Origins of HIV Virus Strains Traced to Gorillas

Two of four strains of the virus that can cause AIDS come from gorillas in southwestern Cameroon, an international team of scientists reported in studies published Monday in the United States.

The new information means that researchers now know the origins of all strains of the HIV virus that occur in people.

HIV (HIV-1) has at least four strains. Known as Groups M, N, O and P, each one had its own origin -- from ape to man, on at least four separate occasions.

Groups M and N were known to have come from chimpanzees in Cameroon. But until now the origin of the O and P strains had been unknown.

Results of the study led by Martine Peeters, a virologist at France's Research and Development Institute (IRD) and the University of Montpellier, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

HIV-1's Group M is the most widely spread, behind the greatest part of the epidemic with more than 40 million people now infected around the world.

Group P has only been detected in two people so far. And Group O has been found in central and western Africa, infecting about 100,000.

The breakthrough was made possible thanks to genetic samples from chimpanzees and gorillas from Cameroon, Gabon, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Read more at Discovery News

Albino Toddler in Africa Killed for Witchcraft

A toddler named Yohana Bahati was abducted from his home in northern Tanzania on Feb. 14, taken by two men armed with machetes. Police were called and fears were immediately raised because of the child’s rare genetic disorder, albinism. The condition results in a lack of pigmentation in the hair, skin, and eyes, giving them poor eyesight and extreme sensitivity to light. It also makes its sufferers a target for magic-related murder.

Bahati was soon found several kilometers from his home and the worst fears were realized. As a news article in “The Telegraph” described:

“The mutilated body of an albino toddler has been found in Tanzania with his limbs hacked off, the latest such killing for body parts for witchcraft… police finding the body on Tuesday afternoon in a forest area close to his home. ‘His arms and legs were hacked off,’ regional police chief Joseph Konyo said. The baby’s mother Ester Jonas, aged 30, is in a serious state in (the) hospital with machete cuts to her face and arms after she tried to protect her baby.”

This horrific crime highlights the unusual intersection of magic beliefs, African culture, and government. This is only the latest in a series of albino murders. In Tanzania and Burundi, at least 50 albinos have been murdered for their body parts in recent years according to a 2010 Red Cross report. In November 2009, four people were arrested and sentenced to death in northern Tanzania for killing an albino man to harvest his body parts.

Throughout Africa witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing (or removing) magic curses or bringing luck in love or business. The belief and practice of using body parts for magical ritual or benefit is called muti.

Muti murders are particularly brutal, with knives and machetes used to cut and hack off limbs, breasts, and other body parts from their living victims. According to the United Nations albino body parts can sell for around $600 (or about what the average person earns in one year) in Tanzania.

Muti Magic

Earlier this year Tanzanian officials had reportedly banned witch doctors in an effort to prevent further witchcraft-related murders of people with albinism, but magical beliefs are deeply embedded in sub-Saharan cultures. Though the practice of muti specifically is not commonly practiced by witch doctors and traditional healers throughout Africa, it happens often enough (especially in East Africa) that albinos and their families live in constant fear for their lives.

What makes the death of Yohana Bahati especially tragic is his young age (most victims are older children or adults), and also the explanation for why the attacks have been increasing in recent months and may get worse: the use of magic by politicians in Tanzania’s upcoming elections to gain an advantage over their rivals.

As bizarre as it may sound to Westerners, the idea of using magic to gain an edge over an opponent — or for success in business or romance — is routine and commonplace throughout Africa. Witch doctors are hired to cast or remove curses, and if you believe that magic affects your daily life — as many Africans do — then obviously those with the most to gain or lose (such as those vying for public office) want the most powerful magic employed on their behalf.

Read more at Discovery News

Hunt for Dwarf Planet Ceres' Mysterious Water Begins

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is about to make its second and final stop during its exploration of the asteroid belt and it is already returning some stunning images that are creating more questions than answers.

After leaving massive asteroid Vesta’s orbit in 2012, Dawn has traveled through the asteroid belt that occupies the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter to rendezvous with 600 mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres — the first spacecraft ever to orbit two celestial bodies during its mission.

The probe will be captured by Ceres’ gravity on Friday, March 6, and in the run-up to this highly anticipated event, the probe has been sending back increasingly detailed observations of the solar system’s innermost dwarf planet that are already puzzling planetary scientists. One puzzle focuses on bright patches on the Cererian landscape — one of which is a particularly bright spot, with a dimmer partner, inside an impact crater.

