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NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY—Archaeologists at Northern Arizona University are hoping a new technology they helped pioneer will change the way scientists study the broken pieces left behind by ancient societies.

The team from NAU’s Department of Anthropology have succeeded in teaching computers to perform a complex task many scientists who study ancient societies have long dreamt of: rapidly and consistently sorting thousands of pottery designs into multiple stylistic categories. By using a form of machine learning known as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the archaeologists created a computerized method that roughly emulates the thought processes of the human mind in analyzing visual information.

“Now, using digital photographs of pottery, computers can accomplish what used to involve hundreds of hours of tedious, painstaking and eye-straining work by archaeologists who physically sorted pieces of broken pottery into groups, in a fraction of the time and with greater consistency,” said Leszek Pawlowicz, adjunct faculty in the Department of Anthropology. He and anthropology professor Chris Downum began researching the feasibility of using a computer to accurately classify broken pieces of pottery, known as sherds, into known pottery types in 2016. Results of their research are reported in the June issue of the peer-reviewed publication Journal of Archaeological Science.

“On many of the thousands of archaeological sites scattered across the American Southwest, archaeologists will often find broken fragments of pottery known as sherds. Many of these sherds will have designs that can be sorted into previously-defined stylistic categories, called ‘types,’ that have been correlated with both the general time period they were manufactured and the locations where they were made” Downum said. “These provide archaeologists with critical information about the time a site was occupied, the cultural group with which it was associated and other groups with whom they interacted.”

The research relied on recent breakthroughs in the use of machine learning to classify images by type, specifically CNNs. CNNs are now a mainstay in computer image recognition, being used for everything from X-ray images for medical conditions and matching images in search engines to self-driving cars. Pawlowicz and Downum reasoned that if CNNs can be used to identify things like breeds of dogs and products a consumer might like, why not apply this approach to the analysis of ancient pottery?

Until now, the process of recognizing diagnostic design features on pottery has been difficult and time-consuming. It could involve months or years of training to master and correctly apply the design categories to tiny pieces of a broken pot. Worse, the process was prone to human error because expert archaeologists often disagree over which type is represented by a sherd, and might find it difficult to express their decision-making process in words. An anonymous peer reviewer of the article called this “the dirty secret in archaeology that no one talks about enough.”

Determined to create a more efficient process, Pawlowicz and Downum gathered thousands of pictures of pottery fragments with a specific set of identifying physical characteristics, known as Tusayan White Ware, common across much of northeast Arizona and nearby states. They then recruited four of the Southwest’s top pottery experts to identify the pottery design type for every sherd and create a ‘training set’ of sherds from which the machine can learn. Finally, they trained the machine to learn pottery types by focusing on the pottery specimens the archaeologists agreed on.

“The results were remarkable,” Pawlowicz said. “In a relatively short period of time, the computer trained itself to identify pottery with an accuracy comparable to, and sometimes better than, the human experts.”

For the four archaeologists with decades of experience sorting tens of thousands of actual potsherds, the machine outperformed two of them and was comparable with the other two. Even more impressive, the machine was able to do what many archaeologists can have difficulty with: describing why it made the classification decisions that it did. Using color-coded heat maps of sherds, the machine pointed out the design features that it used to make its classification decisions, thereby providing a visual record of its “thoughts.”

“An exciting spinoff of this process was the ability of the computer to find nearly exact matches of particular snippets of pottery designs represented on individual sherds,” Downum said. “Using CNN-derived similarity measures for designs, the machine was able to search through thousands of images to find the most similar counterpart of an individual pottery design.”

Pawlowicz and Downum believe this ability could allow a computer to find scattered pieces of a single broken pot in a multitude of similar sherds from an ancient trash dump or conduct a region-wide analysis of stylistic similarities and differences across multiple ancient communities. The approach might also be better able to associate particular pottery designs from excavated structures which have been dated using the tree-ring method.

Their research is already receiving high praise.

