Homeopathy Takes Some Hits

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently uncovered significant violations at one of the world's largest manufacturers of homeopathic products. It is only the latest in a long line of blows to the homeopathy industry, both in Europe and the United States.

For example a major medical insurance company in the U.K. recently stopped paying for homeopathic treatment, citing no evidence that homeopathy is effective.

Homeopathy was invented around 1796 by a doctor named Samuel Hahnemann. He believed (contrary to the principles of physics) that homeopathic medicines become more effective the more they are diluted.

Homeopathic solutions are often so literally watered-down that they don't contain a single molecule of the original medicine or substance: the patient is drinking nothing but water. Homeopathic medicines have not been shown to work better than placebos, yet many people use and endorse homeopathy.

In 2009 the British Science and Technology Select Committee conducted a comprehensive study into whether homeopathy has any scientific validity. The report was devastating:"homeopathy is not efficacious, and explanations for why homeopathy would work are scientifically implausible."

Even professional homeopathic practitioners admitted that basic claims made about homeopathy have never been tested nor proven.

Homeopathic products from A Nelson & Co., a British company that manufactures many products including Nelson's line of pain relievers, digestion aids, emotional aids, energy, acne products and Bach Rescue Remedies sold in America were inspected by the Food and Drug Administration and the conclusions are alarming.

FDA Homeopathy Investigation

In a July 26, 2012, warning letter the FDA informed Nelson's that:

During the inspection, the [FDA] investigator observed glass fragments present during the manufacture... Your firm failed to implement adequate measures to prevent glass contamination and had no documentation to demonstrate that appropriate line clearance and cleaning is conducted following occurrences of glass breakage, which has been a recurring problem.

While the presence of glass in any drug or food is alarming, what should be of bigger concern is that because the manufacturer's dispensing machine was broken, one in six bottles in a sample batch of the homeopathic preparation was never even filled with the product they were selling -- yet not a single homeopathic practitioner or patient noticed!

The investigator also observed for Batch #36659 that one out of every six bottles did not receive the dose of active homeopathic drug solution due to the wobbling and vibration of the bottle assembly during filling of the active ingredient. The active ingredient was instead seen dripping down the outside of the vial assembly. Your firm lacked controls to ensure that the active ingredient is delivered to every bottle.

Imagine if an error was made in the manufacturing of an important life-saving drug, and one out of six pills had no active ingredient at all: Doctors and patients would quickly realize that there was something terribly wrong. But because most homeopathic medications literally have no active ingredient in the first place, any pain relief is attributable to the placebo effect. It makes perfect sense that no one would notice that there was no active ingredient in the preparation, since there's no active ingredient in the medicine even when the bottles are correctly and properly filled.

Skirting Drug Regulations

Most manufacturers of homeopathic preparations sold in the United States try to get around the law requiring that they prove their products are safe and effective. One method is to include a legal warning on the packaging that any statements about what the product does be followed in fine print with the disclaimer: "This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

By explicitly referring to alternative medicines and homeopathic preparations as dietary supplements instead of drugs, manufacturers avoid any legal obligation to prove that what they sell works. In addition to the other problems, the FDA found that Nelson's had made claims about their products that would classify them as drugs:

Your product labeling documents the intended uses of your products including, but not limited to the following: Arnica: "Homeopathy, such as the homeopathic remedy Rhus tox and Arnica, has been traditionally used to help relieve the symptoms of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis." Arnileve: "Apply Arnileve Arnica Cream liberally to the affected area in order to reduce inflammation and hasten recovery time." Based on the above labeling and claims, these products are drugs...because they are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease in man, and...because they are intended to affect the structure or any function of the body.

In one strange effort to avoid scrutiny from public health officials, a leading manufacturer of homeopathic remedies is considering marketing their (supposedly efficacious) homeopathic pills and preparations as candy. Any "medication" which can simply and accurately be re-labeled as "confectionary" is no medication at all.

Read more at Discovery News

Roman Curses Appear on Ancient Tablet

An ancient Roman lead scroll unearthed in England three years ago has turned out to be a curse intended to cause misfortune to more than a dozen people, according to new research.

Found in East Farleigh, U.K., in the filling of a 3rd to 4th Century AD building that may have originally been a temple, the scroll was made of a 2.3- by 3.9-inch inscribed lead tablet.

Popular in the Greek and Roman world, these sorts of "black magic" curses called upon gods to torment specific victims.

