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UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL —Humans have been exploiting bees as far back as the Stone Age, according to new research from the University of Bristol published in Nature today.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

CELL PRESS—Plague infections were common in humans 3,300 years earlier than the historical record suggests, reports a study published in Cell. By sequencing the DNA of tooth samples from Bronze Age individuals from Europe and Asia, the researchers discovered evidence of plague infections roughly 4,800 years ago. But it was at least another thousand years until the bacterium that causes the disease, Yersinia pestis, acquired key changes in virulence genes, allowing it to spread via fleas and evade the host immune system.

“We found that the Y. pestis lineage originated and was widespread much earlier than previously thought, and we narrowed the time window as to when it developed,” says senior study author Eske Willerslev of the Center for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen. “This study changes our view of when and how plaque influenced human populations and opens new avenues for studying the evolution of diseases.”

Y. pestis was the notorious culprit behind the sixth century’s Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, which killed 30%-50% of the European population in the mid-1300s, and the Third Pandemic, which emerged in China in the 1850s. Earlier putative plagues, such as the Plague of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago and the second century’s Antonine Plague, have been linked to the decline of Classical Greece and the undermining of the Roman army. However, it has been unclear whether Y. pestis could have been responsible for these early epidemics because direct molecular evidence for this bacterium has not been obtained from skeletal material older than 1,500 years.

Based on their recent work, Willerslev, Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg, and their collaborators suspected that the plague could have shaped human populations much earlier than previously thought. A few months ago, they published a high-profile population genomics study of Eurasian individuals from the Bronze Age (c. 3000 BC to 1500 BC), which they showed was a highly dynamic period involving large-scale migrations and population replacements that were responsible for shaping major parts of present-day demographic structure in both Europe and Asia.

But the reason for these migrations was not clear. “One of the scenarios we discussed was the idea that large epidemics could have facilitated such dynamics,” says study co-first author Morten Allentoft of the Center for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen. “Perhaps people were migrating to get away from epidemics or re-colonizing new areas where epidemics had decimated the local populations. Could it be, for example, that plague was present in humans already in these prehistoric times?”

To answer this question, the researchers screened 89 billion raw DNA sequence reads obtained from the teeth of 101 Bronze Age individuals from Europe and Asia. These teeth were obtained from various museums and archaeological excavations. They discovered Y. pestis DNA in seven of these individuals, whose teeth were dated between 2794 BC and 951 BC (early Iron Age). Evolutionary analysis revealed that the most recent common ancestor of all known Y. pestis strains is 5,783 years old–thousands of years older than previous estimates.

Moreover, Y. pestis genomes from the Bronze Age lacked a gene called Yersinia murine toxin (ymt), which is known to protect the pathogen inside the flea gut and thereby enable the spread of plague to humans via an insect vector. However, this gene was present in the Y. pestis genome from the Iron Age individual, suggesting that plague became transmissible by fleas between approximately 3,700 and 3,000 years ago. This new finding conflicts with previous studies suggesting that the ymt gene was acquired early in Y. pestis evolution due to its importance in the pathogen’s life cycle.

Besides widespread transmission through fleas, another secret to Y. pestis‘ success has been its stealthy evasion of the host immune system. In mammals, the immune system has evolved to recognize and mount protective responses against a protein called flagellin, which is the principal component of the flagella–the whip-like appendage that helps bacteria move around. In all previously known Y. pestis strains, a mutation in the flhD gene has prevented the expression of the flagellin protein.

However, this mutation was not present in the two oldest Bronze Age individuals, and the flagella system was still in the process of devolving in the youngest Bronze Age individual. Taken together, the findings suggest that Y. pestis did not fully adapt as a flea-borne mammalian pathogen until the beginning of the first millennium BC, giving rise to the historically recorded plagues.

“The underlying evolutionary mechanisms that facilitated the evolution of Y. pestis are still present today, and learning from this will help us understand how future pathogens may arise or develop increased virulence,” says co-first study author Simon Rasmussen of the Technical University of Denmark. “Additionally, our study changes the historical understanding of this extremely important human pathogen and makes it possible that other so-called plagues, such as the Plague of Athens and the Antonine Plague, could have been caused by Y. pestis.”

The photo shows a Bronze Age human skull from the Yamnaya culture painted with red ochre. Yamnaya later developed into the Afanasievo culture of Central Asia, one of the cultures that carried the early strains of Y. pestis. Credit: Rasmussen et al./Cell 2015

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In future studies, the researchers will look for evidence of plague in other geographic regions and time periods to get a better grasp of the history of this disease. They will also search for ancient DNA remains of other blood-borne bacteria and viruses. “Our findings reveal that one can find ancient pathogenic microbes in ancient human material showing no obvious morphological signs of disease,” Willerslev says. “So plague is just one disease to look at, and one could explore all kinds of diseases like this in the future.”

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This project was funded by the European Research Council, the Marie Curie Actions of the European Union, the Villum Foundation, the University of Copenhagen, the Danish National Research Foundation, and The Lundbeck Foundation.

