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PLOS—Winemaking practices in coastal Italy during the Roman period involved using native grapes for making wine in jars waterproofed with imported tar pitch, according to a study* published June 29, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Louise Chassouant of Avignon University and colleagues.

The authors examined three Roman period amphorae – wine jars – from a seabed deposit near the modern harbor of San Felice Circeo, Italy, about 90 km southeast of Rome. A combination of chemical markers, plant tissue residue, and pollen provided evidence of grape derivatives and pine within the jars. The evidence suggests the amphorae were used in both red and white winemaking processes, while the pine was used to create tar for waterproofing the jars and perhaps also flavoring the wine, as has been observed at similar archaeological sites.

The grapevine pollen matches wild species from the area, suggesting these winemakers were using local plants, although it remains unclear whether these were domesticated at the time. The pine tar, on the other hand, is non-local, and was likely imported from Calabria or Sicily based on other historical sources.

The authors emphasize the benefit of this multidisciplinary approach to characterize cultural practices from archaeological artifacts. In this case, the identification of plant remains, chemical analysis, historical and archaeological records, amphorae design, and previous findings all contributed to the conclusions of this analysis, providing an example of methodology for interpreting a history beyond the artifacts which would not be possible using a single technique.

The authors add: “If there was a message to be retained from the reading of this article, it would be related to the multidisciplinary methodology to be applied. Indeed, by using different approaches to unravel the content and nature of the coating layer of Roman amphorae, we have pushed the conclusion further in the understanding of ancient practices than it would have been with a single approach.”

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From the amphorae to understanding the content; this multi-analytical analysis relied on archaeobotany and molecular identification. Louise Chassouant, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Roman amphorae. Rob Mitchell, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Dating of a cave infill in South Africa that has yielded numerous Australopithecus fossils reveals that the fossils are older than previously thought and that the South African individuals were contemporaneous with Australopithecus afarensis in East Africa. Sterkfontein cave in South Africa is a treasure trove of Australopithecus fossils, often thought to be younger than A. afarensis, which lived in East Africa. Darryl E. Granger and colleagues calculated the ages of the Sterkfontein rocks in which the fossils are found by measuring the amounts of aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 isotopes in rocks containing quartz. The rare isotopes were formed by high-energy cosmic rays while the rocks were at the surface and decayed after they were buried in the cave with the fossils. The cosmogenic isotopes yielded an age of around 3.4-3.7 million years, older than the previously determined age of 2.1-2.6-million-years. The previous age was derived from calcite flowstones, which were intrusions into the fossil-bearing formation, leading to an underestimation of the fossils’ age. According to the authors, the revised age places South African Australopithecus as a contemporary of A. afarensis and other early Australopithecus species, expanding the diversity of hominin morphologies and habitats in the mid-Pliocene Epoch.

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Female Australopithecus Sts 71, discovered in 1947 from Member 4 at Sterkfontein, South Africa and newly dated to 3.4-3.6 million years. Jason L. Heaton, Birmingham-Southern College, Birmingham, Alabama

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‘Mrs. Ples’ (Sts 5), discovered at Sterkfontein, South Africa in 1947, now shown to be contemporaneous with Lucy’s species in East Africa. Jason L. Heaton, Birmingham-Southern College, Birmingham, Alabama

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Article Source: PNAS news release.

*“Cosmogenic nuclide dating of Australopithecus at Sterkfontein, South Africa,” by Darryl E. Granger et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 27-Jun-2022. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2123516119

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FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY—With some 7,000 islands and cays and a 7,000-year history of human habitation, the Caribbean Sea is practically synonymous with maritime travel. The very word “canoe” is derived from the term “kana:wa,” used by the Indigenous Arawakans of the Caribbean to describe their dugout vessels.

Without clear road signs to indicate where native islanders were traveling, however, the task of reconstructing ancient trade routes relies on subtle clues locked away in the archaeological record. Researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History recently turned to pottery to tease apart the navigational history of the Caribbean, analyzing the composition of 96 fired clay fragments across 11 islands.

The study*, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, is the broadest of its kind yet conducted in the Greater Antilles and marks the first time that pottery artifacts from the Lucayan Islands — The Bahamas plus the Turks and Caicos Islands — have been analyzed to determine their elemental composition and origin.

“Our methods mark a big improvement over other studies that mostly look at a single site or single island, where you might see differences but not know what it means because you’re looking at the results in isolation,” said co-author Lindsay Bloch, a courtesy faculty member with the Florida Museum’s Ceramic Technology Lab.

People have lived on the Caribbean islands on and off for more than 7,000 years, migrating in waves from Central and South America. As early as 800 B.C., new groups arrived from Venezuela and established a trading network among islands, which they used to exchange food, tools and jewelry. But the most common artifacts that survived to the present are the pottery vessels these objects were carried in.

“Most materials don’t preserve well in the Caribbean because of the warm, humid environment, but pottery is durable, so it ends up being one of the most common things we find,” said lead author Emily Kracht, a collections assistant in the Ceramic Technology Lab.

Over the ensuing millennia, different Caribbean cultures developed unique styles and techniques for constructing their pottery. Some artifacts are simple and unadorned, while others are highly decorated, with a lattice of incised lines, punctations, raised ridges and flared rims.

Many studies have relied almost entirely on similarities in style to distinguish between different cultures and infer their movements. But, as Bloch explains, this method has often left more questions than answers and excludes material with potentially valuable information.

“The vast majority of pottery that we find anywhere in the world is going to be undecorated. It’s going to be things used for cooking or storage, which are typically plain and often get ignored because they’re seen as generic,” she said.

Rather than studying the minutiae of varying styles, the researchers focused instead on what the pottery was made of. Using a laser to etch microscopic lines into their samples, the researchers determined the exact amounts and identities of each element in the clay used to make the pottery. Their final analysis included more than seven decades’ worth of archaeological collections that span over 1,000 years of Indigenous Caribbean history.

“One of the advantages of elemental analysis is that we’re explicitly looking for differences, which allows us to see where a pot was made and compare that to where it ended up,” Bloch said.

Such detailed comparisons are possible due to the complexity of the Caribbean’s underlying geology. The largest islands in the archipelago likely got their start as an ancient underwater plateau in the Pacific Ocean. After the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, the Caribbean plate drifted east in a flurry of volcanic eruptions that elevated the plateau above sea level before ultimately reaching its current position in the Atlantic.

Millions of years of weathering reduced these volcanic outcrops into fine-grained clays with differing concentrations of elements like copper, nickel, chromium and antimony. These differences mean that even the smallest Caribbean pottery sherd bears the elemental signature of the region it was made in.

The results of researchers’ comparative analysis aren’t what might be expected by simply looking at a map. The Lucayan Islands were initially used only temporarily for harvesting resources, and the people who traveled to them would have set sail from the larger islands to the south that supported permanent population centers.

Cuba might initially seem like it’s the perfect staging ground for these operations, being by far the largest Caribbean island and the closest to The Bahamas. While people did make the trek across open water from Cuba, the results of the study indicate the Caribbean’s cultural hub was instead centered on the northwest coast of Hispaniola, from which people imported and exported goods for hundreds of years.

“At least some of the pottery would have been used to ferry goods out to these islands, and people would potentially carry back a variety of marine resources,” Bloch said.

People eventually struck up permanent settlements in The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, becoming collectively known as the Lucayans, or the People of the Islands. They began making their own pottery from claylike soils deposited by African dust plumes blown in from the Saharan Desert, but the results didn’t quite hold up to the pottery from Hispaniola — literally. Lucayan pottery, called Palmetto Ware, is most often thick and soft and crumbles over time due to the poor quality of the grainy Saharan soil.

Thus, up until the arrival of the Spanish, Hispaniola remained the main trading partner and exporter of pottery to the Lucayan Islands.

“We knew that the Lucayans were related to people in Hispaniola, and this study shows their enduring relationship over hundreds of years through pottery,” Kracht said.  

William Keegan of the Florida Museum of Natural History is also a co-author on the study.

