First full genome of Ancient Egyptian sequenced; Wild killer whales offer gifts to humans; First demonstration of interstellar navigation

0:28Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. Hello and welcome to The World, The Universe and Us, the weekly news podcast from New Scientist. I'm Dr Penny Sartre. I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. Now on today's show we've got three firsts. The first genome sequence from someone from ancient Egypt. Ooh. The first reports of wild killer whales giving gifts to humans. To humans? Yeah. Wow. And the first example of interstellar navigation. Wahey! Which is another way of saying, you know, the first way of navigating by a spacecraft that's left the solar system. What a show. Very exciting. There's also some breaking news.

1:01We'll get to the detection of a new interstellar object passing through our solar system from outside it. Super exciting. But of those first, though, we're going to start with the ancient Egyptian genome. Yeah, this week we have publication of the first whole ancient Egyptian genome. It's from a man who lived 4 ,500 to 4 ,800 years ago. And here he is. Wow, that's amazing. Really lifelike. Yeah, it's a stunning reconstruction, isn't it? How did they do it? Well, they had the skull and they've just got really good at doing this stuff now. Incredible. Really brought him to life. And I've seen they've even speculated on what his occupation was.

1:39Yeah, they have. So look, that's what we're going to get into. To find more about that, we're joined by writer Mike Marshall, who's reported on this for us. Hi, Mike. Hello. Back again. So, Mike, the first thing I want to know is, well, this is the first genome we've had from an ancient Egyptian. But we've, you know, we had John recently talk about Denisovans. We know about Neanderthal genomes. Why is this only the first from ancient Egypt, which is a lot more recent than all of that? Yeah, in fact, it's funny because when we were first talking about this story, we were kind of taken aback. How have we not had any ancient DNA from Egypt before?

2:14But yeah, it is. It is almost the first one. So eight years ago, there were some partial genomes, three partial genomes from people who live significantly more recently than this. but this is the first complete genome of a person from ancient Egypt between 2855 and 2570 BC. So why is that then? How have they managed to do this now and why not before? So, I mean, we've all been melting in the heat wave and it's basically the same issue. Right. It's too hot. DNA degrades in the heat. And so the best places to preserve DNA are like the high Arctic where it's absolutely freezing all year round. whereas Egypt where you routinely get up to temperatures in the 30s it's just not the right kind of location for it and in fact the researchers said that this was a real long shot they didn't think it would work.

3:07So what was the circumstances of this guy then? Where did they find him and how were they able to get DNA from him? He was excavated from a site called Nuwairat which is near this great big necropolis called Beni Hassan quite far south down the Nile, quite a long way south from Cairo. He was excavated a little over 100 years ago, very early 20th century, and he was buried in a burial pot, essentially a ceramic pot, and that was placed into a tomb that had been cut into the rock. And it's possible that that created a very stable environment. Probably the temperature didn't go up and down too much, and that sort of enabled the DNA to survive longer than it otherwise would have.

3:50Yeah, the guy I spoke to, the archaeologist, said it was basically like a big Tupperware pot that he was interned in. And like Mike says, it kept it relatively stable. So that's why they've been lucky on this occasion to get DNA out. Brilliant. And so what have they been able to tell from his genome? So he was male. As we said, he lived a little over 4 ,500 years ago. And the key thing that sort of leaps out of the genome is where his ancestry is from. So about 80 % of his genetic material has been inherited from North African people, which I think is pretty much what you'd expect. But the other 20 % has come from the Fertile Crescent, the Eastern Fertile Crescent, which is that sort of region that's modern day Iran, Iraq, the very southeast of Turkey.

4:38So one of the great sort of centers of early agriculture and settled city living. and so that sort of immediately raises the question of well how did that how did that happen how come you know this person has essentially one-fifth of their genetic material from over a thousand kilometers away and so it suggests that there's been some sort of contact between those two early societies despite the great distance. And just to put it into context of where this happens in Egyptian history I was thinking of a timeline because it does go on a long time the ancient Egypt. Yes it's like 3 ,000 years and you forget that it was just a very long lived civilization.