Cell, Rasmussen and Allentoft et al.: “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.10.009

Source: Cell Press news release

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE —Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge have unearthed the earliest known European Christian church in the tropics on one of the Cabo Verde islands, 500km off the coast of West Africa, where the Portuguese established a stronghold to start the first commerce with Africa south of the Sahara. This turned into a global trade in African slaves from the 16th century, in which Cabo Verde played a central part as a major trans-shipment centre.

The earliest remains of the church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição date from around 1470, with a further larger construction dating from 1500. Extensions and a re-cladding of the church with tiles imported from Lisbon have also been documented.

This church is the oldest formal European colonial building yet discovered in sub-Saharan Africa, say researchers. It was found amongst the ruins of Cidade Velha, the former capital of Cabo Verde, which at its height was the second richest city in the Portuguese empire; a city that channelled slavery for almost 300 years.

“It’s a profound social and political story to which these new archaeological investigations are making an invaluable contribution,” said Cambridge’s Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen.

Archaeologists from the University and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) have just completed the excavation and conservation of this building for public display, and have been working with the Cabo Verde government and local partners on the town’s archaeology since 2007.

“We’ve managed to recover the entire footprint-plan of the church, including its vestry, side-chapel and porch, and it now presents a really striking monument,” said Christopher Evans, Director of the CAU.

“Evidently constructed around 1500, the most complicated portion is the east-end’s chancel where the main altar stood, and which has seen much rebuilding due to seasonal flash-flood damage. Though the chancel’s sequence proved complicated to disentangle, under it all we exposed a gothic-style chapel,” he said.

“This had been built as a free-standing structure prior to the church itself and is now the earliest known building on the islands – the whole exercise has been a tremendous success.”

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During the excavation several tombstones of local dignitaries were recovered. One enormous stone found in the side chapel belonged to Fernão Fiel de Lugo, a slaver and the town’s ‘treasure holder’ between 1542 and 1557. “This is a place of immense cultural and heritage value. This excavation has revealed the tombs and graves of people that we only know from history books and always felt could be fiction,” Cidade Velha’s Mayor, Dr Manuel Monteiro de Pina, said.

The research team discovered a densely packed cemetery dug into the floor of the church, which they say will be of great importance for future academic investigations. It is estimated that more than 1,000 people were buried here before 1525, providing a capsule of the first 50 years of colonial life on the island.

Preliminary analysis of samples shows that about half the bodies are African, with the rest from various parts of Europe. An excavation is being planned to collect data for isotope analysis of more bodies to learn more about the country’s founding population and its early slave history.

“From historical texts we have learned about the development of a ‘Creole’ society at an early date with land inherited by people of mixed race who could also hold official positions. The human remains give us the opportunity to test this representation of the first people in Cabo Verde,” said Evans.

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 These are some of the tombstones of Portuguese slavers revealed by the excavation. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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The significance of the discovery, a central feature of the Cidade Velha UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been widely acknowledged. Hundreds of people have visited the site since work began, and school groups have frequently been brought out to see the church. On his visit, the President Jorge Carlos Fonseca endorsed the contribution made by this project. “I can see the importance the site has for Cabo Verde to understand our history and our identity,” he said.

“The hope is that the work will both encourage much-needed cultural tourism, and help the nation build a more nuanced sense of its notable past,” said Sørensen.

The ten small islands that make up Cabo Verde are harsh volcanic rock, and were barren of people, mammals and trees until the Portuguese arrived in 1456. The Portuguese transformed the islands into one of the major hubs for the transatlantic slave trade, bringing with them crops, livestock and people in the form of traders, missionaries and thousands upon thousands of slaves. The slaves were funnelled through the islands where they were ‘sorted’ and sold before being shipped off to plantations across the Atlantic World.

The discovery of Brazil, in particular, and the establishment of plantations there, caused trade through Cabo Verde to explode. “The islands were a focal point for the initial wave of globalisation, all built on the back of the slave trade,” said Sørensen. “The excavation reveals these global connections as the finds include fine ware and faience from Portugal, German stoneware, Chinese porcelain and pottery from different parts of West Africa.”

In addition to the excavated church, there were around 22 other churches in the small river valley where the old town of Cidade Velha sits, including a large cathedral built with imported Portuguese stones. It is clear the church had huge influence here – a mere 15 degrees north of the equator – from the late medieval period onwards, say the researchers.

Centuries later, pirate attacks plagued the islands. French privateer Jacques Cassard launched a devastating attack on Cidade Velha in 1712, from which it would never recover, and, as slavery began to be outlawed during the 19th century, the islands lost their financial basis and were neglected by the Portuguese. The islanders were left to the mercy of an inhospitable landscape with erratic rainfall that undermined agricultural activities and caused drinking water to be scarce.

Cabo Verde became a republic in 1975, and as an independent nation it is coming to terms with a heritage and identity rooted in slavery. The research team believe the new archaeological discoveries will prove integral to this process.