Speaking during Monday’s press conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Dawn deputy project scientist Carol Raymond outlined some possibilities that may explain these strange features. As previously reported, one mechanism that could be creating the bright patches is cryovolcanism, where sub-surface ice is forced to the surface. But as Dawn’s imagery becomes sharper by the day, this mechanism is looking less likely.

“A cryovolcano will likely result in a constructional feature,” said Raymond. “So we’d expect to see a mounded feature on the surface — some sort of deposit around a central vent or a crack. In the case of this crater, what we can say is that the brightest spot is not associated with a ‘positive relief feature’ — i.e. a mound or peak … so a cryovolcano is not at the top of the list for that feature.”

We’ll have to wait until Dawn has completed its first science orbit (in late-April) so the probe’s instrumentation can be better calibrated to understand just why these spots are so bright and, ultimately, understand their origin.

Although cryovolcanism may be looking less and less likely, the mystery of Ceres’ water is one of most exciting unknowns on the minds of the Dawn team.

“One of the mysteries is that of liquid water,” Dawn mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman told Discovery News. “Are there sub-surface reservoirs of water — ponds or lakes or oceans? I think that’s really exciting.”

From observations and theoretical models, scientists have a pretty good idea that Ceres was a planet in the making in the early epochs of the solar system. It is composed of stratified material and from density models of the world, there are strong indications that there should be sub-surface reservoirs of water.

As Ceres isn’t heated by the the tidal heating that Saturn’s moon Enceladus or Jupiter’s moon Europa experience and receives weak sunlight as its only heat source, it is most likely that if Ceres did have sub-surface liquid water reservoirs early in its history, they are likely now long frozen, unless interactions with minerals in the rocks produced salts to maintain a liquid state.

The expectation that Dawn would see Ceres covered with ice was further bolstered last year when the ESA Herschel space telescope detected water vapor in the vicinity of Ceres. Although it wasn’t a huge quantity, it did boost hopes that Ceres may be venting water vapor into space from its sub-surface reservoirs, in a similar (but more understated) manner to Enceladus’ impressive south pole geysers. Another theory is that, by chance, Herschel may have spotted the after effects of a meteorite impact on Ceres that kicked up surface ice into space.

Before Dawn started its approach of Ceres, it seemed highly possible that Ceres was going to have more in common with Enceladus and Europa — two icy worlds with sub-surface oceans. As it turns out, as Ceres came into focus, its ancient cratered surface, as opposed to an ice-covered crust, came as a surprise.

“That was the biggest surprise I think for me and many of the team members — when we saw those craters we were like ‘Okay…’,” Raymond told Discovery News. “The ice should be close to the surface, it flows. So something else is going on. There’s lots of ideas as to how we can explain that but we’re going to have to sharpen our pencils, do a lot of detailed models and we’re going to need a little more insight from high-resolution data (from Dawn).”

There is still a possibility that water vapor may be escaping from the dwarf planet, but Dawn’s instrumentation isn’t designed to specifically seek out venting regions. But through the use of its infrared spectrometer, Dawn may be able to detect the back-scattered light created by dust that is being blown into space by the venting water vapor. A “tenuous atmosphere about Ceres” may also be a possibility, according to Raymond.

“Since I have the meteorology background, I most want to know what’s going on with the water vapor, maybe there’s an atmospheric thing going on,” Keri Bean, Dawn mission operations engineer, told Discovery News. “Dawn will give us an answer, one way or another. It may not be able to see it (the water vapor), but that will also be a clue. So it will be interesting to see what Dawn does.”

Rather than answering any questions early in Dawn’s Ceres encounter, it seems even more questions are popping up.

“The real excitement is, what does Ceres have to tell us? It’s not a specific question; it’s rather that this is a mysterious alien world that, for two centuries has just been this faint smudge of light,” added Rayman. “Now we’re finally getting this in-depth, richly detailed portrait. That’s what I think is exciting.

“What questions is Ceres going to answer that we’re not even smart enough to ask now?”

Read more at Discovery News

Could This Alien Cell Thrive on Titan?

In a world first, chemical engineers have taken a different look at a question astronomers and biologists have been pondering for decades: Does Saturn moon Titan host life?

Of course, Titan is way too hostile for life as we know it to eke out an existence — it is a frigid world awash with liquid methane and ethane and a noxious atmosphere devoid of any liquid water. But what if there is a different kind of biology, a life as we don’t know it, thriving on the organic chemistry that is abundant on Titan’s surface?

