Gauck, a biological anthropology student at Binghamton, was among 28 winners of the 2022 SUNY Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) Award. The prize encourages undergraduate and graduate SUNY students to apply for competitive graduate fellowships to fund their master’s or doctoral studies.

The GREAT Award comes with $5,000 in flexible funding from the SUNY Office of Research and Economic Development, and is given to students who have already received national recognition from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program or the National Institutes of Health’s National Research Service Awards.

Gauck received an honorable mention from the NSF, and was delighted to discover she had won a GREAT Award. “I wasn’t anticipating it, so it was a nice surprise,” says the Pilot, Va., resident. “I would definitely encourage students to apply for national fellowships. Even if they don’t get the ‘big one,’ they still have a chance to receive funding and support from the SUNY system.”

After earning her bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and biological sciences at East Tennessee State University in 2018, Gauck considered medical school but decided she didn’t want to simply treat patients: “I realized I was more interested in looking at ‘why’ — Why are some people more likely to get sick than others? Why do we still have diseases after thousands of years?”

Gauck completed her master’s degree in biological anthropology at Binghamton and is in the first year of her doctoral studies. She works in the lab of Katherine Wander, associate professor of anthropology, which supports research in anthropology and global health. The lab works in collaboration with multiple research institutes and universities on questions involving nutrition, infectious disease risk and chronic disease risk in infants, children and adults. The team has ongoing projects in Tanzania, Nigeria, Bangladesh, China and the islands of Vanuatu.

Gauck’s current research looks at the risk factors and health consequences associated with co-infections of intestinal parasites and tuberculosis in northeastern Tanzania. She plans to use her GREAT Award funding to travel to Kilimanjaro and to purchase kits so she can conduct biomarker assays. Her goal is to create a pilot program as the potential basis for her dissertation, which would then allow her to gain funding through larger grants.

“Meg is a creative and insightful researcher and a joy to collaborate with,” Wander says. “Her ideas are innovative, pulling together insights from many fields to answer important questions about human biology that anthropology alone cannot answer.”

When Gauck graduates, she plans to work in the field of infectious disease. “I’m very interested in tuberculosis, so who knows where that will take me,” she says. “I could go into academia or I could work for research labs in the private or public sector. More than anything, I’d like to continue researching and finding ways to apply what I’m finding either through public health policy or teaching.”

“Misliya is an exciting discovery,” says Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist and a coauthor of the study. “It provides the clearest evidence yet that our ancestors first migrated out of Africa much earlier than we previously believed. It also means that modern humans were potentially meeting and interacting during a longer period of time with other archaic human groups, providing more opportunity for cultural and biological exchanges.”

Quam is part of a large team, led by Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University, that reported its findings Thursday in the journal Science.

The fossil, an upper jawbone with several teeth, was found at one of several prehistoric cave sites on Mount Carmel. Several dating techniques applied to archaeological materials and the fossil itself suggest the jawbone is between 175,000 and 200,000 years old, pushing back the modern human migration out of Africa by at least 50,000 years.

Researchers analyzed the fossil remains relying on microCT scans and 3D virtual models and compared it with other hominin fossils from Africa, Europe and Asia.

“While all of the anatomical details in the Misliya fossil are fully consistent with modern humans, some features are also found in Neandertals and other human groups,” Quam says. “One of the challenges in this study was identifying features in Misliya that are found only in modern humans. These are the features that provide the clearest signal of what species the Misliya fossil represents.”

The archaeological evidence reveals that the inhabitants of Misliya Cave were capable hunters of large game species, controlled the production of fire and were associated with an Early Middle Paleolithic stone tool kit, similar to that found with the earliest modern humans in Africa.

While older fossils of modern humans have been found in Africa, the timing and routes of modern human migration out of Africa are key issues for understanding the evolution of our own species, the researchers say. The Middle East represents a major corridor for hominin migrations during the Pleistocene and was occupied at different times by both modern humans and Neandertals.

This discovery opens the door to demographic replacement or genetic admixture with local populations earlier than previously thought, Quam says. Indeed, the evidence from Misliya is consistent with recent suggestions based on ancient DNA for an earlier migration, prior to 220,000 years ago, of modern humans out of Africa. Several recent archaeological and fossil discoveries in Asia are also pushing back the first appearance of modern humans in the region and, by implication, the migration out of Africa.