Rolled up to conceal their inscriptions, the tablets were either nailed to the wall of a temple or buried in places considered to be close to the underworld, such as graves, springs or wells.

The scroll, unearthed in the Kent village had been carefully rolled up and buried, most likely in the third century AD, similar to other curse tablets found throughout Europe.

The researchers tried to read the fragile scroll without unrolling it by using a technique called neutron computed tomography imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, but "the resolution was not sufficient to discern any writing on it," said the Maidstone Area Archaeological Group, which made the finding.

As the curse tablet, or defixio, was unrolled, the inscribed letters became visible under a scanning electron microscope.

Roger Tomlin, lecturer in late Roman history at Wolfson College, Oxford, and an authority on Roman inscriptions, was finally able to decode the inscribed text.

"The tablet is not necessarily complete, but what there is consists of two columns of personal names," Tomlin told Discovery News.

He deciphered the Latin names Sacratus, Constitutus, Memorianus, Constant[...] and the Celtic names (Atr)ectus and Atidenus. Eight other names are incomplete.

Interestingly, the scribe wrote a few of the names backward or upside down.

Experts speculated that this was probably intended to invoke "sympathetic magic" and make life especially difficult for the named and shamed individuals.

However, the motive of the curse and the curse itself remain a mystery.

"No god is named. Indeed, we cannot be sure that we have the beginning of the text," Tomlin said.

Overall, more than 200 curse tablets have been found in Britain. The largest collection was found in the thermal spring at Bath, -- about 100 tablets -- and are displayed in the Roman Baths Museum.

The second-largest collection is from the Roman temple at Uley, and some are displayed in the British Museum.

Most curses related to thefts and called upon a god to fulfill the malevolent wishes detailed in the inscriptions.

One of the tablets from Bath, for example, prayed that its victim should "become as liquid as water," while another on display at the British Museum cursed "Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts and memory."

According to the Maidstone Area archaeologists, it is reasonable to assume that the names listed were of people who lived at the site.

Read more at Discovery News

Dying Star Devours Its Own Planet

In the second episode of the Doctor Who rebooted series -- starring Christopher Eccleston as the ninth doctor -- the regenerated Time Lord takes his new "companion," Rose, far into the future. Specifically, he takes her to the year five billion, to join a bevy of various alien leaders on board a space station, parked near the sun. They are there for a momentous occasion: the sun is about to expand into a red giant, and in the process, destroy the Earth.

Science fiction? Well, yes, at least when it comes to the whole time travel and alien space station bit. But as far as the fate of the sun -- and with it, the fate of our pretty blue planet -- that's firmly in the realm of science fact.

Astronomers have just announced the first observational evidence of an aging star destroying its own planet in the Astrophysical Journal.

The sun's energy comes from the nuclear reactions taking place in its core, specifically the conversion of hydrogen into helium. But that energy is not infinite. Eventually all the hydrogen will be converted into helium -- in fact, as this article at Universe Today points out, that process speeds up, little by little, with a corresponding slight increase in the sun's brightness, or heat:

In 1.1 billion years from now, the Sun will be 10 percent brighter than it is today. This extra energy will cause a moist greenhouse effect in the beginning, similar to the runaway warming on Venus. But then the Earth’s atmosphere will dry out as the water vapor is lost to space, never to return.
 

In 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40 percent brighter than it is today. It will be so hot that the oceans will boil and that water vapor will be lost to space as well. The ice caps will permanently melt, and snow will be ancient history; life will be unable to survive anywhere on the surface of the Earth. The Earth will resemble dry hot Venus.

When all the hydrogen is turned into helium -- roughly 6 billion years from now -- the sun will no longer generate sufficient energy to counteract the pull of gravity. The core will contract inward, heating up the interior to sufficient temperatures to fuse helium into carbon. This spells doom for Earth, and all of its inhabitants, assuming any managed to survive that hot, dry Venus stage.

As this new phase begins, the sun will puff outward and turn into a red giant, expanding its outer layers as the core collapses. Those outer layers will engulf the nearest planets, including Earth, which will plunge into the core and be vaporized.

The sun's own lifetime will continue, however, until it ultimately cools into a white dwarf star.

In a trillion years, that remnant of our our sun will reach thermal equilibrium with the rest of the cosmos (just a few degrees above absolute zero).

That puffing-out stage, into a red giant, is what the Doctor Who episode depicts. And now an international team of astronomers has found evidence of a similar event when they studied a red giant star called BD+48 740.