Normally, astrobiologists combine what we know about Earth’s biosphere and astronomers zoom in on other stars containing exoplanets in the hope that some of those alien world have some similarities to Earth. By looking for small rocky exoplanets orbiting inside their star’s habitable zones, we are basically looking for a “second Earth” where liquid water is at least possible. Where there’s liquid water on Earth, there’s inevitably life, so scientists seeking out alien life "follow the water" in the hope of finding life with a similar terrestrial template on other planets.

Titan, however, does not fall into this category. It's about as un-Earth-like as you can get. So, chemical molecular dynamics expert Paulette Clancy, astronomer Jonathan Lunine and James Stevenson, a graduate student in chemical engineering, all from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., have looked at Titan in a different light and created a theoretical model of a methane-based, oxygen-free life form that could thrive in that environment.

There is no known template for this kind of life on Earth, but the researchers have studied what chemicals are in abundance on Titan and worked out how a very different kind of life could be sparked.

As a collaborator on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission, Lunine, Professor in the Physical Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Astronomy, has been fascinated with the possibility of methane-based life existing on Titan for some time, so he joined forces with Clancy and Stevenson to see what this hypothetical life form might look like.

In their research published in the journal Science Advances on Feb. 27, the researchers focused on building a cell membrane “composed of small organic nitrogen compounds and capable of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit; or 94 Kelvin),” said a Cornell press release. On Earth, water-based molecules form phospholipid bilayer membranes that give cells structure, housing organic materials inside while remaining permeable. On Titan, liquid water isn’t available to build these cell membranes.

“We’re not biologists, and we’re not astronomers, but we had the right tools,” said Clancy, lead researcher of the study. “Perhaps it helped, because we didn’t come in with any preconceptions about what should be in a membrane and what shouldn’t. We just worked with the compounds that we knew were there and asked, ‘If this was your palette, what can you make out of that?’”

The researchers were able to model the ideal cell that can do all the things that life can do (i.e. support metabolism and reproduction), but constructed it from nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen-based molecules that are known to exist in Titan’s liquid methane seas. This chemical configuration gives this theoretical alien cell stability and flexibility in a similar manner to Earth life cells.

“The engineers named their theorized cell membrane an ‘azotosome,’ ‘azote’ being the French word for nitrogen. ‘Liposome’ comes from the Greek ‘lipos’ and ‘soma’ to mean ‘lipid body;’ by analogy, ‘azotosome’ means ‘nitrogen body.’” — Cornell

“Ours is the first concrete blueprint of life not as we know it,” said lead author Stevenson, who also said that he was inspired, in part, by Isaac Asimov, who wrote the 1962 essay “Not as We Know It” about non-water-based life.

Read more at Discovery News

'Skeletorus' and 'Sparklemuffin' the Newest Spiders

Two gorgeous new species of peacock spiders nicknamed "Skeletorus" and "Sparklemuffin" have been discovered in Australia, according to a new report.

Peacock spiders are so-named because of their bright colors and their dancelike, courtship rituals.

The two new species were found in southeast Queensland by Madeline Girard, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley who studies peacock spiders, and a friend who went with her into the field. Girard affectionately gave the nickname Sparklemuffin to one of the species, Maratus jactatus, which has bluish and reddish stripes on its abdomen.

She nicknamed the other species Skeletorus for its white markings on a black background, which make it look a bit like a skeleton. Sparklemuffin looks similar to three previously discovered species in this group of peacock spiders, whereas Skeletorus looks very different from all the other known species in the group.

In fact, Skeletorus, officially named Maratus sceletus, "looks dramatically different all other peacock spiders known to date, making me think that this group is perhaps much more diverse than we had thought," said Jürgen Otto, an entomologist who specializes in photographing the arachnids and who co-authored the report.

"Despite the large number of species we have discovered just in the last few years, I can't help feeling that we may have just scratched the surface of this most exciting group of spiders, and that nature has quite a few more surprises in store," Otto told Live Science.

The first peacock spider was discovered in the 1800s, said study co-author David Hill, the editor of the journal Peckhamia, which published the new report on Jan. 20. But then, "for more than 100 years, almost nobody looked at these animals," until Otto started photographing them and recording their courtship displays, Hill said. The spiders are very small, measuring between 3 and 7 millimeters (0.1 to 0.3 inches) long, he added.