“Cabo Verde is a young nation in many ways, and it needs its history to be unearthed and accessed so it can continue to build its national identity,” said Sørensen.

Evans added: “The finds so far clearly demonstrate the fantastic potentials of Cabo Verde’s archaeology and the contribution they can make to the future of these Atlantic islands.”

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This image shows Christopher Evans from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit on site with members of the excavation team. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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 Source: University of Cambridge news release.

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Travel and learn with Far Horizons.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years.

Together with two previous drought atlases covering North America and Asia, the Old World Drought Atlas significantly adds to the historical picture of long-term climate variability over the Northern Hemisphere. In so doing, it should help climate scientists pinpoint causes of drought and extreme rainfall in the past, and identify patterns that could lead to better climate model projections for the future. A paper describing the new atlas, coauthored by scientists from 40 institutions, appears today in the journal Science Advances.

“The Old World Drought Atlas fills a major geographic gap in the data that’s important to determine patterns of climate variability back in time,” said Edward Cook, cofounder of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and leader of all three drought-atlas projects. “That’s important for understanding causes of megadroughts, and it’s important for climate modelers to test hypotheses of climate forcing and change.”

For example, if Europe had a wet year north of the Alps and a dry year to the south, that provides clues to circulation patterns and suggests influence from the North Atlantic Oscillation, one of the primary sources of climate variability affecting patterns in Europe. “You can’t get that from one spot on a map,” Cook said. “That’s the differentiator between the atlas and all these wonderful historic records – the records don’t give you the broad-scale patterns.”

The new atlas could also improve understanding of climate phenomena like the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, a variation in North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures that hasn’t been tracked long enough to tell if it is a transitory event, forced by human intervention in the climate system, or a natural long-term oscillation. By combining the Old World Drought Atlas with the Asia and North America atlases, climatologists and climate modelers may also discover other sources of internal climate variability that are leading to drought and wetness across the Northern Hemisphere, Cook said.

In the Science Advances paper, Cook and his coauthors compare results from the new atlas and its counterparts across three time spans: the generally warm Medieval Climate Anomaly (1000-1200); the Little Ice Age (1550-1750); and the modern period (1850-2012).

The atlases together show persistently drier-than-average conditions across north-central Europe over the past 1,000 years, and a history of megadroughts in the Northern Hemisphere that lasted longer during the Medieval Climate Anomaly than they did during the 20th century. But there is little understanding as to why, the authors write. Climate models have had difficulty reproducing megadroughts of the past, indicating something may be missing in their representation of the climate system, Cook said.

The drought atlases provide a much deeper understanding of natural climate processes than scientists have had to date, said Richard Seager, a coauthor of the paper and a climate modeler at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“Climate variability tends to occur within patterns that span the globe, creating wet conditions somewhere and dry conditions somewhere else,” said Seager. “By having tree ring-based hydroclimate reconstructions for three northern hemisphere continents, we can now easily see these patterns and identify the responsible modes of variability.”

The hemispheric scale adds to the potential uses of what was already the gold standard of paleo-hydroclimate research, said Sloan Coats, a climate dynamicist at the University of Colorado who studies megadroughts using the atlases. “The fact that the drought atlases provide a nearly hemispheric view of hydroclimate variability provides an incredible amount of information that can be used to better understand what was happening in the atmosphere and ocean,” Coats said.

In Europe and the Mediterranean, the new drought atlas expands scientists’ understanding of climate conditions during historic famines.

For instance, an unusually cold winter and spring are often blamed for a 1740-1741 famine in Ireland. The Old World Drought Atlas points to another contributor: rainfall well below normal during the spring and summer of 1741, the authors write in the paper. The atlas shows how the drought spread across Ireland, England and Wales.

The atlas also tracks the reach of the great European famine of 1315-1317, when historical documents describe how excessive precipitation across much of the continent made growing food nearly impossible. The atlas tracks the hydroclimate across Europe and shows its yearly progressions from 1314 to 1317 in detail, including highlighting drier conditions in southern Italy, which largely escaped the crisis.

The atlas may also help shed light on more recent phenomena, including a record 2006-2010 drought in the Levant that a recent Lamont study suggests may have helped spark the ongoing Syrian civil war.

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The North America atlas, published in 2004, has been used by other researchers to suggest that a series of droughts starting around 900 years ago may have contributed to the eventual collapse of native cultures. Likewise, the Asia atlas, published in 2010, has led researchers to connect droughts, at least in part, to the fall of Cambodia’s Angkor culture in the 1300s, and China’s Ming dynasty in the 1600s.

The tree ring data used to create the new atlas included cores from both living trees and timbers found in ancient construction reaching back more than 2,000 years. They come from 106 regional tree ring chronologies, each with dozens to thousands of trees, and were contributed to the project by the International Tree Ring Data Bank and European tree-ring scientists.

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The paper, “Old World Megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era,” is published in Science Advances: 202-326-6440 

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

Any artist-created images you may have seen depicting prehistoric humans hunting or fighting with saber-toothed cats may not represent a scene very far from reality about 300,000 years ago when Lower Paleolithic humans actually did share the same environment with the big cats in what is present-day Europe.

