After much preparation and a long travel of the samples from Cyprus to the UK, Ireland, Paris, back to Cyprus, to Italy, our prehistoric bone samples have now made their landing in Jordan! As we speak, we are finishing up the high resolution virtual palaeohistology imaging with Tomography experts Gianluca Iori and Philipp Hans at the BEATS beamline. BEATS stands for ‘BEAmline for Tomography at SESAME’. This beamline was constructed within the H2020 European project, with the objective to build a beamline for tomography at the SESAME synchrotron in Jordan. The Enigma PI has been involved in the creation of a BEATS user-community during her time at the Cyprus Institute, so it’s a fantastic opportunity to now perform scans for Virtual Palaeo histology at this beamtime. During the experiment, we first imaged a set of Prehistoric Cypriot Zooarchaological samples to study the inner structure of the Petrous Bone. The samples are very robust, so positioning these samples was not an easy task, however, the images obtained are extremely promising for our further analysis! Additionally, we were able to scan rib fragments from Anatomically Modern Humans from a historical Italian reference collection. The bone samples come from idividuals with detailed demographic data, which allows us to correlate the histomorphometric features with demographic data – a crucial component for the MSCA-PF objectives as it allows us to put our Neanderthal data in context. that have detailed demographic information. This will allow us to compare our Neanderthal data properly with 3D parameters for bone vascularity and osteocyte density. As this was a remote beamtime, A really big thanks from Italy and Cyprus to Gianluca Iori and Philipp Hans for their superb work and efforts! If you want to learn more about the BEATS beamline, please follow this link: XX https://www.sesame.org.jo/beamlines/beats or follow their updates on twitter XX https://x.com/BEATSeu1
Also a big thanks to my MSCA supervisor Diego Dreossi who helped me during with the organization of the beamtime and the offline Tomolab scans of the samples, which were essential for the analysis.
PHOTO: From Left to Right: Anna Spyrou, Simone Lemmers, Gianluca Iori, Philipp Hans, Diego Dreossi