While the period is viewed as a dynamic time in European and African history, it is commonly considered a static period in East Asia. New research from the 91̽�� challenges that perception.

Researchers discovered a complete — a method for making a set of tools — in the Longtan site in southwest China, which has been dated to about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Quina technology was found in Europe decades ago but has never before been found in East Asia.

The team published its findings March 31 in .

“This is a big upset to the way we think about that part of the world in that period of time,” said , co-author and 91̽��professor of archaeology. “It really raises the question of, what else were people doing during this period that we haven’t found yet? How is this going to change how we think about people and human evolution in this area?”

The Middle Paleolithic, or Middle Stone Age, occurred about 300,000 to 40,000 years ago and is considered a crucial time in human evolution. The period is associated with the origin and evolution of modern humans in Africa. In Eurasia, it’s linked to the development of several archaic human groups such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. However, there is a widely held belief that development in China was sluggish during most of the Paleolithic.

The Quina system identified in China has been dated to 55,000 years ago, which is in the same period as European finds. This disputes the idea that the Middle Paleolithic was stagnant in the region and deepens the understanding of , and possibly other hominins.

The most distinctive part of the Quina system is the scraper — a stone tool that is typically thick and asymmetrical with a broad and sharp working edge that has clear signs of use and resharpening. Researchers found several of these, as well as the byproducts of their manufacture. Tiny scratches and chips on the tools indicate they were used for scraping and scratching bones, antlers or wood.

Marwick said the question now becomes: how did this toolkit arrive in East Asia? Researchers will work to determine whether there is a direct connection — people moving gradually from west to east — or if the technology was invented independently with no direct contact between groups.

It will help if researchers can find an archaeological site with a deep set of layers, Marwick said, so they can see what tools developed before the appearance of Quina technology.

“We can try to see if they were doing something similar beforehand that Quina seemed to evolve out of,” Marwick said. “Then we might say that development seems to be more local — they were experimenting with different forms in previous generations, and they finally perfected it. Alternatively, if Quina appears without any sign of experimentation, that suggests this was transmitted from another group.”

There are likely several reasons why Quina technology has just now been found in East Asia. One factor, Marwick said, is that archaeologists working in China are learning more about archaeology in other parts of the world and how to recognize their findings. He said the pace of research is also increasing, which means archaeologists are more likely to find rarer artifacts.

“The idea that nothing has changed for such a long time in East Asia also has a tight grip on people,” Marwick said. “They haven’t been considering the possibility of finding things that challenge that. Now maybe there are some scholars who are interested in questioning those ideas.”

Much of archaeological discovery relies on luck, Marwick said, but one goal for the future is to uncover human remains in the area.

“That could answer the question of whether these tools are the product of a modern human like you and me,” Marwick said. “There have never been any Neanderthals found in East Asia, but could we find a Neanderthal? Or, more likely, could we find a Denisovan, which is another kind of human ancestor? If we can find the human remains associated with this period, we might find something surprising — maybe even a new human ancestor that we don’t know about yet.”

Other co-authors were Qi-Jun Ruan, Hao L, Pei-Yuan Xiao, Ke-Liang Zhao, Zhen-Xiu Jia and Fa-Hu Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Bo Li of the University of Wollongong in Australia, Hélène Monod of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain; Alexander Sumner of DePaul University; Jian-Hui Liu of the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology; Chun-Xin Wang and An-Chuan Fan of the University of Science and Technology of China; Marie-Hélène Moncel of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris; Marco Peresani and Davide Delpiano of the University of Ferrara in Italy; and You-Ping Wang of Peking University in Beijing.

The research was funded by the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China, the Open Research Fund of TPESER, the Australian Research Council, the Research Academy of Songshan Civilization in Zhengzhou and the University of Ferrara.

For more information, contact Marwick at bmarwick@uw.edu.

Ancient food scraps found at Australia’s earliest site of human occupation, in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory, are helping researchers generate rainfall records dating back 65,000 years.

A new study led by the University of Queensland and involving the 91̽�� provides a glimpse into the region’s climate at the time when people first entered the Australian continent from the north.