An international team contributed to the research, which compared the DNA sequences of 35 modern people living on islands off the coast of New Guinea with DNA drawn from two early human species: Denisovans, whose remains were found in Siberia, and Neandertals, first discovered in Germany.

“Substantial amounts of Neandertal and Denisovan DNA can now be robustly identified in the genomes of present-day Melanesians, allowing new insights into human evolutionary history,” they write. “As genome-scale data from worldwide populations continues to accumulate, a nearly complete catalog of surviving archaic lineages may soon be within reach.”

Andrew Merriwether, a molecular anthropologist at Binghamton University, collected the modern-day blood samples used in the study about 15 years ago in Melanesia. This is the first time full genomes from those samples have been sequenced.

“I’m surprised that these Neandertal and Denisovan genomes made it out to this remote place,” he says. “We know people have been there for at least 48,000 years because we find human remains that go back that far, but no one has ever been able to connect them to any other place. When you compare most of their genome sequences, they don’t cluster with any other group. They’ve been there and been isolated for a very, very long time.”

Earlier studies have revealed some genetic overlap (about 2 percent) between Neandertals and non-African populations and little or no Neandertal and Denisovan ancestry among Africans. This new research suggests Neandertals and modern human ancestors intersected at least three times. It also found an overlap of between 1.9 and 3.4 percent in the genetic codes of Denisovans and modern-day Melanesians.

Skepticism about the new findings is entirely appropriate, says Merriwether, who specializes in reconstructing the past using samples from contemporary populations and ancient DNA from the archaeological record.

“Ancient DNA is always damaged and broken into small pieces,” he explains. “You only need one molecule of modern DNA to outperform all the ancient DNA.”

An independent laboratory did the sequencing of Merriwether’s samples. That, combined with a powerful new statistical technique that was used in the analysis, finally convinced him that the genetic similarities were real.

The cost and time involved in sequencing a full human genome has dropped dramatically. The first, completed in 2003, took 13 years and cost about $2.7 million. Today, it’s possible to sequence a sample in days for thousands of dollars. Still, this type of research still poses significant challenges.

The human genome contains about 3 billion “letters,” and ancient samples are difficult to work with. When people die, their DNA starts breaking down immediately, Merriwether notes, and it isn’t repaired anymore. Normally, a person’s DNA is fixed thousands of times a minute. Bacteria and fungi contaminate most DNA samples taken from human remains, he says, making up as much as 97 percent of the DNA that’s recovered.

Even collecting the modern samples wasn’t a simple task.

Merriwether and longtime collaborator Jonathan Friedlaender of Temple University obtained blood samples throughout the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They traveled with George Koki of the Institute for Medical Research in Papua New Guinea and Heather Norton, then a student at Penn State and now a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati.

“It’s challenging to reach these places,” Merriwether says. “They’re volcanic islands with mountains. It’s also the most linguistically diverse place on Earth.”

How diverse? People in this region speak some 800 languages. A common trading language (Tok Pisin) that’s a mix of Polynesian and English helped make it possible for the anthropologists to communicate with residents.

Because malaria is so prevalent in the region, there are many clinics set up to test and treat people. That also meant Merriwether and his colleagues usually weren’t the first people asking residents of these islands for blood samples.

Studies like this one may enable scientists to answer big questions about human migrations and evolution thousands of years ago.

Merriwether is particularly fascinated by the Denisovan DNA fragments found in the Melanesian genomes. How did ancient humans travel — and cross the ocean — to get to Melanesia and when and where did the Denisovan DNA enter our gene pool? Sequencing of additional DNA samples found in Asia may one day help to answer those questions.

“Most people know back a few generations, maybe five generations,” Merriwether says, “but where did we come from before that? That’s what we want to find out.”

The study’s authors are based at Binghamton University, the University of Washington, the University of Ferrara in Italy, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the University of Cincinnati, the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, the Institute for Medical Research in Papua New Guinea and Temple University.

An analysis of artifacts found on what was previously called Easter Island revealed that these objects were likely general purpose tools and not spear points, says Carl Lipo, professor of anthropology at Binghamton and lead author on the study, published this month in the journal Antiquity.

People have long believed that the island civilization ran out of resources and, as a result, engaged in massive in-fighting, which led to its collapse. Thousands of obsidian, triangular objects found on the surface, known as mata’a, seemed to support this theory. Because of their large numbers and because they’re made of sharp glass, many believed the mata’a were weapons of war.

