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What's up?
Adam Grant from Work Life, a TED podcast here, and I want to tell you about something exciting.
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Why is blight so far like?
It sounds so simple.
They had no idea.
But now the data.
I find this not only refreshing but but at some level, astounding nature.
Welcome back to The Nature Podcast.
This week, how ancient diseases shaped humanity.
And how whale excrement is helping researchers understand algal blooms.
I'm Nick Pertuchel.
And I'm Sharmini Bundel.
First up, an analysis of DNA from ancient microbes has shed light on some of the earliest human diseases and on what may have driven the first prehistoric outbreaks.
Reporter Anand Jagatia takes up the story.
Diseases have undoubtedly shaped the course of human history.
From COVID-19 and malaria to the Black Death, pathogens have been infecting, sickening and killing people for millennia.
But since when exactly?
One big question that we are trying to solve for many pathogens in particular is when in human history or prehistory did they actually become human pathogens?
This is Alexander Herbig from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
They have certainly evolved from their ancestors, bacterial or viral, into a form that has specialised to the human host.
One long-standing idea is that this might have started happening around 12000 years ago, when a big shift was taking place in the way humans lived.
So a turnover in human lifestyle from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle towards a more sedentary lifestyle with pastoralism and also agriculture, with animal domestication, living in larger settlements and close to livestock, where there can be a lot of zoonotic events, pathogens basically jumping from animals to the human host, and therefore pathogens could actually start to evolve in a way that they adapt to the human host.
The advent of agriculture brought with it many changes to civilisation, but was one of them an increase in infectious diseases.
A paper in Nature this week suggests that it was thanks to the analysis of DNA from pathogens of the past, as lead author Martin Sikora from the University of Copenhagen explains.
We were able to directly probe the DNA molecules that are in the bloodstream at the individual at the time that they died.
And any pathogen that's present in high enough concentrations in the bloodstream we, in principle, are able to detect.
Extracting genetic material from precious archaeological specimens is destructive and time-consuming.
So, rather than collecting new samples, Martin and a team of researchers actually re-analysed DNA sequences that already exist.
They came from over 1300 individuals who lived from about 35000 years ago to the present across Western Europe and parts of Asia.
Even 10 years, 15 years, after you've collected a sample and studied it for human ancestry, you can still find some useful, interesting and exciting things in there, with new tools, with new analysis methods and with a new approach.
And so our approach was just look at anything that's present that looks ancient, right?
Any microbial DNA that has sort of the telltale signatures of ancient DNA.
And let's just see what's there.
And from that try to understand what was sort of the dynamics of the different things that we find in the past.
The ancient DNA had been recovered from inside the teeth of these individuals.
Teeth have blood vessels running through them, giving the team access to a soup of DNA fragments that were once present in the bloodstream.
To analyse this.
First they screened for genetic material that looked ancient, and then for any fragments that looked like they came from bacteria or viruses, by comparing them to libraries of genome sequences for microbial species.
The resulting data allowed them to create a pathogen landscape of the diseases that have infected humans through time.
Unsurprisingly, they found widespread instances of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes plague.
But the data also threw up a few unexpected results, including a pathogen transmitted by human body lice.
It's a bacterial species called Borrelia recurrentis.
And this is one of those diseases where it really nicely highlights the power of this in terms of understanding burden of pathogens in the past.
Because this is a disease that today is very rare in the world.
But we actually detected it in up to 3% of our samples.
So this is a really nice example of a disease that seems to have been extremely common, high impact in past populations that we don't really know all that much today.
The authors also speculated on a connection between leprosy and the squirrel trade of the ancient Vikings.
The interesting thing with leprosy is that we only find it in Europe, particularly northern Europe, and only within the last, let's say, thousand years, so very recently.
This is quite interesting because there have been a few recent studies that have found leprosy also in squirrels.
The fact that we see this happening around Europe in the time periods of the Viking period in particular, where apparently squirrel fur was traded quite widely.
It's an interesting side note.
Of course we don't have a direct link to that, but I think it certainly could be one way how transmission of this particular bacterium between humans and squirrels, and vice versa, could have been facilitated.
The team then looked at the bigger picture to see if there were any trends.
And when they categorised the different diseases by where they came from, they noticed something striking about the timing of zoonotic pathogens, those that had jumped from animals into humans.
We never saw any of those before around 6,500 years ago.
We never detected any of them before.
And that is not the same for other classes.