Using the nutshell of the anyakngarra — also known as pandanus, a palm-like tree or shrub — the research team worked alongside Mirarr Traditional Aboriginal Owners to develop a novel method to investigate past rainfall at the archaeological site of Madjedbebe.

“Using the scraps from meals eaten tens of thousands of years ago, we can now tell a localised story of climate change and explore its effects on communities through time,” said the study’s lead author, , a research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage and a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland. “The nutshells hold evidence in their composition for the amount of water available to them when they were growing and can be used to understand past rainfall.”

The was published Jan. 25 in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The nutshells were discovered during excavations at Madjedbebe in Mirarr country in the Alligator Rivers region in 2012, and are the leftovers from meals eaten up to 65,000 years ago.

“The periods of low rainfall indicated by the pandanus nutshell correlate with increases in stone tool-making at the site, suggesting the region was a refuge during drier periods,” said study co-author , associate professor of anthropology at the UW.

Data and code related to work at the site is openly available for other researchers, Marwick said, a critical aspect of archaeological study.

Coupled with other archaeological evidence from Madjedbebe, the research shows that the region was likely a good place to live even during glacial periods, allowing people to thrive during the driest spells in Australia’s history. This included the Last Glacial Maximum, between 18,000 and 25,000 years ago, an extended period of aridity around the world, Florin said.

The study also found that the modern era — not the Last Glacial Maximum — marks the driest time in recorded human occupation of the region.

“It is also a time when the plants and animals of the region are experiencing extreme hardships; with feral animals, loss of biodiversity and disruptions to cultural landscape management, including vegetation burning, all posing increased threats to the health and wellbeing of the landscape and its traditional owners,” Florin said.

Chris Clarkson, a professor at the University of Queensland and director of the excavation related to the study, called the research a huge leap forward.

“We’re now able to read the changing rainfall record through time and match this to the amazing strategies that were developed by Aboriginal people to cope with a dramatically changing landscape,” Clarkson said.

chief executive officer Justin O’Brien said the Madjedbebe site is providing an “extraordinary depth of knowledge.”

“This research reaffirms the importance of its long-term protection,” O’Brien said.

Other co-authors on the study were Patrick Roberts, Catherine Lovelock and Andrew Fairbairn of the University of Queensland; Nicholas Patton of the University of Canterbury; James Shulmeister of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage; Linda Barry and Quan Hua of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation; May Nango and Djaykuk Djandjomerr of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation; Richard Fullagar of the University of Wollongong; and Lynley Wallis of Griffith University.

The study was funded by the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering, the Australian Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Dan David Foundation, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

For more information, contact Marwick at bmarwick@uw.edu, Florin at��stephanie.florin@uqconnect.edu.au; Clarkson at c.clarkson@uq.edu.au; or Kirsten Blair of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation at kristen@mirarr.net.

Adapted from a news release by the University of Queensland.

Data manipulation and analysis is at the heart of many recent scientific advances, industrial innovations and insights into the human experience. That’s why the new data science minor will provide students the opportunities to learn data science skills and analysis while also understanding the broader contextual and ethical implications of using data.

“The goal is to combine some of the technical skills that relate to the new developments of generating and analyzing large amounts of data. And then giving students the context and the critical thinking skills to do something meaningful with that,” said , an associate professor of archaeology and director of the new data science minor.

The minor was developed, in particular, for students from the arts, social sciences and humanities. While not intended to make these students competitive for jobs whose exclusive role is data science, it will allow students whose primary expertise is in a particular domain to more effectively utilize data, communicate insights based on data analysis, and interact with colleagues using common tools for data analysis.

“We imagine that a graduate of this program will be perfectly suited to ‘translating’ roles in industry, where they can understand and speak the languages of the different specialists of data science,” Marwick said. “They might be the one who is in the meeting that includes the engineers, includes the programmer, includes policymakers or people writing about it. Our graduates might be the ones who are coming up, asking the challenging questions and sort of connecting the skills of the engineer to the work of the policy maker, kind of gluing things together to help everyone be effective.”