They used spectroscopic analysis to determine the chemical composition of this star system, and found huge amounts of lithium. It's a rare element, despite being one of the oldest (dating back to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago), because it is usually destroyed by stars. So why is it so abundant here?

Alexander Wolszczan (Penn State University) and his colleagues propose in their paper that the lithium was created when a planet-sized massive object spiraled into BD+48 740, heating up sufficiently while it was being "digested" to trigger the production of lithium.

It's not just the spectroscopic evidence that points to the destruction of a planet. The team found another massive planet (larger than Jupiter) orbiting the star, with an equally rare highly elliptical orbit. This could also be caused by the destruction of a massive planet by the host star. That event would produce a burst of energy sufficient to toss the second massive planet into such a strange orbit.

"Catching a planet in the act of being devoured by a star is an almost improbable feat to accomplish, because of the comparative swiftness of the process," co-author Eva Villaver (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid) said via press release. But astronomers can infer this happened by looking at stellar chemistry and orbits of other planets in the system.

Read more at Discovery News

LHC Smashes Highest Man-Made Temperature Record

Just a couple of short months ago, we reported that Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider had made the Guinness World Records for achieving the "Highest Manmade Temperature" -- a whopping 4 trillion degrees Celsius, 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.

That was the work of the lab's PHENIX collaboration, designed to study the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed for ten-millionths of a second after the universe's birth.

Even then, we noted that another experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), called ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), was nipping at the record's heels. The latest results from the LHC were just announced at the 2012 Quark Matter conference last week, and sure enough, the record has been beaten -- actually, smashed.

Physicists want to know more about the QGP in order to further probe the extreme conditions that existed in the earliest moments of the cosmos. In those first fractions of a second, the universe was so hot that no nuclei could exist. Instead, there was the QGP, made of quarks and gluons (the massless particles that "carry" the force between quarks).

But making this exotic plasma in a laboratory requires enormous energies. Here's a short video detailing how Brookhaven's RHIC achieves them:


ALICE uses lead ions instead of gold ones to create a QGP. The LHC, with its much-higher energies, had no problem beating PHENIX's temperatures by some 38 percent, boosting the record for the hottest manmade material from around 4 trillion degrees Celsius to an eye-popping 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius (that's nearly 10 trillion degrees Fahrenheit).

As impressive as this achievement might be, smashing Guinness records really isn't the point. Unlike ATLAS and CMS, which are focused on hunting for the Higgs boson, ALICE is focused on studying the QCP and other conditions in the primordial universe.

The scientists on ALICE presented a bunch of new results at the conference, most notably concerning charmed particles -- those that contain either a charm or anti-charm quark. Charm quarks are 100 times heavier than the more common up and down quarks that make up normal matter.

The heavier the particle, the more energy it takes to create it within a particle accelerator, and the more quickly it decays into lighter particles. This also makes it more difficult to study such a particle's properties. It's just not around long enough to get a good look, so to speak.

Enter the QGP, which serves to slow down charm quarks as they pass through it; in fact, the ALICE scientists reported that the quarks actually seem to be dragged along by the plasma's current. (Yes, the QGP has a flow.)

And sometimes, they found, those charm and anti-charm quarks recombine to form something called "charmonium." This notion dates back to the 1980s, when such an end product was proposed as a direct signature, or indicator, that a QGP had formed. It was first confirmed in 2000 at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron.

Read more at Discovery News

More Evidence for Russian Quasicrystal Meteorite

Earlier this year, we told you about an unusual type of rock known as a quasicrystal, found deep in the Russian mountains in 2010 -- the first known naturally occurring quasicrystal. And the most likely origin of that rock was a meteorite from outer space.

Now physicist Paul Steinhardt is back with new evidence that his theory about the origin of that Russian quasicrystal is correct, and that meteorite responsible for its transport likely hit Earth around 15,000 years ago, during the last glacial period.

Those findings just appeared in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics, published by the Institute of Physics in England. It's one of the most colorful material physics papers I've read in recent memory, complete with candid photos of scientists in the field.

Quasicrystals are an unusual type of material first described in the 1980s by Israeli scientist Daniel Schechtman. A quasicrystal has a strange atomic structure that gives it unique properties, falling somewhere between a true crystal and glass.

Schechtman found them quite by accident, while on sabbatical in the US. He was working with rapidly cooled alloys of aluminum and manganese, and noticed an unusual pattern in the electron diffraction pattens they produced.

