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UC team discovers rare warrior tomb filled with Bronze Age wealth and weapons

Posted on October 27, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—On the floor of the grave lay the skeleton of an adult male, stretched out on his back. Weapons lay to his left, and jewelry to his right.

Near the head and chest was a bronze sword, its ivory hilt covered in gold. A gold-hilted dagger lay beneath it. Still more weapons were found by the man’s legs and feet.

Gold cups rested on his chest and stomach, and near his neck was a perfectly preserved gold necklace with two pendants. By his right side and spread around his head were over one thousand beads of carnelian, amethyst, jasper, agate and gold. Nearby were four gold rings, and silver cups as well as bronze bowls, cups, jugs and basins.

The above describes what a University of Cincinnati-led international research team found this summer when excavating what was initially thought to be a Bronze Age house.

Instead, the team made a rich and rare discovery of an intact, Bronze Age warrior’s tomb dating back to about 1500 B.C., and that discovery is featured in The New York Times, in an article titled: A Warrior’s Grave at Pylos, Greece, Could Be a Gateway to Civilizations.

The find is so extraordinary that UC’s Shari Stocker, senior research associate in the Department of Classics, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, states: “This previously unopened shaft grave of a wealthy Mycenaean warrior, dating back 3,500 years, is one of the most magnificent displays of prehistoric wealth discovered in mainland Greece in the past 65 years.”

Stocker co-leads the team that unearthed the undisturbed shaft tomb, along with Jack Davis, UC’s Carl W. Blegen Chair in Greek Archaeology. Other team members include UC faculty, staff specialists and students, some of whom have worked in the area around the present-day city of Pylos on the southwest coast of Greece for the last quarter century as part of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project. That UC-based effort is dedicated to uncovering the pre-history and history of the Bronze Age center known as the Palace of Nestor, an extensive complex and a site linked to Homeric legend. Though the palace was destroyed by fire sometime around 1200 B.C., it is nevertheless the best-preserved Bronze Age palace on the Greek mainland.

It was UC archaeologist Carl Blegen, along with Konstantinos Kourouniotis, director of the National Archaeological Museum, who initially uncovered the remains of the famed Palace of Nestor in an olive grove in 1939. Located near the present-day city of Pylos, the palace was a destination in Homer’s “Odyssey,” where sacrifices were said to be offered on its beaches. The king who ruled at the Palace of Nestor controlled a vast territory that was divided into more than 20 districts with capital towns and numerous small settlements.

Explains Stocker, “This latest find is not the grave of the legendary King Nestor, who headed a contingent of Greek forces at Troy in Homer’s ‘Iliad.’ Nor is it the grave of his father, Neleus. This find may be even more important because the warrior pre-dates the time of Nestor and Neleus by, perhaps, 200 or 300 years. That means he was likely an important figure at a time when this part of Greece was being indelibly shaped by close contact with Crete, Europe’s first advanced civilization.”

Thus, the tomb may have held a powerful warrior or king – or even a trader or a raider – who died at about 30 to 35 years of age but who helped to lay the foundations of the Mycenaean culture that later flourished in the region.

Davis speculates, “Whoever he was, he seems to have been celebrated for his trading or fighting in nearby island of Crete and for his appreciation of the more-sophisticated and delicate are of the Minoan civilization (found on Crete), with which he was buried.”

POTENTIAL WEALTH OF INFORMATION

The team found the tomb while working in the area of the Palace of Nestor, seeking clues as to how the palace and its rulers came to control an area encompassing all of modern Messenia in western Greece and supporting more than 50,000 inhabitants during the Bronze Age.

Davis says that researchers were there to try and figure out how the Palace of Nestor became a center of power and when this rise in power began, questions they now think the tomb may help answer.

Given the magnitude of this find, it may be necessary to rethink when Plyos and the wider area around it began to flourish. It may have been earlier than previously thought since, somehow, whether via trade or force (e.g., raiding), its inhabitants had acquired the valuable objects found within the tomb.

Many of the tomb’s objects were made in nearby Crete and show a strong Minoan style and technique unknown in mainland Greece in the 15th century BC.

The same would likely have been true of the warrior’s dwelling during this lifetime. He would have lived on the hilltop citadel of nearby Englianos at a time when great mansions were first being built with walls of cut-stone blocks (vs. uncut rock and stones) in the style then associated with nearby Mediterranean Island of Crete and its Minoan culture, their walls decorated with paintings influenced by earlier Minoan wall paintings.

The weapons of bronze found within the tomb included a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle covered with gold.

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Sharon Stocker, left, and Jack Davis, right, have worked in the Pylos region of Greece for 25 years. They led a team of 45 archaeologists and experts in various specialties as well as students during this summer’s excavations. Stocker stands in the shaft tomb the team uncovered. Credit: University of Cincinnati, Pylos Excavations

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WEALTH OF JEWELS AND WEAPONRY

A remarkable store of riches was deposited in the tomb with the warrior at the time of his death. The mere fact that the vessels in the tomb are of metal (vs. ceramic pottery) is a strong indication of his great wealth.

“It is truly amazing that no ceramic vessels were included among the grave gifts. All the cups, pitchers and basins we found were of metal: bronze, silver and gold. He clearly could afford to hold regular pots of ceramic in disdain,” according to Stocker.

This member of the elite was accompanied in the afterlife by about 50 seal-stones carved with intricate Minoan designs of goddesses as well as depictions of bulls and human bull jumpers soaring over their horns. Four gold rings in the tomb contain fine Minoan carvings. A plaque of carved ivory with a representation of a griffon with huge wings lay between the man’s legs. Nearby was a bronze mirror with an ivory handle. Archaeological conservator Alexandros Zokos was essential partner in the removal, cleaning and preservation of the finds from the grave.

The weapons of bronze within the tomb include a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle, several daggers, a spearhead, along with the already-mentioned sword and dagger with gold pommels.

Other grave gifts originally rested above the dead warrior atop a coffin of wood which later collapsed, spilling a crushing load of objects down on the skeleton – and making the job of excavation difficult and slow.

The gifts atop the coffin included bronze jugs; a large, bronze basin; thin bands of bronze, probably from the warrior’s suit of body armor; many wild boar’s teeth from the warrior’s helmet.

In combination with this weaponry, the discovery of so much jewelry with a male burial challenges the commonly held belief that these apparently “feminine” adornments and offerings accompanied only wealthy women to the hereafter.

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This gold ring with a Cretan bull-jumping scene was one of four solid-gold rings found in the tomb. This number is more than found with any other single burial elsewhere in Greece. Credit Jennifer Stephens

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The weapons of bronze found within the tomb included a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle covered with gold. Credit: University of Cincinnati, Pylos Excavations

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PREVIOUSLY UNEXPLORED FIELD

What would eventually become the successful excavation of the tomb began on the team’s very first day of its field work in May 2015, conducted in a previously unexplored field near the Palace of Nestor. They immediately found one of the four walls of the warrior’s grave.

“We put a trench in this one spot because three stones were visible on the surface,” says Davis, adding, “At first, we expected to find the remains of a house. We expected that this was the corner of a room of a house, but quickly realized that it was the tops of the walls of a stone-lined grave shaft.”

In the end, the shaft measured about 5 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long. It took the team about two weeks to clear the shaft before “we hit bronze,” says Stocker. At that point, they realized they might have an exceptional prize: an undisturbed grave shaft, never stripped by looters. She explains, “The fact that we had not encountered any objects for almost a meter indicated that whatever was at the bottom had been sealed for a long time.”

Stocker and Alison Fields, a UC graduate student of classics, did most of the actual excavation because their smaller size allowed them to work more easily and carefully around the tomb and its many precious objects.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Both Stocker and Davis say it was good luck to discover this intact grave. Given the rarity of the find, it’s unlikely to be repeated. “It’s almost as if the occupant wants his story to be told,” Davis says.

And that story will continue to unfold. The UC team and others are studying the artifacts in detail, with all artifacts remaining in Greece and their final disposition determined by the Greek Archaeological Service. Former UC anthropologist Lynne Schepartz, now of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, will study the skeletal remains.

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RESEARCH PARTNERS AND SUPPORT

The excavation was organized through the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati, with sponsorship from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and with permits from the Greek Ministry of Culture. Research at Pylos by the University of Cincinnati in 2013 was supported by the Institute for Aegean Prehistory, the Louise Taft Semple Fund of UC’s Department of Classics and private donors including Phocion Potamianos, a Greek-American; James H. Ottaway, Jr., trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; and Robert McCabe, president of the Board of Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and his wife, Dina McCabe.

Davis and Stocker also give credit and thanks to their team, the “very helpful local office of the Ministry of Culture of Greece and guards who provided security; Evangelia Militsi, director of antiquities for the Messenia office of the Ministry of Culture, and Evangelia Malapani, curator of antiquities.”

CATALOGUE OF OBJECTS FOUND WITHIN THE WARRIOR TOMB

GOLD

Four complete solid-gold seal rings to be worn on a human finger. This number is more than found with any single burial elsewhere in Greece.
Two squashed gold cups and a silver cup with a gold rim
One unique necklace of square box-shaped golden wires, more than 30 inches long with two gold pendants decorated with ivy leaves.
Numerous gold beads, all in perfect condition.

SILVER

Six silver cups.

BRONZE

One three-foot long sword, with an ivory hilt overlaid with gold in a rare technique imitating embroidery (found at warrior’s left chest).
Under this sword was a smaller dagger with a gold hilt employing the same technique.
Other bronze weapons by his legs and feet.
Bronze cups, bowls, amphora, jugs and a basin, some with gold, some with silver trim.