Data science is a cross-cutting and evolving area of scholarship, Marwick said. For the purposes of the minor, the scope of data science education consists of the union of two areas: 1. Education activities that develop competency in producing, managing or analyzing data; 2. Activities promoting the synthesis, contextualization and interpretation of the data.

“Data science education must distinguish itself by closely coupling the teaching of methods, tools, applications and meta-examination of data science practice,” Marwick said.

The new minor is designed to meet the needs of a wide range of students and is open to student in any major, Marwick said. “There is no required progression through courses.”

Students can opt for flexible pathways while avoiding bottlenecks caused by popular courses. Course work is divided into three broad categories: ‘Data Studies’ that teaches foundational data literacy and explores the broader implications of the field; ‘Data Skills’ dives into basic programming, visualization, machine learning, data acquisition and management practices, software tools and qualitative analysis; and ‘Cross-cutting’ courses that explore the potential of this new field in various domains and that synthetize theories and questions in the context of a project-based learning environment. Students can declare the minor through their departmental adviser.

A minor in data science could provide students with an attractive credential for graduate programs, other degree programs and employment with non-profits, governments and companies that want employees with communication and critical thinking skills accompanied by general competence in data analysis.

For more information, take a look at the minor’s website or contact Marwick at bmarwick@uw.edu.

Humans’ ability to transform the natural environment is often considered a modern phenomenon, from increasing deforestation, soil erosion and greenhouse gas emissions. This year, an international group of geologists deemed the start of the Anthropocene — the time of humans’ most far-reaching effects on the Earth — to be the middle of the 20^th century.

But what constitutes transformation, or even significant human activity, is still debated, and many researchers challenge the relatively recent frame placed around history.

A new map synthesized from more than 250 archaeologists worldwide argues that the human imprint on our planet’s soil goes back much earlier than the nuclear age. A core group of those researchers, including the 91̽��, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, illustrate in an Aug. 30 in Science how foragers and, eventually, farmers fundamentally altered the land on the planet by 3,000 years ago.

The project analyzes land use from roughly 10,000 years ago, the time of hunters and gatherers, to the year 1850, after the Industrial Revolution. ��The new study adds an archaeological perspective to existing models of historical land use. Based on researchers’ expertise of land use on six continents, the crowdsourced map shows that agriculture — an extraction of environmental resources that leaves a complex mark on the landscape — began earlier, and in more parts of the world, than more recent studies have reported.

“There are archaeologists working all over the world, but they aggregate data differently, and it can be difficult to find larger patterns,” said co-author , an associate professor of anthropology at the UW. “By asking archaeologists a series of questions rather than combining datasets, we’ve created a brilliant workaround — essentially, what were people doing, and how much, in different parts of the world?”

Commonly cited have used statistics and maps to estimate human behavior and environmental change prior to modern times. For the ArchaeoGLOBE project, the research team spent months developing the survey and considering how to divide up the Earth into analytical regions, said , who led the global collaboration of archaeologists while a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. In the end, the team split up the Earth (excluding Antarctica) into 146 regions and sought archaeologists’ input on human activity in those regions at 10 different points in time. Some 700 responses came in.

Among their findings:

• Foraging, defined as hunting, gathering and fishing, was common in most parts of the world 10,000 years ago, but was declining in more than half the world’s regions by 3,000 years ago.
• Pastoralism — the raising of livestock — by 8,000 years ago had spread from some of its origin areas in Southwest Asia to arid environments like North Africa and Eurasia, where it was common by 4,000 years ago.
• By 6,000 years ago, some form of agriculture was being practiced in nearly half of the world’s regions, and by 3,000 years ago, was widespread.
• Farming is generally thought to “replace” hunting and gathering as a means of food production, but in some areas, agriculture occurred simultaneously with, or as a complement to, foraging.

“This type of work causes us to rethink the role of humans in environmental systems, particularly in the way we understand ‘natural’ environments,” said Stephens, a research analyst with the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago and an affiliate at the Max Planck Institute. ��“Many people have realized for some time now that the study of long-term human-environment interactions must include archaeological knowledge, but our research and dataset really open the door to this sort of collaboration at global scale for the first time.”