5:18So here's how I think of it if you if you start with the modern day the most famous Egyptian is Mo Salah of Liverpool. Okay. And then you go back 2 ,000 years you've got Cleopatra then you go back another 1 ,300 years you've got Tutankhamen and then you have to go back almost another 2 ,000 years before you get to this guy that we've just sequenced. So that's the sort of scale of uh what we're talking about amazing yeah and we're yeah we're quite early in in that sort of that 3 000 year egyptian history we're quite near the beginning of it this guy came from either the end of what's called the early dynastic period which is really the first time when egypt was unified into like one state or possibly yeah the very early old kingdom which is one of the periods when they actually you know start building um some of the sort of spectacular structures that we still see today.

6:09So later on in the old kingdom. The pyramids. Yeah, I'm getting to that. Yeah, some of the first pyramids are from the old kingdom and the really famous great pyramid of Giza is from the old kingdom, or even that is still several hundred years after this guy lived. And look, the DNA analysis is really impressive. They've managed to get it out of this tooth. but it's what they've done with the forensic analysis of the skeleton that's really amazing isn't it mike i spoke with joel irish he's at liverpool john moore's university and he explained what they did from looking at the muscle markings and the wear on the bones and here he is from us sitting in front of a computer we're not going to have much of any muscle markings because we're just vegetating in front of this this guy not only had arthritis in the entire skeleton but incredibly specific arthritis showing very severe features that are reminiscent of what they would do for their lifetime, during their entire lifetime.

7:12This guy had an incredibly hard physical life, and that's unusual because being buried in a rock-cut tomb in a pottery coffin would have been more likely a higher status individual. So it's really unusual to see somebody who obviously worked so hard to be in a high status tomb. But so for example, there's like an attachment on the back of the skull that can be a huge, large bony ridge, and that connects the neck muscles to the back. And I found it, he has a massive one. Now males generally have larger ones, but his was like humongous, giant. So that means he was looking down a lot. And what I found really funny is that I was looking at some clinical studies, and they're finding this more and more in modern teenagers.

8:01They look down at their cell phones so much because their heads are like this. So this guy was looking down for like decades of his life. The most interesting thing were his ischia, the bones we're sitting on right now. Ours would be very narrow because we're just sitting on a nice comfortable chair. His, because of inflammation they call osteitis, The left side in particular was incredibly, it's like double width of what it normally should be. So this means that he spent his lifetime sitting on either a low stool, and I'll say why a low stool, or on a hard surface like the ground for like decades of his life.

8:40And then if you look at the femora, the heads of the femora have this area of attachment for a ligament that attaches to the pelvis. And normally it's a small little hole, but this is like three, four times larger than normal. And also there are other signs showing that ligaments were quite large and that he would have had been putting his legs straight out in front of him for long periods of time. So sitting vertically hunched forward with legs straight out in front. There's also some huge muscle markings on the back they call the linea aspera. That's where the hamstring muscles attach. And again, you're stretching your legs out, so it causes them to enlarge.

9:26So that's showing sitting legs straight out, but he's also showing an amazing amount of squatting. And so he was also sitting on the ground a lot and squatting down a lot. And then finally, on the right foot only, the bone for his big toe is just horrifically arthritic, showing polishing. But even more bizarre is that the bones of the arches, this part right here, are normally non-mobile. There's fibrous joints between them, but they're not meant to move. But in this case, they were incredibly worn. There was even polishing. So that's showing that he was somehow moving his right foot in a very odd way, whereas the left foot was not moving whatsoever, or it was normal in appearance.

10:11And so based on this, I went through and looked at all these tomb paintings, and they show, and also these little models that are in tombs showing different occupations. So you've got like masons, you've got farmers, you've got soldiers, you've got weavers, I mean, all these different possibilities. And the one that really stuck with me that would fit all these motions was that of a potter. And so if you could even, There's a really interesting thing on YouTube of this woman who did a thesis showing how it works with a pottery wheel. And the pottery wheel was first introduced about the time this guy was alive.

10:49But all of these movements are indicative of someone sitting out, working on a pottery wheel in front of them, but also doing things like stoking the kiln, carrying heavy pottery. I mean, it fit perfectly. The thing, of course, is that this is entirely circumstantial. He could have been doing something completely different. You've convinced me. You're like Sherlock Holmes here with this picture you're painting. It was so much fun. I've got to say, I had a blast with this guy. I just wanted to learn as much about him as I could. So, I mean, it's really, it's a cliche to say that archaeology brings the history to life, but it really does.

