New Caledonian crows are the only species besides humans known to manufacture hooked tools in the wild. These birds produce these remarkable tools from the side branches of certain plants, carefully 'crafting' a crochet-like hook that can be used for snagging insect prey.
The study, published in Current Biology on December 7, 2017, reveals how crows manage to fashion particularly efficient tools, with well-defined 'deep' hooks.
The hook is widely regarded as one of humankind's most important innovations, with skillful reshaping, a useless piece of raw material is transformed into a powerful tool. While our ancestors started making stone tools over 3 million years ago, hooks are a surprisingly recent advance; the oldest known fish hooks are just 23,000 years old.
Project leader Dr. Christian Rutz has conducted field research on New Caledonian crows for over a decade. His team recently noticed that crows' hooked tools vary considerably in size and shape. While some tools only exhibit a small extension at the tip, others have deeper hooks.
Dr. Rutz explains: "We suspected that tools with pronounced hooks are more efficient, and were able to confirm this in controlled experiments with wild-caught crows. The deeper the hook, the faster birds winkled (to extract with difficulty) bait from holes in wooden logs."
This finding raised the intriguing question of what it takes to make such well-formed hooks. The researchers started planning their study by imagining how humans would approach a comparable task. "When a craftsperson carves a tool from a piece of wood, two things ensure a quality product: good raw materials and skill," Dr. Rutz said.
Researchers found that the same, apparently, applies to New Caledonian crows. The researchers discovered that the depth of the hook was influenced by both the properties of the plant material, and the technique crows used for detaching branches. When birds made controlled cuts with their sharp bills, the resulting hooks were significantly deeper than when they used a 'sloppier' alternative method of simply pulling off branches. Careful cutting may leave more wooden material at the tip of the stick from which the hook can subsequently be 'sculpted'.
Surprisingly, adult crows, which are expected to have considerable tool-making experience, did not produce the deepest hooks and regularly employed the 'quick-and-dirty' manufacture technique. Dr. Rutz notes that making very deep hooks may not be the best strategy in the wild: "It probably takes more time and effort to make such tools, and experienced birds may try to avoid these costs. It is also possible that deep hooks break more easily when inserted into narrow holes and crevices."
Dr. Christophe Boesch, a world-leading chimpanzee expert and Director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, comments: "We have recently discovered that chimpanzees routinely use naturally-hooked stems to fish for algae, but they don't actively craft these hooks. The crows can reshape plant material with their pointed bills, which act like 'precision pliers', but this would be very difficult for chimpanzees with their large fingers."
The present study is the first to examine in a non-human animal what factors determine the morphology of crafted tools, and as a consequence, their foraging efficiency. Paleo-anthropologists try to understand how our ancestors produced relatively complex tool shapes from basic raw materials, such as wood, bone or seashell, but they face the challenge that the manufacture process cannot be directly observed.
The New Caledonian crow, with its remarkable ability to fashion hooked tools from plant stems, provides a fascinating window into humans' evolutionary past.
Hooked on Crows,
Steph
A new study comparing the bones of central European women who lived during the first 6,000 years of farming with those of modern athletes has shown that the average prehistoric agricultural woman had stronger upper arms than living female rowing champions.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge's Department of Archeology say this physical prowess was likely obtained through tilling soil and harvesting crops by hand, as well as the grinding of grain for as much as five hours a day to make flour.
Until now, archeological investigations of past behavior have interpreted women's bones solely through direct comparison to those of men. However, male bones respond to strain in a more visibly dramatic way than female bones.
The Cambridge scientists say this has resulted in the systematic underestimation of the nature and scale of the physical demands borne by women in prehistory.
"This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women," said Dr. Alison Macintosh, lead author of the study published this month in the journal Science Advances.
"By interpreting women's bones in a female-specific context we can start to see how intensive, variable and laborious their behaviors were, hinting at a hidden history of women's work over thousands of years."
The study used a small CT scanner in Cambridge's laboratory to analyze the arm (humerus) and leg (tibia) bones of living women who engage in a range of physical activity: from runners, rowers and footballers to those with more sedentary lifestyles.
The bone strengths of modern women were compared to those of women from early Neolithic agricultural eras through to farming communities of the Middle Ages.
"We can forget that bone is a living tissue, one that responds to the rigours we put our bodies through. Physical impact and muscle activity both put strain on bone, called loading. The bone reacts by changing in shape, curvature, thickness, and density over time to accommodate repeated strain," said Dr. Macintosh.

"By analyzing the bone characteristics of living people whose regular physical exertion is known, and comparing them to the characteristics of ancient bones, we can start to interpret the kinds of labor our ancestors were performing in prehistory."
Over three weeks during trial season, Macintosh scanned the limb bones of the Open- and Lightweight squads of the Cambridge University Women's Boat Club, who ended up winning this year's Boat Race and breaking the course record. These women, most in their early twenties, were training twice a day and rowing an average of 120 kilometers a week at the time.