Understanding the history of human impact on the environment has implications for addressing climate change, the authors say. With the release in early August of a from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s clear that human impact is a critical issue for the future of the Earth, Stephens said. “But there is also a deep history of anthropogenic changes to the planet that has yet to be meaningfully incorporated in these discussions.”

“It’s time to get beyond the mostly recent paradigm of the Anthropocene and recognize that the long-term changes of the deep past have transformed the ecology of this planet, and produced the social-ecological infrastructures – agricultural and urban – that made the contemporary global changes possible,” said co-author of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who initially proposed and helped design the study.

The ArchaeoGLOBE maps contain more information about some regions of the world than others, reflective of where much archaeological attention has been directed, researchers point out. That’s due partly to the expertise of the archaeologists who participated in the current study, as well as the availability of resources and support for study in various locations. While extensive data was available from the Western and Northern hemispheres, study authors say, less-investigated regions clearly warrant more research.

That can be facilitated by making information available, said Marwick, who contributed expertise on Southeast Asia and assisted with putting all of ArchaeoGLOBE’s materials online, accessible to anyone.

“A global dataset like this invites lots of interesting follow-up investigations that have not been possible before now. With all our data openly available, anyone anywhere can freely dig in and test out new ideas on a global scale,” Marwick said.

The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Additional authors of the Science article were and of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History; of University College London; of Arizona State University; and of the Smithsonian National Museum of National History.

For more information, contact Marwick at bmarwick@uw.edu, Stephens at lucas.s.stephens@gmail.com, or Ellis at ece@umbc.edu.

Material from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Maryland Baltimore County was included in this release.

New analysis of artifacts found at a South China archaeological site shows that sophisticated tool technology emerged in East Asia earlier than previously thought.

A study by an international team of researchers, including from the 91̽��, determines that carved stone tools, also known as Levallois cores, were used in Asia 80,000 to 170,000 years ago. Developed in Africa and Western Europe as far back as 300,000 years ago, the cores are a sign of more-advanced toolmaking — the “multi-tool” of the prehistoric world — but, until now, were not believed to have emerged in East Asia until 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

With the find — and absent human fossils linking the tools to migrating populations — researchers believe people in Asia developed the technology independently, evidence of similar sets of skills evolving throughout different parts of the ancient world.

Theis published online Nov. 19 in Nature.

“It used to be thought that Levallois cores came to China relatively recently with modern humans,” said , 91̽��associate professor of anthropology and one of the paper’s corresponding authors. “Our work reveals the complexity and adaptability of people there that is equivalent to elsewhere in the world. It shows the diversity of the human experience.”

Levallois-shaped cores — the “Swiss Army knife of prehistoric tools,” Marwick said — were efficient and durable, indispensable to a hunter-gatherer society in which a broken spear point could mean certain death at the claws or jaws of a predator. The cores were named for the Levallois-Perret suburb of Paris, where stone flakes were found in the 1800s.

Featuring a , created through a sequence of steps, Levallois flakes were versatile “blanks,” used to spear, slice, scrape or dig. The knapping process represents a more sophisticated approach to tool manufacturing than the simpler, oval-shaped stones of earlier periods.

The Levallois artifacts examined in this study were excavated from Guanyindong Cave in Guizhou Province in the 1960s and 1970s. Previous research using uranium-series dating estimated a wide age range of the archaeological site — between 50,000 and 240,000 years old — but that earlier technique focused on fossils found away from the stone artifacts, Marwick said. Analyzing the sediments surrounding the artifacts provides more specific clues as to when the artifacts would have been in use.

Marwick and other members of the team, from universities in China and Australia, used (OSL) to date the artifacts. OSL can establish age by determining when a sediment sample, down to a grain of sand, was last exposed to sunlight — and thus, how long an artifact may have been buried in layers of sediment.