Schechtman was famously ridiculed for his ideas when he first proposed them, but eventually it appeared in Physical Review Letters. That paper is now one of the ten most cited articles in the history of the journal, sparking a revolution in crystallography and snagging Schechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Most quasicrystals to date -- over a hundred different varieties -- have been created under carefully controlled conditions in the laboratory. Man made quasicrystals are now used in non-stick frying pans, ball bearings, and razor blades.

But the original theory predicted that quasicrystals should occur naturally, and be as robust and stable as regular crystals. Steinhardt started searching for this elusive object back in 1984 in major museum collections, but came up empty. He resumed the search more than 10 years later, and this time he succeeded.

In 2007, Steinhardt and his cohorts pored over a collection of rocks belonging to Luca Bindi of the University of Florence. One of those specimens,found in the Koryak Mountains, exhibited a quasicrystalline pattern.

A mass spectroscopy analysis revealed unusual ratios of oxygen atoms and their isotopes, matching the ratios typically found inside a certain type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite. The samples also contained silica, suggesting it had formed under high pressure conditions.

Steinhardt and his colleagues hypothesized that the most likely scenario is that the quasicrystal found in the Koryak Mountains fell to Earth inside a meteorite, outlined in their paper published in the Jan. 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

But in order to definitively prove this hypothesis, Steinhardt had to verify that the sample was, indeed, from that region. The paper merely states that the year-long forensic investigation had "more twists and turns than can be recounted here," while the press release offers tantalizing hints that those twists and turns involved "secret diaries, smugglers, gold prospectors and bears." (I hereby offer to buy Steinhardt a drink, just to hear his swashbuckling tale of adventure in the way such tales were meant to be told.)

The man who found the sample back in 1979 turned out to be one Valery Kryachko, who was panning for platinum along the clay bed of a tributary of the Khatyrka River. He failed to find platinum but did bring back "a few rocks with metallic phases," according to the paper. The quasicrystal sample was among them.

So, where there's one naturally occurring quasicrystal, might there be more? Steinhardt knew this would require an expedition to the place where the original rock was found. Never mind funding, guides, and all the practical details involved in pulling off such an explanation. "Only one person in the world knew the precise spot where the original sample was discovered in 1979, and travel to the autonomous okrug of Chukotka is restricted," the authors wrote.

But succeed they did, setting off last July with a team of ten scientists, two drivers and cook, crawling across the tundra and into the Koryak Mountains on a pair of slow-moving tractor vehicles. It took four days just to get there, and the effort seems to have been worth the trek.

Steinhardt and his colleagues collected more samples, which contained more naturally occurring quasicrystals. They were also able to verify that the local terrestrial environment didn't have the kind of extreme conditions that would have been necessary to produce such quasicrystals, significantly bolstering Steinhardt's case that they arrived here via meteorite. Based on sediment samples, the researchers peg the likely date of that impact at around 15,000 years ago.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Aren't There More Stars?

Boston University undergraduate researcher Rob Marchwinski and his colleagues in BU’s Astronomy Department may have found the answer to a universal question: Why aren’t there more stars?

A possible answer to that question presented itself to Marchwinski while he, graduate student Michael Pavel and Professor of Astronomy Dan Clemens used new data from the Galactic Plane Infrared Polarization Survey (GPIPS) to create the first complete map of magnetic field strength in a large, interstellar gas cloud. (The GPIPS is being conducted by BU astronomers on the 1.8-meter Perkins telescope, which is shared by Boston University and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.)

Stars form when large clouds of interstellar gas and dust nucleate or form centers, eventually consolidating into dense cores, which in tum collapse under the force of gravity. While the steps in the star formation process have become better understood in recent years, the rate at which new stars form has remained something of a mystery. Indeed, most models predict there should be up to ten times more stars forming than are observed. What is preventing stars from forming at faster rates?

Working with more than 3000 infrared polarization measurements—out of the roughly one million gathered by the GPIPS—Marchwinski was able to identify the very weak magnetic field present in a gas cloud located about 6000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. The huge cloud, spanning an area of 30 by 120 light-years, contains more than 17,000 times the mass of the Sun in diffuse gas and dust. However, despite its enormous size, the BU researchers have measured an average magnetic field strength of just over five micro-Gauss—about one hundred thousand times weaker than the magnetic field on Earth.