SEAL STONES

More than 50 seal stones, with intricate carvings in Minoan style showing goddesses, altars, reeds, lions and bulls, some with bull-jumpers soaring over the bull’s horns – all in Minoan style and probably made in Crete.

IVORY

Several pieces of carved ivory, one with a griffon with large wings and another depicting a lion attacking a griffon.
Six decorated ivory combs.

PRECIOUS STONE BEADS

An astonishing hoard of over 1000 beads, most with drill holes for stringing together. The beads are of carnelian, amethyst, jasper and agate. Some beads appear to be decorations from a burial shroud of woven fabric, suggested by several square inches of cross woven threads which survived in the grave for 3,500 years.

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Research backs human role in extinction of mammoths, other mammals

Posted on October 26, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING—Radiocarbon analysis of the decline and extinction of large mammals in the Americas lends support to the idea that hunting by humans led to the animals’ demise—and backs the generally accepted understanding of when humans arrived in, and how they colonized, the Western Hemisphere.

Those findings by University of Wyoming researchers are reported this week in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a major scientific journal. The study was conducted by Professor Todd Surovell and graduate student Spencer Pelton in UW’s Department of Anthropology; Professor Richard Anderson-Sprecher in the Department of Statistics; and Assistant Professor Adam Myers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Their work supports a hypothesis forwarded in 1973 by well-known geoscientist Paul Martin that the chronology of the extinction of animals such as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses and ground sloths in the Americas could be used to map the spread of humans through the New World.

“The heavy ecological footprint of human societies throughout prehistory is becoming increasingly apparent through a variety of environmental (indicators) independent of the archeological record,” the researchers wrote. “Past human societies have disrupted ecological communities in dramatic ways for many tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.”

The study involved compiling radiocarbon dates from fossils of now-extinct animals from North and South America, and looking at how those dates correspond with initial evidence of human colonization. The researchers found that, as Martin predicted, decline and extinction of the large mammals began between 13,300-15,000 years ago in Alaska and areas near the Bering Strait; between 12,900-13,200 years ago in the contiguous United States; and between 12,600-13,900 years ago in South America.

That supports the generally accepted understanding of how humans colonized the Americas: first, that they crossed from Siberia to Alaska across a Bering Strait land bridge; and then that they moved southward across North America and into South America. Hunting of the native large mammals is thought to have fueled rapid human population growth and expansion.

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Participants in the University of Wyoming’s Archaeological Field School work at the site of a mammoth kill near LaPrele Creek in Converse County, Wyo., during the past summer. A new study by UW researchers supports the hypothesis that hunting by humans led to the extinction of mammoths and other large mammals in the Americas between 12,600 and 15,000 years ago. Credit: UW Photo

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A number of hypotheses have been forwarded to explain the extinction of those animals. The “overkill hypothesis” connects their demise directly to overhunting by humans, and that is supported by the north-to-south extinction trend observed in the new study.

“… (T)he north to south time-transgressive pattern is striking, and, barring significant new data, it would be difficult to reconcile this pattern with extinction hypotheses that invoke a single climatic, ecological or catastrophic extinction mechanism across the entirety of the Americas,” the researchers wrote.

Still, they acknowledge that the issue isn’t completely settled. They note that the radiocarbon results show that the initial decline of large mammals in the far north began earlier than has been estimated by Martin and others, pointing to human colonization earlier than the current archeological record suggests; and that there is some evidence of isolated human populations in North America as early as 15,500 years ago, before significant declines in large mammal populations. Further study is needed to resolve those issues, the researchers say.

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

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DNA from ancient baby remains in Alaska supports Bering land bridge layover

Posted on October 26, 2015 by No Author -

SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 26, 2015 – University of Utah scientists deciphered maternal genetic material from two babies buried together at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago. They found the infants had different mothers and were the northernmost known kin to two lineages of Native Americans found farther south throughout North and South America.

By showing that both genetic lineages lived so far north so long ago, the study supports the “Beringian standstill model.” It says that Native Americans descended from people who migrated from Asia to Beringia – the vast Bering land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska – and then spent up to 10,000 years in Beringia before moving rapidly into the Americas beginning at least 15,000 years ago.

“These infants are the earliest human remains in northern North America, and they carry distinctly Native American lineages,” says University of Utah anthropology professor Dennis O’Rourke, senior author of the paper set for online publication the week of Oct. 26 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We see diversity that is not present in modern Native American populations of the north and we see it at a fairly early date. This is evidence there was substantial genetic variation in the Beringian population before any of them moved south.”

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This is the Upward Sun River archaeological site in Alaska. Credit Ben Potter, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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Another theory was that the two Native Americans lineages evolved as the people moved south and dispersed, not while they still were in Beringia, says Justin Tackney, the new study’s first author and a University of Utah anthropology doctoral student. But finding those lineages in the infants only a few thousand years after the migration south began indicates those lineages already were present before the migration started.

“It supports the Beringian standstill theory in that if they [the infants] represent a population that descended from the earlier Beringian population, it helps confirm the extent of genetic diversity in that source population,” O’Rourke says. “You don’t see any of these lineages that are distinctly Native American in Asia, even Siberia, so there had to be a period of isolation for these distinctive Native American lineages to have evolved away from their Asian ancestors. We believe that was in Beringia.”

The burial of ancient infants is rare. One was a 6- to 12-week-old baby; the other a stillborn or preterm 30-week fetus. The discovery of the infant burials first was reported in the same journal this past November. They are among human remains at only eight sites in North America older than 8,000 years and from which researchers obtained mitochondrial DNA – genetic information inherited only from mothers. The infants are the northernmost of all those remains and of the two lineages they represent.

In the eight sites, “we find all five of the major lineages of Native Americans,” Tackney says. “That indicates that all were present in the early population in Beringia that gave rise to all modern Native Americans.”

Sequencing DNA from the burials of Upward Sun River

The Upward Sun River ancient campsite was discovered in 2006 in the Tanana River valley about 50 miles southeast of Fairbanks. The area once was part of Beringia. The land bridge between Asia and Alaska existed when sea levels were low during the last Ice Age from 28,000 years ago to at least 18,000 years ago.

In 2010, a team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks anthropologist Ben Potter discovered the remains of a cremated 3-year-old child buried near the hearth of a residential structure. The child’s DNA couldn’t be recovered from the charred remains.

In 2013, Potter’s team found the remains of two more buried infants beneath the first. They had’t been cremated. Potter says it’s hard to tell how the infants died. Potter, who co-authored the new study, asked O’Rourke to analyze their mitochondrial DNA.

O’Rourke and Tackney worked with University of Utah geneticists to sequence the mitochondrial DNA of the two infants – known as USR1 and USR2 for Upward Sun River. Mitochondrial DNA is located in mitochondria, or the power plants of cells.

From fragments of skull bone, the researchers read 58.7 million DNA sequences from USR1 and 55.8 million from USR2. From those, the Utah scientists obtained 20,004 high-quality mitochondrial DNA sequences for USR1 and 32,979 for USR2.

“We were able to obtain the entire mitochondrial genome [genetic blueprint] sequence for each of them, as opposed to just a partial sequence,” O’Rourke says.

Infants related to two native lineages throughout the Americas

Potter says the new findings help in “understanding the genetic diversity among very early Beringian populations that connects them in many ways to Native Americans in both North and South America.”

The researchers identified infant USR1 as belonging to Native American lineage C1b, while infant USR2 is part of a more common native lineage known as B2. (Native American lineages begin with the letters A, B, C, D or X.)

“It’s not common to find infants buried together that are not related maternally,” O’Rourke says. “It raises questions about the social structure and mortuary practices of these early people,” including whether the babies had a common father.

Lineage C1 (most remains aren’t identified to the subgroup C1b level) is found most often among the Pima and Hualapai Indians of Arizona, the Delta Yuman of California, and six other tribes, including the Ignaciano in Bolivia, the extinct Tainos in Puerto Rico and a group represented by 700-year-old bones at Norris Farms in Illinois.

Lineage B2 is found most often in 37 tribes throughout the Americas, including the Yakama, Wishram, Northern Paiute-Shoshoni, Navajo, Hualapai (which also carries C1 genes), Zuni and Jemez in North America and the Quecha and Aymara in Peru. The B2 lineage also was common among the U.S. Southwest’s ancient Fremont and Anasazi.

The genetic data indicate that the most recent common ancestor of the C1b lineage existed at least 12,854 years ago, and the most recent common ancestor of the B2 lineage existed at least 12,024 years ago. O’Rourke suspects the real times were even earlier, but that nonetheless both 11,500-year-old infants were at or near the root of their respective genealogical trees.

“It may well be that the population represented by Upward Sun River is indicative of many such isolated populations distributed across Beringia, each of which may have contributed migrants to that early American Indian dispersal, and each may have been slightly genetically different from the others,” O’Rourke says.

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This map shows the location of the Upward Sun River site in Alaska where the remains of two infants, Upward Sun River individuals 1 and 2, were found in an 11,500-year-old burial. A new University of Utah analysis shows the infants belong to two genetic groups or lineages known as B2 and C1. The maps shows other Native American groups throughout the Americas that are part of the same lineages. Credit Ben Potter, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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Native lineages spread unevenly in the Americas

Modern tribal populations in northern North America show little mitochondrial DNA diversity, O’Rourke says. Why did lineages that once occupied the subarctic vanish there but show elsewhere in the Americas? And why aren’t the five major lineages spread evenly across the Americas?

“The reason is changes in population size and rates of population migration,” O’Rourke says. “In small populations, some lineages just get lost and don’t get passed on, and in others they become established and more common.”