We have the ancient human oral microbiome as a test case, the bacteria that are in the teeth of the individuals.
So that one we detect throughout all the time at reasonably stable proportions, showing that it's not due to not being able to detect.
But we didn't see these zoonotic pathogens before around 6,500 years ago.
And what's more like.
When we then look at sort of the relative frequency of those, we see this sort of steady increase through time and particularly high rates of detection in this period where in Western Eurasia you had this transition from Neolithic farming to the more pastoralist populations.
So precisely in that time period, when we would expect most contact with animals, we see most of these pathogens around.
The authors say that their study provides direct evidence that the transition to farming and the domestication of livestock led to a greater transmission of infectious diseases, and they could only show this because they screened for so many different pathogens.
The fact other microbes did show up before 6500 years ago means that the absence of evidence for zoonotic pathogens is actually evidence for their absence in humans.
Alexander Herbig, who wasn't associated with the new nature study, agrees that this is a powerful approach.
So the hypothesis that this type of lifestyle change of keeping livestock actually creates these new niches for pathogens to evolve?
The hypothesis is not new.
What we see here, however, is very systematic data across many pathogens that also shows this.
And it's really fascinating to see that this works.
The fact that we can actually use ancient pathogenomics to find such patterns, because we do know that there are these challenges.
We have only trace amounts of DNA from the pathogen.
It's highly degraded.
We have contamination from the environment.
We have a lot of caveats that we have to deal with.
And still, the study shows very clearly that we can see patterns through time, which really shows how much potential there is in this type of analysis.
There are some limitations to the study however, with some diseases evading detection using current methods.
A lot of high-impact diseases like, for example, influenza or COVID.
Even though it's a recent one, these are RNA viruses.
And at this time, we don't have any way to extract ancient RNA from samples, right?
So we basically have a big blind spot still in terms of a class of pathogens that we know have been very important, have had huge impact on population in the past, but we cannot get access to with this type of approach.
We also have only access to diseases that are at high enough concentration in the bloodstream.
So one of the examples of things we don't find that has had a huge burden on past populations is tuberculosis right.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
It's a lung infection.
It doesn't really enter the bloodstream.
And these are sort of two obvious limitations, right?
We have blind spots in terms of diseases that we can detect.
Nevertheless, the study of ancient microbial DNA is providing valuable insights into the transmission of prehistoric diseases, not just when and where they spread, but why.
And both Martin and Alex are excited about where the field goes next.
So we do want to expand the current study.
So definitely want to increase the sample size in terms of the number of individuals and also the geographic ranges, to get a much better view.
Definitely also now that we have these large lists of interesting pathogens and some of them that we actually haven't really been expecting, to really dig further into those.
In addition to extending this type of analysis to a larger number of human individuals I can imagine also including animal remains from various time periods and places but also looking into factors in human society, in the environment, that were actually driving how pathogens affected human societies actually during outbreaks.
This will, of course, be even more challenging and come with even more caveats, but I think that can drive the field also really into a new direction.
That was Alexander Herbig from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
You also heard from Martin Sikora from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Anand Jagatir reported that story.
For more on ancient pathogens, check out the show notes for some links.
Coming up, how whale poo could link toxic algal blooms to climate change.
Right now though, it's time for the Research Highlights with Dan Fox.
Remnants of DNA extracted from bone fragments have confirmed the key ingredient in the Roman Empire's favourite fish sauce.
Garum, an umami-packed fish sauce, was a common condiment in the cuisine of ancient Rome.
It was made in huge outdoor facilities where small fish were smashed and then pickled in vats of brine.
Bones at the bottom of these vats suggest that sardines might have been a key ingredient, but the remains have been hard to identify.
Researchers sequenced the DNA in fish bones found in garum vats at an archaeological site in northwestern Spain and, despite the fermentation process and intervening centuries, were able to confirm that all the bones belonged to European sardines.
Tuck into that research in Antiquity.
Analysis of animal manure from 26 countries has identified global hotspots for antibiotic resistance genes.
Manure contains a wide range of genes that help bacteria resist the effects of antibiotics.
And as the world's livestock population grows, so does the amount of manure produced each year.
Improper disposal could allow the transfer of these antibiotic resistance genes to pathogens that affect humans.
Researchers analysed genomic material from the manure of chicken, pigs and cattle on six continents.
The team identified more than 5000 antibiotic resistance genes in the manure and found that these genes were much more diverse than had previously been thought.