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Ancient pottery holds clues to the past lives, traditions, and movements of Indigenous people from the Caribbean Islands. Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace

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Indigenous Caribbean islanders developed elaborate and ornate pottery styles that varied across time and between cultures. Photo by Lindsay Bloch

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Article Source: FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY news release.

*Production of Greater Antillean pottery and its exchange to the Lucayan Islands: A compositional study, Journal of Archaeological Science, 17-May-2022. 10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103469

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION—WASHINGTON — At the time of Spanish conquest in 1521, the Aztec’s capital Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, was already one of the largest, most populous cities in the world, managing complex problems of urban development, flooding and water supply.

The city’s ongoing struggles to balance these same issues, 500 years later,  are a case study in environmental adaption with lessons for contemporary decision makers and the future of megacities, according to Beth Tellman, a human-environmental geographer at the University of Arizona.

“Can megacities adapt to climate change, are they going to collapse, or are we going to figure it out? I think looking at Mexico City is a really interesting way to answer that question because it’s a city that’s been figuring it out for 700 years and that’s had consequences. Some people have really gained from that adaptation and other people have lost out,” Tellman said.

One of the essential lessons from revisiting and synthesizing the many existing records of the city’s history, Tellman argues, is technological innovation alone can’t solve water problems that have social and political dimensions.

“If a new diversion protects a community from flood, but drowns another community in the diversion path, is it a success? Any time you build a levy, it’s going to move water faster downstream or to the other side. We need to be thinking more about: Whose adaptation is this? Do we actually have all affected people at the table?”

Tellman will speak today about her research on how urban managers mitigate — and create — vulnerability to environmental hazards in Mexico City and other cities around the world in at 5:00 pm EDT session at the Frontiers in Hydrology meeting, convening this week in San Juan, Puerto Rico and online.

The Frontiers in Hydrology meeting is a partnership between AGU and the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) designed to inspire new ideas and solutions for the future of water by bringing together engineers, hydrologists, social scientists, urban planners, atmospheric scientists and affiliated communities from around the world that work on all aspects of water issues.

Free media registration is available for online and in-person attendance at the meeting.

Complex trade-offs

“As cities grow and get more complex, managing risks in a separate way is a strategy that does not work and ignoring that reality makes it worse, because instead of anticipated consequences of adaptation decisions, you have these unanticipated consequences,” Tellman said.

Tenochtitlán, and later Mexico City, like many modern cities, started out managing water supply, flooding and urban development separately. But as the city grew, the three adaptation pathways intersected in complex ways, creating complicated risk trade-offs.

The city, built on an island in saline Lake Texcoco, controlled flooding through a sophisticated network of dikes, levees and canals. Aqueducts, sluices and other infrastructure provided fresh water and kept it separated from the salty lake water. But aqueducts contributed to destructive flooding, and dikes to prevent flooding in one location channeled floodwaters into others.

After conquest destroyed much of the original city infrastructure, the Spanish chose to deal with flooding by draining the lake, which created new problems. Now a megacity of 20 million, Mexico City continues to battle flooding, while simultaneously struggling with water shortages. Groundwater pumping to supply fresh water has caused the city to sink, breaking drains, which causes more flooding. Both problems hit neighborhoods unevenly, with the greatest burden falling on low-income areas, Tellman said. Technological solutions like rainwater capture do not reach people with greatest need, because of political barriers to providing city improvements to undocumented residents.

“Vulnerability cannot be eliminated,” Tellman said. “It’s transferred over time or space or to different populations, and what that means is that we should not have the engineering hubris to say we’re going to eliminate vulnerability. What we should instead do is democratically negotiate the consequences of adaptation. It’s not just climate adaptation, but climate justice.”

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A model of ancient Tenochtitlan, which can be viewed in Mexico City. Branz, Pixabay

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Article Source: AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION news release

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AGU (www.agu.org) supports 125,000 enthusiasts to experts worldwide in Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, we advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values. Our programs include serving as a scholarly publisher, convening virtual and in-person events and providing career support. We live our values in everything we do, such as our net zero energy renovated building in Washington, D.C. and our Ethics and Equity Center, which fosters a diverse and inclusive geoscience community to ensure responsible conduct.

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TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY—A joint study by researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University unraveled the earliest evidence for domestication of a fruit tree. The researchers analyzed remnants of charcoal from the Chalcolithic site of Tel Zaf in the Jordan Valley and determined that they came from olive trees. Since the olive did not grow naturally in the Jordan Valley, this means that the inhabitants planted the tree intentionally about 7,000 years ago.

The groundbreaking study was led by Dr. Dafna Langgut of the  Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology & Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University. The charcoal remnants were found in the archaeological excavation directed by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports from the publishers of Nature.

Dr. Langgut: “I am the head of the Laboratory of Archaeobotany & Ancient Environments, which specializes in microscopic identification of plant remains. Trees, even when burned down to charcoal, can be identified by their anatomic structure. Wood was the ‘plastic’of the ancient world. It was used for construction, for making tools and furniture, and as a source of energy. That’s why identifying tree remnants found at archaeological sites, such as charcoal from hearths, is a key to understanding what kinds of trees grew in the natural environment at the time, and when humans began to cultivate fruit trees.”

In her lab, Dr. Langgut identified the charcoal from Tel Zaf as belonging to olive and fig trees. “Olive trees grow in the wild in the land of Israel, but they do not grow in the Jordan Valley,” she says. “This means that someone brought them there intentionally – took the knowledge and the plant itself to a place that is outside its natural habitat. In archaeobotany, this is considered indisputable proof of domestication, which means that we have here the earliest evidence of the olive’s domestication anywhere in the world. I also identified many remnants of young fig branches. The fig tree did grow naturally in the Jordan Valley, but its branches had little value as either firewood or raw materials for tools or furniture, so people had no reason to gather large quantities and bring them to the village. Apparently, these fig branches resulted from pruning, a method still used today to increase the yield of fruit trees.”

The tree remnants examined by Dr. Langgut were collected by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University, who headed the dig at Tel Zaf. Prof. Garfinkel: “Tel Zaf was a large prehistoric village in the middle Jordan Valley south of Beit She’an, inhabited between 7,200 and 6,700 years ago. Large houses with courtyards were discovered at the site, each with several granaries for storing crops. Storage capacities were up to 20 times greater than any single family’s calorie consumption, so clearly these were caches for storing great wealth. The wealth of the village was manifested in the production of elaborate pottery, painted with remarkable skill. In addition, we found articles brought from afar: pottery of the Ubaid culture from Mesopotamia, obsidian from Anatolia, a copper awl from the Caucasus, and more.”

Dr. Langgut and Prof. Garfinkel were not surprised to discover that the inhabitants of Tel Zaf were the first in the world to intentionally grow olive and fig groves, since growing fruit trees is evidence of luxury, and this site is known to have been exceptionally wealthy.

Dr. Langgut: “The domestication of fruit trees is a process that takes many years, and therefore befits a society of plenty, rather than one that struggles to survive. Trees give fruit only 3-4 years after being planted. Since groves of fruit trees require a substantial initial investment, and then live on for a long time, they have great economic and social significance in terms of owning land and bequeathing it to future generations – procedures suggesting the beginnings of a complex society. Moreover, it’s quite possible that the residents of Tel Zaf traded in products derived from the fruit trees, such as olives, olive oil, and dried figs, which have a long shelf life. Such products may have enabled long-distance trade that led to the accumulation of material wealth, and possibly even taxation – initial steps in turning the locals into a society with a socio-economic hierarchy supported by an administrative system.”

Dr. Langgut concludes: “At the Tel Zaf archaeological site we found the first evidence in the world for the domestication of fruit trees, alongside some of the earliest stamps – suggesting the beginnings of administrative procedures. As a whole, the findings indicate wealth, and early steps toward the formation of a complex multilevel society, with the class of farmers supplemented by classes of clerks and merchants.”