“Dating for this site was challenging because it had been excavated 40 years ago, and��the��sediment profile was exposed to air and without protection. So trees, plants, animals, insects could��disturb the��stratigraphy, which may affect the dating results if conventional methods were used for dating,” said����, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Wollongong in Australia and one of the paper’s corresponding authors.��“To solve this��problem��we��used��a new single-grain dating technique recently developed in our OSL lab at the University of Wollongong to date��individual mineral grains in the sediment. Luckily we found residual sediment left over by the previous excavations, so that allowed us to take samples for dating.”

The researchers analyzed more than 2,200 artifacts found at Guanyindong Cave, narrowing down the number of Levallois-style stone cores and flakes to 45. Among those believed to be in the older age range, about 130,000 to 180,000 years old, the team also was able to identify the environment in which the tools were used: an open woodland on a rocky landscape, in “a reduced rainforest area compared to today,” the authors note.

In Africa and Europe these kinds of stone tools are often found at archaeological sites starting from 300,000 and 200,000 years ago. They are known as Mode III technology, part of a broad evolutionary sequence that was preceded by hand-axe technology (Mode II) and followed by blade tool technology (Mode IV). Archaeologists thought that Mode IV technologies arrived in China by migration from the West, but these new finds suggest they could have been locally invented. At the time people were making tools in Guanyindong Cave, the — ancestors to Homo sapiens and relative contemporaries to elsewhere in the world — roamed East Asia. But while hundreds of fossils of archaic humans and related artifacts, dating as far back as , have been found in Africa and Europe, the archaeological record in East Asia is sparser.

That’s partly why a stereotype exists, that ancient peoples in the region were behind in terms of technological development, Marwick said.

“Our work shows that ancient people there were just as capable of innovation as anywhere else. Technological innovations in East Asia can be homegrown, and don’t always walk in from the West,” he said.

The independent emergence of the Levallois technique at different times and places in the world is not unique in terms of prehistoric innovations. Pyramid construction, for one, appeared in at least three separate societies: the Egyptians, the Aztecs and the Mayans. Boatbuilding began specific to geography and reliant on a community’s available materials. And writing, of course, developed in various forms with distinct alphabets and characters.

In the evolution of tools, Levallois cores represent something of a . Subsequent manufacturing processes yielded more-refined blades made of rocks and minerals that were more resistant to flaking, and composites that, for example, combined a spear point with blades along the edge. The appearance of blades later in time indicates a further increase in the complexity and the number of steps required to make the tools.

“The appearance of the Levallois strategy represents a big increase in the complexity of technology because there are so many steps that have to work in order to get the final product, compared to previous technologies,” Marwick said.

The study was funded by the Australian Research Council, the National Science Foundation of China, the University of Wollongong, the China Scholarship Council, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology.

Other authors on the paper were Yue Hu and Xue Rui��of the University of Wollongong; of Peking University in China; , Jian-Ping Yue and of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Wen-Rong Chen of the Bureau of Cultural Relics Protection in Guizhou Province, China.

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For more information, contact Marwick at bmarwick@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: FT140100384, FT140100101, NSFC 41471003, 201506010345, XDPB05, 41272033, SKLLQG1501

When and how the first humans made their way to Australia has been an evolving story.

While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa.

Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the 91̽��, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago — more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A published July 20 in the journal Nature describes dating techniques and artifact finds at Madjedbebe, a longtime site of archaeological research, that could inform other theories about the emergence of early humans and their coexistence with wildlife on the Australian continent.

The new date makes a difference, co-author and 91̽��associate professor of anthropology said. Against the backdrop of theories that place humans in Australia anywhere between 47,000 and 60,000 years ago, the concept of earlier settlement calls into question the argument that humans caused the extinction of unique megafauna such as giant kangaroos, wombats and tortoises more than 45,000 years ago.

“Previously it was thought that humans arrived and hunted them out or disturbed their habits, leading to extinction, but these dates confirm that people arrived so far before that they wouldn’t be the central cause of the death of megafauna,” Marwick said. “It shifts the idea of humans charging into the landscape and killing off the megafauna. It moves toward a vision of humans moving in and coexisting, which is quite a different view of human evolution.”

