'Game-changer' in evolution from S. African bones

This image released by the journal Science shows Lee R. Berger of the University …

  Two million-year-old bones belonging to a creature with both apelike and human traits provide the clearest evidence of evolution's first major step toward modern humans — findings some are calling a potential game-changer.

This image released by the journal Science shows the right hand skeleton of the adult …

An analysis of the bones found in South Africa suggests Australopithecus sediba is the most likely candidate to be the ancestor of humans, said lead researcher Lee R. Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

The fossils, belonging to a male child and an adult female, show a novel combination of features, almost as though nature were experimenting. Some resemble pre-human creatures while others suggest the genus Homo, which includes Homo sapiens, modern people.

"It's as if evolution is caught in one vital moment, a stop-action snapshot of evolution in action," said Richard Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution. He was not among the team, led by South African scientists, whose research was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Scientists have long considered the Australopithecus family, which includes the famous fossil Lucy, to be a primitive candidate for a human ancestor. The new research establishes a creature that combines features of both groups.

The newly studied bones were found in 2008 in the fossil-rich cave region of Malapa near Johannesberg. Berger's then 9-year-old son, Matthew, found a bone that was determined to belong to the child. Two weeks later Berger uncovered the fossils of the female.

The journal published five papers detailing the findings, including separate reports on the foot, hand, pelvis and brain of A. sediba.

Berger said the brain, hand and foot have characteristics of both modern and early pre-human forms that show a transition under way. It represents a bona fide model that could lead to the human genus Homo, Berger said.

Kristian J. Carlson, also at Witwatersrand, said the brain of A. sediba is small, like that of a chimpanzee, but with a configuration more human, particularly with an expansion behind and above the eyes.

This seems to be evidence that the brain was reorganizing along more modern lines before it began its expansion to the current larger size, Carlson said in a teleconference.

"It will take a lot of scrutiny of the papers and of the fossils by more and more researchers over the coming months and years, but these analyses could well be 'game-changers' in understanding human evolution," according to the Smithsonian's Potts.

So, does all this mean A. sediba was the "missing link"?
Well, scientists don't like that term, which Berger calls "biologically unsound."

This is a good candidate to represent the evolution of humans, he said, but the earliest definitive example of Homo is 150,000 to 200,000 years younger.

Scientists prefer the terms "transition form" or "intermediary form," said Darryl J. DeRuiter of Texas A&M University.

"This is what evolutionary theory would predict, this mixture of Australopithecene and Homo," DeRuiter said. "It's strong confirmation of evolutionary theory."

But it's not yet an example of the genus Homo, he said, though it could have led to several early human forms, including Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis or Homo erectus — all considered early distant cousins to man, Homo sapiens.

These articles "force a rethinking of how traits are coupled together in human evolution," the Smithsonian's Potts said in an email from Kenya, where he is doing research.

"For example, in previous definitions of our genus, the leading edge in the emergence of Homo has been brain enlargement. The sediba bones show, however, that reorganization of the brain and pelvis typically connected with the evolution of Homo need not have involved brain enlargement," he noted.

"The more we learn about human evolution, the more we see that traits" that must have happened together could occur separately, Potts said.

For example, the study of the hand shows that major changes in the thumb usually associated with toolmaking "did not imply abandoning life in the trees. In the foot article, we're introduced to a unique and previously unknown combination of archaic and advanced traits in sediba," Potts explained.

The researchers reported that the fingers of A. sediba were curved, as might be seen in a creature that climbed in trees. But they were also slim and the thumb was long, more like a Homo thumb, so the hand was potentially capable of using tools, though no tools were found at the site.

The fossil provides the first chance for researchers to evaluate the function of a full hand this old, said Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Previously, hand bones older than Neanderthals have been isolated pieces rather that full sets.

The heel bone seems primitive, the researchers said. Yet its front is angled, suggesting an arched foot for walking on the ground, and there is a large attachment for an Achilles tendon as in modern humans, they said.

The pelvis is short and broad like a human pelvis, creating more of a bowl shape than in earlier Australopith fossils like the famous Lucy, explained Job Kibii of the University of the Witwatersrand.

That may force a re-evaluation of the process of evolution because many researchers had previously associated development of a human-like pelvis with enlargement of the brain, but in A. sediba the brain was still small.