According to scientists who have studied remains unearthed at the archaeological site of Schöningen in north-central Germany, the wooden spear-making humans who lived in the region of the site had up-close-and-personal contact with the European saber-toothed cat (Homotherium latidens) about 300,000 years ago. Whether they interacted with the big cats as their predators (hunter) or as defenders (the hunted), is still open to question and debate.

The clues come from their examination of five fossil teeth and one fossil humerus identified as representing two saber-toothed cats, found within the context of the finds unearthed at the famous Schöningen site, where, in addition to other items, archaeologists recovered a number of wooden spears, one lance, a double pointed stick, and a burnt stick dating to the Holsteinian, c. 300 kyr. 

“The humerus is a unique specimen; it shows evidence of hominin impacts and use as a percussor,” reported the researchers in their report abstract, the full study of which is now published and available online as an article in press in the Journal of Human Evolution. “The Homotherium remains from Schöningen are the best documented finds of this species in an archaeological setting and they are amongst the youngest specimens of Homotherium in Europe,” the researchers added.*  

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Spear no. 8 at Schöningen in situ. P. Pfarr NLD, Wikimedia Commons 

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The study of the finds has implications for understanding the relationship between these Paleolithic humans and the carnivores who lived within the same ecological context. “The presence of this species as a carnivore competitor would certainly have impacted the lives of late Middle Pleistocene hominins,” the researchers concluded. “The discovery illustrates the possible day-to-day challenges that the Schöningen hominins would have faced and suggests that the wooden spears were not necessarily only used for hunting, but possibly also as a weapon for self-defense.”*

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen is best known for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden weapons or artifacts uncovered there by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Hartmut Thieme between 1994 and 1998 at an open-cast lignite mine. Deposited in organic sediments at a former lakeshore, they were found in combination with the remains of about 16,000 animal bones, including 20 wild horses, whose bones featured numerous butchery marks, including one pelvis that still had a spear protruding from it. The finds are considered evidence that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits as early as 300,000 or more years ago.

The saber-toothed cat fossil study was conducted by Jordi Serangeli of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, and colleagues from other institutions, who also authored the recently published paper.

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*Jordi Serangeli, et al., The European saber-toothed cat (Homotherium latidens) found in the “Spear Horizon” at Schöningen (Germany), Journal of Human Evolution, 23 October 2015. 

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA—Most of what we know about Mayan civilization relates to kings, queens and their elaborate temples. To understand what life was like for the 99 percent, one researcher turned to ancient animal bones stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Ashley Sharpe, a doctoral student at the museum on the UF campus, says the picture researchers have painted of the Maya people isn’t broad enough.

“When you think about the Romans and the Greeks, we know a lot about all of the different social classes — from the Caesars down to the commoners — but although there were tens of thousands of middle-class and lower-income Maya in big cities, we still don’t know much about the everyday lives of most people.”

For the first time in Maya archaeology research, 22,000 animal remains at the museum, one of the largest collections of its kind outside of Central America, were used as clues about life in the Maya lower classes. The bones revealed that the civilization known for its art and astronomy also had political and economic systems that were more complex than previously thought – systems similar to modern societies. The details are described in a new study appearing online this month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

“We looked at how the Maya acquired and distributed animal resources in order to learn more about the economy and how the royal, elite and lower classes interacted,” said Sharpe, who has either lived in or made frequent trips to the Maya region since 2008. “It turns out, the Maya states and classes were not all homogenous. They had complicated systems in place for trade relations, distribution of food and access to species, which varied among the cities and social classes much like they do today.”

Sharpe and co-author Kitty Emery, Florida Museum associate curator of environmental archaeology, examined the animal remains recovered from the ruins of three Maya city-states in Guatemala, including the famous site of Aguateca that was burned after a surprise enemy attack which resulted in a level of preservation similar to the Roman ruins of Pompeii.

Sharpe traced the movement of animals and their resources from trade partners to Aguateca and the capitals of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. She also followed the flow of resources between royalty, the rich and the poor at the capital cities and to the less powerful surrounding villages.

“The Maya used animals for things like hides, tools, jewelry and musical instruments, but they were also vitally important as emblems of status, royalty and the symbolic world of the gods, and thus often were prime resources jealously guarded by the rich and powerful,” Emery said.

Surprisingly, however, study researchers found that middle-ranking elites used the widest variety of animals. Royalty and other high-ranking elites focused on a select group of symbolic and prestigious animals like jaguars and crocodiles, Sharpe said.

“We had expected that the elites would have the highest diversity but that was not the case,” she said. “The elites ate animals that were considered delicacies, sort of the way people in our own upper class eat things like caviar, but the rest of us think it’s kind of gross.”

