Archaeology

• The Southern Ute Indian Tribe Growth Fund (“Growth Fund”), the business arm of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, announced today its newest business subsidiary, Kava Equity Partners, LLC (“Kava Equity Partners”).
• The Growth Fund also announced the recent hiring of Mr. Peter Shepard as Assistant Operating Director of the Growth Fund and Mr. James Dudley as Managing Director of Kava Equity Partners.
• Mr. Dudley, as Managing Director of Kava Equity Partners, is responsible for sourcing, underwriting, structuring, and closing private equity investments and actively participates in Kava Equity Partners’ strategy development and portfolio management.
• “I’m honored and excited to join the Southern Ute Indian Tribe Growth Fund,” said Mr. Shepard.

• This amazing find would subsequently become known as Ötzi the Iceman.
• His body and belongings were extensively studied, prompting numerous questions: what was he doing here?
• His unique preservation enabled the sequencing of Ötzi’s whole genome – the complete “instruction booklet” for building a human.
• But it was enough for a team led by Turi King at the University of Leicester to extract fragments of DNA from them.

Crime scene samples

• Sequencing a genome, which comprises billions of DNA bases, enables scientists to evaluate regions of the human genome that contribute to appearance.
• For more than 30 years, forensic scientists have looked at specific highly variable regions in DNA to match these to crime scene samples, or to relatives of a suspect or victim.
• So how likely is it that DNA from such a sample could accurately paint a picture of me?
• Can forensic scientists build a kind of identikit photo from a crime scene DNA sample?
• Hair colour can be predicted from DNA, but darker shades of hair are more accurately predicted than blonde hair.

Environmental factors

• Commercially sold laboratory kits such as Hirisplex can simultaneously evaluate several DNA regions to predict the hair and eye colour from a biological sample.
• However, unlike eye colour, hair colour prediction from DNA is only of value until midlife, when the natural processes of ageing lead to greying or white hair.
• These processes also lead to hair loss in some people and more than 300 gene variants have been linked to baldness.
• More representative data from the rest of the world will therefore enhance studies in forensic archaeology, such as the Ötzi research.

• Beyond scholarly discourse, the Summit will provide a global platform for collaboration with wider audiences.
• Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani, Executive Director of Archaeology, Conservation and Collections at RCU, said: "The AlUla World Archaeology Summit will foster an environment of cross-disciplinary collaboration and knowledge exchange.
• We're excited to host the inaugural Summit in AlUla, where the world came to meet, and where we will meet again."
• The AlUla World Archaeology Summit serves the objectives of Saudi Vision 2030 with its focus on positively impacting humanity through insights gained from both cultural heritage and advancements in science.

• Sand is a vast canvas – and may have been used as one for far longer than people realise.
• When people think of ancient palaeoart, cave paintings (pictographs), rock engravings (petroglyphs), images on trees (dendroglyphs) or arrangements of rocks in patterns (geoglyphs) might come to mind.
• Until recently it was only possible to speculate that the oldest art might have been in sand.

Method

• In the case of the Cape south coast aeolianites, we use a dating method called optically stimulated luminescence.
• Given how the tracks and markings in this study must have been formed – impressions made on wet sand, followed by rapid burial with new blowing sand – it is a good method as we can be reasonably confident that the dating “clock” started at about the same time as the trackways and markings were created.
• Of course, we had to be diligent in trying to exclude other causes of the patterns in rock that we encountered, including modern graffiti.

Understanding the marks

• The other two contained either knee or footprint impressions in association with the ammoglyphs.
• At one of the latter sites human forefoot impressions were found in association with a number of linear grooves and small round depressions.
• We were not able to determine whether these represented palaeoart, were some form of “messaging”, or had a utilitarian function such as foraging.
• Read more:
  South Africa's Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human

An ancient impulse

• The creation of art is one of the characteristics that helps to make us human.
• Knowing that our ancestors so long ago did the same as we do today perhaps helps to add to that sense of “humanness”.