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Rectangular room at Chalcolithic Tel Tsaf. Prof. Yosef Garfinkel

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7,000 years-old hearth remains at the village of Tel Tsaf. Prof. Yosef Garfinkel

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Article Source: TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

*7000-year-old evidence of fruit tree cultivation in the Jordan Valley, Israel, Scientific Reports, 6-May-2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10743-6

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Archaeologists working with HS2, a major high-speed railway development project in the UK, have uncovered a significant Anglo-Saxon burial site in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. Almost three quarters of the graves contained high quality grave goods, suggesting the site was the final resting place of a wealthy Anglo-Saxon community.

The items uncovered are dated to the 5^th and 6^th century, a period in which there are gaps in the historical and archaeological record. The discoveries are expected to contribute significantly to the understanding of how people in Anglo-Saxon Britain lived their lives, and what culture and society was like at that time.

The team of around 30 field archaeologists from INFRA JV, working on behalf of HS2’s Enabling Works Contractor, Fusion JV, completed the field work in 2021, at a site which they knew was in use over a long period of time. Evidence of Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman activity was all discovered but it was the presence of the Anglo-Saxon burial ground that stood out most for the archaeologists working on the site. The site contained 138 graves, with 141 inhumation burials and 5 cremation burials – one of the largest Anglo-Saxon burial grounds ever uncovered in Britain.

Speaking about the incredible discoveries filmed for his streaming service History Hit, Dan Snow, Historian and Presenter, said:

“1500 years ago people in Britain stopped writing things down. Traditionally this period has been dismissed as a Dark Age. But archaeology has filled the gaps. By studying the things our forebears have left in the ground, their glass, jewelry, weapons and even their bodies, we can build a rich picture of a dynamic and vital period of our history. This stunning set of discoveries on the HS2 route can tell us more about how our predecessors lived, fought and ultimately died. It is one of the best and most revealing post-Roman sites in the country and it was thrilling to join the team as they uncovered their wonderful finds.“

Many of the burials were found with two brooches on their collarbone, indicating that they would have been holding up garments such as a cloak, or a peplos – a long garment worn by women with shoulder brooches. The brooches vary in style – some were disk brooches made with gilt, or coin brooches made of silver. A pair of small square-headed brooches were excavated – a miniature form of the great square-headed brooch, such as the famous Chessell Down Brooch on display at the British Museum.

Some of the items uncovered could have been imported from across Europe, such as amber beads, and various metals and raw materials used to make the artifacts. Two glass cone beakers were uncovered intact, which are similar to vessels made in Northern France, although they were also making them in England at the time. The beakers, which would have been used for drinking liquids such as wine, may suggest the people there had access to fine beverages from abroad. The vessels have decorative trails in the glass and are comparable to the “Kempston” type cone beaker, uncovered in Bedfordshire in 1891, with one currently on display in the British Museum.

One individual, a female, was discovered with a vast array of goods, the quality of which suggest that she was of high-status amongst the buried population at the site. She was buried with a complete ornate glass bowl made of pale green glass, thought to be made around the turn of the 5^th century, so it may have been an heirloom from the Roman era. Other burial items included multiple rings made of copper alloy, a silver ‘zoomorphic’ ring, brooches, discs, iron belt fittings and objects made of ivory. In total, over 2200 personal burial artifacts were discovered, including 2000 beads, 89 brooches, 40 buckles, 52 knives, 15 spearheads, and 7 shield bosses.

Talking about the excavations, Mike Court, Lead Archaeologist for HS2 Ltd, said:

“As we near the end of our archaeology field work on Phase One of HS2, we are just at the beginning of our understanding of how the discoveries will improve our historical knowledge of Britain.

“The archaeological finds made at this site in Wendover will not only be of interest to the local community but are of national importance, providing a valuable insight into life in Anglo-Saxon Britain.”

Whilst the majority of burials were inhumations, many were buried with vessels which were similar in style to cremation urns but were placed in graves as accessories. One of these had a unique style with horns protruding out, and distinctive “hot cross bun’ stamps – a fairly common Anglo-Saxon motif.

Dr Rachel Wood, Lead Archaeologist for Fusion JV, said:

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Site of the HS2 excavation of an Anglo Saxon burial ground in Wendover where 141 burials were uncovered. Courtesy HS2

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Iron and wood bucket with bits of wood that survived, fused to the metalwork. Courtesy HS2

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A tubular rimmed glass bowl found in a burial thought to be made around the turn of the 5th century and could have been an heirloom from the Roman era. Courtesy HS2

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A 6th century decorative footed pedestal bückelurn with three horns, decorated with cross stamps, found in a grave in Buckinghamshire. There is a twin item that is currently on display in Salisbury Museum that is so similar, experts believe that they may be made by the same potter. Courtesy HS2

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Decorated glass beads uncovered in an Anglo Saxon burial during HS2 archaeological excavations in Wendover. Over 2000 beads were uncovered in the excavation. Courtesy HS2

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A silver “zoomorphic” ring, date uncertain, discovered in an Anglo Saxon burial in Wendover. Courtesy HS2

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A 5th or 6th century copper alloy toiletry set, with ear wax cleaning spoon, alongside a brooch, found in an Anglo Saxon burial of a likely female between 18-24 years old. Courtesy HS2

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A skeleton uncovered in an Anglo Saxon burial ground in Wendover, in a grave containing multiple grave goods. Courtesy HS2

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Article Source: Edited from a HS2 news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—In 1347, plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea. The disease then disseminated across Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa claiming up to 60 percent of the population in a large-scale outbreak known as the Black Death. This first wave further extended into a 500-year-long pandemic, the so-called Second Plague Pandemic, which lasted until the early 19th century.

The origins of the Second Plague Pandemic have long been debated. One of the most popular theories has supported its source in East Asia, specifically in China. To the contrary, the only so-far available archaeological findings come from Central Asia, close to Lake Issyk Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan. These findings show that an epidemic devastated a local trading community in the years 1338 and 1339. Specifically, excavations that took place almost 140 years ago revealed tombstones indicating that individuals died in those years of an unknown epidemic or “pestilence”. Since their first discovery, the tombstones inscribed in Syriac language, have been a cornerstone of controversy among scholars regarding their relevance to the Black Death of Europe.

In this study*, an international team of researchers analyzed ancient DNA from human remains as well as historical and archaeological data from two sites that were found to contain “pestilence” inscriptions. The team’s first results were very encouraging, as DNA from the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was identified in individuals with the year 1338 inscribed on their tombstones. “We could finally show that the epidemic mentioned on the tombstones was indeed caused by plague”, says Phil Slavin, one of the senior authors of the study and historian at the University of Sterling, UK.

Researchers found the Black Death’s source strain

But could this have been the origin of the Black Death? Researchers have previously associated the Black Death’s initiation with a massive diversification of plague strains, a so-called Big Bang event of plague diversity. But the exact date of this event could not be precisely estimated, and was thought to have happened sometime between the 10^th and 14^th centuries. The team now pieced together complete ancient plague genomes from the sites in Kyrgyzstan and investigated how they might relate with this Big Bang event. “We found that the ancient strains from Kyrgyzstan are positioned exactly at the node of this massive diversification event. In other words, we found the Black Death’s source strain and we even know its exact date [meaning the year 1338]”, says Maria Spyrou, lead author and researcher at the University of Tübingen.

But where did this strain come from? Did it evolve locally or did it spread in this region from elsewhere? Plague is not a disease of humans; the bacterium survives within wild rodent populations across the world, in so-called plague reservoirs. Hence, the ancient Central Asian strain that caused the 1338-1339 epidemic around Lake Issyk Kul must have come from one such reservoir. “We found that modern strains most closely related to the ancient strain are today found in plague reservoirs around the Tian Shan mountains, so very close to where the ancient strain was found. This points to an origin of Black Death’s ancestor in Central Asia”, explains Johannes Krause, senior author of the study and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The study demonstrates how investigations of well-defined archaeological contexts, and close collaborations among historians, archaeologists and geneticists can resolve big mysteries of our past, such as the infamous Black Death’s origins, with unprecedented precision.