For each gene, the team calculated a risk score representing the likelihood that the gene would affect the efficacy of antibiotic treatment in humans.
They then used machine learning to develop a global map of the risks posed by these genes.
Many African nations, for example, were predicted to have high risk scores for chicken manure, whereas the risk scores for pig manure were highest in China.
Digest that research by reading the paper in Science Advances.
Next up on the podcast, we've got a story about how studying bowhead whale poo is helping researchers better understand levels of algal toxins in a delicate marine ecosystem.
Now algae, or algae, are a diverse group of aquatic organisms, and in many cases they're a vital part of an ecosystem's food web.
But there are some algae that are problematic, producing potent toxins that can pass up the food chain, causing significant health risks to wildlife and humans.
Under the right conditions, these algae can experience explosive population growth, forming what are known as harmful algal blooms.
It's thought that the warming of the world's oceans and seas could increase the frequency of these blooms, but a lack of long-term data has made linking these difficult.
And this is where the whale poo comes in.
This week in Nature, a team report the results from a 19-year study in an area that has experienced high levels of warming the Arctic.
Working with indigenous peoples.
The team have used the diet of bowhead whales to measure the levels of algal toxins in Arctic food webs.
One of the team is Cathy Le Fay from NOAA Fisheries at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in the US.
Reporter Benjamin Thompson gave her a call and she told him about the two toxins this research focuses on.
So we've been studying blooms of what's called Alexandria, which produces a neurotoxin called saxotoxin and causes the human illness known as paralytic shellfish poisoning.
And then we are also studying pseudonychia blooms which produce domoic acid, which cause amnesic shellfish poisoning.
We know that these toxins have been present in the Arctic, in food webs, in low levels.
But we haven't seen those high levels where we've seen these deaths of wildlife like we do in California coast, etc.
But because of the rapid warming, we predicted that this would be a huge risk.
And so that's why we focused on the Arctic.
And one might imagine that you would go about this by taking water samples, looking at them down the microscope to try and see which of these species is there, which of these two toxins that you're particularly interested in, and the levels they're at.
But that's not what you've done, is it, Cathy?
You've come about this in a slightly different way and took advantage of the diet of the filter-feeding bowhead whale, which feeds in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Alaska.
Could you tell me about these animals and how they helped you answer this question?
I will say that in our studies we have used research cruises to sample the water, sample the animals do all these things.
But these are usually like one, two, three, four years.
That's all you can really get funding for.
But the opportunity presented here with the bowhead whale is that we were able to, in collaboration with tribal Arctic communities in the north, in Uktyagvik, Get samples from bowhead whales on a regular basis.
These are faecal samples, which shows what they've been eating in the fall for 19 years in a row.
And tell me about the diet of these whales then and how it's helping you.
So the algae bloom and then things like krill and copepods.
These are little filter feeding animals in the plankton.
They filter feed on the algae and they accumulate those algae and the toxins.
And then bowhead whales primarily feed on krill and copepods.
We're a layer up.
And so it's this very cool food chain assessment of toxin levels.
And to get these samples you've really worked very, very closely with the indigenous peoples who live in this area, as you say.
Tell me a little bit about these samples and about how the experiment went ahead.
Okay, so in the Arctic there's an opportunity to work with the tribal communities there and the whaling communities that subsistence harvest these animals.
And they have a massive program on the health of bowhead whales.
So they utilize veterinarians and scientists and native scientists and communities.
And as part of that, they send fecal samples from these animals each year to our lab.
We were providing results just in context of the health of the animals, to try to determine if these toxins could be impacting these animals, etc.
About five years into it, I was like, wow, this is a regular sampling of the Beaufort Sea food web.
And so the samples you're gaining from these whales then really kind of gives you, I guess, a time course of levels of toxins each year.
And so, in your work, you've compared these samples with what else was known about the environmental conditions in and around the Beaufort Sea.
Is that correct?
Yes.
So each year, each animal actually has a different set of environmental conditions.
And we could use that to determine the relationship between environmental conditions like ocean warming or open water area and toxin concentration or prevalence in the whales.
And what's the kind of the headline result that you saw when you compiled all your data and analysed it?
Basically, warmer ocean conditions equal higher toxin concentrations in the fecal samples from whales.
More open water area was correlated with higher prevalence.
That means more animals having toxins.
So we looked at both concentrations, which increase with warming, and prevalence, which is how many of the animals in that year had toxin.
That was related with open water.