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Temple Seigeur, Aguateca. Wikimedia Commons

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Sharpe said poor villagers mostly ate fish and shellfish from rivers near their homes. However, both the poor and middle-elite classes living at the capitals kept a wider variety of animals for themselves than they shared with the surrounding villages, particularly more species from deep inside forests and from the ocean, which was 50 to 100 miles away. At Aguateca, more than 100 miles from the nearest coast, thousands of marine shells were found covering the floors of ancient households and craft workshops.

“These people didn’t have pack animals like in the Old World where they had horses and donkeys to carry goods,” Sharpe said. “They were literally carrying things on their backs from the sea. They did have rivers to help with transportation, but not a lot of rivers, and on land they also had the jungle to contend with.”

At Yaxchilan, more than half of the skeletons found were deer, suggesting residents primarily relied on nearby forests, including the deer that fed on their corn fields. However, much like in medieval Britain, there is evidence the Maya may have regulated hunting and fishing, creating more of a divide in access to animal resources among the classes, Sharpe said. At each of the three cities, elites, middle and lower classes all had access to different types of species, both imported marine resources as well as animals that could be obtained from nearby forests and rivers, she said.

The differences in predominate species, such as marine animals and deer, show the city-states likely had different trade partners, which Sharpe said makes sense because we know there were, at times, hostilities between the cities. The differences could also point to unique cultural identities, she said. For example, the residents of Aguateca were known for their jewelry made from shells.

“This is the first time we’re seeing this sort of evidence for what the middle and lower classes were doing,” Sharpe said.

Archaeologists have been working amid dense jungle to understand how the many Maya city-states functioned since the early 20th century. They have raised questions about how states cooperated, or didn’t, with one another, how much control and interaction state capitals had with their subordinate villages, and how the various social classes differed, Sharpe said.

Sharpe and Emery decided to analyze animal bones to begin answering these questions because animal resources played such a vital role in the politics and economy of the Late Classic Maya civilization (A.D. 500-900), Emery said. But buried beneath the jungle floor in Guatemala are enough mysteries to fill Sharpe’s entire career.

“It almost doesn’t matter where you dig in the jungle near these centers, you hit paved limestone floor. It gives you the sense that at one time, the entire place was deforested and it was a massive city,” she said. “When you travel to these capitals, you drive over unexcavated mounds that were once people’s houses — people we know little or nothing about.”

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Source: University of Florida press release.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY—New research led by Florida Institute of Technology shows that the impacts of indigenous people prior to European contact impacted riverside forests, but that such impacts were largely limited to an area within a day’s walk from a river.

The findings by the international team of archaeobotanists, paleoecologists and ecologists will be published online in the paper “Anthropogenic influence on Amazonian forests in prehistory: An ecological perspective” on Oct. 28 in the Journal of Biogeography.

The new research, conducted using plant fossils, estimates of mammal density, remote sensing and human population modeling, reinforces that Amazonian forests may be very vulnerable to disturbance by logging , mining and other large enterprises. The study refutes an emerging theory from some archaeologists and anthropologists that Amazonian rain forests are the result of ancient managed landscapes – a notion that undermines the ecological view of these forests as fragile ecosystems.

“Nobody doubts the importance of human actions along the major waterways,” said Mark Bush, professor of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology and the lead author of the paper. “But whether humans had a greater impact on the ecosystem than any other large mammal has yet to be established in much of western Amazonia.”

Dolores Piperno, curator of archaeobotany and South American archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History and co-author of the study, said the recent emphasis on Amazonia as a manufactured and domesticated landscape overstates the facts.

“At nearly the size of the continental United States, Amazonia is a vast landscape with considerable biotic and abiotic heterogeneity. Extrapolations being made from relatively few archaeological sites mainly located along water courses as to the overall effect of prehistoric human occupation must be tempered in the face of available and yet-to-be-accumulated empirical data.”

“This is not a debate solely about what happened over 500 years ago,” Bush added. “The implications are very relevant to modern society and conservation.”

He said if the forests were heavily modified prior to European arrival and have regrown in just over one tree generation to such a vast level of biodiversity, this rapid recovery could be used as a justification to log forests aggressively. If, however, humans had a very limited influence, as their findings have shown, then logging and other major disturbances would have long-lasting, possibly irreversible, consequences on the forest.

“This distinction becomes increasingly important as policy makers decide whether to enforce or relax protections of areas already designated as parks, including the Yasuni of Ecuador and protected areas in Brazil,” said Bush, who has spent almost 30 years conducting research in the Amazon.

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This is a false-color satellite image of a western Amazonian river showing abandoned ox-bow channels and ox-bow lakes where the river has meandered in its floodplain. Beyond the limit of the ox-bows is the terra firme forest. A new study finds the impact of people living near rivers on the surrounding land is less than earlier theories had suggested. Credit: Florida Institute of Technology

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The study is also relevant in shaping our understanding of the extent to which the Amazon Basin might offset carbon dioxide produced in industrialized areas. The young forest implied by the man-made-disturbance scenario leads to a large potential for further uptake of carbon, helping to offset carbon emissions from other regions. Bush and colleagues, however, project that very little of Amazonia will behave this way, suggesting that the massive amount of carbon held in Amazonian forest is most likely already close to a maximum capacity.