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View of the Tian Shan mountains. Studying ancient plague genomes, researchers traced the origins of the Black Death to Central Asia, close to Lake Issyk Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan. © Lyazzat Musralina

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Excavation of the Kara-Djigach site, in the Chu-Valley of Kyrgyzstan within the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains. This excavation was carried out between the years 1885 and 1892. © A.S. Leybin, August 1886

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Plague inscription from the Chu-Valley region in Kyrgyzstan. The inscription is translated as follows: “In the Year 1649 [= 1338 CE], and it was the Year of the tiger, in Turkic [language] “Bars”. This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. [He] died of pestilence”. © A.S. Leybin, August 1886

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Researchers uncover evidence of fire at a 1-million-year-old archaeological site in Israel. Identification of fire at early hominin sites typically relies on visual assessments of physical alterations associated with fire. Filipe Natalio and colleagues combined spectroscopic techniques and machine learning to estimate the heat exposure of flint tools and faunal remains lacking visual indications of heat exposure from Evron Quarry, Israel, a Lower Paleolithic site dated to 1,000,000 to 800,000 years ago. The authors assessed the heat exposure of 26 flint tools using UV Raman spectroscopy and a deep learning model trained on modern flint materials heated to known temperatures. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy revealed the heat exposure of 87 faunal remains and associated sediments. The authors found that the flint tools were heated to a wide range of temperatures with no spatial patterning associated with temperature variability. The authors identified 13 tusk fragments that had been heated to temperatures above 600 °C. However, the sediments associated with the tusk fragments had not experienced temperatures above 400 °C. The authors suggest that hominin fire use is a possible explanation for the observed patterns of heat exposure. According to the authors, the methods could be used to identify nonvisual evidence of fire use at other Lower Paleolithic sites.

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Above and below: Stone tools from Evron Quarry, Israel. Filipe Natalio and Zane Stepka

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Article Source: PNAS news release.

*“Hidden signatures of early fire at Evron Quarry (1.0 to 0.8 Mya),” by Zane Stepka, Ido Azuri, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Michael Chazan, and Filipe Natalio.

AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM—In a world first, a team of international scientists led by Australian Museum and University of Sydney archaeologist, Dr Amy Mosig Way have revealed that early humans across southern Africa made a particular type of stone tool – the backed artifact- in the same shape. Published in Scientific Reports the study clearly shows that the populations must have been in contact with each other.

The researchers reported that the Howiesons Poort backed artifacts, also known as the ‘stone Swiss Army knife’ of prehistory, were made to a similar template across great distances and multiple biomes. These artifacts were produced in enormous numbers across southern Africa at this time, roughly 65-60 thousand years ago.

Lead author Dr Way explained that these tools were made in many different shapes across the world and because the people across southern Africa all chose to make the tools look the same it indicates they must have been sharing information and communicating with each other, ie they were socially connected.

“People have walked out of Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have evidence for early Homo sapiens in Greece and the Levant from around 200 thousand years ago. But these earlier exits were overprinted by the big exit around 60-70 thousand years ago, which involved the ancestors of all modern people who live outside of Africa today,” Dr Way said.

“Why was this exodus so successful where the earlier excursions were not? The main theory is that social networks were stronger at this time.  This analysis shows for the first time that these social connections were in place in southern Africa just before the big exodus,” Dr Way added.

Senior Research Associate, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, Dr Paloma de la Peña, who studies the cultural behavior of the early Homo sapiens, said the backed artifact has been associated with many different domestic activities such as cutting and scraping, and hunting activities (they were sometimes part of projectiles).

“While the making of the stone tool was not particularly difficult, the hafting of the stone to the handle through the use of glue and adhesives was hard, which highlights that they were sharing and communicating complex information with each other,” Dr de la Peña explained.                         

“What was also striking was that the abundance of tools made in the same shape coincided with great changes in the climatic conditions. We believe that this is a social response to the changing environment across southern Africa,” Dr de la Pena added.

Chief Scientist, Australian Museum, Professor Kristofer Helgen said that like us, ancient humans relied on cooperation and social networking, and this research provides early dated observation of this behavior.

“Examining why early human populations were successful is critical to understanding our evolutionary path. This research provides new insights into our understanding of those social networks and how they contributed to the expansion of modern humans across Eurasia,” Professor Helgen said.                                                                                    

Dr Way said another fascinating fact about this particular tool – the backed artifact – is that it was made independently by many different groups of people across the world, including here in Australia.

“I compared some of the Australian shapes from five thousand years ago with the African shapes 65 thousand years ago (as they can’t possibly be related), to show the southern African tools all cluster within a much larger range of possible shapes,” Dr Way said.

 In southern Africa, previous research by Dr de la Peña has shown that backed artifacts were used as barbs in hunting technology. In Australia, Australian Museum Senior Fellow, archaeologist, Dr Val Attenbrow has shown that in addition to forming armatures in spears, these artifacts were also used for a variety of functions and purposes, such as working bone and hide and drilling and shaping wooden objects.

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Dr Paloma de la Pena. Dr Paloma de la Pena

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Backed piece sibudu. Dr Paloma de la Pena

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Fig 1 map and objects (c) from published study. Dr Paloma de la Pena. Dr Paloma de la Pena

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Article Source: Australian Museum news release.

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PLOS—A cave in southern Spain was used by ancient humans as a canvas for artwork and as a burial place for over 50,000 years, according to a study published June 1, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by José Ramos-Muñoz of the University of Cadiz, Spain, and colleagues.

Cueva de Ardales, a cave in Málaga, Spain, is famous for containing over 1,000 paintings and engravings made by prehistoric people, as well as artifacts and human remains. However, the nature of human usage of this cave has not been well-understood. In this study, the authors present the results of the first excavations in this cave, which shed light on the history of human culture in the Iberian Peninsula.

A combination of radiometric dating and analysis of remains and artifacts within the cave provide evidence that the site’s first occupants were likely Neanderthals over 65,000 years ago. Modern humans arrived later, around 35,000 years ago, and used the cave sporadically until as recently as the beginning of the Copper Age. The oldest rock art in the cave consists of abstract signs such as dots, finger tips, and hand-stencils created with red pigment, while later artwork depicts figurative paintings such as animals. Human remains indicate the use of the cave as a burial place in the Holocene, but evidence of domestic activities is extremely poor, suggesting humans were not living in the cave.

These results confirm the importance of Cueva de Ardales as a site of high symbolic value. This site provides an incredible history of human activity in Spain, and along with similar sites – there are more than 30 other caves in the region with similar paintings – makes the Iberian Peninsula a key locality for investigating the deep history of European culture.

The authors add: “Our research presents a well-stratified series of more than 50 radiometric dates in Cueva de Ardales that confirm the antiquity of Palaeolithic art from over 58,000 years ago. It also confirms that the cave was a place of special activities linked to art, as numerous fragments of ochre were discovered in the Middle Palaeolithic levels.”

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Excavation area in Cueva de Ardales with evidence from the Middle Palaeolithic period. Ramos-Muñoz et al., CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Lithics from the Middle Paleolithic layers of zone 3. A: Quartzite core or heavy duty tool, B: Blade, C: Levallois flake, D: Sidescraper. Ramos-Muñoz et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release

*Ramos-Muñoz J, Cantalejo P, Blumenröther J, Bolin V, Otto T, Rotgänger M, et al. (2022) The nature and chronology of human occupation at the Galerías Bajas, from Cueva de Ardales, Malaga, Spain. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0266788. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266788

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SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—The first successfully sequenced human genome from an individual who died in Pompeii, Italy, after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is presented this week in a study published in Scientific Reports. Prior to this, only short stretches of mitochondrial DNA from Pompeiian human and animal remains had been sequenced.

Gabriele Scorrano and colleagues examined the remains of two individuals who were found in the House of the Craftsman in Pompeii and extracted their DNA. The shape, structure, and length of the skeletons indicated that one set of remains belonged to a male who was aged between 35 and 40 years at the time of his death, while the other set of remains belonged to a female aged over 50 years old. Although the authors were able to extract and sequence ancient DNA from both individuals, they were only able to sequence the entire genome from the male’s remains due to gaps in the sequences obtained from the female’s remains.