11:30It really does. And I guess, Mike, I wanted to ask you, we've had you on the show before talking about the origins of writing and how ancient Egypt seems to have played a role, but also Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia. Does this like take us anywhere closer to understanding that? So this is where we get into like speculation territory, but possibly, yeah. So the way that we understand it at the moment is that the oldest known form of writing is cuneiform, which is invented in Mesopotamia. and then a few hundred years later maybe 300 years later we get the first evidence of writing in egypt you know the origins of the famous hieroglyphics and that we've tended to think of those as being um independent inventions of writing but if there's actually if you know but as we said this guy's genome shows that actually there was some degree of connection between the two societies you know he's literally got a fifth of his dna from people from the fertile crescent so is it possible then that actually you know there was some degree of influence between the two you know maybe one of them invented writing and then the idea was transmitted by people who were traveling between the two uh we don't know that you know that's that's pretty close to pure speculation but the the timing is so close that you really only have to find one slightly older example of an egyptian hieroglyph or proto-hieroglyph for them to actually be simultaneous 300 years sounds like a lot, and it is, but at the same time, this far back in time with the archaeological record as incomplete as it is, it's not actually that big a gap at all.

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13:33Orcas, also known as killer whales, are in the news this week for a few reasons, actually. Big week for orca. But the first thing we're going to look at is that for the first time they've been documented giving gifts to humans, gifts of seafood. So I'm looking at a picture of one now. This is an orca offering a piece of liver. Other pictures have orca coming and bringing rays or birds over to people. Yeah, like delivery drivers. Yeah, a bit. No app involved. But they are bringing food, dead items. We haven't ordered them, but they're bringing them along and offering them to humans. Yeah, a range of different items.

14:06There's a video of a couple of these killer whales orca. And you can see them come up to the biologist filming them and release like a dead bird. It's a guillemot or a muir, as they call them in North America. And yeah, just dropping it there in the water for the human. Quite incredible to see. And so these are food items. These are seabirds and things that the whales themselves are feeding on, picking off the surface, and they seem to think, we've had all we need. I'll take this over to those other animals in a boat over there. Is that what's going on? Yeah, they're using it to interact with the humans, they've noticed.

14:44And that video of the guillemot was the first time that the biologist, he's called Jared Towers. He's at a marine research firm called Bay Cytology. It's the first time he'd seen that sort of thing in his career. And then it happened again when a killer whale came up and offered him a harboseal calf. Oh, that's grim. You start wondering if there's something specific about him, whether you all could think like that guy really needs a good meal. Do you think it happens on the street to him and people run after him with flowers? Or cupcakes. No, I mean, maybe. But the point of this is that it is a big deal for a wild animal to interact with another species in this way.

15:22Wild animal. OK, so all this does seem to suggest maybe that killer whales or orca are capable of like a generalised altruism, like kindness. It's almost giving. And then, you know, there seems to be a lot else going on here. They're curious, they're bold, they're coming over. Are they recognising our sentience? Apparently they're notoriously curious. Right. OK. And it's different from if you think about your cat bringing you a dead mouse. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. I mean, in that case, we have an established relationship. The cat lives in the house. But this is a killer, a wild orca and a random, essentially random human.

16:01And I think that's what's really instructive about what we're talking about here is that it challenges what we think about the inner experience. that you're getting at there of non-humans. And I spoke to Laurie Marino about this. She's a marine biologist at New York University and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project. My initial opinion about these sharing behaviours is that it is generalised from the sharing behaviour they show with each other, that is mothers and calves, family members. This is an extension of that behaviour to another species. And to the extent that the sharing represents a warm and positive engagement, then I would think the same kind of interpretation can be offered here.

16:49The orcas are providing a gift, and they are doing so as a way to build rapport with the humans. They are likely also entertaining ideas about why the humans do not normally accept these gifts. So in my view, this is similar to the way dolphins might protect humans in the sea from sharks or even help swimmers having difficulty staying afloat. They do this with each other and they generalise it. And it's part of their sophisticated level of sociality. So, you know, there's been quite a lot of news in recent years about attacks, so-called attacks on boats from Orca, especially around sort of Spain and Portugal.

17:32do you think this study has any sort of light to shed on that about what's really going on there? Are they just being curious rather than kind of vengeful? Well I think so. It doesn't look like those attacks are revenge attacks on humans as much as that narrative did get picked up. So the orca only attack sailboats, attack sailboats and not ones with motorised components. So some people say it may be like a sort of extreme kind of back scratch they're trying to get. But they bite the rudder as well of these boats. So it's a bit different to simple curiosity, but it does seem to be exploratory of some kind.