The name Australopithecus means "southern ape," and "sediba" means natural spring, fountain or wellspring in the local Sotho language.

After the bones were discovered, the children of South Africa were invited to name the child, which they called "Karabo," meaning "answer" in the local Tswana language. The older skeleton has not yet been given a nickname, Berger said.

The juvenile would have been aged 10 to 13 in terms of human development; the female was in her 20s and there are indications that she may have given birth once. The researchers are not sure if the two were related.

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Online:

http://www.sciencemag.org

  

On ancient Susquehanna, flooding's a frequent fact

Lucy Mitchell looks at the high water level during flooding of the Susquehanna River …

 Early settlers called the Susquehanna River "a mile wide and a foot deep." It's just a folk saying, but it hints at the forces behind a river that is, in fact, exceptionally likely to flood.

And flooding it is, with record or near-record levels recorded along its path from New York state to Chesapeake Bay after a wet summer that included storms Irene and now Lee.

"The Susquehanna is one of the most flood-prone rivers in America," said Chris Duffy, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State University.

It's an especially shallow river, Duffy said, and that means big rainfalls can create floods rapidly. But another issue is what's underneath the water.

"Here, you encounter the bedrock pretty quickly," Duffy said, meaning that even floods won't quickly scour out deep spots. Upstream, the average river depth is only a few feet, and perhaps only 15 or 20 feet at the mouth.

In contrast, parts of New York's Hudson River are about 200 feet deep, and its shipping channel from New York City to Albany is maintained at a depth of about 32 feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Susquehanna — which derives its name from the Susquehannock tribe that once lived in the area — is also one of the world's most ancient rivers, at about 200 million years old, Duffy said. It once flowed all the way to the ocean, but as sea levels rose its lower valley got submerged and became the Chesapeake.

The Susquehanna has flooded 14 times since 1810, according to the Susquehanna River Basin Commission — an average of every 15 years. And most of the communities in the basin have residents in flood-prone areas— 1,160 out of 1,400.

The worst flood in modern times was in 1972, when the remnants of Hurricane Agnes dumped biblical rains. Seventy-two people died, and damage topped $2.8 billion — about $14.3 billion in today's dollars, according to the river commission. So far, the current floods haven't been nearly as destructive.

Size is a factor in the river's propensity to overflow, too.
At about 450 miles long, the Susquehanna is the largest river in the eastern U.S. It drains a basin of more than 27,000 square miles containing more than 3.8 million people, according to Bucknell University, which estimates that floods cause an average of about $113 million in damage every year.

"It's just always been there," Duffy said of the flooding threat, so much so that many towns along its banks have been creating flood control structures, such as levees, for 100 or even 200 years.

And even with the current crisis, Duffy said that some communities have prepared well for such events.

"Wilkes-Barre has really taken care of business," he said.

But not all the changes have helped mitigate flooding, he said.

In the Colonial era, many tributaries had water-powered mills, and those may have helped control some of the water flowing into the river.

"Yes, we have done some major manipulation of environments" along the river, Duffy said, but many wetlands are still intact along the tributaries.

Weather experts note that the recent combination of Irene and Lee hitting the entire region with record rainfalls is bound to cause flooding.

    

Too wacky? Moving water from flood to drought

   As the soggy East tries to dry out from flooding and Texas prays for rain that doesn't come, you might ask: Isn't there some way to ship all that water from here to there?

It's an idea that has tempted some, but reality gets in the way.

A Texas oilman once envisioned long pipelines carrying water to drought-stricken Texas cities, just one of several untested fantasies of moving water vast distances. Parched Las Vegas still wants to indirectly siphon off excess water from the overflowing Mississippi River. French engineers have simulated hauling an iceberg to barren Africa. There are even mega-trash bags to move heavy loads of water.

There's certainly plenty of rainwater available. Tropical Storm Lee dumped enough on the already saturated Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and Gulf Coast to bring 9.6 inches of rain across the entire state of Texas, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and The Associated Press.

"One man's flood control is another man's water supply," said Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. "Doesn't it make you want to think about a larger distribution that helps both? That's the crazy part of this. It's a win-win. There's no loser."