Both Sparklemuffin and Skeletorus, along with the three other known species that belong to the calcitrans peacock spider group, share certain similarities, some of which have a lot to do with the way the arachnids perform their characteristic mating dances. For instance, the males display a flap-like body part called a fan that is adorned with a pattern of bold, transverse stripes, according to the report. They also raise a single leg, displaying it to the female.

Read more at Discovery News

Emperor Penguins May Have Suffered in Ice Age Cold

They prefer freezing conditions but Antarctica's emperor penguins may have struggled with the cold during the last Ice Age when temperatures cooled, a study suggested Monday.

Researchers looking at how climatic changes have affected the highly cold-adapted penguin -- the tallest and heaviest of all penguin species -- over the last 30,000 years suggest that there were only three populations in the last ice age.

But as temperatures have warmed up since then, the species has flourished and there are now seven times more of the penguins in many more locations, said joint lead researcher Jane Younger.

"We hadn't really thought about the fact that it would be too cold for them in the past," Younger, a PhD student at the University of Tasmania, told AFP.

"They live through life in minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) now so they are pretty cold adapted."

By examining the genetic diversity of modern and ancient penguin populations, scientists from the universities of Tasmania, Southampton and Oxford in Britain, and the Australian Antarctic Division were able to estimate their numbers over time.

They found that numbers began increasing over the last 12,000 years when temperatures rose by an average of about 15 degrees Celsius and as the amount of sea ice around Antarctica began to reduce.

Younger said the warmer temperatures likely gave penguin chicks a better chance of surviving the winter -- when temperatures would have dropped to minus 45 degrees Celsius during the ice age.

Too much sea ice could have also reduced the locations for breeding, while a shrinking of the ice would have allowed them easier access to the open ocean to feed, she said.

"We were actually really surprised by this. What we had thought was that the ice age, because there was so much more sea ice, which they need (to breed), and because they are so cold-adapted, that this would probably be a good thing for them," she said.

Emperor penguins, which can get heat stress with temperatures above zero, breed during the winter, with the males keeping the egg safe and warm during the cold months.

"What happens occasionally is that the egg will get dropped onto the ice, and these days they can usually get the egg back and it will be alright if it was not out too long," Younger said.

"But the temperatures during the ice age were about 15 degrees colder so... if the egg was dropped it would have been in pretty serious danger almost straight away. And the same thing once the chicks have hatched out of the egg, they need to be kept warm throughout the winter."

The researchers believe a population survived in the Ross Sea region because an area of ocean was always kept free of sea ice by wind and currents, according to the study published in Global Change Biology.

Read more at Discovery News

25 Tons of Pigeon Poo Found in Medieval Monument

A medieval monument in England underwent a dramatic cleaning when a high pressure tanker sucked up about 25 tons of pigeon poo from the historic structure.

Measuring almost three feet deep, the bird droppings built up over decades inside the towers of the roofless 14th-century Landgate Arch in Rye, East Sussex.

Since there is no public access to the towers, the massive, mushy mess went unnoticed until last month, when members of the Rother District Council, which owns the ancient monument, made the stomach-turning finding.

“Whilst we’ve removed other massive blockages such giant fatbergs in sewers, we have never seen such a monumental mass of festering feces before,” Mike Walker, managing director for CountyClean Environmental Services, appointed to clean the towers last week, said in a statement.

He added that the build up behind the doors was such that cleaners had to force the doors open.

“Once inside, it was like walking on a giant chocolate cake and the smell was awful –- even through a facemask,” he said.

Had the guano not been removed, it would have continued to accumulate and cause structural damage to the monument. The acidic pigeon poo can damage stonework seriously.

The clean-up took four days using a powerful custom built machine.

“The machine provides high powered vacuum suction through hoses as well as high pressure water jetting,” Graeme Sanderson at CountyClean Environmental Services told Discovery News.

Read more at Discovery News

Coffin-Within-a-Coffin Opened at Richard III Grave

A mysterious lead coffin found close to King Richard III’s grave beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, contained the skeleton of an elderly woman, archaeologists at Leicester University announced today.

Featuring an inlaid crucifix, carefully soldered on all sides but with feet sticking out of the bottom, the lead coffin was discovered inside a larger limestone sarcophagus in August 2013 . The discovery came one year after the battle-scarred remains of the last Plantagenet king of England — the family ruled vast areas of Europe — were unearthed.