Lipo and his team analyzed the shape variability of a photo set of 400-plus mata’a collected from the island using a technique known as morphometrics, which allowed them to characterize the shapes in a quantitative manner. Based on the wide variability in shape and their difference from other traditional weapons, the team determined that the mata’a were not used in warfare after all.

“We found that when you look at the shape of these things, they just don’t look like weapons at all,” Lipo says. “When you can compare them to European weapons or weapons found anywhere around the world when there are actually objects used for warfare, they’re very systematic in their shape. They have to do their job really well. Not doing well is risking death.”

He says the mata’a wouldn’t be lethal. “You can always use something as a spear,” Lipo says. “Anything that you have can be a weapon. But under the conditions of warfare, weapons are going to have performance characteristics. And they’re going to be very carefully fashioned for that purpose because it matters.”

Lipo’s study suggests that the ancient civilization never experienced the oft-theorized warfare. Instead, the belief that the mata’a were weapons used in the collapse of the civilization is likely a late-European interpretation of the record.

“What people traditionally think about the island is being this island of catastrophe and collapse just isn’t true in a pre-historic sense,” Lipo says. “Populations were successful and lived sustainably on the island up until European contact.”

Lipo and his team believe that the mata’a are found all over the landscape because they were cultivation tools used in ritual tasks like tattooing or domestic activities such as plant processing.

“We’ve been trying to focus on individual bits of evidence that support the collapse narrative to demonstrate that really there’s no support whatsoever for that story,” he says. “Sort of a pillar of the broader study is the fact that this is an amazing society that really was successful. It just doesn’t look like success to us because we see fields that are rock, we think catastrophe, and in fact it’s actually productivity.”

Reno, a cultural anthropologist, doesn’t find solutions to all the waste humans create — 220 million tons a year in America, according to the Duke University Center for Sustainability and Commerce. (That’s enough to cover 82,000 football fields 6 feet deep.)

Reno studies humans’ relationship to waste, the economics and politics — even empires — that waste creates, and the almost religious significance to how we treat waste. He focused on anthropology and psychology as an undergraduate at Cornell University before earning a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. He also spent a year as a paper picker at a landfill. His job? To make sure trash didn’t blow off the landfill, an acolyte on the altar of excess.

Reno pauses outside the sewage treatment plant and sniffs. “Hydrogen sulfide,” he diagnoses. “Not too bad, actually.”

He describes the opening to the book he recently completed:

His boss at a Detroit-area landfill, Bob, described his worst day. A co-worker fell head-first into a vat of human sludge and couldn’t get out; Bob dived in to save him. Firefighters and EMTs didn’t want to drive up on the waste pile.

Reno says Bob worked up to his armpits in human excrement, even as emergency workers later checked into hospitals because they had touched poop. The co-worker died. As Bob straightened up, he saw the line of trucks waiting to dump more sludge. And behind them an endless trail of trucks looking to dump solid waste.

“The garbage,” Bob said, “just keeps coming.”

We keep trash in a special place, treat it a special way. Even just a couple of seconds at the top of the garbage can is enough to turn something perfectly useful into garbage — a zombie-like quality of undeath that mocks the cycle of life-death-decay-regeneration that many religions embody.

“We separate two things that throughout history have been combined,” Reno muses. “Cemeteries and waste.”

“But we paradoxically have turned waste into something sacred,” he adds. “When we recycle plastic bottles, we feel good. It’s almost a spiritual thing.

“The reality of recycling is a lot more dirty and frightening,” he continues, because many recyclables are shipped to countries willing to pay near-slave wages to turn refuse into resource.

“Josh is an early pioneer in this,” says Robin Nagle, a New York University anthropologist and author of Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, which is based on her experience as a garbage collector. “If we don’t understand the genesis of garbage, we can’t provide an effective solution.”

Nagle already uses Reno’s dissertation in her research and classes, and looks forward to the added authority of his book, to be titled Waste Away: Living and Working with a Northern American Landfill. “There’s a promise implied in messages of how we live,” she says. “It’s all very grounded in consumption and things and stuff.”

D. Andrew Merriwether ambles into his lab wearing a green T-shirt, a weathered Binghamton University ball cap and a graying ponytail. He ignores the birthday cake on the bench (chocolate frosting with peanut butter cups) and pulls up a stool.

He has been doing some fieldwork, he says. For this particular molecular anthropologist, that means he was actually in the field — with his alpaca.