Comparisons of the male individual’s DNA with DNA obtained from 1,030 other ancient and 471 modern western Eurasian individuals suggested that his DNA shared the most similarities with modern central Italians and other individuals who lived in Italy during the Roman Imperial age. However, analyses of the male individual’s mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA also identified groups of genes that are commonly found in those from the island of Sardinia, but not among other individuals who lived in Italy during the Roman Imperial age. This suggests that there may have been high levels of genetic diversity across the Italian Peninsula during this time.

Additional analyses of the male individual’s skeleton and DNA identified lesions in one of the vertebrae and DNA sequences that are commonly found in Mycobacterium, the group of bacteria that the tuberculosis-causing bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis belongs to. This suggests that the individual may have been affected by tuberculosis prior to his death.

The authors speculate that it may have been possible to successfully recover ancient DNA from the male individual’s remains as pyroclastic materials released during the eruption may have provided protection from DNA-degrading environmental factors, such as atmospheric oxygen. The findings demonstrate the possibility to retrieve ancient DNA from Pompeiian human remains and provide further insight into the genetic history and lives of this population, they add.

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Example of Pompeii victim discovered through plaster casting during excavations. Wingrid1979, Pixabay

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Article Source: Scientific Reports news release.

*Bioarchaeological and palaeogenomic portrait of two Pompeians that died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, Scientific Reports, 26-May-2022. 

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UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—A newly discovered network of “lost” ancient cities in the Amazon could provide a pivotal new insight into how ancient civilizations combined the construction of vast urban landscapes while living alongside nature. 

A team of international researchers, including Professor Jose Iriarte from the University of Exeter, has uncovered an array of intricate settlements in the Llanos de Mojos savannah-forest, Bolivia, that have laid hidden under the thick tree canopies for centuries. 

The cities, built by the Casarabe communities between 500-1400 AD, feature an unprecedented array of elaborate and intricate structures unlike any previously discovered in the region – including 5m high terraces covering 22 hectares – the equivalent of 30 football pitches – and 21m tall conical pyramids. 

Researchers also found a vast network of reservoirs, causeways and checkpoints, spanning several kilometers. 

The discovery, the researchers say, challenges the view of Amazonia as a historically “pristine” landscape, but was instead home to an early urbanism created and managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years. 

Crucially, researchers maintain that these cities were constructed and managed not at odds with nature, but alongside it – employing successful sustainable subsistence strategies that promoted conservationism and maintained the rich biodiversity of the surrounding landscape. 

The research, by Heiko Prümers, from the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut^, Carla Jaimes Betancourt from the University of Bonn, José Iriarte and Mark Robinson from the University of Exeter, and Martin Schaich from the ArcTron 3D is published in the journal Nature. 

Professor Iriarte said: “We long suspected that the most complex pre-Columbian societies in the whole basin developed in this part of the Bolivian Amazon, but evidence is concealed under the forest canopy and is hard to visit in person. Our lidar system has revealed built terraces, straight causeways, enclosures with checkpoints, and water reservoirs. There are monumental structures just a mile apart connected by 600 miles of canals, long raised causeways connecting sites, reservoirs and lakes.   

“Lidar technology combined with extensive archaeological research reveals that indigenous people not only managed forested landscapes but also created urban landscapes, which can significantly contribute to perspectives on the conservation of the Amazon.   

“This region was one of the earliest occupied by humans in Amazonia, where people started to domesticate crops of global importance such as manioc and rice. But little is known about daily life and the early cities built during this period.” 

The team of experts used lidar technology – dubbed “lasers in the sky” – to peer through the tropical forest canopy and examine the sites, found in the savannah-forest of South West Amazonia. 

The research revealed key insights into the sheer magnitude and magnificence of the civic-ceremonial centers found buried in the forest.   

It showed that the core, central spread over several hectares, on top of which lay civic-ceremonial U-shaped structures, platform mounds and 21-m tall conical pyramids.  

The research team conservatively suggest that the scale of labor and planning to construct the settlements has no precedents in Amazonia and is instead comparable only with the Archaic states of the central Andes. 

Crucially, the research team insist this new discovery gives a pivotal new insight into how this ancient urbanism was carried out sustainably and embracing conservationism. 

At the same time the cities were built communities in the Llanos de Mojos transformed Amazonian seasonally flooded savannas, roughly the size of England, into productive agricultural and aquacultural landscapes.  

The study shows that the indigenous people not only managed forested landscapes, but also created urban landscapes in tandem – providing evidence of successful, sustainable subsistence strategies but also a previously undiscovered cultural-ecological heritage. 

Co-author, Dr Mark Robinson of the University of Exeter added: “These ancient cities were primary centers of a regional settlement network connected by still visible, straight causeways that radiate from these sites into the landscape for several kilometers. Access to the sites may have been restricted and controlled.  

“Our results put to rest arguments that western Amazonia was sparsely populated in pre-Hispanic times. The architectural layout of Casarabe culture large settlement sites indicates that the inhabitants of this region created a new social and public landscape.

“The scale, monumentality and labor involved in the construction of the civic-ceremonial architecture, water management infrastructure, and spatial extent of settlement dispersal, compare favorably to Andean cultures and are to a scale far beyond the sophisticated, interconnected settlements of Southern Amazonia.^” 

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Screenshot from a 3D animation of the Cotoca site (Source: H. Prümers / DAI).

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Lidar Image of the Cotoca site (MULTI-HS_D16_H15_RGB image, generated with “Relief Visualization Toolbox”) (Source: H. Prümers / DAI).

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Co-author Carla Jaimes Betancourt descending from the central pyramid of the Cotoca site (Source: H. Prümers / DAI).

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Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon is published in Nature.

Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER news release

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UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER—The team behind the discovery of Richard III have resumed major archaeological excavations at Leicester Cathedral, close to where the King was found.

Archaeologists and other experts from University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) are leading excavations on the site of the Old Song School, at the eastern end of Leicester Cathedral, which could reveal aspects of Leicester life from the past 1,000 years.

The area within the Cathedral Gardens, previously part of St Martins’ churchyard, is being transformed into a new heritage and learning space as part of the Leicester Cathedral Revealed project, enabled by a £4.5 million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

In advance of the regeneration, ULAS experts and colleagues from the University’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History hope to examine a cross section of the City’s history and learn more about the early foundation of the Cathedral – formerly a Parish Church – on the site.

These archaeological excavations, up to two meters below ground level, will allow experts to track the history of this part of Leicester from the Victorian period through Medieval, Saxon, Roman and perhaps even to early Iron Age settlement.

Mathew Morris is a Project Officer at ULAS and leads the excavations. He was also part of the team which unearthed the remains of Richard III in 2012, a stone’s throw from the Cathedral site. He said:

“This is in an area of Leicester which we rarely get to excavate, and it’s going to be the first time which we have excavated a continuous cemetery sequence dating from the late Saxon period to the relatively recent past, giving us a fantastic opportunity to investigate the story of Leicester through the lives of the people who lived and were buried here.

“The excavation is also going to give us the chance to explore the origins of the Cathedral site, including the foundation of the original church and aspects of the Roman town which predated it.”

Preliminary investigations took place in late 2021, with the ULAS team carefully uncovering more than 120 burials in the top-most layers on the site. The area was once used as the churchyard for burials of people from all walks of life living in the surrounding parish.

It is believed that there could be hundreds more burials on the site, which experts will need to painstakingly excavate by hand. Samples will then be tested by University of Leicester experts, which will reveal insights into the life of those who lived, worked and died in the City.

Dr Sarah Inskip is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Leicester and will lead this work to study these remains, as part of a wider project to study the history of tobacco use from the 15^th to 18^th Centuries. She said:

“The individuals offer an unprecedented glimpse into life in Leicester through the Medieval and Post-Medieval periods. The ability to assess individuals from one location over such a long time period will allow us to see how the lives of Leicester people changed with major social upheaval and transitions, such as epidemic disease, the arrival of new global commodities such as tobacco, and industrialization.”