The researchers conclude that pre-European land-use by native peoples in Amazonia was highly variable, with dense settlements and profound forest disturbance over a relatively small proportion of the basin, leaving large areas little affected by human activity.

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The data used in the study were gathered with support from the National Science Foundation, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and National Museum of Natural History.

Source: Press release of the Florida Institute of Technology.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

PHILADELPHIA, PA, OCTOBER 2015—A regal and undisputed centerpiece of the lower Egypt Gallery, the Penn Museum’s massive granite Sphinx—the largest ancient sphinx in the Western Hemisphere—has long been an icon for the Museum and a “must see” for visiting guests. In 2013, when the Sphinx had been in Philadelphia 100 years, the Museum hosted a party, inviting the public and Philadelphia school children to come out and celebrate. Hijinks with the Sphinx featured talks, a social media contest, family activities, and anniversary cupcakes to mark the occasion.

Meanwhile, Josef Wegner and Jennifer Houser Wegner, long-time Associate Curators in the Museum’s Egyptian Section, were working on an even bigger tribute: a book. While the idea started out as an oversized booklet, their research took on a life of its own, and the fascinating story behind the Sphinx took on a more sizeable form. The Sphinx That Traveled to Philadelphia: The Story of the Colossal Sphinx in the Penn Museum, published by the Penn Museum and distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press, is a uniquely Philadelphia story told in 256 pages packed with 455 illustrations. The hardbound book ($29.95) goes on sale in the Penn Museum shop beginning November 1. Readers can also order the book through the University of Pennsylvania Press website and other retail outlets.

“When we started the project we knew the sphinx was a wonderful artifact—but we had no idea how wonderful,” noted Joe Wegner. “Before long, we realized that this one extraordinary object, created thousands of years ago by ancient Egyptians, had many fascinating stories to tell. The sphinx is silent no more.”

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Written to celebrate the centennial of the Sphinx’s arrival in Philadelphia in 1913, the narrative of The Sphinx that Traveled to Philadelphia covers the original excavations and archaeological history of the Sphinx, how it came to Philadelphia, and the unexpected ways in which the Sphinx’s story intersects with the history of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Museum just before World War I.

The book features ample illustrations—photographs, letters, newspaper stories, postcards, maps, and drawings—drawn largely from the extensive materials in the Museum Archives. Images of related artifacts in the Penn Museum’s Egyptian collection and other objects from the Egyptian, Near East, and Mediterranean Sections (many not on view and some never before published), as well as pieces in museums in the US, Europe, and Egypt, place the story of the Penn Museum Sphinx in a wider context. The writing style is informal and text is woven around the graphics that form the backbone of the narrative.

The Sphinx that Traveled to Philadelphia is designed to be of interest to a wide audience of adult readers but accessible and engaging to younger readers—including, hopefully, the next generation of Egyptologist, as well.

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If you liked this and you like Egyptology, see the full feature article about the grand throne room of Merenptah, Merenptah Rising, in Popular Archaeology.

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Source: Penn Museum subject press release.

Photos, top to bottom: The Penn Museum’s lower Egypt Gallery features the largest ancient sphinx in the Western Hemisphere (Photo: Penn Museum). Cover of The Sphinx That Traveled to Philadelphia: The Story of the Colossal Sphinx in the Penn Museum, published by the Penn Museum and distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press (Image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press).

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 ______________________________________________

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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY—By combining three important palaeoclimatic records (small vertebrates, marine microfauna and stable isotopes of herbivores), a multidisciplinary team of the UPV/EHU has reconstructed past environments with the best resolution ever achieved. The study*, led by Juan Rofes, currently a researcher at the Musèum National d’Histoire Naturelle, CNRS, Paris, has been published in the prestigious British Scientific Reports, which is one of the Nature group journals.

This group of archaeologists, palaeontologists, geologists, geochemists and palaeo-oceanographers has for the first time reconstructed the environment covering a period of nearly 35,000 years of the Cantabrian Region during the Upper Pleistocene. To do this, they have combined three palaeoclimatic records: marine microfauna, small vertebrates and stable isotopes of herbivores. The latter two records come from the Antoliñako Koba site (Gautegiz-Arteaga, Bizkaia, Basque Country, Spain), an exceptional archaeological deposit containing a long chrono-cultural sequence of nine levels, ranging from the Aurignacian and going right up to the Epipalaeolithic. This site was excavated and processed over a 20-year period by the archaeologist Mikel Aguirre (UNED-Open University), who is also a member of the multidisciplinary team.

“The two principal merits of the study are, firstly, having compared the continental and marine records of the same region, filling the gaps that existed in the terrestrial sequence by using the marine record, which tends to be more complete; and, secondly, having produced a continuous palaeo-environmental reconstruction of the period between 44 and 9 million years before present in the Cantabrian Region”, explained archaeozoologist and palaeontologist Juan Rofes. The article has been published by the journal Scientific Reports, which, owing to its high impact index (WOS 2014: 5.58), is the fifth most important multidisciplinary publication in the world.