They also found seven dense cores within the cloud, with average masses of one hundred times that of the Sun. These cores, which eventually will develop into new stars, are also sites of somewhat stronger magnetic field strengths that are just strong enough to prevent gravitational collapse. "It is surprising that magnetic fields as weak as these can disrupt star formation, but it seems to be the case in this cloud," said Marchwinski.

Read more at Science Daily

Big Bang Theory Challenged by Big Chill

The start of the Universe should be modeled not as a Big Bang but more like water freezing into ice, according to a team of theoretical physicists at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University.

They have suggested that by investigating the cracks and crevices common to all crystals -- including ice -- our understanding of the nature of the Universe could be revolutionized.

Lead researcher on the project, James Quach said current theorizing is the latest in a long quest by humans to understand the origins and nature of the Universe.

"Ancient Greek philosophers wondered what matter was made of: was it made of a continuous substance or was it made of individual atoms?" he said. "With very powerful microscopes, we now know that matter is made of atoms."

"Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales.

"A new theory, known as Quantum Graphity, suggests that space may be made up of indivisible building blocks, like tiny atoms. These indivisible blocks can be thought about as similar to pixels that make up an image on a screen. The challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly."

However James Quach and his colleagues believe they may have figured out a way to see them indirectly.

"Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," he said. "Then as the universe cools, it 'crystallizes' into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the Universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice."

RMIT University research team member Associate Professor Andrew Greentree said some of these defects might be visible.

"Light and other particles would bend or reflect off such defects, and therefore in theory we should be able to detect these effects," he said.

The team has calculated some of these effects and if their predictions are experimentally verified, the question as to whether space is smooth or constructed out of tiny indivisible parts will be solved once and for all.

Read more at Science Daily

Tiny Green Bug May Be First Photosynthetic Animal

Pea aphids may have an unprecedented ability to harvest sunlight, and use the energy for metabolic purposes. It would make it the only species of animal known to have photosynthesis-like powers.

It comes down to carotenoids, which are a type of pigment used in animals for crucial functions like vision, bone growth and vitamin production. All known animals obtain these by eating the plants, algae and fungi that naturally synthesize the orange-red compounds.

Back in 2010, University of Arizona biologists researcher Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik discovered that pea aphids can make their own carotenoids, like a plant. “What happened is a fungal gene got into an aphid and was copied,”said Moran in a press release.

Entomologist Alain Robichon, of the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute in France, wanted to find out why the insects make such metabolically expensive chemicals.

Carotenoids are responsible for aphid body color, and the researchers found that insects changed color depending on environmental conditions. In optimal environments, aphids make a medium amount of carotenoids and come out orange. In the cold, the insects have a high level of carotenoids and are green. In areas with limited resources, aphids are almost devoid of the pigment and are born white.

The team then measured the aphids’ levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) — a way to measure energy transfer in living organisms — and received striking results. Green aphids make significantly more ATP than white ones, and orange aphids made more ATP while exposed to sunlight than when kept in the dark.

The researchers also crushed the orange aphids and purified their carotenoids, to demonstrate that it was these extracts that could absorb light and pass this energy on. This all suggests that the synthesized pigments may contribute to a system of photo-induced electron transfer, where the aphids can harness energy from the sunlight.

Read more at Wired Science

Hook-Legged Spider Found in Oregon Cave

A group of cave explorers and scientists have made a rare discovery:  an entirely new taxonomic family of spider in the caves of southern Oregon.

Only two other spider families (the taxonomic group above both genus and species) have been found since 1990, and this is the first newly discovered, native one uncovered in North America since 1890, said California Academy of Sciences researcher Charles Griswold, lead author of the study that described the species.

So far, the family consists only of the one species described, which the researchers named Trogloraptor marchingtoni. The species is named after Neil Marchington, a member of the Western Cave Conservancy, who first discovered the spider. The genus name, Trogloraptor, means "cave robber."

It's an apt name for a spider with unique hooks, or claws, on its legs, which the researchers believe are used to snatch flying insects, like midges, out of the air. With its legs outstretched, the spider measures up to 3 inches (8 centimeters) long.

"They're biggish," Griswold said. "But when you're in a cave and it's dark and there's only the beam of your head lamp, they look much bigger. It's quite astonishing to see them hanging from a few threads."