“Studying the DNA of ancient individuals is important in researching how the Western Hemisphere was populated,” Tackney says. “Studying the genetics of these infants who died 11,500 years ago in what is now central Alaska helps answer questions of who these people were and how they are related to modern native populations.”

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The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and University of Utah, and supported by representatives of two native groups in the Upward Sun River area: the Healy Lake Tribal Council and Tanana Chiefs Conference.

O’Rourke, Tackney and Potter conducted the study with University of Utah senior lab specialists Michael Powers of the DNA sequencing core facility and W. Scott Watkins, in human genetics, and Derek Warner, sequencing facility director. Other co-authors were University of Kansas anthropologist Jennifer Raff, a former Utah postdoctoral fellow; archaeologist Joshua Reuther, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks; and bioarchaeologist Joel Irish, of Liverpool John Moores University.

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

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New insights on the wooden weapons from the Paleolithic site of Schöningen

Posted on October 23, 2015 by No Author -

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen in north-central Germany is famous 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. In a recent study, a team of scientists from Germany and Switzerland document results of an ongoing analysis of the nine spears, one lance, a double pointed stick, and a burnt stick dating to the Holsteinian, c. 300 kyr. Macroscopic and microscopic analyses, as well as studies of thin sections, have now contributed to a better understanding of the manufacture of the wooden weapons.

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The Schöningen excavation site. Tangelnfoto, Wikimedia Commons

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Spear 6 in situ. P. Pfarr NLD, Wikimedia Commons

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Spear 8 in situ. P. Pfarr NLD, Wikimedia Commons

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In general, the researchers report that the spears are extremely well-preserved and show no or little sign of taphonomic alteration, although some of the weapons are broken and parts were slightly moved, likely through water action. Most significantly, the excellent preservation conditions have provided considerable information on the operational sequence of production. Specifically, the hunters selected thin trunks of spruce or pine and initially stripped off the bark. Traces of cutting, scraping, and smoothing can be observed on the spear surfaces in detail. In the case of one of the artifacts, designated ‘spear X’, repeated use of the weapon is implied by apparent re-sharpening of the tip.

The researchers also suggest that analyses of the wood anatomy provides information on climatic conditions at the time of production, and contribute to a better understanding of the development of the site.

The detailed study report is published as an article in press in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Source: Edited and adapted from the subject abstract and other information sources.

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

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The Sphinx that came to Philadelphia

Posted on October 19, 2015 by No Author -

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

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The environment of the Cantabrian Region in the course of 35,000 years is reconstructed

Posted on October 16, 2015 by No Author -

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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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!

Shift in weaning age supports hunting-induced extinction of Siberian woolly mammoths

Posted on October 15, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR—Chemical clues about weaning age embedded in the tusks of juvenile Siberian woolly mammoths suggest that hunting, rather than climate change, was the primary cause of the elephant-like animal’s extinction.

Woolly mammoths disappeared from Siberia and North America about 10,000 years ago, along with other giant mammals that went extinct at the end of the last glacial period. Current competing hypotheses for the mammoth’s extinction point to human hunting or climate change, possibly combining in a deadly one-two punch.

Despite decades of study, the issue remains unresolved and hotly debated. But two University of Michigan paleontologists may have found an ingenious way around the logjam.

U-M doctoral student Michael Cherney and his adviser, Museum of Paleontology Director Daniel Fisher, say an isotopic signature in 15 tusks from juvenile Siberian woolly mammoths suggests that the weaning age, which is the time when a calf stops nursing, decreased by about three years over a span of roughly 30,000 years leading up to the woolly mammoth’s extinction.

Climate-related nutritional stress is associated with delayed weaning in modern elephants, while hunting pressure is known to accelerate maturation in animals and would likely result in earlier weaning, according to Cherney and Fisher.

“This shift to earlier weaning age in the time leading up to woolly mammoth extinction provides compelling evidence of hunting pressure and adds to a growing body of life-history data that are inconsistent with the idea that climate changes drove the extinctions of many large ice-age mammals,” said Cherney, who is conducting the work for his doctoral dissertation in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

“These findings will not end the debate, but we hope they will show people the promise of a new approach toward solving a question that, so far, has just led to divided camps,” said Cherney, who is scheduled to present his findings Oct. 15 at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Dallas.

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The scholarly debate on what caused the extinction of the woolly mammoth has revolved around the competing hypotheses of climate change and human hunting. Flying Puffin, Wikimedia Commons

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A fragment of a woolly mammoth tusk. Bone from the tusks of mammoths have been sampled and tested for study to help resoved the mystery of the mammoth extinction. James Petts, Wikimedia Commons

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The study was made possible by the extensive collection of Siberian mammoth tusks that Fisher has amassed over the past 20 years. The specimens–collected and exported under permits from the Russian government with the help of colleagues in Russia, France and the Netherlands–include about three dozen juvenile tusks.

“We have known for about a decade that valuable information about weaning age could be extracted from these tusks,” said Fisher, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Fisher also led the team that recovered the partial remains of a mammoth this month near Chelsea, Michigan.

“But this is the first time we’ve had data from enough individuals, and covering a wide enough range of geologic ages, to show a pattern through time,” Fisher said. “This is a milestone in the development of our approach, and it shows that the extinction problem is solvable.”

Fifteen tusks from individuals ranging in age from 3 to 12 were analyzed. The 3-year-old’s tusk is about 10 inches long, while the 12-year-old’s tusk is about 30 inches long.

As part of the study, Cherney measured the isotopic composition of tail hairs from a mother-calf pair of African elephants at the Toledo Zoo. The elephant calf was in the process of being weaned from mother’s milk, which enabled Cherney to observe the isotopic effects of nursing and the long transition to a fully solid diet for a close relative of mammoths.

Cherney compared the ratio of the two stable isotopes of nitrogen, nitrogen-14 and nitrogen-15, from proteins in elephant tail hairs. He found that as the proportion of solid food in the elephant calf’s diet increased, the ratio of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 steadily dropped. This pattern had been previously documented in other mammals, including humans, but never in elephants.

Armed with this isotopic weaning signature, he then turned to the mammoth tusks. CT scans enabled Cherney to identify annual growth increments–which resemble a tree’s annual growth rings–in the tusks. Samples for each year of growth were collected, and nitrogen isotopes from collagen proteins were measured.

The isotopic ratios from the calves’ early years of life consistently displayed a trend toward lower nitrogen-15 values, reflecting the decreased contribution of milk to the overall diet, Cherney said.

“It was the same pattern we saw in the Toledo Zoo elephant calf,” he said.

The gradual decrease in nitrogen-15 was followed, in most cases, by an abrupt increase that Cherney and Fisher interpret as a sign of short-term nutritional stress during the first year after being fully weaned.

Radiocarbon dating of the 15 Siberian tusks showed they span the period from about 40,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago.

Cherney and Fisher showed that over the span of 30,000 years, the average weaning age decreased from age 8 to age 5.

The current weaning study is part of a much larger, decades-long effort by Fisher and a series of graduate students to extract “life history” information preserved in fossil tusks. Biologists use the term life history to refer to the full range of changes an organism experiences in the course of its growth and development.

“I started studying tusks 30 years ago and realized early on that life histories are the key,” Fisher said. “Nobody else has used tusks, which are after all a record of life and growth, as a source of data in this way.”

Over the years, Fisher and his students have shown that mammoth tusks hold life-history information about growth rates, age of sexual maturation, spacing of pregnancies, and weaning.

Because the timing of those life-history milestones can be affected by various environmental pressures, the tusks provide a way to “look directly at how the animals themselves were impacted by, and responded to, changes in their environment,” Cherney said.

Often, environmental changes have predictable effects on life histories. By analyzing evidence from mammoth tusks, Fisher and his students can test those predictions.

“The strength of life-history analyses for resolving the extinction debate rests in the knowledge that the age of final weaning is a life-history landmark that is expected to change differently in response to predation and climate-related nutritional stress,” said Cherney, who will speak during the Romer Prize Session at the paleontology meeting. “Our analysis sets up a test of competing hypotheses, and our preliminary results are consistent with expectations under hunting pressure.”

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The work was funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society and CRDF Global. Cherney and Fisher plan to submit their findings for publication in a scientific journal.

Source: Subject University of Michigan press release.

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Our ancestors probably didn’t get 8 hours a night, either

Posted on October 15, 2015 by No Author -

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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Archaeologists memorialize the historic chancel burials at Jamestown

Posted on October 13, 2015 by No Author -

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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Mysterious Ancient Maya Mural Keeps Its Secrets

Posted on October 9, 2015 by No Author -

Archaeologists have uncovered some inexplicable finds in a rare case involving the discovery of a Maya wall painting, or mural, at a shrine complex at the ancient site of Tulix Mul in northern Belize.

Buried anciently under a fill of large uncut stones at the beginning of the Maya Late Classic period, a vaulted room within a monumental structure features a plastered wall that hides two successive wall paintings, an unusual find for archaeologists investigating Maya remains. The discovery was first made in 2013 as a team of archaeologists, students and volunteers under the Blue Creek Archaeological Project with the Maya Research Program (MRP) and the University of Texas at Tyler began excavating a structure that showed intrusion by a looter’s trench at the site of Tulix Mul, which is associated with another site known as Nojol Nah, a site where MRP has been excavating for years. Although excavations at this structure revealed the plastered, vaulted room, the biggest prize was the evidence of the wall painting, hidden beneath the plaster. Through time, small fragments had exfoliated from the plaster, revealing the underlying presence of a polychrome, fine-line mural. The mural style appeared generally similar to that found years before by other archaeologists at San Bartolo in Guatemala. Like San Bartolo, there are only a few other known Maya murals found in Central America. Aside from their artistic beauty, they have provided significant new information about Maya art, religious concepts, trade and interaction. The Tulix Mul mural may prove to be equally informative, especially as the site investigators suspect that another rubble-filled room (still unexcavated) may also contain a mural.