Specifically, the changes in the communities of microvertebrates (mammals, amphibians and reptiles) and the stable isotope data (carbon and nitrogen) obtained from the bone collagen of deer in the continental site, have been compared with marine microfaunal evidence (foraminifera, planktonic and benthic species, ostracods and oxygen isotopes) gathered in the south of the Bay of Biscay by Dr Blanca Martínez-García (UPV/EHU). The sequence at the Antoliñako Koba site was dated by means of radiocarbon, which made it possible to compare the various signs with each other, and also with other known environmental records of the North Atlantic (sedimentary and pollen phases of the Cantabrian Region, variations in the sea level and ice cores made to the north of Greenland).

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A view of Antoliñako Koba site (Gautegiz-Arteaga, Bizkaia, Basque Country, Spain) during the excavation. Credit Mikel Aguirre.

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The research confirms a series of warm and cold events in the Cantabrian Region, which to a greater or lesser extent coincide with the climate evolution in the northern hemisphere during the Upper Pleistocene. “The contribution of this exhaustive palaeo-environmental reconstruction to regional and continental prehistory is unquestionable, since it enables us to get to know the climatic and environmental framework in which human groups in the past moved and which determined many of their strategies to adapt and survive. What is more, at this time of climate change increased by human pressure, it is a good idea to look at the past in order to learn lessons for the future,” explained Rofes. The study came about during the postdoctoral training period that Juan Rofes (Lima, Peru, 1974), PhD holder of the University of Zaragoza, spent at the UPV/EHU’s Faculty of Science and Technology. Today, he is on a European Union post-doctoral Marie Curie contract at the Musèum National d’Histoire Naturelle, CNRS, Paris.

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*Rofes, J., Garcia-Ibaibarriaga, N., Aguirre, M., Martínez-García, B., Ortega, L., Zuluaga, M.C., Bailon, S., Alonso-Olazabal, A., Castaños, J. & Murelaga, X. Combining Small-Vertebrate, Marine and Stable-Isotope Data to Reconstruct Past Environments. Scientific Reports 5, 14219; doi: 10.1038/srep14219 (2015). http://www.nature.com/articles/srep14219

Source: Subject press release of the University of the Basque Country

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – LOS ANGELES—They stay up late into the evening, average less than 6.5 hours of sleep and rarely nap.

College students during final exams? Working moms? Hard-charging executives? Think again, says a UCLA-led team of researchers who studied sleeping patterns among traditional peoples whose lifestyles closely resemble those of our evolutionary ancestors.

What the team found among the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia and the Tsimane of Bolivia challenges conventional wisdom about the sleeping habits of pre-industrial humans. The findings, published today in Current Biology, suggest that the industrialized world’s sleep habits do not differ much from those that humans evolved to have.

“The argument has always been that modern life has reduced our sleep time below the amount our ancestors got, but our data indicates that this is a myth,” said Jerome Siegel, leader of the research team and professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“I feel a lot less insecure about my own sleep habits after having found the trends we see here,” added lead author Gandhi Yetish, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico.

The findings do validate some common ideas about sleep and health, including the benefits of morning light, a cool bedroom and a consistent wake-up time.

An international authority on sleep, Siegel is a past president of the Sleep Research Society. For 40 years, he has run a basic sleep research lab in Los Angeles.

He started studying sleep among traditional peoples two years ago, asking anthropologists who were already heading into field to bring along special watch-sized devices that measure sleeping and waking times as well as light exposure.

Researchers from Hunter College, Yale University, UC Santa Barbara and the University of New Mexico clocked sleep patterns among the Hadza, hunter-gatherers who live near the Serengeti National Park, and the Tsimane, hunter-horticulturalists who live along the Andean foothills.

Siegel, aided by contacts supplied through a colleague at Witwatersrand University in South Africa, gathered measurements among the San hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert. In addition to measuring how long and when these adults slept during the summer and winter, Siegel measured their body temperatures, the temperature in their environment and the amount of light to which they were exposed.

The team, which received support from UCLA, the National Institute of Health and the National Research Foundation of South Africa, collected sleep records on 94 adults for a total of 1,165 days. The study is the first on the sleep habits of people who maintain foraging and traditional hunting lifestyles in the present day.

One myth dispelled by the results is that in earlier eras people went to bed at sundown. The subjects of the study stayed awake an average of 3 hours and 20 minutes after sunset.

“The fact that we all stay up hours after sunset is absolutely normal and does not appear to be a new development, although electric lights may have further extended this natural waking period,” said Siegel, who is also chief of neurobiology research at the Veteran Affairs of Greater Los Angeles Health Care System.

Most of the people studied by Siegel’s team slept less than seven hours each night, clocking an average of six hours and 25 minutes. The amount is at the low end of sleep averages documented among adults in industrialized societies in Europe and America.