But moving vast quantities of water is not simple or cheap, and thus not realistic, experts say. Mostly, it's too costly and political.
However, these dreamed-up concepts show that a quiet water crisis is getting more desperate.
"We will go to any lengths to avoid confronting the reality of water shortages," said University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon, author of the book "Unquenchable."
"What all those zany ideas suggest are the traditional beliefs that we can control nature and there must be some oasis out there where we can go to, to import water."
But those are mirages, he said — tempting, but not realistic.
Mike Halpert, deputy director of the NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, knows the temptation. He's about to fly from Washington, which has had 7 inches since Monday, to Houston, which got about that amount of rain for the entire spring and summer. All that D.C. rain would be enough water for every person in Houston for 10 days.
He jested that he would love to carry water in his suitcases. He said colleagues have been "joking that we'll send Texas our water. Will they send us their oil? But I don't think that's going to fly."
The trouble with water is "there's enough quantity but it is not always in the right places," said G. Tracy Mehan, who was chief water regulator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration during the George W. Bush Administration.
So how about moving it?
"The short answer ... is that it costs too much. It's not a technical problem," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Studies Institute and a MacArthur genius grant recipient for his work on water.
Las Vegas' grand proposal is to take water from the mighty Mississippi in a series of smaller pipeline-like exchanges among states just west of the Mississippi to refill the overused Colorado River. There are no official cost estimates, but it likely would be in the hundreds of billions dollars. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens abandoned his plans for a massive water pipeline stretching across Texas to just moving water around the Texas Panhandle.
Water weighs a lot — about 8.3 pounds per gallon — so moving massive amounts, often up mountains, costs a lot, Glennon said. Gleick notes that conservation and efficiency are cheaper.
Building a pipeline to pump water from flooded areas is foolish because each year it is somewhere different that gets drenched, so you can't build something permanent based on a couple of years' unusual rainy weather, NOAA's Halpert said.
For purely moving water, Gleick likes a smaller-scale concept: the trash bag. A California firm has designed Spragg Bags "with the world's strongest zippers" that haul millions of gallons of drinking water from one place to another over the ocean, said inventor Terry Spragg. It's been used in Greece.

When asked the cost to haul excess water by bag from the flooded Northeast to Texas, Spragg declined to say. "It just wouldn't be practical. It's just too distant... Forget about taking it from New Jersey or Pennsylvania, there are sources that are closer."

If you want to go high-tech for water, desalination — taking salt out of ocean water — and reusing wastewater for drinking water are cheaper and more realistic, said Gleick, author of the book "Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water."

In Big Spring, Texas, they are looking at reusing wastewater by treating it and then adding it to the fresh water supply. Orange County, Calif., has a state-of-the-art water recycling program. And on the International Space Station astronauts use a system that turns their urine into drinkable water. Tampa has a new $158 million water desalination plant that can produce as much as 25 million gallons of water a day from the sea.

While those who need more water say the challenge is just a matter of balancing out too much and too little, other experts say there is a bigger problem: 1 billion people on Earth don't have clean drinking water.
"Absolutely there's a water crisis, but it means different things in different places," Gleick said. "In Africa, it's people dying because they don't have safe drinking water. In Texas, it means people at risk and property being damaged because there's a natural drought. In some places, it might mean not enough water to make semiconductors and grow food.
"Nature always distributes water unevenly — that's just the way it goes," Gleick said.
In the 20th century in the United States, the answer to water shortages was to drill another well, tap another aquifer, build more dams, divert more rivers and build pipelines, Gleick said. But now "we're running into limits."
Politics is almost as big a barrier as price. Legal battles over water run rampant in U.S. history, especially out West. But now they have gone nationwide, along with shortages. North Carolina has sued South Carolina, Florida has sued Georgia and Alabama, and the Great Lakes states have banded together to fend off water diversions, Glennon said. The Great Lakes region has been in and out of court over water rights for about a century.
"People are concerned about water rights. Even in eastern water-rich states, you don't want to be giving it away," said Robert Holmes, who deals with the problem of too much water. He is the national flood hazard coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey.

University of Colorado natural hazards professor Kathleen Tierney put it more bluntly: "As we say in Colorado, whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over."

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Online:

Peter Gleick: http://www.pacinst.org/about_us/staff_board/gleick/

Robert Glennon: http://rglennon.com/books/unquenchable/

Southern Nevada Water Authority: http://www.snwa.com/

Spragg Bags: http://www.waterbag.com/