Radiocarbon dating suggests the lady in the lead casket might have died as late as 1400, although it's much more likely she was buried in the last half of the 13th century — long before Richard III’s death at the Battle of Bosworth.

Although her sarcophagus was the first intact medieval stone coffin unearthed in the area, it wasn’t the only grave found at the site. Nine other burials were identified beneath the car park, which was basically the site of Grey Friars Church, the medieval friary of the Franciscans known to have been Richard III’s final resting place.

Established in around 1250, the friary was demolished in 1538, as part of King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.

“There is the potential for hundreds more burials elsewhere inside the church, the other friary buildings and outside in the cemetery,” said Grey Friars site director Mathew Morris, who led the dig.

The mysterious coffin-within-a-coffin prompted various speculations about the individual it contained. All suggested it was a male.

The guessing game included two leaders of the English Grey Friars order -- Peter Swynsfeld, who died in 1272, and William of Nottingham, who died in 1330.

“We speculated that this grave might be for one of them. To find that it contained a woman was intriguing and to some extent frustrating for we know much less about the women associated with the friary than the men,” Morris told Discovery News.

Three graves exhumed out of the 10 found so far at the Grey Friars turned to contain female skeletons.

“The discovery is going to add important insights into the interaction of women and the religious orders in the medieval period,” Morris said.

He noted that statistically, the sample is too small to draw any conclusions to the significance of women’s presence at Grey Friars. Richard III, who will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral on March 26, would certainly not have been the only male buried there during the friary’s 300 year history.

“After all, if we carried out more excavations it is possible that we could find that these are the only four women buried in the church,” Morris said.

Two graves inside the choir -- where Richard III was found -- contained wooden coffins and two females aged between 40 and 50 years-old. Radiocarbon dating indicate they died between 1270 and 1400.

One of the women likely had a congenital hip dislocation which forced her to walk with a crutch, while the other lived a life of hard physical labor, regularly using her arms and legs to lift heavy weights.

Another female skeleton, believed to have died in her early to mid-20s, also led a life of hard physical work.

Analysis of the female remains, including the lady in the lead coffin, who was over 60 when she died, revealed that all four women had a highly varied, protein-rich diet including large amounts of sea fish. This indicates that they would have been wealthy, the archaeologists concluded.

“The friary’s main source of donations came from the town’s middle classes, merchants and tradespeople who were probably of more modest means, and worked for a living,” Morris said.

Buried in a prominent position in the church, the lady in the lead coffin was certainly enjoying a high social status.

Read more at Discovery News

First detailed microscopy evidence of bacteria at the lower size limit of life

Scientists have captured the first detailed microscopy images of ultra-small bacteria that are believed to be about as small as life can get. The research was led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. The existence of ultra-small bacteria has been debated for two decades, but there hasn't been a comprehensive electron microscopy and DNA-based description of the microbes until now.

The cells have an average volume of 0.009 cubic microns (one micron is one millionth of a meter). About 150 of these bacteria could fit inside an Escherichia coli cell and more than 150,000 cells could fit onto the tip of a human hair.

The scientists report their findings Friday, Feb. 27, in the journal Nature Communications.

The diverse bacteria were found in groundwater and are thought to be quite common. They're also quite odd, which isn't a surprise given the cells are close to and in some cases smaller than several estimates for the lower size limit of life. This is the smallest a cell can be and still accommodate enough material to sustain life. The bacterial cells have densely packed spirals that are probably DNA, a very small number of ribosomes, hair-like appendages, and a stripped-down metabolism that likely requires them to rely on other bacteria for many of life's necessities.

The bacteria are from three microbial phyla that are poorly understood. Learning more about the organisms from these phyla could shed light on the role of microbes in the planet's climate, our food and water supply, and other key processes.

"These newly described ultra-small bacteria are an example of a subset of the microbial life on earth that we know almost nothing about," says Jill Banfield, a Senior Faculty Scientist in Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division and a UC Berkeley professor in the departments of Earth and Planetary Science and Environmental Science, Policy and Management.

"They're enigmatic. These bacteria are detected in many environments and they probably play important roles in microbial communities and ecosystems. But we don't yet fully understand what these ultra-small bacteria do," says Banfield.

Banfield is a co-corresponding author of the Nature Communications paper with Birgit Luef, a former postdoctoral researcher in Banfield's group who is now at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.

"There isn't a consensus over how small a free-living organism can be, and what the space optimization strategies may be for a cell at the lower size limit for life. Our research is a significant step in characterizing the size, shape, and internal structure of ultra-small cells," says Luef.