Earlier burials will also be studied by experts from York Osteoarchaeology.

Dean of Leicester, the Very Revd David Monteith, added:

“Leicester Cathedral is pleased to be working with ULAS once again on the archaeological excavation work for our Leicester Cathedral Revealed project that will renew the Cathedral so that it can be its very best as a place of worship, heritage, pilgrimage, hospitality, learning, sanctuary and celebration.

“The archaeological excavations are a key element of the repair and restoration works to the existing Cathedral building and the construction of a new visitor and learning center, The Chapter House – a striking extension to the Cathedral on the footprint of the Old Song School. The Chapter House will provide an exhibition gallery with immersive interpretation, a flexible learning space for school children and community groups, facilities for volunteers and WCs.”

Building work on the Leicester Cathedral Revealed project is led by main contractor Messenger Construction Ltd. ULAS excavations are expected to last for several months, with post-excavation work taking place into 2023.

Once the project is completed, the studied individuals will be reinterred by Leicester Cathedral.

John Thomas, Deputy Director of ULAS, added:

“The opportunity to examine a cross section of past Leicester residents is tremendously exciting and the timing of this excavation with the 10-year anniversary of the discovery of Richard couldn’t be more fitting.

“Collaborative work at the University and beyond revealed much about the life of Richard III and we hope to use comparable techniques to gain similar insights into those less historically visible.”

Later in 2022, the University of Leicester will mark the 10 years since the discovery of the remains of Richard III in a Leicester car park.

Working with the Richard III Society and other partners, ULAS archaeologists unearthed the King’s mortal remains in a trench in 2012. Further study, including genetic testing of the skeleton’s DNA against a known modern-day relative, revealed the remains belonged to the last Plantagenet King.

Richard’s remains were later reinterred in a specially-created tomb at Leicester Cathedral in 2015, in the presence of Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and members of the Royal Family.

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ULAS archaeologist excavates a broken headstone from a brick lined grave at Leicester Cathedral. ULAS

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ULAS archaeologists excavate the burial ground at Leicester Cathedral. ULAS

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER news release.

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UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING—Archaeological excavations led by Wyoming’s state archaeologist and involving University of Wyoming researchers have confirmed that an ancient mine in eastern Wyoming was used by humans to produce red ocher starting nearly 13,000 years ago.

That makes the Powars II site at Sunrise in Platte County the oldest documented red ocher mine — and likely the oldest known mine of any sort — in all of North and South America. The excavations, completed shortly before the 2020 death of famed UW archaeologist George Frison, confirmed theories he advanced stemming from research he began at the site in 1986.

The findings appear in “In situ evidence for Paleoindian hematite quarrying at the Powars II site (48PL330), Wyoming,” a paper* published May 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), one of the world’s most prestigious multidisciplinary scientific journals covering the biological, physical and social sciences.

The paper’s lead author is Wyoming State Archaeologist Spencer Pelton, who became involved in the Powars II project in 2016 when he was a UW doctoral student.

“We have unequivocal evidence for use of this site by early Paleoindians as long as 12,840 years ago and continuing by early Americans for about 1,000 years,” Pelton says. “It’s gratifying that we were finally able to confirm the significance of the Powars II site after decades of work by so many, including Dr. Frison, who learned of the site in the early 1980s and was involved in the research until his death.”

In fact, Frison — who died in September 2020 as the only UW faculty member ever elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences — is listed as a co-author of the new paper. Other contributors were George Zeimens, executive director of the Sunrise Historic and Prehistoric Preservation Society; Erin Kelley, a UW graduate and Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist staff member; and UW Ph.D. students Sarah Allaun, Alexander Craib, Chase Mahan and Charles Koenig.

Red ocher, also known as hematite, fulfilled a wide range of functions in Paleoindian societies, including as a pigment in rituals. It has been found at ancient graves, caches, campsites and kill sites in the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains and beyond. The Powars II site is the only red ocher quarry identified in the North American archaeological record north of southern Mexico — and one of only five such quarries identified in all of the Americas.

Among the artifacts previously discovered at the Powars II site are Clovis points — believed to be from the first inhabitants of North America — along with other projectile points, tools and shell beads.

The 2017-2020 excavation led by Pelton — a 6- by 1-meter trench bisecting a previously undocumented quarry feature — yielded several thousand more Paleoindian artifacts, along with many well-preserved animal bones and antlers. The animal bones and antlers were used to extract the red ocher in the quarry.

The projectile points come from numerous locations in the region, including from as far away as the Edwards Plateau in Texas, according to the paper. That makes it likely that red ocher found at archaeological sites throughout the American midcontinent came from the Powars II quarry.

“Beyond its status as a quarry, the Powars II artifact assemblage is itself one of the densest and most diverse of any thus far discovered in the early Paleoindian record of the Americas,” Pelton says. “The site contains over 30 chipped stone tools per square meter, some of the oldest canid remains from an American archaeological site and rare or unique artifacts, among other distinctions.”

The researchers say the evidence discovered so far indicates the quarry was used in two primary periods. During the first, dating to as long as 12,840 years ago and lasting several hundred years, people not only quarried red ocher — using bones and antlers as tools — but also produced and repaired weapons, along with other activities. After a hiatus of a century or more, the site was occupied by humans who mined red ocher and deposited artifacts in piles in a quarry pit.

“Further excavation of the estimated 800-square-meter remainder of the site will certainly reveal complexity not captured by our sample,” the researchers wrote.

Pelton nominated the Powars II site to the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

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University of Wyoming Ph.D. student Chase Mahan inspects an artifact from excavation at the Powars II archaeological site in 2020. Spencer Pelton

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This complete Clovis point was recovered from the Powars II site. Spencer Pelton

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*In situ evidence for Paleoindian hematite quarrying at the Powars II site (48PL330), Wyoming, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12-May-2022. 10.1073/pnas.2201005119 

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FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—What links a finger bone and some fossil teeth found in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos?

The answer to this question has been established by an international team of researchers from Laos, Europe, the US and Australia.

The human tooth was chanced upon during an archaeological survey in a remote area of Laos. The scientists have shown it originated from the same ancient human population first recognized in Denisova Cave (dubbed the Denisovans), in the Altai Mountains of Siberia (Russia).

The research team made the significant discovery during their 2018 excavation campaign in northern Laos. The new cave Tam Ngu Hao 2, also known as Cobra Cave, is located near to the famous Tam Pà Ling Cave where other important 70,000-year-old human (Homo sapiens) fossils had been previously found.

The international researchers are confident the two ancient sites are linked to Denisovan occupations despite being thousands of kilometers apart. 

Their findings* have been published in Nature Communications, led by The University of Copenhagen, the CNRS (France), University of Illinois Urbanna-Champain (USA), the Ministry of Information Culture and Tourism, Laos and supported by microarchaeological work undertaken at Flinders University, and geochronological analyses at Macquarie University and Southern Cross University in Australia. 

Lead Author and Assistant Professor of Palaeoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Fabrice Demeter, says the cave sediments contained teeth of giant herbivores, ancient elephants and rhinos that where known to live in woodland environments. 

“After all this work following the many clues written on fossils from very different geographic areas our findings are significant,” Professor Demeter says.

“This fossil represents the first discovery of Denisovans in Southeast Asia and shows that Denisovans were in the south at least as far as Laos. This is in agreement with the genetic evidence found in modern day Southeast Asian populations.” 

Following a very detailed analysis of the shape of this tooth, the research team identified many similarities to Denisovan teeth found on the Tibetan Plateau – the only other location that Denisovan fossils have ever been found. 

This suggested it was most likely a Denisovan who lived between 164,000 -131,000 years ago in the warm tropics of northern Laos. 

Associate Professor Mike Morley from the Microarchaeology Laboratory at Flinders University says the cave site named Tam Ngu Hao 2 (Cobra cave), was found high up in the limestone mountains containing remnants of an old cemented cave sediment packed with fossils.