The Neolithic women analyzed in the study (from 7400-7000 years ago) had similar leg bone strength to modern rowers, but their arm bones were 11-16% stronger for their size than the rowers, and almost 30% stronger than typical Cambridge students. {Bone scan is at left, above, vs. x-ray to the left}.
The loading of the upper limbs was even more dominant in the study's Bronze Age women (from 4300-3500 years ago), who had 9-13% stronger arm bones than the rowers but 12% weaker leg bones.
A possible explanation for this fierce arm strength is the grinding of grain. "We can't say specifically what behaviors were causing the bone loading we found. However, a major activity in early agriculture was converting grain into flour, and this was likely performed by women," said Dr. Macintosh.
"For millennia, grain would have been ground by hand between two large stones called a saddle quern. In the few remaining societies that still use saddle querns, women grind grain for up to five hours a day." {The mano and metate is a variety of saddle quern used for nixtamalization or grinding.}
"The repetitive arm action of grinding these stones together for hours may have loaded women's arm bones in a similar way to the laborious back-and-forth motion of rowing."
However, Macintosh suspects that women's labor was hardly likely to have been limited to this one behavior.
"Prior to the invention of the plough, subsistence farming involved manually planting, tilling and harvesting all crops," said Dr. Macintosh. "Women were also likely to have been fetching food and water for domestic livestock, processing milk and meat, and converting hides and wool into textiles.
"The variation in bone loading found in prehistoric women suggests that a wide range of behaviours were occurring during early agriculture. In fact, we believe it may be the wide variety of women's work that in part makes it so difficult to identify signatures of any one specific behavior from their bones."
Dr. Jay Stock, senior study author added: "Our findings suggest that for thousands of years, the rigorous manual labor of women was a crucial driver of early farming economies. The research demonstrates what we can learn about the human past through better understanding of human variation today."
Where all the women are strong,
Steph (former member of Smith College Crew)
You may know why/how I came up with this week's Partial Ellipsis of the Sun topic.
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Male mammoths really had to watch their steps. More than two-thirds of woolly mammoth specimens recovered from several types of natural traps in Siberia came from males, researchers report November 2, 2017, in Current Biology."
"Paleogenomicist Patrícia Pečnerová of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and her colleagues examined genomic data recovered from 98 mammoth bone, tooth, tusk and hair shaft specimens and found that 69 percent of their owners were male."
"Sex biases in fossil preservation are rare, and the sexes were almost certainly balanced at birth. So the researchers considered whether social and behavioral patterns might have meant that male mammoths more often died in such a way that their remains were buried and preserved, such as becoming trapped in a bog or falling through thin ice."
"In modern elephants, herds of females and young live together, led by an experienced female, whereas males are more likely to live in bachelor groups or alone. That could result in more risk-taking behavior for those males."
"Woolly mammoths, the distant cousins of modern elephants, may have had the same social structures, the researchers suggest."
"The study, the authors say, highlights how fossil genomic data can help illuminate the past social structures and behavior of extinct animals — and how existing fossils may not fully represent the original population. . ."
And that risky behavior in males, be they mammoths or human beings, happens. . .
Woolly, Boolly, Woolly, Boolly,
Steph
Archbishop Ussher declared today, October 23rd, 4004 B.C. (at 9 a.m.) to be the Earth's birthday. Geologists everywhere will raise a glass this evening to celebrate. . .and serve up a piece of birthday cake on a "brand new" tectonic plate, the Malpelo plate, off the coast of Ecuador. The Malpelo plate is that thumb-like protrusion on the northeast corner of the Nazca Plate (seen below in light blue).
"Researchers led by Rice University geophysicist Dr. Richard Gordon discovered the microplate while analyzing the junction of three other plates in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Their research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The Malpelo plate, named for an island and an underwater ridge it contains, is the 57th tectonic plate to be discovered and the first in nearly a decade. "Mal pelo" means "bad hair" in Spanish (making the Malpelo plate the patron saint of bad hair days?)
How do geologists discover a plate? In this case, they carefully studied the movements of other plates and their evolving relationships to one another as the plates move at a rate of millimeters to centimeters per year.
The Pacific lithospheric plate that roughly defines the volcanic Ring of Fire is one of about 10 major rigid tectonic plates that float and move atop Earth's mantle, which behaves like a fluid over geologic time. Interactions at the edges of the moving plates account for most earthquakes experienced on the planet. There are many small plates that fill the gaps between the big ones, and the Pacific Plate meets two of those smaller plates, the Cocos and Nazca, west of the Galapagos Islands.
One way to judge how plates move is to study plate-motion circuits, which quantify how the rotation speed of each object in a group (its angular velocity) affects all the others. Rates of seafloor spreading determined from marine magnetic anomalies combined with the angles at which the plates slide by each other over time tells scientists how fast the plates are moving."