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View of Tulix Mul from the south. Courtesy Maya Research Program

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Site map of Tulix Mul, with structure featuring the mural indicated as ‘F’. From the 23rd Annual Report (see below), Maya Research Program and Center for Social Science Research.

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Above and below: View into the vaulted room, now excavated, containing the mural, which includes a bench below and in front of it (currently still mostly plasted over by the ancients). Courtesy Maya Research Program

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Closeup detail view of mural thus far exposed. Courtesy Maya Research Program

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But after several seasons of working at the site of the mural, only traces of the mural still remain visible. That’s because of the delicate condition of the murals beneath their overlying plaster shroud, and the effects of the environment decaying the associated material through time. Efforts thus far have produced mixed results.

“We were very pleased to have stabilized and conserved the mural at Tulix Mul,” said Colleen Hanratty, one of the leading archaeologists with the MRP. “But we were not able to reveal more of the secondary mural below the first due to it’s very unstable nature.”

Thus, ongoing work at the mural site will require patience and special attention. Pieta Greaves, the on-site conservator of the mural, reports that because of the fragmentary condition of the visible images, continuing work will “require a specialist to further determine the nature of the images.”*

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Above and below: GigaPan technology, a robotic camera mount system used to create super-high resolution panoramic photographs (based on similar technology used by NASA for the Mars rovers), was applied to create views that made these images of the exposed fragmentary portions of the mural possible. From the 23rd Annual Report (see below), credit Texas A&M University’s Center for Heritage Conservation, GigaPan, and the Maya Research Program and Center for Social Science Research.

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In the meantime, scientists are scratching their heads over the presence of incised symbolic or image markings on the plaster that covers the wall painting. The ‘graffiti’, as they are calling it, is clearly ancient, as it was obviously incised before the vaulted room containing the mural was filled in by stones at the beginning of the Late Classic period. “Due to the hardness of the plaster and the cleanness of the lines,” reports Greaves, “it is likely that a lithic tool would have been used to create the designs.”*

The images, by interpretation, include an unknown animal and fish, and a crouched figure looking over a representation of the sun at what appears to be a monster. The other images remain without interpretation and it is not known how much of the entire graffiti work has been lost through time by plaster loss.

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A graffiti scene showing what has been interpreted as a possible crouched figure looking over the sun towards a monster. From the 23rd Annual Report (see below), Maya Research Program and Center for Social Science Research.

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In time, however, the underlying mural, once uncovered and more thoroughly studied, could have important implications for understanding Tulix Mul and by extension the behavior of the Maya elite generally. Reported Thomas Guderjan, the Director of the Blue Creek Archaeological Project, the mural “was above and behind a bench viewable from the courtyard and would frame the figure of the noble seated on the bench as he was approached…….a very powerful statement.”*

See more about the wall paintings in the January 2014 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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*The 23rd Annual Report of the Blue Creek Archaeological Project, Thomas H. Guderjan and C. Colleen Hanratty, Ed., Maya Research Program and the Center for Social Science Research, April 2015.

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Ancient genome from Africa sequenced for the first time

Posted on October 8, 2015 by No Author -

University of Cambridge—The first ancient human genome from Africa to be sequenced has revealed that a wave of migration back into Africa from Western Eurasia around 3,000 years ago was up to twice as significant as previously thought, and affected the genetic make-up of populations across the entire African continent.

The genome was taken from the skull of a man buried face-down 4,500 years ago in a cave called Mota in the highlands of Ethiopia – a cave cool and dry enough to preserve his DNA for thousands of years. Previously, ancient genome analysis has been limited to samples from northern and arctic regions.

The latest study is the first time an ancient human genome has been recovered and sequenced from Africa, the source of all human genetic diversity. The findings are published today in the journal Science.

The ancient genome predates a mysterious migratory event which occurred roughly 3,000 years ago, known as the ‘Eurasian backflow’, when people from regions of Western Eurasia such as the Near East and Anatolia suddenly flooded back into the Horn of Africa.

The ancient genome enabled researchers to run a millennia-spanning genetic comparison and determine that these Western Eurasians were closely related to the Early Neolithic farmers who had brought agriculture to Europe 4,000 years earlier.

By comparing the ancient genome to DNA from modern Africans, the team has been able to show that not only do East African populations today have as much as 25% Eurasian ancestry from this event, but that African populations in all corners of the continent – from the far West to the South – have at least 5% of their genome traceable to the Eurasian migration.

Researchers describe the findings as evidence that the ‘backflow’ event was of far greater size and influence than previously thought. The massive wave of migration was perhaps equivalent to over a quarter of the then population of the Horn of Africa, which hit the area and then dispersed genetically across the whole continent.

“Roughly speaking, the wave of West Eurasian migration back into the Horn of Africa could have been as much as 30% of the population that already lived there – and that, to me, is mind-blowing. The question is: what got them moving all of a sudden?” said Dr Andrea Manica, senior author of the study from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

Previous work on ancient genetics in Africa had involved trying to work back through the genomes of current populations, attempting to eliminate modern influences. “With an ancient genome, we have a direct window into the distant past. One genome from one individual can provide a picture of an entire population,” said Manica.

The cause of the West Eurasian migration back into Africa is currently a mystery, with no obvious climatic reasons. Archaeological evidence does, however, show the migration coincided with the arrival of Near Eastern crops into East Africa such as wheat and barley, suggesting the migrants helped develop new forms of agriculture in the region.

The researchers say it’s clear that the Eurasian migrants were direct descendants of, or a very close population to, the Neolithic farmers that brought agriculture from the Near East into West Eurasia around 7,000 years ago, and then migrated into the Horn of Africa some 4,000 years later. “It’s quite remarkable that genetically-speaking this is the same population that left the Near East several millennia previously,” said Eppie Jones, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin who led the laboratory work to sequence the genome.

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Above and below: Mota cave, where the burial was located. Credit Kathryn and John Arthur

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Archaeologists outside the entrance to the Mota cave, where the remains containing the ancient genome were found. Credit Kathryn and John Arthur

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Inside Mota cave – excavation of the rock cairn under which the burial was found. Cedit Kathryn and John Arthur

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While the genetic make-up of the Near East has changed completely over the last few thousand years, the closest modern equivalents to these Neolithic migrants are Sardinians, probably because Sardinia is an isolated island, says Jones. “The famers found their way to Sardinia and created a bit of a time capsule. Sardinian ancestry is closest to the ancient Near East.”

“Genomes from this migration seeped right across the continent, way beyond East Africa, from the Yoruba on the western coast to the Mbuti in the heart of the Congo – who show as much as 7% and 6% of their genomes respectively to be West Eurasian,” said Marcos Gallego Llorente, first author of the study, also from Cambridge’s Zoology Department.

“Africa is a total melting pot. We know that the last 3,000 years saw a complete scrambling of population genetics in Africa. So being able to get a snapshot from before these migration events occurred is a big step,” Gallego Llorente said.

The ancient Mota genome allows researchers to jump to before another major African migration: the Bantu expansion, when speakers of an early Bantu language flowed out of West Africa and into central and southern areas around 3,000 years ago. Manica says the Bantu expansion may well have helped carry the Eurasian genomes to the continent’s furthest corners.

The researchers also identified genetic adaptations for living at altitude, and a lack of genes for lactose tolerance – all genetic traits shared by the current populations of the Ethiopian highlands. In fact, the researchers found that modern inhabitants of the area highlands are direct descendants of the Mota man.

Finding high-quality ancient DNA involves a lot of luck, says Dr Ron Pinhasi, co-senior author from University College Dublin. “It’s hard to get your hands on remains that have been suitably preserved. The denser the bone, the more likely you are to find DNA that’s been protected from degradation, so teeth are often used, but we found an even better bone – the petrous.” The petrous bone is a thick part of the temporal bone at the base of the skull, just behind the ear.

“The sequencing of ancient genomes is still so new, and it’s changing the way we reconstruct human origins,” added Manica. “These new techniques will keep evolving, enabling us to gain an ever-clearer understanding of who our earliest ancestors were.”

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The study was conducted by an international team of researchers, with permission from the Ethiopia’s Ministry of Culture and Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage.

Source: Subject press release of the University of Cambridge

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Human Ancestor Candidate Sported Hands and Feet Much Like Modern Humans

Posted on October 6, 2015 by No Author -

After extensive study of the hand and foot fossils of the newly discovered species H. naledi, 1550 fossil elements of which were recovered in 2013 in the Rising Star cave system in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage region of South Africa, scientists are suggesting that this hominin may have been uniquely adapted for both tree climbing and walking as dominant forms of movement, while also being capable of precise manual manipulation.

The research was conducted by a team of international scientists associated with the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, home of the Rising Star Expedition team that discovered the largest hominin find yet made on the African continent.

According to the researchers, when considered together, these papers, published in the journal Nature and entitled The foot of Homo naledi and The hand of Homo naledi, relate a decoupling of the upper and lower limb function in H. naledi, and provide an important insight into the skeletal form and function that may have characterized early members of the Homo genus.

The foot of Homo naledi

Lead author William Harcourt-Smith and colleagues describe the H. naledi foot based on 107 foot elements from the Dinaledi Chamber, including a well preserved adult right foot. The 107 elements also included assorted parts provisionally assigned to two other adults and a juvenile. They show the H. naledi foot shares many features with a modern human foot, indicating it was well-adapted for standing and walking on two feet. However, the authors note it differs in having more curved toe bones (proximal phalanges), indicating a significant tree-climbing capacity, a characteristic more associated with more ‘primitive’ homins and other primates.

