Hibernation, Fish Sauce & Stone Age Babies

Hibernation, Fish Sauce & Stone Age Babies
Current mood: working
Category: Life

Doctors Say Man Survived Extreme Weather by 'Hibernating'

Thursday , December 21, 2006

TOKYO — A man who went missing in western Japan survived in near-freezing weather without food and water for over three weeks by falling into a state similar to hibernation, doctors said.

Mitsutaka Uchikoshi had almost no pulse, his organs had all but shut down and his body temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit when he was discovered on Rokko mountain in late October, said doctors who treated him at the nearby Kobe City General Hospital. He had been missing for 24 days.

"On the second day, the sun was out, I was in a field, and I felt very comfortable. That's my last memory," Uchikoshi, 35, told reporters Tuesday before returning home from hospital. "I must have fallen asleep after that."

Doctors believe Uchikoshi, a city official from neighboring Nishinomiya who was visiting the mountain for a barbecue party, tripped and later lost consciousness in a remote mountainous area.

His body temperature soon plunged as he lay in 50-degree weather, greatly slowing down his metabolism.

"(Uchikoshi) fell into a state similar to hibernation and many of his organs slowed, but his brain was protected," said Dr. Shinichi Sato, head of the hospital's emergency unit. "I believe his brain capacity has recovered 100 percent."

Uchikoshi was treated for severe hypothermia, multiple organ failure and blood loss from his fall, but was unlikely to experience any lasting ill effects, Sato said.

Doctors were still uncertain how exactly Uchikoshi survived for weeks with his metabolism almost at a standstill.

In animals like squirrels or bears, hibernation reduces the amount of oxygen that cells need to survive, protecting them from damage to the brain and other organs.

Wrecked Roman Ship Carried Hundreds of Jars of Fish Sauce

Tuesday , November 14, 2006

MADRID, Spain — A shipwrecked first-century vessel carrying delicacies to the richest palates of the Roman Empire has proved a dazzling find, with nearly 2,000-year-old fish bones still nestling inside clay jars, archaeologists said Monday.

Boaters found its cargo of hundreds of amphorae in 2000 when their anchor got tangled with one of the two-handled jars.

After years of arranging financing and crews, exploration of the site a mile off the coast of Alicante in southeast Spain began in July, said Carles de Juan, a co-director of the project, who works for the Valencia regional government.

The ship, estimated to be 100 feet long with a capacity for around 400 tons of cargo, is twice the size of most other Roman shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean, de Juan said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Its cargo of an estimated 1,500 well-preserved clay amphorae was used in this case to hold fish sauce — a prized condiment for wealthy Romans, he said.

For nearly 2,000 years, the 3-foot-tall amphorae lay undisturbed except for the occasional octopus that would pry one open, breaking the ceramic-and-mortar seal in search of food or shelter.

Besides the size of the ship and good condition of its cargo, the site is also important because it is so easily accessible — in just 80 feet of water about a mile from the coast. Other wrecks are so deep they cannot be examined by scuba divers.

"I am not going to say it was on the beach, but almost," said de Juan, who was among the first divers to examine the shipwreck in 2000.

"We knew it was an important find but had no real idea until now," he said. "It is an exceptional find."

The last time a ship of this size and quality emerged was in 1985 off Corsica, he said.

Javier Nieto, director of the Center for Underwater Archaeology of Catalonia and not related to this project, also called it immensely important because of the good condition of the cargo. No other Roman shipwreck is currently under study in the Mediterranean, he added.

"For archaeologists, a sunken ship is a historic document that tells us about ancient history and how its economy worked," Nieto said from Barcelona. "This ship will contribute a lot."

This ship probably sank in a storm while sailing back to Rome from Cadiz in the south of what is now Spain. The storm must have been ferocious because it is odd for such a vessel to have been so close to shore.

"The crew did not care about the cargo or money or anything. They headed for land to save their lives," de Juan said.

De Juan and the other co-director of the project, Franca Cibercchini of the University of Pisa in Italy, presented their first report on the site at a marine archaeology conference last week in the town of Gandia, near Valencia.

When word of the find first spread in 2000, pirate scuba divers raided the site and stole some of the amphorae. This forced the Valencia government to build a thick metal grating to cover the remains and protect the jars.

What remains of the wooden structure of the ship itself — about 60 percent — is buried under mud in the seabed, de Juan said.

The cargo probably also includes lead, which the Romans used for plumbing, and copper, which they mixed with tin to make bronze for everything from plates to jewelry.

The fish sauce is no longer in the amphorae because the seals were not hermetic and could not withstand 20 centuries under water. But traces of fish bone remain inside and these will help researchers determine how the sauces were made, de Juan said.

Buried Stone Age Babies Suggest Prehistoric Compassion

Friday , December 08, 2006

By Heather Whipps

Infants may have been considered equal members of prehistoric society, according to an analysis of burial pits found in Austria.

Two separate pits, one containing the remains of two infants and the other of a single baby, were discovered at the same Stone Age camp of Krems-Wachtberg in Lower Austria.

Both graves were decorated with beads and covered in red ochre, a pigment commonly used by prehistoric peoples as a grave offering when they buried adults.

Using radiocarbon dating, archaeologists from the Prehistoric Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences put the remains at about 27,000 years old.

"Nothing comparable to these burials of such young Upper Paleolithic individuals has been found before," study co-author Christine Neugebauer-Maresch wrote in a recent edition of the journal Nature.

The discovery could challenge the long-held belief that — since child burials seem to be so rare — infants in this period were treated with a degree of indifference, the researchers said.

Rare birth of twins?

Archaeologists first found two skeletons entombed together in a pit protected by the scapula of a woolly mammoth that had been placed on top, while excavating at Krems in 2005.

"Equal age at death, which is supported by equal measurements of long bones, and that the babies had been buried together contemporaneously, suggests that they are twins," Neugebauer-Maresch said. "The birth of twins would have been a rare and therefore special event in a hunter-gatherer society of the ice age, which could be an explanation for the ritual burial activities."

But the recent discovery of the third infant grave also adorned with red ochre and jewelry suggests that the special treatment extended to many or all babies and not just twins, she said.

Probably no foul play

Further testing on the skeletons will try to determine how the infants died, said Neugebauer-Maresch, but it can't be performed until the bones are fully excavated.

She denied that the twin anomaly may have scared the hunter-gatherers into performing some kind of sacrifice ritual, however.

"We prefer natural circumstances, because there is just now no evidence for a ritual killing," she told LiveScience.

Copyright © 2006 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.