Griswold and his colleagues think that the newly discovered spiders hang from the underside of caves on simple webs, waiting to snatch a meal with their astonishing sicklelike legs. The few specimens Griswold and his graduate student Tracy Audisio have reared in the lab, though, haven't eaten anything. "It seems very shy," Griswold told OurAmazingPlanet.

The spider also has poisonous glands, although there's no evidence that it is dangerous to humans.

Griswold said this discovery could help explain why there are legends about giant spiders living in caves in this region. And perhaps there are other similar species yet to be found; many caves, especially in the western United States, remain little studied.

Finding a new family like this is an historic moment for the field. "It is just as fascinating to arachnologists as the discovery of a new dinosaur is to paleontologists," said spider expert Norman Platnick at the American Museum of Natural History. Platnick was not involved in the discovery or description of the new species.

Another unusual thing about the spider is that it has two rows of teeth, or serrula. "I don't recall seeing any other spiders with that kind of serrula," Platnick told OurAmazingPlanet.

Currently, there are only 111 recognized spider families. New families get added in one of two ways. The more common way is by studying a group that has already been described, and discovering that its relationships are not what had been previously thought, Platnick said. Less common is a case like Trogloraptor, where a new family is established when the animal is first described, he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Skull Resets Human Migration Clock

Newfound pieces of human skull from "the Cave of the Monkeys" in Laos are the earliest skeletal evidence yet that humans once had an ancient, rapid migration to Asia.

Anatomically modern humans first arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa. When and how our lineage then dispersed out of Africa has long proven controversial.

Archaeological evidence and genetic data suggest that modern humans rapidly migrated out of Africa and into Southeast Asia by at least 60,000 years ago. However, complicating this notion is the notable absence of fossil evidence for modern human occupation in mainland Southeast Asia, likely because those bones do not survive well in the warm, tropical region.

Now a partial skull from Tam Pa Ling, "the Cave of the Monkeys" in northern Laos helps fill in this mysterious gap in the fossil record.

"Most surprising is the fact that we found anything at all," researcher Laura Lynn Shackelford, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Illinois, told LiveScience. "Most people didn't think we'd find anything in these caves, or even in the region where we're working in mainland Southeast Asia. But we're stubborn, gone where no one's really looked before, or at least in almost a century."

Rough terrain, persistent scientists

The fossils were discovered in 2009 in the limestone cave, which is located at the top of the Pa Hang Mountain 3,840 feet (1,170 meters) above sea level.

"The cave is surrounded by lots of papaya and banana trees, so a troop of monkeys likes to come and forage there, therefore its name," Shackelford said.

There were many challenges working in this area.

"It's incredibly difficult to access the site — it's only 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the capital, but it takes us two days to drive there because of the rough terrain," Shackelford said. "We have to hike up the side of a cliff, do a bit of rock-climbing to get to the mouth of the cave, and then going in, we have to go 60 meters (200 ft) down a slope of wet clay. We also have to carry a generator and lights with us to see in the cave. We have to push pigs out of the way to get through the jungle — there are just pigs wandering around there."

"Every bit of clay has to be removed and taken back up by hand, trowel and bucket, so work is incredibly slow," she added. "We only go in the dry season in the winter, so we don't really have to deal with insects and snakes — well, we did have snakes fall into the pit while excavating. And in the cave, we've had more than our fair share of spiders and bats."

Oldest bones of modern humans

No artifacts were found at the site, nor were signs of human occupation.

"We think this fossil was outside with other fauna and flora, and during the rainy season, rain washed it into the cave," Shackelford said. "In subsequent seasons, more sediment washed into the cave and covered it."

The shape of the bone and teeth is distinctly anatomically modern human, not like those of an extinct lineage such as the Neanderthals. A variety of dating techniques of the sediments surrounding the fossils suggests they are at least 46,000 to 51,000 years old, and direct dating of the bone suggests a maximum age of about 63,000 years. This makes these fossils the earliest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans east of the Middle East.

These findings "change the thinking regarding modern human migration routes into Asia, that there were more routes of dispersal than previously thought," Shackelford said.

"The typical thinking was that once modern humans hugged the coastline to go from India to Southeast Asia, they went southward into Indonesia and Australasia (the region comprising Australia, New Zealand and neighboring Pacific islands)," she explained. "We think they absolutely did that, but we're also suggesting other populations probably went north or northeast toward China, and some went through the mountains into mainland Southeast Asia, taking advantage of river systems. Beforehand, no one thought they would have gone into the mountains of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand."

Read more at Discovery News