“It was a striding long-distance traveler with an arched foot and a non-grasping big toe with subtle differences from humans today in having somewhat more curved toes and a reduced arch,” said lead study author Jeremy DeSilva of Dartmouth College. “It looks like what the foot of Homo erectus might look like. H. erectus is the earliest human with body proportions similar to our own, with long legs, short arms. It might be closely related to H. erectus, but the brain is smaller and it has a Lucy-like shoulder with curved fingers. This is a new combination that we haven’t seen before.”

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The Homo naledi hand and foot were uniquely adapted for both tree climbing and walking upright. Credit Peter Schmid and William Harcourt-Smith | Wits University

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The hand of Homo naledi

Another lead author, Tracy Kivell of the University of Kent and colleagues, describe the H. naledi hand based on nearly 150 hand bones from the Dinaledi Chamber, including a nearly complete adult right hand (missing only one wrist bone) of a single individual, which is a rare find in the human fossil record.

The H. naledi hand reveals a unique combination of anatomy that has not been found in any other fossil human before. The wrist bones and thumb show anatomical features that are shared with Neanderthals and modern humans and suggest powerful grasping and the ability to use stone tools.

However, the finger bones are more curved than most early fossil human species, such as Lucy’s species Australopithecus afarensis, suggesting that H. naledi still used their hands for climbing in the trees. This mix of human-like features in combination with more primitive features demonstrates that the H. naledi hand was both specialized for possible complex tool-use activities, as well as for climbing locomotion.

“The tool-using features of the H. naledi hand in combination with its small brain size has interesting implications for what cognitive requirements might be needed to make and use tools, and, depending on the age of these fossils, who might have made the stone tools that we find in South Africa,” says Kivell.

DeSilva says that throughout Africa there were probably a variety of hominin-like creatures living in microhabitats, evolving different kinds of adaptations to survive in their environments. “Humans are like every other animal on the planet. Our evolutionary history is mixed.”

“It’s a mosaic, lots of different experiments,” he continued, “and we just happen to be the only one left, for whatever reason.”

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Source: Edited and adapted from the subject releases of the University of the Witwatersrand and Dartmouth College.

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Did you like this? See the latest, in-depth feature article about the Homo naledi discovery in Popular Archaeology.

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Petroglyph in Spain Marks when Atlantic and Mediterranean Cultures Met

Posted on October 5, 2015 by No Author -

A unique petroglyph discovered near the Atlantic coast of northern Spain has provided evidence that contacts between ancient Atlantic cultures and contemporaneous cultures of the Mediterranean were earlier and perhaps more intense than previously thought.

The rock art panel, located in the Costa dos Castros region and known as Auga dos Cebros, depicts a boat with a structure, including a combination of oars and sails, that match the general design and concept of seafaring vessels of Mediterranean cultures roughly 4,000 years ago. The typical Atlantic equivalent boats of the time were known to feature primarily oar-propelled boats without sails, with a different overall form.

When first encountered, the petroglyph piqued the interest of researcher Javier Costas Goberna, who first began searching for comparable evidence and renderings in the archaeological record throughout Europe. Coming up empty, he turned his attention to researching the Mediterranean regions. His search here proved fruitful, discovering evidence of very similarly designed vessels as evidenced by a variety of archaeological finds. In fact, fellow researcher María Ruiz-Gálvez Priego identified the Auga dos Cebros boat as being remarkably similar to Aegean model vessels of approximately 2000 B.C., particularly as they were depicted on ancient Cretan stamps. Like the Auga dos Cebros boat, those vessels featured outwardly-opened bows and sterns, masts and rigging that held sails as the primary means of propulsion, and lines that are interpreted to represent oars and/or oarsmen for secondary, additional propulsion.

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Above: A graphic representation of the Auga dos Cebros petroglyph, showing the obvious boat feature at the bottom. This image is a screenshot of the same as depicted in the YouTube video (see below).

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Combined with the fact that the Auga dos Cebros petroglyph represents the only such depiction of this type of seafaring vessel in the Atlantic/European region characteristic to the Bronze Age time period, the researchers posit that the Auga dos Cebros boat likely traveled from a Mediterranean point of origin, suggesting contact or trade with Atlantic cultures as much as 4,000 years ago.

More about this important discovery, including images, can be found in the Dig Ventures article by Maiya Pina-Dacier.

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The Iceman Cameth

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Patrick Hahn -

Patrick D Hahn is an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Loyola University Maryland and a free-lance writer. His writing has also appeared in Biology-Online, Loyola Magazine, Natural News, the Canada Free Press, and the Baltimore Sun.

In his laboratory at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Dr. Dennis Stanford hands me a slab of brown plaster. It’s a replica of a bone fragment – from a mastodon or a giant ground sloth – recovered from Vero Beach, Florida. On the slab is an etching of a mastodon, placed there by some unknown artist. The bone has become mineralized, making radiocarbon dating impossible, but we do know that the last mastodons disappeared from eastern North America some 12-13,000 years ago, making the etching at least that old. It could be much older than that, which would make this artifact part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn everything scientists once thought they knew about the peopling of the Americas.

At seventy-two, Dr. Stanford still is a redoubtable figure: bushy black eyebrows, thick unkempt gray hair, snow-white beard. It is quite easy to imagine him attired in sealskins, standing in the prow of one of the Ice Age longboats that he suggests may have carried the first human voyagers to the Americas. But Stanford is not a mariner by trade. He heads the Smithsonian Institution’s Paleo-Indian program.

Once upon a time, scientists believed they knew when, where, and how the first human beings arrived in North America. During the last Ice Age, bands of hunter-gatherers living in Siberia walked across the Bering Land Bridge and then southward, by means of an “ice-free corridor” which opened through the ice sheet that covered much of North America. By 11,500 BC, they had made it as far south as New Mexico, as evidenced by archaeological excavations that have unearthed evidence of a specific style of tool-making called Clovis, named after a nearby town. Clovis spear points were fashioned from a single stone, by means of what is called bifacial flaking. The people who made these tools went on to populate all of the Americas.

Some archaeologists are trying to challenge this tidy scenario. One of the chief challengers has been Dennis Stanford.

Stanford didn’t set out to be a spoiler. But as he attempted to follow the origins of Clovis technology back to its supposed origin in eastern Siberia, the trail went cold. The spear points used by the aboriginal Siberians look nothing like those recovered from Clovis. Rather, they are created by means of what is called “microblade” technology.

Stanford hands me a replica of such a point. Several flint blades, each created from a single flake of stone, are set in grooves in a bone handle.

So if Clovis technology didn’t come from Asia, as he suggests, where might it have originated? Stanford has advanced a radical hypothesis: Perhaps Clovis technology has its roots in Europe.

More than 20,000 years ago, inhabitants of what is today Western Europe employed a style of tool-making similar to that of Clovis, called Solutrean, named after the Rock of Solutré in eastern France. Some Solutreans congregated near the coast. They left behind carvings depicting auks, deep-sea fish such as salmon and tuna, and seals or walruses being harpooned or caught in nets. Stanford has suggested a daring alternative to traditional views, proposing a testable hypothesis that some Ice Age seafarers could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to North America over 20,000 years ago.

Stanford notes that Europe during the Ice Ages was relatively devoid of trees, but they probably had access to driftwood, in the form of large fallen trees transported there by the Gulf Stream. They should have figured out that there was land to the west, somewhere beyond the horizon.

“These people weren’t bothered by cell phones and all this crap. They’re watching the sky every night, they’re watching this, they’re watching that. And they’re watching these big trees coming and they’re wondering, ‘Where in the Hell are all those big trees coming from? We don’t have ‘em over here.’ So they knew there was something over there.”

Back then the ice sheets extended as far south as 40 degrees north latitude. Seemingly endless herds of seals resting on the pack ice might have been an irresistible target for the Solutreans. These ancient mariners might have sallied forth in boats with sealskin stretched over wood frames, like those used by the modern-day Inuit. If you’re hunting seals, the more eyes you have to watch breathing holes the better your chance of success. Entire family groups might have joined in on these expeditions. As their long-distance seafaring capabilities grew, they might have ranged farther and farther until finally arriving on the coast of North America.

It’s not inconceivable. The Solutreans had eyed needles they could have used to stitch together sealskins to make boats and waterproof clothing. (Similar needles have been found in Clovis sites as well.) With sea levels lower than they are now, the distance they had to cross would have been about 1400 miles—shorter than the journey from Alaska to Greenland the Thule people are known to have made in prehistoric times.

Critics point to the complete lack of evidence of practical long-distance seafaring capability of any Ice Age peoples. But Stanford notes that the boats they would have used would have been made of perishable materials, and at any rate would have been submerged when sea levels rose as the ice sheet melted at the end of the last Ice Age.

Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation antedating Clovis by thousands of years, including sites on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Tools associated with these sites have a distinctly Solutrean look.

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Above: Typical Solutrean style points and artifacts found in Europe. World Imaging, Wikimedia Commons

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Stanford shows me some other artifacts. In addition to bifacial spear points, there are bone points, spear throwers, bow drills, hammerstones, scrapers, and flat stones that still retain traces of birch sap, which may have been used to apply waterproof seals to their boats.

“Everything the Solutreans had, they have here,” Stanford explains. “Of course, that’s just coincidence.” Then he laughs that infectious laugh of his.

What’s more, these sites actually pre-date the existence of the ice-free corridor that is believed to have enabled the first Americans to travel here from Siberia. It’s possible that the first Americans came by traversing the margin of the ice sheet on the west coast, but that would actually be a longer journey than the proposed migration across the Atlantic.