And open water, I guess, is related to ice melting and there being less of it about.
Yes, it is a significant thing.
Loss of sea ice that has been part of that environment for thousands of years.
And with that comes warmer waters and more sunlight and more blooms and more toxins.
And how are these conditions altering the algal life cycle then?
What does your results show you about that?
Okay, so we know that cells of Alexandrium which produce the saxitoxin which cause paralytic shellfish poisoning, have been in this region in background concentrations.
We know that warmer water conditions increase the growth rates of those cells in the water column at the surface.
However, these particular cells can also produce cysts.
They're like seeds that go down to the bottom of the ocean.
They're in the sediments and they stay there until conditions are right and they can germinate and seed a bloom right from there.
Historically, in the Arctic, the bottom conditions of the ocean have been too cold for these cysts to germinate.
In the last decade, the bottom finally reached temperatures in which these cells can germinate.
Now we have these other sources of massive cispids to seed these blooms.
That's why we never see a year without saxitoxin in the Arctic over these 19 years.
When I talked about prevalence.
It is there every single year in at least 40 of the animals and it gets up to concentrations above seafood safety regulatory limits.
We believe that is due to that cyst contribution to the blooms.
Pseudonychia, which produces the domoic acid.
That's the other toxin we worked with.
They do not have cysts.
Their concentrations and prevalences are lower than they are for saxitoxin.
However, they are still correlated and increasing with these environmental conditions.
But we believe that they're not as significant in terms of toxicity to health yet because because they don't have that cyst component to really amp up the concentrations.
And so you've shown then, that there is this correlation between warming waters and levels of these toxins.
What does this mean for the whales and for the folk for whom these animals are an important food source?
At this point, there's no evidence that these bloom conditions and these toxin levels are high enough to impact the health of the bowhead whale, at least from what we've seen.
However, these toxins are accumulating in other components of the food web and there's a comprehensive utilization of marine resources in the Arctic by these communities.
They are absolutely dependent, and have been for thousands of years, on subsistence harvest of marine resources, the bowhead whale being one of those resources, but also other components of the food web.
And presumably you've shared these results with the communities you've been collaborating with.
What sense did you get from them from the results that you showed them?
So we have direct relationships with the communities.
We've been sharing the information.
And because of these studies, there is a huge push within the communities themselves to learn about these toxins.
There are programs being developed for these community members to look at their own seawater samples, watch for blooms.
There's training on how to recognize these cells.
We're starting to try to figure out how to be able to test for the toxins in the food.
But all of the communities are directly involved.
We have worked with the tribal councils.
These are just really amazing people who who have a lot of traditional ecological knowledge of their ecosystem.
They're the first ones to notice the changes up there.
They provide us with a ton of information and we try to share our information with those communities and together we work on it.
And there's huge interest in harmful algal blooms there.
And this link that you've shown, it is a correlative study.
It's not a causal study.
What will it take to conclusively show that these two things are links, do you think?
I'm pretty conservative in the way I analyze data and try not to overstate stuff, but this is the first study of its kind in my mind.
We have atmospheric environmental oceanic, biological evidence showing this direct relationship between warmer water influx, open water area and these toxin concentrations.
Yes, there's going to be other changes involved in this.
Absolutely.
But there is a very strong mechanistic link.
And you've got 19 years worth of data.
Where do you maybe see it going in the next 19 years?
What does your gut tell you?
If you look at the average sea surface temperatures in the Arctic in the summer since 1900, when they first started taking these measurements, there is an absolute acceleration of warming from the year 2000 on.
The 10 warmest years are after the year 2000.
So I expect, unfortunately, for it to keep happening.
I don't see it going back.
It's a significant concern.
Kathy Le Fay talking to Benjamin Thompson there.
To read her paper, look out for a link in the show notes.
Finally on the show, it is time for the briefing chat.
So we are going to chat about a couple of articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing, Nature's daily newsletter on the latest science news.
So Nick, which article did you pick today?
So I was reading an article in Nature all about an interstellar object that is currently zipping its way through our solar system.
Ooh, okay, interstellar.
So it's not from our solar system.
It's come from the beyond.
From the beyond indeed.
Yes, it's the third such object that has come from somewhere beyond our solar system.
So you may remember...
Some of the previous ones.
In 2017, there was Oumuamua, which was a famously cigar-shaped object that sort of spanned its way through the solar system and created all sorts of theories about where it might have come from.