He’s looking for genetic links that cause choanal atresia — a disorder found in both the alpaca and humans in which tissue or bone blocks nasal passages. It’s frequently fatal among the alpaca because babies with the condition can’t breathe while nursing.

Choanal atresia has perhaps 20 causes, Merriwether says. Only a couple may be genetic, but understanding the genetics may lead to strategies for prevention or early diagnosis in humans.

That’s a small part of how the alpaca play into his research. “They’re just so neat: curious, quick, smart,” he says. “They survive on almost nothing.”

As a species domesticated by early South American populations, they reflect the culture of the people about whom Merriwether did his dissertation 20 years ago. “For the poorest people of South America, it’s their only source of cash income,” he says. Like those people, Merriwether and his wife shear their alpaca herd.

Genetically, the alpaca had to adapt to life in the 13,000-foot altitudes of the Andes just as people did, says Professor Ralph Garruto, a National Academy of Sciences member whose presence at Binghamton drew Merriwether to the faculty in 2003. How they did that is a question with implications for cultures across the world.

“How do people who are genetically different adapt to the same stressors?” Garruto asks. Women in most parts of the world can’t carry a fetus to term above 10,000 feet, but the people of the Andes do it routinely — as do the alpaca. “All the changes in the alpaca help us see the mechanism in that animal and whether there are parallels in humans. We’re talking survivability and functionality of human beings.”

The alpaca aren’t Merriwether’s sole focus. About a third of his research lies in Melanesia, with the peoples of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. He has many of the same questions he had about the South American cultures that got him into molecular anthropology in the first place: How did they get there? How long ago? How have they adapted?

“Almost every question I am interested in,” he notes, “has DNA as a way of answering it.”

This perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA carried out by an international research team. Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist, was a co-author of the study led by Anders Götherström at Uppsala University and Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

“The Neandertals are our closest fossil relatives and abundant evidence of their lifeways and skeletal remains has been found at many sites across Europe and western Asia,” said Quam, assistant professor of anthropology. “Until modern humans arrived on the scene, it was widely thought that Europe had been populated by a relatively stable Neandertal population for hundreds of thousands of years. Our research suggests otherwise and, in light of these new results, this long-held theory now faces scrutiny.”

Focusing on mitochondrial DNA sequences from 13 Neandertal individuals, including a new sequence from the site of Valdegoba cave in northern Spain, the research team found some surprising results. When they started looking at the DNA, a clear pattern emerged. Neandertal individuals from Western Europe that were older than 50,000 years and individuals from sites in western Asia and the Middle East showed a high degree of genetic variation, on par with what might be expected from a species that had been abundant in an area for a long period of time. In fact, the amount of genetic variation was similar to what characterizes modern humans as a species. In contrast, Neandertal individuals from Western Europe that were younger than 50,000 years show an extremely reduced amount of genetic variation, less even than the present-day population of remote Iceland.

These results suggest that Western European Neandertals went through a demographic crisis, a population bottleneck that severely reduced their numbers, leaving Western Europe largely empty of humans for a period of time. The demographic crisis seems to coincide with a period of extreme cold in Western Europe. Subsequently, this region was repopulated by a small group of individuals from a surrounding area. The geographic origin of this source population is not clear, but it may be possible to pinpoint it further with additional study.

“The fact that Neandertals in Western Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us,” said Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. “This indicates that the Neandertals may have been more sensitive to the dramatic climate changes that took place in the last Ice Age than was previously thought.”

Quam concurs and suggests that this discovery calls for a major rethinking of the idea of cold adaptation in Neandertals.

“At the very least, this tells us that without the aid of material culture or technology, there is a limit to our biological adaptation,” Quam said. “It may very well have been the case that the European Neandertal populations were already demographically stressed when modern humans showed up on the scene.”

The results presented in the study are based entirely on degraded ancient DNA, and the analyses have therefore required advanced laboratory and computational methods. The research team includes statisticians, experts on modern DNA sequencing and paleoanthropologists from Sweden, Denmark, Spain and the United States.

“This is just the latest example of how studies of ancient DNA are providing new insights into an important and previously unknown part of Neandertal history,” Quam said. “Ancient DNA is complementary to anthropological studies focusing on the bony anatomy of the skeleton, and these kinds of results are only possible with ancient DNA studies. It’s exciting to think about what will turn up next.”