Stanford opens another drawer and shows some spear points recovered from Tennessee. The points are over 14,000 years old, he says, which makes them older than Clovis points. Intriguingly, they seem intermediate in form between Solutrean and Clovis technology, providing a possible link between the two cultures.

He opens yet another drawer and pulls out a spear point he says archaeologists recovered while excavating the ruins of an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Virginia. X-ray fluorescence revealed the flint came from France. Stanford wanted to carry out a proper excavation, but the landowner refused to allow it. The state granted the owner permission to bulldoze the site.

“They said there’s no such thing as pre-Clovis culture anyway,” he adds, and again he laughs his infectious laugh.

Almost every part of Stanford’s argument has been vigorously disputed by the scientific community. Recent genetic studies have tended to support the East Asian/Siberian origins of Native Americans. And last year, James Walker and David Clinnick of Durham University published a critical appraisal of the Solutrean hypothesis in World Archaeology. In a telephone interview, Mr. Clinnick stated “For us, the Solutrean hypothesis is not a likely scenario. But as far as the other issue — how people came from East Asia into the Americas — I think we’re pretty open to multiple different conversations.”

Mr. Walker added, “There are different theories as to how the first people got to the Americas. And there are, as David and I see it, problems and good things about all these different ones. But I think the lack of a clean-cut answer at this stage is perhaps what has driven them to look for alternatives. I really feel it’s like one of the last big mysteries in archaeology that we haven’t got our heads wrapped around yet and maybe we won’t.”

Meanwhile, Stanford is showing no signs of slowing down. He has identified four more ancient sites on the eastern shore where he plans to begin excavations.

As I am leaving, Stanford recalls an incident from his youth: In Point Barrow, Alaska, he met three men who told a tale of a fantastic voyage. While hunting seals they were cast adrift on an ice floe, floating past the North Pole all the way to the eastern coast of Greenland, a journey of thousands of miles. They survived by spearing seals, using the rendered fat to build fires on the ice and drinking the melted water. At last they were picked up by an Icelandic Coast Guard vessel and flown to New York, and from there back to their homes. Stanford told the men about his theory of how the first European voyagers came to America thousands of years ago, expecting to meet with incredulity. Instead, they shrugged.

“So what?” Stanford recalls them saying. “Even a white man could do that.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly described the artifact mentioned in the first paragraph as coming from the Chesapeake Bay and dating from 22,000 years ago.

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Did you like this? Read about the Solutrean Hypothesis in greater detail in the feature article, Out of Europe, published in the June 2013 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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Mummification was commonplace in Bronze Age Britain

Posted on September 30, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD—Ancient Britons may have intentionally mummified some of their dead during the Bronze Age (c. 2500 – 800 BC), according to archaeologists at the University of Sheffield.

The study is the first to provide indications that mummification may have been a widespread funerary practice in Britain.

Working with colleagues from the University of Manchester and University College London, Dr Tom Booth analyzed skeletons at several Bronze Age burial sites across the UK. The team from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology found that the remains of some ancient Britons are consistent with a prehistoric mummy from northern Yemen and a partially mummified body recovered from a sphagnum peat bog in County Roscommon, Ireland.

Building on a previous study conducted at a single Bronze Age burial site in the Outer Hebrides, Dr Booth used microscopic analysis to compare the bacterial bio-erosion of skeletons from various sites across the UK with the bones of the mummified bodies from Yemen and Ireland.

Archaeologists widely agree that the damp British climate is not favorable to organic materials and all prehistoric mummified bodies that may be located in the UK will have lost their preserved tissue if buried outside of a preservative environment such as a bog.

Dr Booth, who is now based at the Department of Earth Sciences at London’s Natural History Museum, said: “The problem archaeologists face is finding a consistent method of identifying skeletons that were mummified in the past – especially when they discover a skeleton that is buried outside of a protective environment.

“To help address this, our team has found that by using microscopic bone analysis archaeologists can determine whether a skeleton has been previously mummified even when it is buried in an environment that isn’t favorable to mummified remains.

“We know from previous research that bones from bodies that have decomposed naturally are usually severely degraded by putrefactive bacteria, whereas mummified bones demonstrate immaculate levels of histological preservation and are not affected by putrefactive bio-erosion.”

Earlier investigations have shown that mummified bones found in the Outer Hebrides were not entirely consistent with mummified remains found elsewhere because there wasn’t a complete absence of bacterial bio-erosion.

However, armed with a new technique, the team were able to re-visit the remains from the Outer Hebrides and use microscopic analysis to test the relationship between bone bio-erosion and the extent of soft tissue preservation in bone samples from the Yemeni and Irish mummies.

Their examinations revealed that both the Yemeni and Irish mummies showed limited levels of bacterial bio-erosion within the bone and therefore established that the skeletons found in the Outer Hebrides as well as other sites across Britain display levels of preservation that are consistent with mummification.

The research team also found that the preservation of Bronze Age skeletons at various sites throughout the UK is different to the preservation of bones dating to all other prehistoric and historic periods, which are generally consistent with natural decomposition. Furthermore, the Sheffield-led researchers also found that Bronze Age Britons may have used a variety of techniques to mummify their dead.

Dr Booth added, “Our research shows that smoking over a fire and purposeful burial within a peat bog are among some of the techniques ancient Britons may have used to mummify their dead. Other techniques could have included evisceration, in which organs were removed shortly after death.

“The idea that British and potentially European Bronze Age communities invested resources in mummifying and curating a proportion of their dead fundamentally alters our perceptions of funerary ritual and belief in this period.”

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The Skrydstrup Woman, example of a European mummy found in a tumulus in Denmark. She was discovered in 1935 and dated to 1300 BCE. Wikimedia Commons

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The research also demonstrates that funerary rituals that we may now regard as exotic, novel and even bizarre were practiced commonly for hundreds of years by our predecessors.

Also, this method of using microscopic bone analysis to identify formerly-mummified skeletons means that archaeologists can continue searching for Bronze Age mummies throughout Europe.

“It’s possible that our method may allow us to identify further ancient civilizations that mummified their dead,” Dr Booth concluded.

The research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, was published in the journal Antiquity.

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Source: Edited from the subject press release of the University of Sheffield.

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Possible site of ancient Sodom yields more finds

Posted on September 28, 2015 by No Author -

Now having completed the tenth season of excavations, an archaeological team headed by Steven Collins of Trinity Southwest University, New Mexico, has unearthed a goldmine of ancient monumental structures and artifacts that are revealing a massive Bronze Age city-state that dominated the region of Jordan’s southern Jordan Valley, even during a time when many other great cities of the “Holy Land” region were either abandoned or in serious decline.

Known as Tall el-Hammam, Collins has been leading excavations at the imposing mound, or tel, since 2005.

“Very, very little was known about the Bronze Age in the Middle Ghor (southern Jordan Valley) before we began our excavations in 2005,” says Collins. “Even most of the archaeological maps of the area were blank, or mostly so. What we’ve got on our hands is a major city-state that was, for all practical purposes, unknown to scholars before we started our Project.”

Indeed, according to Collins, when comparing it with the remains of other nearby ancient cities, along with its prime location and dates of occupation, it emerges today as the best candidate for the lost city of Sodom—the infamous city that, based on the Biblical account, was destroyed by God in a fiery cataclysm because of its iniquity.

“Tall el-Hammam seemed to match every Sodom criterion demanded by the text,” he says. “Theorizing, on the basis of the Sodom texts, that Sodom was the largest of the Kikkar (the Jordan ‘Disk’, or ‘well-watered plain’ in the biblical text) cities east of the Jordan, I concluded that if one wanted to find Sodom, then one should look for the largest city on the eastern Kikkar that existed during the Middle Bronze Age, the time of Abraham and Lot. When we explored the area, the choice of Tall el-Hammam as the site of Sodom was virtually a no-brainer since it was at least five to ten times larger than all the other Bronze Age sites in the entire region, even beyond the Kikkar of the Jordan.”

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Map showing location of Tall el-Hammam in the ‘Kikkar’ of the Jordan with surrounding archaeological sites. Courtesy Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP), from the article, Making the Case for Sodom. published June 5, 2014 in Popular Archaeology.

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View of Tall el-Hammam. The mound is the most prominent feature on the landscape for miles around. Courtesy Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project, from the article. Making the Case for Sodom, published June 5, 2014 in Popular Archaeology.

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But Collins would be the first to say that the story of this site is far more than the possible discovery of a lost Biblical city. It is, first and foremost, the story of an ancient people who built a massive Bronze Age city that thrived and prospered in a place strategically located among key water resources and trade routes, emerging as the central hub of a dominant city-state during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (between 3500 and 1540 B.C.).

“The site is monstrous,” say Collins. He describes the site as consisting of both a lower and upper city. It features Early Bronze Age (3500 – 2350 BCE) evidence for a 5.2 meter thick city wall (built and then re-built stronger following an earthquake) as much as 10 meters in height and made entirely of mudbricks, with associated gates, towers, at least one roadway, and plazas. During the Middle Bronze Age (2000 – 1540 BCE), new construction, even more massive than those of the Early Bronze Age, replaced the old. To fortify the upper city, the Middle Bronze Age inhabitants built a massive mudbrick defensive rampart system. “It was a huge undertaking, requiring millions of bricks and, obviously, large numbers of laborers,” states Collins. “The flat top of the rampart was about 7m (22 ft.) wide, and probably served as a ring-road around the upper city. The outer edge of the rampart has a footprint of approximately 250m x 400m. The 36-degree outer slope was covered with hard-packed clay, and rose over 30m (100 ft.) above the lower city. It was an impressive and formidable defensive system protecting the residences of the wealthier citizens of the city, including the king’s palace and related temples and administrative buildings.”* Moreover, in the lower city they followed the lines of the earlier, Early Bronze Age city walls and constructed a 4m-thick city wall built on a foundation of large stones and topped, like the upper city wall, by a mudbrick superstructure. This, too, was reinforced by an earthen/mudbrick rampart system sloping down and out at about 35-38 degrees from the new lower city wall. Put together, Collins says, the lower city defensive works rise over 100 feet above the surrounding plain, with the upper city rampart rising an additional 100+ feet above the lower city/tall. More Middle Bronze Age finds included a large monumental complex in the lower city/tall, remains of a mudbrick palatial structure in the upper city/tall (called the “red palace” because of the color of the mudbricks due to a fiery conflagration), and remains of a monumental gateway complex. The close of the 10th season in 2015 confirmed a few more surprises, including clear evidence that the Middle Bronze Age walls and fortifications were more extensive than previously thought, including the uncovering of more towers and gates.