The scientists set out to study bacteria from phyla that lack cultivated representatives. Some of these bacteria have very small genomes, so the scientists surmised the bacteria themselves might also be very small.

To concentrate these cells in a sample, they filtered groundwater collected at Rifle, Colorado through successively smaller filters, down to 0.2 microns, which is the size used to sterilize water. The resulting samples were anything but sterile. They were enriched with incredibly tiny microbes, which were flash frozen to -272 degrees Celsius in a first-of-its-kind portable version of a device called a cryo plunger. This ensured the microbes weren't damaged in their journey from the field to the lab.

The frozen samples were transported to Berkeley Lab, where Luef, with the help of Luis Comolli of Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division, characterized the cells' size and internal structure using 2-D and 3-D cryogenic transmission electron microscopy. The images also revealed dividing cells, indicating the bacteria were healthy and not starved to an abnormally small size.

The bacteria's genomes were sequenced at the Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility located in Walnut Creek, California, under the guidance of Susannah Tringe. The genomes were about one million base pairs in length. In addition, metagenomic and other DNA-based analyses of the samples were conducted at UC Berkeley, which found a diverse range of bacteria from WWE3, OP11, and OD1 phyla.

This combination of innovative fieldwork and state-of-the-art microscopy and genomic analysis yielded the most complete description of ultra-small bacteria to date.

Among their findings: Some of the bacteria have thread-like appendages, called pili, which could serve as "life support" connections to other microbes. The genomic data indicates the bacteria lack many basic functions, so they likely rely on a community of microbes for critical resources.

The scientists also discovered just how much there is yet to learn about ultra-small life.

"We don't know the function of half the genes we found in the organisms from these three phyla," says Banfield.

Read more at Science Daily

Rare Intact Roman Tombstone Found in England

A rare, intact Roman tombstone was unearthed this week by archaeologists digging ahead of construction of a parking lot in Cirencester, in western England.

Made from Cotswold limestone, the 1,800-year-old inscribed stone was found in a grave -- directly above an adult skeleton.

The likely association of the gravestone with the human remains makes the discovery unique, said Neil Holbrook, chief executive of Cotswold Archaeology.

“It’s the sort of thing archaeologists only find in places like Pompeii,” Holbrook told reporters.

Found lying on its front, the tombstone revealed fine decorations and five lines of Latin inscription when it was turned over. It read: “D.M. BODICACIA CONIUNX VIXIT ANNO S XXVII.”

“Our preliminary translation of the inscription is: To the spirits of the departed/Bodicacia/faithful wife/died aged 27,” Ed McSloy, Cotswold Archaeology’s finds expert, told Discovery News.

The archaeologists believe the name of the young woman is either Bodicacia or Bodica. However, it's also possible that two names are hidden within the inscription: Bodus, referring to a man, and Cacia, pointing to a woman.

“Bodica/Bodicacia/Bodus all would be Latinized versions of Celtic names, though Cacia could be fully Roman,” McSloy said.

He noted that the root of the name Bodica, as well as its variations, is very likely to be the same as that of Boudicca (Boadicea), the rebel queen of the Iceni, a British tribe, who unsuccessfully attempted to defeat the Romans.

As the name Bodiccia/Bodica/Bodus has a Celtic origin, archaeologists believe the individual was British, and perhaps local to Cirencester.

“Analysis of the bones should confirm whether this person was local to the area,” McSloy said. "It should also be possible to determine gender, age at death, and provide evidence for diet and disease."

The inscription made it possible to date the tomb to the second century A.D., when Cirencester, known by the Romans as Corinium, was the second-largest city in Britain after London.

“The abbreviated use of D.M. (Dis Manibis -- ‘to the spirits of the departed’) is used after the end of the first century A.D.,” McSloy said.

“Also, the style and quality of the lettering seems more appropriate to the second rather than the third century,” he added.

Other clues might come from the title “Coniunx” (faithful wife), which is sometimes used in association with freed slaves.

“There is a possibility that Bodiccia/Bodica/Bodus may have started life as a slave,” McSloy said.

Around 200 inscribed tombstones have been found from Roman Britain, but this is the only one thought to record the person found beneath.

It is also the first example of a tombstone -- from Roman Britain, at least -- depicting the Roman god Oceanus on the pediment, which is the decorated, triangular portion at the top of the stone.

Read more at Discovery News