5 March 2011 | NewScientist | 23

Europe’s first drug users were artists

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties – the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

Like the objects depicted in the mural, P. hispanica has a bell-shaped cap topped with a dome, and lacks an annulus – a ring around the stalk. “Its stalks also vary from straight to sinuous, as they do in the mural,” says Akers (Economic Botany, DOI: 10.1007/s12231-011-9152-5).

This isn’t the oldest prehistoric painting thought to depict magic mushrooms, though. An Algerian mural that may show the species Psilocybe mairei is 7000 to 9000 years old.

Cremated Alaskan child gives glimpse of first AmericansTHE child was dead before it was cremated in the hearth. The fire burned for a couple of hours before the pit was filled with soil and the house abandoned.

This is the extraordinary scene that archaeologists have reconstructed from the 11,500-year-old remains of a child found in an indoor firepit in central Alaska, near the Tanana river.

The bones are the oldest human remains discovered in subarctic North America. The child was about 3 years old and the teeth show distinctive features of

Native Americans and north-eastern Asians (Science, vol 331, p 1058). It’s early days – the find was made just last year – but the hope is that further analysis will help trace how early settlers spread across the Americas.

Alaska is key to that tale: it is thought that during the last ice age, low sea levels allowed humans to walk from Siberia to North America more than 13,000 years ago. But even that theory is disputed, and little is known about the lifestyles and movements of the early settlers.

FISH oil may soon be on the menu for people with cancer to prevent weight loss during chemotherapy.

Weight loss is common during chemotherapy for aggressive tumours, both because treatment may reduce appetite and because tumours lead to muscle wasting. “This leaves patients unable to be given other treatments, such as radiation,” says Rachel Murphy of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Trial studies suggested that fish oil could help, but larger clinical trials proved inconclusive – possibly

because the trials involved people with advanced cancers that were difficult to treat.

Now, Murphy and colleagues have shown that 16 people newly diagnosed with lung cancer who were given 2.2 grams of fish oil a day maintained their weight during chemotherapy. A control group that went without the oil lost an average of 2.3 kilograms over the same period (Cancer, DOI: 10.1002/cncr.25709).

Fish oil may help prevent weight loss by reducing the inflammation response that causes muscle degradation, Murray says.

Fish oil no snake oil for chemotherapy

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We do know, from temporary hunting camps and work sites, that they were hunter-gatherers.

And that is perhaps why the new find is most remarkable. The site was not a camp: the floor had been dug out and holes suggest poles may have supported walls and a roof. The child’s age and the food remains found at the site suggest it was the summer home for a group that comprised at least women and young children.

The team now hopes that DNA tests will show how the settlers are related to modern peoples.

How to mend a broken heart

NEWBORN mice can heal a damaged heart – a finding that could lead to new treatments for heart disease.

Some fish and amphibians can regenerate heart tissue when it is damaged, whereas only embryos were known to have this ability in mammals. To find out if mammals keep it after birth, Enzo Porrello and colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas cut out a chunk of heart tissue from 1-day-old mice.

When they removed the whole organ 21 days later, they found that 99 per cent of the hearts had completely regenerated. Other heart-damaged newborns were later compared with mice that had had sham surgery which did not touch the heart: at 2 months old, the hearts of both groups worked just as well. When the group repeated the surgery in 7-day-old mice, the hearts did not heal, suggesting that the regenerative ability was lost by this age (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1200708).

The team don’t know how regeneration works, but they found that 1-day-old mouse heart cells kept dividing after damage, when adult heart cells would swell and scar. “We need to turn back the clock on the adult human heart to the days just after birth,” says Richard T. Lee at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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