Archaeologists have found the earliest direct evidence for horseback riding – an innovation that would transform history – in 5,000 year old human skeletons in central Europe. “When you get on a horse and ride it fast, it’s a thrill – I’m sure ancient humans felt the same way,” said David Anthony, a co-author of the study and Hartwick College archaeologist. “Horseback riding was the fastest a human could go before the railroads.” Researchers analyzed more than 200 Bronze Age skeletal remains in museum collections in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic to look for signs of what co-author and University of Helsinki anthropologist Martin Trautmann calls “horse rider syndrome” – six tell-tale markers that indicate a person was likely riding an animal, including characteristic wear marks on the hip sockets, thigh bone and pelvis. “You can read bones like biographies,” said Trautmann, who has previously studied similar wear patterns in skeletons from later periods when horseback riding is well-established in the historical record. The researchers focused on human skeletons — which are more readily preserved than horse bones in burial sites and museums – and identified five likely riders who lived around 4,500 to 5,000 years ago and belonged to a Bronze Age people called the Yamnaya. “There is earlier evidence for harnessing and milking of horses, but this is the earliest direct evidence so far for horseback riding,” said University of Exeter archaeologist Alan Outram, who was not involved in the research, but praised the approach. The study was published Friday in the journal Science Advances. Domesticating wild horses on the plains of Eurasia was a process, not a single event, the researchers say. Archaeologists have previously found evidence of people consuming horse milk in dental remains and indications of horses controlled by harnesses and bits dating back more than 5,000 years, but that does not necessarily indicate the horses were ridden. The Yamnaya culture, known for its characteristic burial mounds, originated in what’s now part of Ukraine and western Russia, an area called the Pontic Caspian steppe. The horses they kept were distinct from modern horses – likely more easily startled and less tolerant of humans – although they may have been the immediate genetic ancestors of modern horses, which emerged a few centuries later, the researchers say. The Yamnaya are most significant because of their dramatic expansion across Eurasia in only a few generations — moving westward to Hungary and eastward to Mongolia, said University of Helsinki archaeologist and co-author Volker Heyd. “The spread of Indo European languages is linked to their movement, and they reshaped the genetic make-up of Europe,” he said. Their relationship with horses may have partly enabled this stunning movement, the researchers suggest. “Horses expand the concept of distance – you begin to think about places previously out of reach as being reachable,” said co-author Anthony, the Hartwick College archaeologist. That does not mean the Yamnaya people were warriors on horseback, as the horses they rode were likely too skittish for stressful battlefield situations, he said. But horses may have allowed the Yamnaya to more effectively send communications, build alliances and manage the herds of cattle that were central to their economy. Because only a small percentage of the skeletons studied clearly showed all six markers of riding horseback, “it seems that a minority of the people at that time were riders – that does not suggest that a whole society was built on horseback riding,” said molecular archaeologist Ludovic Orlando, who is based at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France and was not involved in the research. Still, he praised the work for helping to better pinpoint the potential genesis of horseback riding. “This is about the origins of something that impacted human history like only a few other things have,” said Orlando.

A team of experts commissioned by the U.N.’s top human rights body to look into rights violations in Ukraine said Friday its initial investigation turned up evidence of war crimes in the country following Russia’s invasion nearly seven months ago. The experts from the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, mandated by Human Rights Council earlier this year, have so far focused on four regions – Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy. Presenting their most extensive findings so far, they cited testimonies by former detainees of beatings, electric shocks and forced nudity in Russian detention facilities, and expressed grave concerns about executions the team was working to document in the four regions. “Based on the evidence gathered by the commission, it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine,” Erik Mose, the commission’s chairman, told the Human Rights Council. Commission member Pablo de Greiff told reporters the team had “found two instances of ill-treatment of Russian Federation soldiers by Ukrainian soldiers. ... We have found obviously significantly larger numbers of incidences that amount to war crimes on the part of the Russian Federation.” During a 10-day June trip to Ukraine, the team visited Bucha, a city outside Kyiv where Ukrainian authorities found mass graves and bodies strewn in the streets after Russian forces pulled out in late March. “We were struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited. The commission is currently investigating such deaths in 16 towns and settlements,” Mose said. He didn’t specify who or which side in the war allegedly committed the killings.   The findings echo reports by news outlets and others of the destruction, death and despair in Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on Feb. 24. The commission’s work could ultimately contribute to the work of International Criminal Court prosecutors who could bring charges over war crimes in Ukraine, although it remains uncertain whether Russia or other alleged perpetrators will ever face justice. Read: ICC prosecutor to open probe into war crimes in Ukraine Anton Korynevych, ambassador-at-large for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, joined envoys from a number of Western countries who spoke out against Moscow’s war in the wake of the commission’s presentation. Russia’s delegation boycotted the council meeting. Korynevych, speaking by video, called for the creation of a special tribunal that would have jurisdiction “over the crime of aggression against Ukraine” and investigate senior Russian political and military leaders who were allegedly responsible. He said said accountability was crucial for rights violations and atrocities linked to Russia’s “aggression.” But Korynevych also highlighted how the war’s impact has rippled through the world and “put numerous countries on the verge of hunger, exacerbated extreme poverty, created the threat of nuclear catastrophe unseen before” and harmed the livelihoods of millions of people. Commission investigators visited 27 towns and settlements, as well as graves and detention and torture centers; interviewed more than 150 victims and witnesses; and met with advocacy groups and government officials, Mose said. He said an unspecified number of Russian soldiers were found to have committed crimes of sexual or gender-based violence – with victims ranging in age from 4 to 82 years old. The commission plans to gradually expand its investigation, with areas of interest including allegations of filtration camps for people being detained or deported, the forced transfer of people, and allegations of expedited adoption of children. “The evidence of Russia’s atrocities becomes more horrifying by the day, most recently with the uncovering of mass graves in Izium, where the bodies show signs of torture,” Michele Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to the rights council, said, referring to a Kharkiv regional city that Ukrainian forces recaptured in recent weeks. Read: Ukraine alleges torture at village near Russian border Taylor urged the commissioners to continue to “examine the growing evidence of Russia’s filtration operations, forced deportations and disappearances.” She referred to “numerous sources” that indicated Russian authorities have interrogated, detained and/or forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, and reports that children were being deported from Ukraine and placed in Russian orphanages for adoption. A handful of Russia’s allies took to the defense of Moscow. Ina Vasileuskaya, the deputy permanent representative of Belarus to the U.N. in Geneva, said Russia’s invasion aim was to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine. “Biased discussions in the Human Rights Council only accusing Russia are a dead end,” she said.   Vasileuskaya said her country was not a party to the conflict, although Belarus was one of the places Russian forces gathered before invading Ukraine.

Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine will remain in limbo for a while longer after government health advisers declared Wednesday that they need more evidence to decide if a handful of unusual blood clots were linked to the shot — and if so, how big the risk really is. The reports are exceedingly rare — six cases out of more than 7 million U.S. inoculations with the one-dose vaccine. But the government recommended a pause in J&J vaccinations this week, not long after European regulators declared that such clots are a rare but possible risk with the AstraZeneca vaccine, a shot made in a similar way but not yet approved for use in the U.S. At an emergency meeting, advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrestled with the fact that the U.S. has enough alternative shots to vaccinate its population but other countries anxiously awaiting the one-and-done vaccine may not. “I continue to feel like we’re in a race against time and the variants, but we need to (move forward) in the safest possible way,” said CDC adviser Dr. Grace Lee of Stanford University, who was among those seeking to postpone a vote on the vaccine. Authorities have studied the clots for only a few days and have little information to judge the shot, agreed fellow adviser Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington. “I don’t want to send the message there is something fundamentally wrong with this vaccine,” Bell said. “It’s a very rare event. Nothing in life is risk-free. But I want to be able to understand and defend the decision I’ve made based on a reasonable amount of data.” These are not run-of-the-mill blood clots. They occurred in unusual places, in veins that drain blood from the brain, and in people with abnormally low levels of clot-forming platelets. The six cases raised an alarm bell because that number is at least three times more than experts would have expected to see even of more typical brain-drainage clots, said CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro. Also read: Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine  “What we have here is a picture of clots forming in large vessels where we have low platelets,” Shimabukuro explained. “This usually doesn’t happen,” but it’s similar to European reports with the AstraZeneca vaccine. The good news: The government says there are no signs of similar clots after vaccination with the Pfizer and Moderna shots that are the mainstay of the COVID-19 fight in the U.S. The J&J cases now under investigation are all among women younger than 50. But the advisory panel stressed that there’s not enough information to tell if only certain groups would be at risk. In Europe, most but not all cases following AstraZeneca vaccinations have been among women under 60, leading different countries to use that vaccine in varying ways. Also, a 25-year-old man experienced a similar clot during U.S. testing of J&J’s vaccine, something the government scrutinized at the time but could not link to the shot. On Wednesday, the company also brought to the CDC’s attention a woman whose clot did not occur in the brain, sparking more questions about what other evidence to examine. Also read: Merck to help produce rival J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine The CDC expects its advisers to reconsider the evidence within two weeks. So far the clots have occurred between one and three weeks after people received the J&J vaccine, and officials cautioned that more reports could surface. The clot concerns could undermine public confidence in a vaccine many hoped would help some of the hardest-to-reach populations — in poor countries or in places like homeless shelters in the U.S. But the U.S. has intensive monitoring for COVID-19 vaccines, since side effects too rare to have occurred in studies of thousands of people sometimes pop up once shots are used in millions. Shimabukuro said spotting such a rare potential risk amid the nation’s huge vaccine rollout “is an example of a success story for vaccine safety.” Some vaccine specialists who were closely watching the deliberations expressed dismay that the public — here and abroad — will have to wait for more advice. “What they did was they punted,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “I just don’t think waiting is going to give you a critical amount of information that is going to help you make a decision.” He noted that many European countries are dealing with the AstraZeneca uncertainty without stopping its use. Health officials recommended the J&J timeout in part to make sure doctors know how to recognize and treat the unusual condition. The CDC said Wednesday that four of the six women with the unusual clots were treated with a blood thinner named heparin — a treatment the government is warning doctors to avoid. The setback for J&J comes as the worldwide death toll from COVID-19 approaches 3 million, including more than 560,000 who perished in the U.S., which continues to report tens of thousands of new infections every day and an average of almost 1,000 deaths. So far, the J&J vaccine has been a minor player in U.S. vaccinations. More than 122 million Americans have received at least one vaccine dose, and nearly 23% are fully vaccinated. Moderna and Pfizer are on track to have delivered 300 million doses each by mid- to late July. Vaccinations are slower in Europe, where many countries have struggled for supply. J&J delayed some of its European deliveries amid the clot evaluation, but Poland said it would use the batch it already has in hand. European medical regulators plan to issue their own evaluation of the J&J clot issue next week When the clots were spotted after AstraZeneca vaccinations, scientists in Norway and Germany raised the possibility that some people are experiencing an abnormal immune response, forming antibodies that disable their platelets. That’s the theory as the U.S. now investigates the J&J reports.