And then there was another object called Comet 2I Borisov and that flew through the solar system in 2019.
So this is the third such example, and it is a record-breaker.
This one is travelling at 68 kilometres per second, And so it's the fastest interstellar object ever spotted.
I'd forgotten that we had seen and spotted so few of these.
How did we spot this one?
Well, this one was spotted by a telescope in Chile that is part of the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS.
And basically, this system automatically flags interesting objects.
Things that might be interesting to astronomers.
And then astronomers basically get the call.
They come together.
They get the bat signal, as it were, or the asteroid signal.
And they look at these objects in the sky and figure out if it's something that's different or interesting.
And in this case, it was.
One of the researchers who initially clicked the button to call astronomers' attention to this object said that it looked completely garden variety to start with, but then, when other astronomers looked at it, they discovered quite how special it is.
And so they looked at other data and previous images of this same object from the days and weeks beforehand, and from that they were able to work out its trajectory.
And they found it was on a very wide, open, hyperbolic path.
And so it doesn't mean that it's got a predilection for hyperbole.
It means that it's on a big curve and it's not orbiting any particular object.
It's not orbiting the sun.
It's not orbiting any other star.
It's come from somewhere from the beyond.
So it's not that you can look at this thing and go, my gosh, it's from outer space.
But when they looked at its path, you can tell it's come in from somewhere.
Is there much else you can tell?
There's not a lot we can tell at this point.
It's just been spotted.
But the sense I get from reading this article is that astronomers are quite excited because we've spotted this one relatively early.
And so it should give astronomers quite a bit of time to point their instruments at it and gather a lot more data about it.
So they should be able to get data on its composition, its size, its shape and how it changes when it's heated up by the sun, when it gets a bit closer to that.
And that could tell astronomers exactly what the conditions were like where it was formed.
Wherever that was, which I suppose at this point could be anywhere out there possibly.
We'll never know.
Possibly, we'll never know.
It's certainly an unusual object.
And as I say, astronomers seem quite excited because there's a third such example.
And it's rare that we actually get a glimpse of such an object.
So we'll try and gather as much detail as we can about it.
And the exciting thing as well is that we're probably going to be spotting a fair few more of these in the future.
So, Sharmini, you've probably heard of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
It released its first few images in the last couple of weeks.
And in its time in operation it's already spotted more than 2000 never-seen-before asteroids, which is a lot.
And is especially a lot when you consider that in a year we normally see about 20000 such objects from all observatories combined.
So this observatory may be spotting a lot of objects in the future.
And in fact researchers have estimated in a preprint so a non-peer-reviewed article that the Vera C Rubin Observatory will spot anything between 6 to 51 interstellar objects during its 10-year survey.
So the asteroids, it's already spotted, not from outer space, not interstellar objects.
It's already seen a load of them.
And it could be that yeah, there are loads more interstellar objects whizzing around our solar system or I suppose I should say whizzing through our solar system that could be spotted.
So, you know, after a while, this will become old news.
We'll be like, oh, another one from outer space again.
Yeah, the thing is, newsflash, space is quite big and many of these objects are quite small.
So it's hard to spot and we're getting better at it as well.
And so spotting objects like this will help us understand what these objects are like, but it'll also help us assess future threats to Earth.
So as I said, this object is moving very, very quickly.
So it's the sort of object you'd like to be aware of in case it might hit Earth, because things that move very fast have a lot of force, and so they could do a bit of damage.
And so researchers are interested to track any such objects to assess possible future threats to Earth.
And so this is one example.
This one is not actually going to hit Earth, I should say.
I was going to say, like, I didn't bother asking that, but it's not, we're good, right?
We're good on this one.
No, I would have led with that if it was actually going to hit Earth.
I think that's probably quite a strong headline, asteroid to hit Earth.
But anyway, I'm sorry.
Interstellar asteroid.
And actually, that's wrong as well.
It's probably not an asteroid, because one of the things researchers have seen about this object is it's got some telltale signs of it being a comet.
So it's got a tail and it's venting gas and dust.
So it may well be a comet rather than an asteroid.
Oh, so an interstellar comet then.
That's kind of beautiful sounding.
Well, beautiful may well be the word, because in the next few weeks researchers are hoping to get some images of it.
So it's not very useful for podcast times.
But I will tell you now podcast listeners, that if you keep a lookout, there will probably be some images coming of this object, which I should say has the very fun name of C2025N1 or Free Eye Atlas.
Well, just keep an eye out for that.