“There’s this expectation that we should all be sleeping eight or nine hours a night and that if you took away modern technology people would be sleeping more,” said Yetish, who spent 10 months with the Tsimane. “But now for the first time we’re showing that’s not true.”

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 The Hadza of Tanzania are often the subject of studies as an analog for life in prehistoric times in Africa. Kiwi Explorer, Wikimedia Commons

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There is no evidence that these sleep patterns took a toll on people’s health. In fact, extensive studies have found that these groups have lower levels of obesity, blood pressure and atherosclerosis than people in industrialized societies, and higher levels of physical fitness.

The amount they slept varied with the seasons, with the study’s subjects averaging six hours in the summer and just under seven hours in the winter. Still, they rarely took naps.

“There’s this myth that humans used to take daily naps, but that now—because we’re so busy and we can’t get back to our homes—we suppress the naps,” Siegel said. “In fact, napping, is relatively rare in these groups.”

One recent history suggested that humans evolved to sleep in two shifts, a practice chronicled in early European documents. But the people Siegel’s team studied rarely woke for long after going to sleep.

Siegel chalks up the discrepancy between his findings and the historical record to a difference in latitudes. The groups of people studied live near the equator, as did our earliest ancestors; by contrast, early Europeans migrated from the equator to latitudes with much longer nights, which may have altered natural sleeping patterns, he said.

“Rather than saying modern culture has interfered with the natural sleep period, this is a case in which modern culture, with its electric light and temperature control, was able to restore the natural sleep period, which is a single period in traditional humans today and therefore likely in our evolutionary ancestors as well,” Siegel said.

Insomnia was so rare among those studied that the San and the Tsimane do not have a word for the disorder, which affects more than 20 percent of Americans.

The reason may have to do with sleep temperature. The people studied consistently slept during the nightly period of declining ambient temperature, Siegel found. Invariably, they woke up when temperatures, having fallen all night, hit the lowest point in the 24-hour period. This was the case even when the lowest temperature occurred after daybreak. The pattern resulted in roughly the same wake-up time each morning, a habit long recommended for treating sleep disorders.

“In most modern environments, people are sleeping in a fixed temperature, even if it is reduced from daytime levels,” Siegel said. “It may well be that falling environmental temperature is integral to sleep control in humans.”

The team was surprised to find that all three groups receive their maximal light exposure in the morning. This suggests that morning light may have the most important role in regulating mood and the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a group of neurons that serve as the brain’s clock. Morning light is uniquely effective in treating depression.

“Many of us may be suffering from the disruption of this ancient pattern,” Siegel said.

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Source: University of California subject press release.

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Read more in-depth articles about archaeology with a premium subscription to Popular Archaeology Magazine. 

In addition, the latest Popular Archaeology ebook is now available.

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This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!

It stands no more, but the first chapel ever to be built on the North American continent by early English settlers has its successor in a newly reconstructed rendition placed at the very spot where the original church stood within the historic James Fort at the Jamestown site, Virginia, over 400 years ago—and now, a recently installed cedar railing reconstruction frames the space within the church where four famous founders of Jamestown were buried.

Says Dave Givens, Senior Staff Archaeologist with the Jamestown Rediscovery project, the reconstructed cedar railing was designed to replicate as much as reasonably possible the original cedar railing that stood at the spot beginning in 1608. Archaeology and historic documents have served to inform the builders of the railing, just as they informed the builders regarding the mud-and-stud partial reconstruction of the original church ‘footprint’ detected by the archaeological excavations.

Secretary of the Jamestown colony William Strachey is recorded to have described the church, containing the chancel railing where Pocahontas and English tobacco grower John Rolfe presumably married in 1614, as having “a chancel in it of cedar”.

The recently excavated church ‘footprint’ dimensions and location matched those described for it in the historical record. Moreover, four burials uncovered in the chancel space provided further evidence of the ecclesiastical significance of the space. The skeletal remains within those burial spaces were identified as likely belonging to Robert Hunt, the first minister at Jamestown; Sir Ferdinando Wainman, the first English knight buried in North America; Captain Gabriel Archer; and Captain William West, a relative of Lord De La Warr. (See the videos below)  Burials of high status or important community members were often traditionally buried in the chancel spaces of churches during those times.

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 Excavation of the chancel burials at the James Fort site in historic Jamestown, Virginia. (Screenshot from YouTube video, see below)

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As the new reconstructions are designed to demarcate and represent the same construction that existed at the spot beginning in 1608, Jamestown Rediscovery archaeologists hope that they will afford the visiting public an authentically accurate experience for visualizing the place where so much history took place in the earliest years of English colonization of North America. 

For more information about the discoveries at Jamestown, go the Jamestown Rediscovery project website.

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 _________________________________________________________

Read more in-depth articles about archaeology with a premium subscription to Popular Archaeology Magazine. 

In addition, the latest Popular Archaeology ebook is now available.

 ______________________________________________

Travel and learn with Far Horizons.

____________________________________________

This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!