carbon stocks at the national level.

The LiDAR and satellite combination were able to account for variations in the carbon pattern from differences in elevation, slope, climate, and fractional canopy cover over the entire country. For instance, the scientists found that highest carbon levels are in humid forests on the Caribbean side of Panama, often exceeding 110 tons of carbon per hectare (2.5 acres). In contrast, large regions were deforested to very low carbon levels, such as in the developed regions outside the protected watershed of the Panama Canal. Human activity is the overwhelming driver of carbon stock patterns in Panama. --Source: Carnegie Institution for Science

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