Just...
Keep a Google alert for C2021.
I doubtless thingy.
Or maybe better to just follow nature on social media and then maybe we'll post some pictures, if they do indeed materialize over the next few weeks.
But I'll tell you about my story now.
So from outer space to back in the depths of time, it's more ancient humans for me.
I do love ancient humans.
We're talking about Neanderthals today and a bit of a sort of Neanderthal cookery show, potentially.
So this is an article in Nature based on a Science Advances paper.
And have you ever...
You know, when you get the bones from like you have a roast and you take the bones of the chicken or something and you kind of boil them down.
Maybe you throw in some other like little scraps of things and you make a nice broth or a nice stock.
And it all kind of like becomes delicious.
And the fat kind of forms a little layer on the top of you.
Have you ever done that, Nick?
I have done that, yes, but I'm not quite sure what the link is to Neanderthals.
Well, I mean, it's not too far off what they think Neanderthals have been up to.
So what we're talking about today is rendering fat from bones.
So, you know, if you break a bone open, sometimes you can find some lovely, delicious bone marrow.
Apologies to the vegetarians.
I'm a bit of a bone marrow fan.
And, you know, you can get the fatty bone marrow out.
But there's a lot that you're not going to get out unless you boil the bones, and then you can render a lot of the fat out.
And this is something that modern humans we know have been doing for at least 28,000 years.
Hmm.
But this is evidence from a Neanderthal site in Germany 125,000 years ago.
Oh, wow.
So much, much earlier than Homo sapiens were doing it.
Exactly.
And this sounds like a very fascinating site in general, with all sorts of things found in this location.
In this particular layer and in this particular location, they found what they have described as a fat factory.
A fat factory.
So I'm guessing this is kind of an industrial level, getting the fat out of bones, sort of thing going on.
Exactly.
And one of the reasons I think that is because of all the bones and bits of bones that they found there.
So they have found so many fragments broken up, but should with sort of cut marks on them.
And they looked at it and they determined that all these bones were from at least 172 animals.
So like large animals, deer and horses and that kind of thing.
And all of these bones of all these big animals have been deliberately brought to this one location.
So they're all in the sort of same place.
And they haven't exactly got the Neanderthal recipe book where it says you know, simmer gently for 17 hours.
But they've got all of these bones broken up and they've got evidence of fire in this location.
And yeah, they reckon that this is really good evidence of this situation fat rendering, which is something that would have actually been really important for neanderthals living at that time.
And why do you say it would be important?
Because, as you say, this is like quite a concerted effort.
This is hundreds of animal bones they're bringing to one location and essentially, i guess, boiling in a massive pot or something i'm not sure what they use like why would they do this?
Yeah well, i will say that whatever they did use obviously isn't around anymore.
So we don't know.
So that's also hard to figure out.
But yes, so large scale operation.
Why?
Well, for the same reason that you know, modern humans and modern hunter gatherers do this sort of fat rendering process, which is that, especially during the winter months, getting enough fat in your diet can be really difficult if you're eating vegetable matter, and if you're eating vegetables, animals that maybe themselves are very lean and don't have a lot of fat in their meat it can be really hard to get enough fat.
If you just eat lean protein without other nutrients, you can get protein poisoning, which is something that's known as rabbit starvation.
So, especially if you've got a protein heavy diet, it is really important to get this sort of high calorie fat.
And it's not really worth doing if you've only got one bone protein, spend ages boiling it trying to get a bit of fat out.
So the sort of yeah, factory level operation kind of makes it worth it and this does sort of suggest that they were putting that effort into this whole sort of process.
So this is a way for them to get like these essential nutrients to survive these more difficult times, i guess Yeah, and it is very comparable to, like I said, to modern hunter-gatherers.
One of the experts quoted in this says that the social organisation might be different between Neanderthals and modern hunter-gatherers.
The technology might be different, but how you have to live in such a landscape to make your living and to survive and prosper is absolutely comparable to modern hunter-gatherers.
And another researcher says it gives a more complex picture of Neanderthal behaviors, which is obviously something that's pretty hard to figure out.
No, it's definitely hard to figure out.
And it's always interesting to hear how similar our Neanderthal cousins were in some ways to us.
But i think that's all we've got time for on this week's briefing chat.
Thanks so much, shamani.
And if you there, that's right.
You listening at home have been intrigued by these stories.
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This moment, Alex's mile swim, it means everything to him and to all of us.
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