Since 1973, digs at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in Australia’s Northern Territory, have unearthed more than 10,000 stone tools, ochres, plant remains and bones. Following the more recent excavations in 2012 and 2015, a University of Queensland-led research team, which included the UW, evaluated artifacts found in various layers of settlement using radiocarbon dating and optical stimulated luminescence (OSL).

The new research involved extensive cooperation with the local Aboriginal community, Marwick added. The , representing the Mirarr people, joined much of the excavation and reviewed the findings, Marwick said. Researchers had both a memorandum of understanding and a contract with the community, which gave control to the Mirarr as senior custodians, oversight of the excavation and curation of the finds. The Mirarr were interested in supporting new research into the age of the site and in knowing more about the early human occupants, particularly given environmental threats posed by nearby modern-day mining activities.

Noteworthy among the artifacts found were ochre “crayons” and other pigments, what are believed to be the world’s oldest edge-ground hatchets, and evidence that these early humans ground seeds and processed plants. The pigments indicate the use of paint for symbolic and artistic expression, while the tools may have been used to cut bark or food from trees.

Labs in Australia used OSL to identify the age range, Marwick explained. Radiocarbon dating, which requires a certain level of carbon in a substance, can analyze organic materials up to about 45,000 or 50,000 years old. But OSL is used on minerals to date, say, the last time a sand grain was exposed to sunlight — helpful in determining when an artifact was buried — up to 100,000 years ago or more. That process measured thousands of sand grains individually so as to establish more precise ages.

The 91̽��researchers worked in the geoarchaeology lab on the Seattle campus, testing sediment samples that Marwick helped excavate at Madjedbebe. One graduate student and six undergraduate students studied the properties of hundreds of dirt samples to try to picture the time in which the ancient Australian humans lived.

Using a scanning electron microscope, the students examined the composition of the sediment layers, the size of the grains of dirt and any microscopic plant matter. For another test, the students baked soil samples at various temperatures, then measured the mass of each sample, said 91̽��doctoral student , another author on the paper. Because organic matter turns into gases at high heat, a loss of mass indicated how much matter was in a given sample. This helped create a picture of the environments across the sedimentary layers of the site.

The team found that when these human ancestors arrived, northern Australia was wetter and colder.

“Together, we were working on establishing questions: What kind of environments did these people live in? What was the climate like? Were there any disturbances to the site, and were artifacts mixed up from different ages?” Marwick said. “I’m proud of being able to involve 91̽��students in this research in a really substantial way.”

One of the authors, Mara Page, was a senior double-majoring in archaeology and Earth and space sciences when she joined the project. She analyzed stable carbon isotopes found in sediment, which can reveal the types of plants present in the past and the kinds of environments they lived in. She determined that the vegetation at Madjedbebe remained stable during the time of human occupation, which suggests that there was no major environmental change that might have prompted humans to leave the area.

“I feel that I contributed something important by being able to rule something out of the story we were telling,” Page explained.

By placing the date of Australian settlement at around 65,000 years ago, researchers confirm some of the shifting theories about when the first humans left Africa. A common view is that humans moved into Asia 80,000 years ago, and if they migrated to Australia some to 15,000 years later, it means those ancestors co-existed with another early human in Asia, Homo florensiensis. It also means that these early Australians preceded early Europeans, who are believed to have entered that continent 45,000 years ago. A related question is whether these early human species left Africa at one time, gradually spreading the population through Asia, Europe and Australia, or whether there were multiple waves of migration.

In recent years, , obtained through DNA testing of a 90-year-old hair sample of an Aboriginal Australian man, suggests Australia was settled as far back as 70,000 years ago.

Marwick believes the Madjedbebe results, because they rely on so many artifacts and intensive analysis of sediment samples, confirm that early humans occupied Australia at least 65,000 years ago and support the theory that Homo sapiens, the species of modern-day humans, evolved in Africa before dispersing to other continents. The findings also suggest Homo sapiens‘ predecessors, and , overlapped with humans for a long period of time, and suggest a larger role for Australia, and the Eastern Hemisphere in general, in the story of humankind.