18:15And just to be clear, I did look this up. No wild orca has ever killed a human. So we don't think they're trying to lure us in with gifts, right? We don't think that, but we can't rule out this Machiavellian side of it because they do that with other species. Right. So they use fish to lure birds and then they kill the birds. Oh, okay. So they do do something similar. So there is a parallel there maybe. So as you say, no wild walkers have ever been documented killing a human. So it looks unlikely, but they do recommend that if a wild walker comes up and offers you a gift, don't accept it. Just say no.

18:51Yeah. OK, so from that to the even more ridiculous, what about this news I've seen about orcas kissing? They're calling it tongue nibbling. This has been seen in wild orca in Norway, but apparently has also sometimes been seen in captive whales. Yeah, French kissing in orca, I saw it as well. And yeah, I mean, putting your tongue in the mouth of a killer whale is not probably a recommended thing to do. but it's only just been reported this week so we don't know much about it but some suggestions already that it yeah obviously it's some kind of social communication social bonding just like we might right okay and well it could be a form of begging like you see with birds when they you know clatter against each other's bills uh trying yeah trying to stimulate a few food transfer transfer or um someone even said it could be grooming but you know it takes me back to all of those cringe explanations we've had over the years about why did our kissing evolve like to stay cool and all this kind of nonsense.

19:53Yeah maybe they just like it. Yeah yeah maybe they just like it. Okay to outer space now and the first demonstration of interstellar navigation which comes from the New Horizons spacecraft and that's just left the solar system not long ago. Yeah so this is involving a spacecraft that launched nearly 20 years ago and it's now left the solar system using a surprisingly old-fashioned method for navigation. So when sailors use the stars to navigate the seas or sailors of old, they essentially triangulated their position against the stars. And we've got Alex Wilkins here today to explain how that works and how you use it for a spacecraft.

20:31And also, haven't we had other spacecraft, like I'm thinking of Voyager, leave the solar system before? What's the new thing here? Yeah, so you're really right there. we've had five satellites have left the solar system four of those launched in the 70s so the two pioneer satellites and the two voyager satellites pioneer we've lost contact with both of them but voyager are still active and then we had new horizons which as you said launched in 2006 and the neat thing about new horizons is it's got this camera on it which can be used to take pictures of things such as stars so what astronomers have now done is they've used new Horizons camera to take pictures of stars and then use that to navigate through deep space basically by almost like those sailors but in a slightly different way.

21:15It's worth pointing out here that the way sailors use stars to navigate they had this essentially fixed background of the sky so the stars weren't moving they were moving against it whereas New Horizons it's traveled so far from earth that the stars have actually shifted in their position they're no longer fixed and that's what allows them to navigate using this effect called stellar parallax. That's a really cool term. So parallax is this effect where an object appears to shift against its background if you look at it from a different angle. And you can do this yourself if you close one eye and then the other that what you can see moves relative to its background.

21:51I remember seeing a few years ago that they'd first seen this effect with New Horizons. Yeah exactly so they looked at these two nearby stars proximus centauri and wolf 359 and the spacecraft at this point was so far from the solar system eight billion kilometers roughly that the stars positions were notably shifted astronomers can actually measure stellar parallax from earth as well like putting a telescope on one side of the earth and then looking at it from the other but that effect is so tiny you need quite advanced telescopes and you can't see it by eye but when you look at these stars that new horizons took and you compare it to photos we've seen from Earth, then the effect is really pronounced.

22:30Like you can see it actually shifts in the picture itself by a couple of centimetres, obviously magnified. And it's actually the biggest stellar parallax we've ever seen, given how far this spacecraft is. So it feels quite intuitive, but this is actually the first time we've taken such good pictures of it in that kind of level of detail. Exactly. Yeah. I have to say that I'm glad they chose Wolf 359 because you've seen that episode of Star. I'm familiar, yeah. You're familiar with that. No, I'm not. What are we talking about? Oh, it's a famous episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where there's a huge battle at Wolf 359.

23:04I thought I was missing some kind of niche, interesting science about Wolf 359. So to get back to the science, but how do they go from measuring the location of the spacecraft now on New Horizons? So the missing ingredient in all this is the Gaia Space Telescope. So this is this telescope that launched over a decade ago now and collected the positions of loads of stars in our galaxy, really precise distances and kind of angles. And so because we have this amazing 3D map of all the stars in our galaxy, we can reference that parallax shift from the New Horizons camera and then kind of map it out and basically almost triangulate it like you were saying with the sailors earlier.