When you add up the angular velocities of these three plates, they ought to sum to zero," Dr. Gordon said. "In this case, the velocity doesn't sum to zero at all. It sums to 15 millimeters a year, which is huge."
That made the Pacific-Cocos-Nazca circuit a misfit, which meant at least one other plate in the vicinity had to make up the difference. Misfits are a cause for concern -- and a clue.
Knowing the numbers were amiss, the researchers drew upon a Columbia University database of extensive multibeam sonar soundings west of Ecuador and Colombia to identify a previously unknown plate boundary between the Galapagos Islands and the coast. The Malpelo plate is moving independently of the Nazca plate.
"Since we're trying to understand global deformation, we need to understand where the rest of that velocity is going," he said. "So we think there's another plate we're missing."
Let's discover yet another tectonic plate today to serve up that birthday cake! Enjoy, bad or good hair day!
Steph
A geologic mélange consists of a jumble of large blocks of varied types of rocks. A mélange is a large-scale breccia (rock consisting of angular fragments cemented together). It is a mappable body of rock characterized by a lack of continuous bedding and the inclusion of fragments of rock of all different sizes, contained in a fine-grained deformed matrix.
Large-scale mélanges formed in active continental margins generally consist of altered oceanic crustal material and blocks of continental slope sediments in a sheared mudstone matrix.
The mixing mechanisms in such settings may include tectonic shearing forces, ductile flow of a water-charged or deformable matrix (such as serpentinite),
and sedimentary action (such as slumping or gravity-flow).
Some larger blocks of rock may be as much as 1 kilometer (0.62 mi) across. Smaller-scale localized mélanges may also occur in shear or fault zones, where coherent rock has been disrupted and mixed by shearing forces.
For my money, mélange is an beautiful-sounding word for a jumbled mess of lithologies. Sorting out environmental conditions in a mélange is a geological puzzle with well over 1,000 pieces.
Happy sorting and solving all those puzzle pieces!
Steph
Deer and Dear Maizie---Fall in the Rockies:
This is our 200th blog post and our 48th month of publishing Partial Ellipsis of the Sun! Thanks for your support over the past four years!
"Seismologists investigating how earth forms new continental crust have compiled more than 20 years of seismic data from a wide swath of South America's Andean Plateau and determined that processes there have produced far more continental rock than previously believed.

"When crust from an oceanic tectonic plate plunges beneath a continental tectonic plate, as it does beneath the Andean Plateau, it brings water with it and partially melts the mantle, the layer below earth's crust," said Rice University's Dr. Jonathan Delph, co-author of the new study published this week. "The less dense melt rises, and one of two things happens: It either stalls in the crust to crystallize in formations called plutons or reaches the surface through volcanic eruptions."
Dr. Delph said the findings suggest that mountain-forming regions like the Andean Plateau, which geologists refer to as "orogenic plateaus," could produce much larger volumes of continental rock in less time than previously believed.
Co-author Dr. Kevin Ward, a researcher at the University of Utah, said, "When we compared the amount of trapped plutonic rock beneath the plateau with the amount of erupted volcanic rock at the surface, we found the ratio was almost 30:1. That means 30 times more melt gets stuck in the crust than is erupted, which is about six times higher than what's generally believed to be the average. That's a tremendous amount of new material that has been added to the crust over a relatively short time period."
The Andean Plateau covers much of Bolivia and parts of Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Its average height is more than 12,000 feet, and though it is smaller than Asia's Tibetan Plateau, different geologic processes created the Andean Plateau. The mountain-building forces at work in the Andean plateau are believed to be similar to those that worked along the western coast of the U.S. some 50 million years ago. Dr. Delph said it's possible that similar forces were at work along the coastlines of continents throughout Earth's history.

Most of the rocks that form Earth's crust initially came from partial melts of the mantle. If the melt erupts quickly, it forms basalt, which makes up the crust beneath the oceans on Earth; but there are still questions about how continental crust, which is more buoyant than oceanic crust, is formed. Drs. Delph and Ward spent several months combining public datasets from seismic experiments. Seismic energy travels through different types of rock at different speeds, and by combining datasets that covered a 500-mile-wide swath of the Andean Plateau, Ward and Delph were able to resolve large plutonic volumes that had previously been seen only in pieces.

Over the past 11 million years, volcanoes have erupted thousands of cubic miles' worth of material over much of the Andean Plateau. Ward and Delph calculated their plutonic-to-volcanic ratio by comparing the volume of regions where seismic waves travel extremely slowly beneath volcanically active regions, indicating some melt is present, with the volume of rock deposited on the surface by volcanoes.
"Orogenic oceanic-continental subduction zones have been common as long as modern plate tectonics have been active," Dr. Delph said. "Our findings suggest that processes similar to those we observe in the Andes, along with the formation of supercontinents, could have been a significant contributor to the episodic formation of buoyant continental crust."
Happy 200th!
Steph