Marwick, who for open science, particularly in data collection and the code used to analyze it, noted that the Nature paper is also pushing new frontiers because it combines three strands of reproducibility. Researchers examined a field site that has been excavated in the past; they’ve made available their raw data and code; and they consulted an outside lab for third-party OSL verification.

The research was funded primarily by the Australian Research Council, as well as the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Marwick and his students were also supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, the UW-UQ Trans-Pacific Fellowship program, and the 91̽��Royalty Research Fellowship.

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For more information, contact Marwick at bmarwick@uw.edu.

Meanwhile, a variety of academic journals, including several in the Nature Research family, are turning their attention to another aspect of the research process: computer programming code. Code is becoming increasingly important in research because scientists are often writing their own computer programs to interpret their data, rather than using commercial software packages. Some journals now include scientific data and code as part of the peer-review process.

And now, with the May 25 online publication of a by , 91̽�� associate professor of anthropology, and 13 other colleagues at universities across the United States and Europe, there are conventions and tools that researchers can use to make code sharing easier and more efficient. The team’s paper advocating the sharing of code appears in Nature Neuroscience, while the journal in an editorial ��a pilot project to ask future authors to make their code available for review.

Making the programs behind the research accessible allows other scientists to test the code and reproduce the computations in an experiment — in other words, to reproduce results and solidify findings. It’s the “how the sausage is made” part of research, Marwick said. It also allows the code to be used by other researchers in new studies, making it easier for scientists to build on the work of their colleagues.

“What we’re missing is the convention of sharing code or the tools for turning data into useful discoveries or information,” Marwick said. “Researchers say it’s great to have the data available in a paper — increasingly raw data are available in supplementary files or specialized online repositories — but the code for performing the clever analyses in between the raw data and the published figures and tables are still inaccessible.”

Other Nature Research journals, such as and provide for code review as part of the article evaluation process. Since 2014, the company has encouraged writers to make their code available upon request.

The Nature Neuroscience pilot focuses on three elements: whether the code supporting an author’s main claims is publicly accessible; whether the code functions without mistakes; and whether it produces the results cited.

“This is a commitment from a high-impact journal to raise software to the status of a regular research product, that it’s not just a tool that gets discarded along the way, or hidden on a researcher’s computer where no-one else can benefit from it,” Marwick said. “In the future, scientific disciplines will be shifting to a position where you need to share your code as well as your data. It will be easier to reproduce someone’s new discovery, and incorporate their discoveries into your own work.”

Imagine this scenario, Marwick said: A neuroscientist is trying to find new ways to identify early-stage tumors using 3-D brain imagery. She comes up with an algorithm that can pick out specific pixel values in an image, which helps lead to early tumor detection. By sharing the computer code and its mathematical algorithm, the scientist could facilitate a breakthrough.

The Nature Neuroscience paper resulted from a two-day workshop held in 2014 in the United Kingdom, to Marwick, an archaeologist, was invited because of his efforts in using code and promoting open science in archaeology. A Senior Data Science Fellow at the 91̽��eScience Institute, Marwick is active in the institute’s Reproducibility and Open Science Group, which works on issues and practices around tools and practices to enhance data sharing, preservation and reproducibility.

, associate director of the eScience Institute, said code sharing is part of the future. “Reproducibility is literally the definition of science, and as science moves from the lab to the computer, code sharing must be at the core of how we conduct research and train students.”

An open science approach to sharing code is not without its critics, as well as scientists who raise legal and ethical questions about the repercussions. How do researchers get proper credit for the code they share? How should code be cited in the scholarly literature? How will it count toward tenure and promotion applications? How is sharing code compatible with patents and commercialization of software technology?

Marwick, who specializes in prehistoric human evolutionary ecology in Southeast Asia and Australia, has been advocating for code-sharing and related open science initiatives in archaeology through the Society of American Archaeology.

“I’m just trying to shift the needle in my discipline to a practice that benefits everyone — researchers and the public,” he said.

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