23:45And how accurate then is when you use this method to work out the location of your interstellar spacecraft? Is this actually useful? Could we use it one day to navigate? Maybe. So the gold standard we have for tracking spacecraft in outer space is a thing called the Deep Space Network, which is run by NASA. And that's basically a collection of radio telescopes based around Earth that will ping out these signals into space, and then any spacecraft can pick them up, basically time how they're coming in, and use that to work out their distance. This is really accurate and can locate spacecraft within about tens of metres.

24:19By comparison, the interstellar method is much less accurate. It can narrow down new horizons to within a 60 million kilometre radius. 60 million. Yeah, so not quite as accurate. That's about half the distance between Earth and the sun for comparison. Ballpark. Yeah, I mean, it is not a bad ballpark, given the range we're talking about, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, the astronomer that I spoke to who led the work, Todd Lauer, he was honest and said they probably wouldn't be putting the deep space network out of business anytime soon and this is only a demo proof of concept the astronomer also thought that we could improve the accuracy by about 10 to 100 by changing the camera or kind of using different it's still going to be millions of kilometers out yeah yeah but it is worth saying that as the satellite gets further and further away from earth the deep space network will actually take longer and longer to measure so if you're close to another star and earth is light years away then you'll have to wait a year for that signal to come back.

25:16So actually it might be much quicker for the spacecraft to navigate by itself just by looking at the stars. Cool. So next time we do have a mission that's many light years away, we can rely on this, but that's not going to happen anytime soon, is it? Yeah, sadly we don't have any interstellar missions planned on the horizon. Okay. Despite all that, there is a beautiful story here that traces back to the original explorers that we were sort of alluding to, these early sailors. And the paper that you've reported on, Alex, it was dedicated to Chad Kalepa Bebeyan, who's a master Polynesian navigator.

25:51He dedicated his life to the teaching and demonstration of the ancient Polynesian science of maritime and celestial navigation over the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean and beyond. And the authors collaborated with him on this. So yeah, it's a real symbiosis of old and new. here. Oh, how lovely. Okay, let's get to the kind of breaking interstellar news this week. Yeah. We've just detected an interstellar object approaching our solar system. Yeah, this is like the third one, only the third one we've detected. Yeah. So this one has got a provisional name, A11PL3Z. Brilliant. It's actually just been given an official name, breaking news.

26:28It's now called Atlas. Atlas. I'm a little bit disappointed. You'll have to take it up with the astronomers. I thought there was some process because we We had Urmura in 2017, then Borisov in 2019, and now Atlas. I think they've named this after the telescope they use for it or the warning system they use for it. Fair enough. OK. So that's three, like you say, three observations. That's a trend. That means there is a visiting trend to come to our system. A big signpost on Earth. So are we going to be able to study it? What could it tell us? Yes, we will, hopefully. So we think at the moment it's about 20 kilometres wide and looks to be travelling around 60 kilometres per second towards Earth.

27:12That's going to speed up as it goes towards the sun, where the sun's gravity will kind of have this slingshot approach. And it will reach its closest point in October, passing close to Jupiter and within two astronomical units of Earth. So that's distance between Earth and the sun. But because we've actually seen it coming in, now we can prepare for it. We can get all the Earth's telescopes kind of ready and pointing at it. So we should be able to get some interesting information on this. The other ones, we kind of didn't have as much advance warning and we kind of saw them as they were leaving a bit.

27:43Unfortunately, we can't launch a mission because it's moving so fast. By the time that we get the mission ready and the spacecraft gets there, it'll be long gone. But even so, we will get loads of useful and interesting information about where this thing came from and what it might be made of. Because with Oumuamua, there wasn't that much information we could get. So that allowed a gap of speculation from some people about it was an alien object. Exactly. Whereas this, we can probably forestall that by the amount of data we're going to be able to get. Hopefully, or find out that it is aliens after.

28:16I can't wait to know what shape it is. We don't know that yet, right? No, the last one, a muamua was either a long cigar shape or a big flat disc. Maybe this will be something new altogether or one of those. that's all for this week you've been listening to the world the universe and us do go ahead and subscribe leave us comments spread the word thanks to our guests and thanks to you for listening see you next week bye bye get business done with the new american express graphite business cash unlimited card with unlimited 2 cash back on all eligible purchases unlimited 5 cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business, you'll have the confidence to keep building.