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Dr. Collins (left) and Gary Byers atop excavated EB (Early Bronze) city wall foundation. Courtesy Mike Luddeni, from the article. Making the Case for Sodom, published June 5, 2014 in Popular Archaeology.

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But based on the excavated evidence, the city’s Bronze Age heyday seems to have nevertheless come to a sudden, inexplicable end toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age—and the ancient city became a relative wasteland for 700 years, for the most part void of human habitation. The comparatively paltry or lack of Late Bronze Age material is a testament to this, with the same pattern shown in the smaller, nearby sites. A strange development, thinks Collins, for a great city-state that flourished even through the catastrophic climate changes that arguably led to the collapse of the great cities of the Levantine Early Bronze Age around 2350 BCE. Collins is hoping that further research and excavation may shed more light on this mystery.

Life at this ancient site returned after the 700-year gap, however. Excavations have shown a clear monumental Iron Age II (1000 – 332 BCE) presence, for example, with the discovery of a monumental gateway, city wall, monumental building, houses, and what has been interpreted as a cultic center. But these structures were not constructed until centuries later, on a relatively small scale, and the sheer magnitude of the Bronze Age construction never returned.

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See the article, Making the Case for Sodom for more information, including additional images, about the excavations at Tall el-Hammam. In addition, a detailed report of the 10th season of excavations can be accessed here.

*http://www.tallelhammam.com/Recent_Discoveries.html#Chronological_Key

Source: Updated from the article, Making the Case for Sodom, published June 5, 2014 in Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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Fossilized ear bones reveal human ancestors heard higher frequencies

Posted on September 25, 2015 by No Author -

BINGHAMTON, NY – Research into human fossils dating back to approximately two million years ago reveals that the hearing pattern resembles chimpanzees, but with some slight differences in the direction of humans.

Rolf Quam, assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, led an international research team in reconstructing an aspect of sensory perception in several fossil hominin individuals from the sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans in South Africa. The study relied on the use of CT scans and virtual computer reconstructions to study the internal anatomy of the ear. The results suggest that the early hominin species Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, both of which lived around 2 million years ago, had hearing abilities similar to a chimpanzee, but with some slight differences in the direction of humans.

Humans are distinct from most other primates, including chimpanzees, in having better hearing across a wider range of frequencies, generally between 1.0-6.0 kHz. Within this same frequency range, which encompasses many of the sounds emitted during spoken language, chimpanzees and most other primates lose sensitivity compared to humans.

“We know that the hearing patterns, or audiograms, in chimpanzees and humans are distinct because their hearing abilities have been measured in the laboratory in living subjects,” said Quam. “So we were interested in finding out when this human-like hearing pattern first emerged during our evolutionary history.”

Previously, Quam and colleagues studied the hearing abilities in several fossil hominin individuals from the site of the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of the Bones) in northern Spain. These fossils are about 430,000 years old and are considered to represent ancestors of the later Neandertals. The hearing abilities in the Sima hominins were nearly identical to living humans. In contrast, the much earlier South African specimens had a hearing pattern that was much more similar to a chimpanzee.

In the South African fossils, the region of maximum hearing sensitivity was shifted towards slightly higher frequencies compared with chimpanzees, and the early hominins showed better hearing than either chimpanzees or humans from about 1.0-3.0 kHz. It turns out that this auditory pattern may have been particularly favorable for living on the savanna. In more open environments, sound waves don’t travel as far as in the rainforest canopy, so short range communication is favored on the savanna.

“We know these species regularly occupied the savanna since their diet included up to 50 percent of resources found in open environments” said Quam. The researchers argue that this combination of auditory features may have favored short-range communication in open environments.

That sounds a lot like language. Does this mean these early hominins had language? “No,” said Quam. “We’re not arguing that. They certainly could communicate vocally. All primates do, but we’re not saying they had fully developed human language, which implies a symbolic content.”

The emergence of language is one of the most hotly debated questions in paleoanthropology, the branch of anthropology that studies human origins, since the capacity for spoken language is often held to be a defining human feature. There is a general consensus among anthropologists that the small brain size and ape-like cranial anatomy and vocal tract in these early hominins indicates they likely did not have the capacity for language.

“We feel our research line does have considerable potential to provide new insights into when the human hearing pattern emerged and, by extension, when we developed language,” said Quam.

Ignacio Martinez, a collaborator on the study, said, “We’re pretty confident about our results and our interpretation. In particular, it’s very gratifying when several independent lines of evidence converge on a consistent interpretation.”

How do these results compare with the discovery of a new hominin species, Homo naledi, announced just two weeks ago from a different site in South Africa?

“It would be really interesting to study the hearing pattern in this new species,” said Quam. “Stay tuned.”

The study was published on Sept. 25 in the journal Science Advances.

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This is a lateral view of the Paranthropus robustus skull SK 46 from the site of Swartkrans, South Africa showing the 3-D virtual reconstruction of the ear and the hearing results for the early hominins. Credit Rolf Quam

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Skull of the Taung Child, the first Australopithecus africanus fossil find, discovered by Raymond Dart in South Africa in 1924. Wikimedia Commons, Didier Descouens

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*R. Quam, et al., Early hominin auditory capacities, Science Advances 25 September 2015

Source: Edited from the subject Binghamton University and Science Advances press releases.

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Did you like this? Read more about the discoveries at the Swartkrans cave, a free premium article in the December 2013 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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Stem cell research hints at evolution of human brain

Posted on September 24, 2015 by No Author -

University of California – San Francisco—The human cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons, wired together into arcane, layered circuits responsible for everything from our ability to walk and talk to our sense of nostalgia and drive to dream of the future. In the course of human evolution, the cortex has expanded as much as 1,000-fold, but how this occurred is still a mystery to scientists.

Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have succeeded in mapping the genetic signature of a unique group of stem cells in the human brain that seem to generate most of the neurons in our massive cerebral cortex.

The new findings, published Sept. 24, 2015 in the journal Cell, support the notion that these unusual stem cells may have played an important role in the remarkable evolutionary expansion of the primate brain.

“We want to know what it is about our genetic heritage that makes us unique,” said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, professor of developmental and stem cell biology and director of the Eli and Edyth Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF. “Looking at these early stages in development is the best opportunity to understand our brain’s evolution.”

Building a Brain from the Inside Out

The grand architecture of the human cortex, with its hundreds of distinct cell types, begins as a uniform layer of neural stem cells and builds itself from the inside out during several months of embryonic development.

Until recently, most of what scientists knew about this process came from studies of model organisms such as mice, where nearly all neurons are produced by stem cells called ventricular radial glia (vRGs) that inhabit a fertile layer of tissue deep in the brain called the ventricular zone (VZ). But recent insights suggested that the development of the human cortex might have some additional wrinkles.

In 2010, Kriegstein’s lab discovered a new type of neural stem cell in the human brain, which they dubbed outer radial glia (oRGs) because these cells reside farther away from the nurturing ventricles, in an outer layer of the subventricular zone (oSVZ). To the researchers’ surprise, further investigations revealed that during the peak of cortical development in humans, most of the neuron production was happening in the oSVZ rather than the familiar VZ.

oRG stem cells are extremely rare in mice, but common in primates, and look and behave quite differently from familiar ventricular radial glia. Their discovery immediately made Kriegstein and colleagues wonder whether this unusual group of stem cells could be a key to understanding what allowed primate brains to grow to their immense size and complexity.

“We wanted to know more about the differences between these two different stem cell populations,” said Alex Pollen, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Kriegstein’s lab and co-lead author of the new study. “We predicted oRGs could be a major contributor to the development of the human cortex, but at first we only had circumstantial evidence that these cells even made neurons.”

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Drawing of the cerebral cortex. Wikimedia Commons, Wellcome Images

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Outsider Stem Cells Make Their Own Niche

In the new research, Pollen and co-first author Tomasz Nowakowski, PhD, also a postdoctoral researcher in the Kriegstein lab, partnered with Fluidigm Corp. to develop a microfluidic approach to map out the transcriptional profile – the set of genes that are actively producing RNA – of cells collected from the VZ and SVZ during embryonic development.

They identified gene expression profiles typical of different types of neurons, newborn neural progenitors and radial glia, as well as molecular markers differentiating oRGs and vRGs, which allowed the researchers to isolate these cells for further study.

The gene activity profiles also provided several novel insights into the biology of outer radial glia. For example, researchers had previously been puzzled as to how oRG cells could maintain their generative vitality so far away from the nurturing VZ. “In the mouse, as cells move away from the ventricles, they lose their ability to differentiate into neurons,” Kriegstein explained.

But the new data reveals that oRGs bring a support group with them: The cells express genes for surface markers and molecular signals that enhance their own ability to proliferate, the researchers found.