“We have essentially found the ’smoking gun’ – this Denisovan tooth shows they were once present this far south in the karst landscapes of Laos,” says Associate Professor Morley.

The complexity of the site created a challenge for dating and required two Australian teams. 

The team from Macquarie University, led by Associate Professor Kira Westaway, provided dating of the cave sediments surrounding the fossils; and the team from Southern Cross University led by Associate Professor Renaud Joannes-Boyau conducted the direct dating of unearthed fossil remains. 

“Establishing a sedimentary context for the fossils’ final resting place provides an internal check on the integrity of the find– if the sediments and fossils return a similar age, as seen in Tam Ngu Hao 2, then we know that the fossils were buried not long after the organism died,” says Associate Professor Kira Westaway.

Dating directly the fossil remains is crucial, if we want to understand the succession of events and species in the landscape. 

“The good agreement of the different dating techniques, on both the sediment and fossils, attest of the quality of the chronology for the species in the region. And this has a lot of implication for population mobility in the landscape” says A. Prof Renaud Joannes-Boyau from Southern Cross University

The fossils were likely scattered on the landscape when they were washed into the cave during a flooding event that deposited the sediments and fossils.

Unfortunately, unlike Denisova Cave, the humid conditions in Laos meant the ancient DNA was not preserved. However, the archaeological scientists did find ancient proteins suggesting the fossil was a young, likely female, human likely aged between 3.5 – 8.5 years old

The finding suggests Southeast Asia was a hotspot of diversity for humans with at least five different species setting up camp at different times; H. erectus, the Denisovans/Neanderthals, H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis and H. sapiens. 

Southeast Asian caves could provide the next clue and further hard evidence to understand these complex demographic relationships.

Read the full paper in Nature Communications titled ‘A Middle Pleistocene Denisovan from the Annamite Chain in northern Laos’.

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A close up of the tooth from a ‘birds-eye’ viewpoint. Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)

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Views of the TNH2-1 specimen.  Nature Communications.

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Inside Ngu Hao 2 cave showing the concreted remanent cave sediments adhering to the cave wall. The overlying whitish rock is a flowstone that caps the entire deposit. Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)

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A view from inside Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. Note the very different vegetation and climate compared to Laos. Mike Morley, Flinders University.

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Article Source: FLINDERS UNIVERSITY news release.
 

*A Middle Pleistocene Denisovan molar from the Annamite Chain of northern Laos, Nature Communications, 17-May-2022. 10.1038/s41467-022-29923-z 

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BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY—From the Middle Bronze Age, Egypt played a crucial role in the appearance of calcite-alabaster artifacts in Israel, and the development of the local gypsum-alabaster industry. The absence of ancient calcite-alabaster quarries in the Southern Levant (modern day Israel and Palestine) led to the assumption that all calcite-alabaster vessels found in the Levant originated from Egypt, while poorer quality vessels made of gypsum were local products.

Until now this long-held assumption was never scientifically tested. But the recent identification of a calcite-alabaster quarry in the Te’omim cave, located on the western slopes of the Jerusalem hills (near modern-day Beit Shemesh, Israel), calls this hypothesis into question. A new study*, recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, scientifically refutes the hypothesis and, for the first time, allows the distinction between calcite-alabaster originating in Israel from that originating in Egypt. Furthermore, it confirms that calcite-alabaster objects, such as Herod the Great’s alabaster bathtubs, were quarried in Israel rather than Egypt.

The research was conducted as part of Ayala Amir’s MA thesis at the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, supervised by Prof. Boaz Zissu and Prof. Aren M. Maeir, of Bar-Ilan University, and Prof. Amos Frumkin, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Analytical data were first collected from samples of two well-defined sources, from Egypt and modern-day Israel. The Egyptian sources included both ancient and modern calcite-alabaster samples. The ancient samples were obtained courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. These ancient vessel remains were collected by the Austrian archaeological expedition to Giza in the nineteenth century CE. The modern Egyptian artifact, made of geological-sourced calcite-alabaster, was bought in a market in Cairo, Egypt in 2013. The calcite-alabaster from Israel included raw material from the Te’omim cave quarry, chips (mining debitage) found in the cave near the quarry, and chips and a stone block (raw material carved to a cube, but not yet used to make a vessel) from Umm el-‘Umdan — an archaeological site near the Te’omim cave. Additional samples were collected from a speleothem in Natuf cave located in Wadi en-Natuf in western Samaria.

Next, through a multidisciplinary approach, the calcite-alabaster samples from Israel and Egypt were analyzed with the assistance of Prof. Gil Goobes and Prof. Amnon Albeck, of the Department of Chemistry at Bar-Ilan University using four analytic methods, most of which have not been previously used, to determine their origin: inductively coupled plasma (ICP) analysis, routine infra-red (IR) spectroscopy, ¹H- and ³¹P- solid state NMR (ssNMR) experiments and C and O stable isotope ratio analysis to determine their composition and their crystalline structure.

“All four analytical methods applied in the study provided consistent results, clearly distinguishing the Israeli from the Egyptian calcite-alabaster for the first time,” said Prof. Albeck of the findings.

The same methods were then applied to two of Herod the Great’s royal bathtubs, which were made of finely worked calcite-alabaster and found in the Kypros fortress and the palace of Herodium, located just south of Jerusalem. The results unequivocally indicated that the bathtubs were quarried in Israel and not in Egypt, the main source of calcite-alabaster in ancient periods.

“The fact that both bathtubs were unequivocally quarried in Israel and not in Egypt, as we would have expected due to the high quality of the stone, was a particular surprise because that means that Herod the Great used local produce, and that the calcite-alabaster industry in Judea in the second half of the first century BC was sufficiently developed and of high enough quality to serve the luxurious standards of Herod, one of the finest builders among the kings of that period,” said Prof. Aren Maeir.

The source of calcite-alabaster artifacts cannot be determined by traditional archaeological methods. Furthermore, petrographic analysis, the main method used to determine the source of Israeli calcite-alabaster, shows wide variability in texture, depending on its depositional environment. Consequently, this method could not be used to identify the source of the bathtubs.

“The multidisciplinary approach adopted in this study provides information concerning both the composition and crystalline structure of calcite-alabaster and is significant for understanding and interpreting archaeological findings,” said researcher Ayala Amir. “Combining analytic methods with archaeological studies may provide new and fascinating information that could not be obtained by traditional archaeological techniques and enable us to determine the origin of other calcite-alabaster artifacts with much greater confidence,” she added.

This study was supported by grants from the Israel Science Foundation and the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology. It is an outgrowth of the research project “Ancient Quarry of Calcite Cave Deposit (‘Bahat’) in the Jerusalem Hills: Archaeological and Environmental Significances” funded by the Israel Science Foundation and directed by Prof. Boaz Zissu, of Bar-Ilan University, and Prof. Amos Frumkin, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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From the Middle Bronze Age, Egypt played a crucial role in the appearance of calcite-alabaster artifacts in Israel, and the development of the local gypsum-alabaster industry. The absence of ancient calcite-alabaster quarries in the Southern Levant (modern day Israel and Palestine) led to the assumption that all calcite-alabaster vessels found in the Levant originated from Egypt, while poorer quality vessels made of gypsum were local products. Until now this long-held assumption was never scientifically tested. But the recent identification of a calcite-alabaster quarry in the Te’omim cave, located on the western slopes of the Jerusalem hills (near modern-day Beit Shemesh, Israel), calls this hypothesis into question. A new Bar-Ilan University study, recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, scientifically refutes the hypothesis and, for the first time, allows the distinction between calcite-alabaster originating in Israel from that originating in Egypt. Furthermore, it confirms that calcite-alabaster objects, such as Herod the Great’s alabaster bathtubs, were quarried in Israel rather than Egypt. Photo: Herod’s calcite-alabaster bathtub found in Kypros fortress. Prof. Amos Frumkin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Researcher Ayala Amir beside the wall of the quarry, signs of quarrying-scars and cessation of quarrying are visible on the quarry’s walls and floor. Prof. Boaz Zissu, Bar-Ilan University

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Article Source: BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY news release.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* identifies aromatic compounds associated with incense offered at a Buddhist temple during the Tang Dynasty in China. Incense plays many cultural roles, including a role in religious worship, and was a key product traded between China and other countries via the Silk Road trade network. Texts from the Tang Dynasty in China, dated to between 618 and 907 CE, report the introduction of exotic aromatic substances in China, albeit with rare archaeological evidence. Yimin Yang and colleagues chemically analyzed incense compounds discovered at the underground palace of the Famen Temple near Xi’an, China. The temple was constructed to house a finger bone relic purported to belong to the founder of Buddhism, and multiple containers of incense were discovered during excavation of the temple site. Using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis, the authors identified elemi resin and highly scented agarwood, respectively, in two of the containers. Another container held a mixture of agarwood and frankincense, providing the earliest known evidence of the aromatics blending practice known as Hexiang. According to the authors, the results show the contemporary knowledge of exotic incense during the Tang Dynasty and demonstrate the Silk Road’s influence on ancient Chinese society.