“This is a surprising new feature of their biology,” Pollen said. “They generate their own stem cell niche.”

The researchers used their new molecular insights to isolate oRGs in culture for the first time, and showed that these cells are prolific neuron factories. In contrast to mouse vRGs, which produce 10 to 100 daughter cells during brain development, a single human oRG can produce thousands of daughter neurons, as well as glial cells–non-neuronal brain cells increasingly recognized as being responsible for a broad array of maintenance functions in the brain.

New Insights into Brain Evolution, Development and Disease

The discovery of human oRGs’ self-renewing niche and remarkable generative capacity reinforces the idea that these cells may have been responsible for the expansion of the cerebral cortex in our primate ancestors, the researchers said.

The research also presents an opportunity to greatly improve techniques for growing brain circuits in a dish that reflect the true diversity of the human brain, they said. Such techniques have the potential to enhance research into the origins of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders such as microcephaly, lissencephaly, autism and schizophrenia, which are thought to affect cell types not found in the mouse models that are often used to study such diseases.

The findings may even have implications for studying glioblastoma, a common brain cancer whose ability to grow, migrate and hack into the brain’s blood supply appears to rely on a pattern of gene activity similar to that now identified in these neural stem cells.

“The cerebral cortex is so different in humans than in mice,” Kriegstein said. “If you’re interested in how our brains evolved or in diseases of the cerebral cortex, this is a really exciting discovery.”

The study represents the first salvo of a larger BRAIN Initiative-funded project in Kriegstein’s lab to understand the thousands of different cell types that occupy the developing human brain.

“At the moment, we simply don’t have a good understanding of the brain’s ‘parts list,'” Kriegstein said, “but studies like this are beginning to give us a real blueprint of how our brains are built.”

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Source: University of California-San Francisco press release.

Major funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.

Additional authors on the study are Jiadong Chen, PhD; Hanna Retallack; Carmen Sandoval-Espinosa; Cory Nicholas, PhD; S. John Liu; Michael Oldham, PhD; Aaron Diaz, PhD; and Daniel Lim, MD, PhD, all of UCSF; and Anne Leyrat, PhD; Joe Shuga, PhD; and Jay West, PhD, of Fluidigm Corp. Nicholas is now at Neurona Therapeutics. Leyrat, Shuga and West declare a financial interest in Fluidigm Corp. as employees and/or stockholders.

UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy, a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences, as well as a preeminent biomedical research enterprise and two top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco. Please visit http://www.ucsf.edu.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons, http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/59/92/da8e89c7c8f6dc66400920168f1c.jpg

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The Golden Age of King Midas

Posted on September 23, 2015 by No Author -

PHILADELPHIA, PA September 2015—What was behind the legendary story of King Midas and his golden touch?

That is the question that will be answered—not with chests full of gold, but with a spectacular array of specially-loaned ancient artifacts from the Republic of Turkey, keys to telling the true story of a very real, very powerful ruler of the Phrygian kingdom in what is now central Turkey. The Golden Age of King Midas, an exclusive, world premiere exhibition developed by the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street in Philadelphia, in partnership with the Republic of Turkey, runs February 13 through November 27, 2016.

King Midas lived in the prosperous city of Gordion circa 750-700 BCE, ruling Phrygia and influencing neighboring kingdoms, from Assyria and Urartu, to the city-states of North Syria, Lydia, Greece, and beyond. He likely reigned during the time in which Homer’s Iliad was first written down. It was indeed a golden age.

Archaeologists from the Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) have been excavating at the important ancient site of Gordion—and making international headlines with their discoveries—since 1950. This rich site, a cross-roads of many cultures over time, offers insight into thousands of years of history, but it is best known as the political and cultural capital of the Phrygians, a people who dominated much of what is now Turkey nearly 3,000 years ago. With its monumental architecture and a series of wealthy tombs belonging to Phrygian royalty and elites, Gordion is the premiere archaeological site for discovering the unique material achievements of the once great Phrygian civilization.

A Rare Opportunity

In 1957, the Penn Museum excavated a spectacular tomb, the Tumulus MM (Midas Mound), the largest of about 120 man-made mounds of earth, clay, and stone used to mark important burials at Gordion. Dated to about 740 BCE, it is believed to be the final resting place of King Midas’ father Gordias. The archaeologists entered the tomb, the oldest standing wooden building in the world, and beheld an extraordinary sight: the skeleton of a king in what was left of a cedar coffin, surrounded by all the bronze bowls, serving vessels, wooden tables, and food remains from an extensive funeral banquet.

Now housed in Turkish Museums in Ankara, Istanbul, Antalya, and Gordion, most of these extraordinary artifacts have never before traveled to the United States. For the first time, about 120 objects from Turkey, primarily from Tumulus MM and hand selected by exhibition curator Dr. C. Brian Rose, Penn Museum’s Gordion Archaeological Project Director, come to Philadelphia for this exclusive, limited-time engagement. One additional highlight of the exhibit will be an ivory lion tamer figurine on loan from the Delphi Archaeological Museum; it probably formed part of a throne dedicated by Midas to Apollo in the late eighth century BCE. Artifacts from nearby kingdoms, drawn from the Penn Museum’s own international collection, supplement the exhibition and tell the broader story of a golden age presided over by a legendary king.

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A partial view inside Tumulus MM—the burial chamber of a Phrygian ruler, probably the father of King Midas. Tumulus MM is the oldest known intact wooden building in the world. Exhibited: One of the three cauldrons found inside the tomb, probably all used for beer, features two siren attachments and two bearded demon attachments. Bronze drinking bowls are scattered across the floor of the tomb chamber, dated to circa 740 BCE, and excavated by the Penn Museum in 1957. Photo: 1957, Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2390.

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Exhibited: This black polished goat jug, 8.2 inches in length, 5.9 inches in height, and 4.7 inches in width, was excavated from Tumulus P, the burial chamber of a royal child, at Gordion in central Turkey. The jug dates to circa 760 BCE; it was excavated in 1956. Photo: Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Ankara, 12789c.

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Exhibited: Detail of one of the three massive bronze cauldrons from Tumulus MM, tomb of a Phrygian ruler, probably the father of King Midas. The figure of a siren and the associated ring handle form one of four attachments on the cauldron. The cauldron probably once held an alcoholic beverage made of barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead, part of an elaborate funeral banquet for the deceased ruler. The cauldron dates to circa 740 BCE. It was excavated by the Penn Museum at Gordion in 1957. Dimensions—Height: 20.2 inches. Diameter: 30.7 inches (diameter at rim: 23 inches). Capacity: about 40 gallons [=150 liters]. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014_4080.

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Exhibited: Part of the colored pebble mosaic floor, the oldest known in the world, found in a large hall excavated inside the citadel at Gordion in 1956. One of 33 panels removed for conservation and display in 1963, this piece was newly conserved in the summer of 2015 by the team at Gordion. It dates to the late 9th century BCE. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2015_04663.

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Editor’s Note: For more detailed information about the recent discoveries at Gordion, see the feature article, Unearthing the City of King Midas.

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The Golden Age of King Midas opens with a day-long celebration on February 13, 2016. A gala preview evening is planned for Friday, February 5.

The Golden Age of King Midas is made possible with support from Frederick J. Manning, W69, and the Manning Family; the Susan Drossman Sokoloff and Adam D. Sokoloff Exhibitions Fund, and an anonymous donor.

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The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.

The Penn Museum is located at 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (on the University of Pennsylvania campus). Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, and first Wednesdays of each month until 8:00 pm. Closed Mondays and holidays. Admission donation is $15 for adults; $13 for senior citizens (65 and above); free for U.S. Military; $10 for children and full-time students with ID; free to Members, PennCard holders, and children 5 and younger.

Penn Museum can be found on the web at www.penn.museum. For general information call 215.898.4000. For group tour information call 215.746.8183.

Source: Press release of the Penn Museum.

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9,000 year-old ritualized decapitation found in Brazil

Posted on September 23, 2015 by No Author -

A 9,000 year-old case of human decapitation has been found in the rock shelter of Lapa do Santo in Brazil, according to a study* published September 23, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by André Strauss from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany and colleagues.

An archaeological site called Lapa do Santo, located in east-central Brazil, contains evidence of human occupation dating back to ~12,000 years ago. In 2007, researchers found fragments of a buried body, Burial 26, including a cranium, jaw, the first six cervical vertebrae, and two severed hands at the site. They dated the remains back to ~9,000 years ago using accelerator mass spectrometry. The researchers found amputated hands laid over the face of the skull arranged opposite each other and observed v-shaped cut marks on the jaw and sixth cervical vertebra.

Based on strontium analysis comparing Burial 26’s isotopic signature to other specimens from Lapa do Santo, the researchers suggest Burial 26 was likely a local member of the group. Additionally, the presentation of the remains lead the authors to think that this was likely a ritualized decapitation instead of trophy-taking. If this is the case, these remains may demonstrate sophisticated mortuary rituals among hunter-gatherers in the Americas during this time period. The authors think this may be the oldest case of decapitation found in the New Word, leading to a re-evaluation of the previous interpretations of this practice, particularly with regard to its origins and geographic dispersion.

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This is a schematic representation of Burial 26 from Lapa do Santo. Drawing by Gil Tokyo.

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*Strauss A, Oliveira RE, Bernardo DV, Salazar-García DC, Talamo S, Jaouen K, et al. (2015) The Oldest Case of Decapitation in the New World (Lapa do Santo, East-Central Brazil).PLoS ONE 10(9): e0137456. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0137456

Source: The subject PLOS ONE press release.

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

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The Golden Age of King Midas

9,000 year-old ritualized decapitation found in Brazil

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