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The begonia-shaped silver container with the aromatic powder (Hexiang) inside, discovered in the underground palace of Famen Temple. Xinlai Ren and Xinyi Wang

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Characterization of the incense sacrificed to the sarira of Sakyamuni from Famen Royal Temple during the ninth century in China,” by Meng Ren, Xinlai Ren, Xinyi Wang, and Yimin Yang, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16-May-2022. 10.1073/pnas.2112724119 

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UNIVERSITY OF BERN—The genetic origins of the first agriculturalists in the Neolithic period long seemed to lie in the Near East. A new study* published in the journal Cell shows that the first farmers actually represented a mixture of Ice Age hunter-gatherer groups, spread from the Near East all the way to south-eastern Europe. Researchers from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as well as from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Fribourg were involved in the study. The method they developed could help reveal other human evolution patterns with unmatched resolution.   

The first signs of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle are found in the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’, a region in the Near East where people began to settle down and domesticate animals and plants about 11,000 years ago. The question of the origin of agriculture and sedentism has occupied researchers for over 100 years: did farming spread from the Near East through cultural diffusion or through migration? Genetic analyses of prehistoric skeletons so far supported the idea that Europe’s first farmers were descended from hunter-gatherer populations in Anatolia. While that may well be the case, this new study shows that the Neolithic genetic origins cannot clearly be attributed to a single region. Unexpected and complex population dynamics occurred at the end of the Ice Age, and led to the ancestral genetic makeup of the populations who invented agriculture and a sedentary life-style i.e. the first Neolithic farmers.

First farmers emerged from a mixing process starting 14,000 years ago

Previous analyses had suggested that the first Neolithic people were genetically different from other human groups from that time. Little was known about their origins. Nina Marchi, one of the study’s first authors from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and SIB says: “We now find that the first farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a population admixed between hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Near East.” According to the authors, the mixing process started around 14,000 years ago, which was followed by a period of extreme genetic differentiation lasting several thousand years.

A novel approach to model population history from prehistoric skeletons

This research was made possible by combining two techniques: the production of high-quality ancient genomes from prehistoric skeletons, coupled with demographic modeling on the resulting data. The research team coined the term “demogenomic modeling” for this purpose. “It is necessary to have genome data of the best possible quality so that the latest statistical genomic methods can reconstruct the subtle demographic processes of the last 30 thousand years at high resolution”, says Laurent Excoffier, one of the senior authors of the study. Laurent Excoffier is a professor at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and group leader at SIB. He initiated the project together with Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and Daniel Wegmann of the University of Fribourg. Nina Marchi adds: “Simply comparing the similarity of different ancient genomes is not enough to understand how they evolved. We had to reconstruct the actual histories of the populations studied as accurately as possible. This is only possible with complex population genetic statistics.”

Interdisciplinarity key to solve such ancient puzzles

Joachim Burger of the University of Mainz and second senior author emphasizes the necessity of interdisciplinarity: “It took close to ten years to gather and analyze the skeletons suitable for such a study. This was only possible by collaborating with numerous archaeologists and anthropologists, who helped us to anchor our models historically”. The historical contextualization was coordinated by Maxime Brami, who works with Burger at Johannes Gutenberg University. The young prehistorian was surprised by some of the study’s findings: “Europe’s first farmers seem to be descended from hunter-gatherer populations that lived all the way from the Near East to the Balkans. This was not foreseeable archaeologically”.

Towards a general model of human population evolution

Genetic data from fossils (skeletons) are badly damaged and must be processed accordingly using bioinformatics, as Daniel Wegmann from the University of Fribourg and group leader at SIB explains: “The high-resolution reconstruction of the prehistory of the Europeans was only possible thanks to methods that we specifically developed to analyze ancient fossil genomes.” Joachim Burger adds: “With these approaches, we have not only elucidated the origins of the world’s first Neolithic populations, but we have established a general model of the evolution of human populations in Southwest Asia and Europe.”

“Of course, spatial and temporal gaps remain, and this does not imply the end of studies on the evolution of humans in this area”, concludes Laurent Excoffier. Thus, the team’s research plan is already set; they want to supplement their demographic model with genomes from the later phases of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to provide an increasingly detailed picture of human evolution.

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Ancient DNA extraction in Mainz’s lab. Work done in sterile conditions to avoid contamination from modern DNA. Joachim Burger / JGU

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF BERN news release

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN—The movement of herders and livestock into the eastern steppe is of great interest to researchers, but few scholars have linked the introduction of herds and horses to the rise of complex societies.

Now, a new study* in the journal PLOS ONE provides interdisciplinary support for connections between livestock dairying and the rise of social complexity in the eastern steppe. Using proteomic analysis of human dental calculus from sites in the Mongolian Altai, the researchers demonstrate a shift in dairy consumption over the course of the Bronze Age.

By tracking the consumption of dairy among populations in the Altai Mountains in Mongolia, researchers revealed the critical role of domesticated sheep, goats and cattle in ancient economies. The adoption of ruminant livestock eventually led to population growth, the establishment of community cemeteries and the construction of large monuments. While these pronounced changes occurred in tandem with the earliest evidence of horse dairying in Mongolia, the consumption of horse dairy remained a relatively novel practice until later periods.

Thus, the spread of herds into the Mongolian Altai resulted in immediate changes to human diets, with a delay in subsequent social and demographic transformations, said study lead author Alicia Ventresca Miller, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

“As we push back the dates of the introduction of livestock, we need to rethink the pace of social change, which may occur on much longer timescales,” she said.

Ventresca Miller and colleagues from U-M and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany extracted proteins from calculus samples to identify caseins and whey associated with ruminant and horse dairy. Results were interpreted in consultation with researchers from the National University of Mongolia and National Museum of Mongolia, in an effort to clarify how ancient societies changed after the adoption of domesticated livestock.

Dramatic social changes and monumental constructions were fueled by a long-term dependence on sheep, goats and cattle, Ventresca Miller says. This is supported by finds of mostly ruminant bones in large monumental Khirgisuurs in the Altai Mountains, while in other areas of Mongolia horse bone deposits have been identified along with ruminants.

“These new results might allow for a shift in our understanding of Bronze Age dynamics,” said Tsagaan Turbat, professor of archaeology and anthropology at the National University of Mongolia.

Turbat believes that Deer Stone-Khirgisuur complexes, the most studied in the region, may have originated from Sagsai groups in the Altai Mountains.

The current study pushes back the earliest date of horse dairying in the eastern steppe associated with Sagsai burials to about 1350 B.C. As initial evidence of horse milk consumption is rare, this may have been a novelty since horses were an important feature of ritual life, the researchers say.

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Horses and Gers near Khoton (Syrgal) Lake near the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. Noost Bayarkhuu, University of Science and Technology of China

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Sagsai burial from the site of Tsagaan Asga in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. Noost Bayarkhuu, University of Science and Technology of China

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN news release.

* The spread of herds and horses into the Altai: How livestock and dairying drove social complexity in Mongolia, PLoS ONE. 

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