“I fervently hope that Southwestern archaeologists will adopt this approach and do so quickly. It just makes so much sense,” said Stephen Plog, emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Stylistic Variation In Prehistoric Ceramics.” “We learned a ton from the old system, but it has lasted beyond its usefulness, and it’s time to transform how we analyze ceramic designs.”

The researchers are exploring practical applications of the CNN model’s classification expertise and are working on additional journal articles to share the technology with other archaeologists. They hope this new approach to archaeological analysis of pottery can be applied to other types of ancient artifacts, and that archaeology can enter a new phase of machine classification that results in greater efficiency of archaeological efforts and more effective methods of teaching pottery designs to new generations of students.

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A “river” of Tusayan White Ware sherds, showing the change in type designs from oldest at left to youngest at right. Deep learning allows for accurate and repeatable categorization of these sherd types. Chris Downum

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Article Source: NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY news release

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Researchers surveyed 25 archaeological sites in the Bears Ears region of southeastern Utah between 2017 and 2019, and found that at least 31 plant species of importance to local Native American tribes were recorded at archaeological sites, despite being uncommon across the wider landscape; the findings suggest that ancient human transportation and cultivation of native plants influenced modern plant diversity, and tribal expertise for plant conservation efforts may help restore archaeo-ecosystems, according to the authors.

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A two-story Puebloan habitation in the Bears Ears region of southeastern Utah. Kari Gillen (photographer).

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Plant species richness at archaeological sites suggests ecological legacy of Indigenous subsistence on the Colorado Plateau,” by Bruce M. Pavlik et al.

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Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz—When it comes to ancient Roman imperial architecture, most people usually have a mental image of white marble statues, columns, or slabs. While it is true that many buildings and squares at that time were decorated with marble, it was frequently not white but colored marble that was employed, such as the green-veined Cipollino Verde, which was extracted on the Greek island of Euboea. Because marble was very expensive, it was often placed in thin slabs as a cladding over other, cheaper stones. “To date, however, no actual remains of marble workshops from the Roman imperial era have been found, so little is known about marble processing during this period,” said Professor Cees Passchier of the Institute of Geosciences at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Together with other researchers based in Mainz, Turkey, and Canada, he has now finished analyzing the marble cladding of a second century A.D. Roman villa. As the researchers detail in the online edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, they utilized special software normally used for the 3D modeling of geological structures. They discovered that the material loss during marble slab production at the time was likely lower than it is today.

The researchers examined, photographed, and measured 54 restored slabs of Cipollino Verde, each measuring around 1.3 square meters, which had been used to decorate the walls of a villa in ancient Ephesus on the west coast of Turkey. In view of the saw marks on one of the slabs, they were able to infer that these slabs had been cut in a water-powered sawmill, in effect using what we today know as hydraulic metal saws. Using reconstructions based on the slab patterns, the research team was also able to conclude that a total of 40 slabs had been sawn from a single marble block weighing three to four tons. They had been subsequently mounted on the walls in the order in which they were produced and arranged in book-matched pairs side by side, producing a symmetrical pattern. Finally, with the help of the software, the researchers created a three-dimensional model of the marble block, which in turn enabled them to draw conclusions about the material wastage during the production of the slabs. “The slabs are about 16 millimeters thick and the gaps between them, caused by sawing and subsequent polishing, are about 8 millimeters wide. This material loss attributable to production equates to around one third and is therefore less than the rates now commonly associated with many forms of modern marble production,” Passchier pointed out. “We can therefore conclude that marble extraction during the imperial period was remarkably efficient.”

The researchers also found that although 42 slabs had been sawn from one original marble block, two had not been fixed to the walls of the hall. “The arrangement of the slabs on the villa walls suggests these slabs were most likely broken, possibly during polishing or their subsequent transportation,” added Passchier. “This would mean that the amount lost due to breakage would be 5 percent, which would also be an astonishingly low figure.” This small loss leads Passchier to assume that the entire marble block had been transported to Ephesus and that the slabs were then cut and polished there.

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Hall of the ancient Roman villa in Ephesus with its restored marble slabs, which have now been examined in more detail. ©: Sinan Ilhan

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One of the analyzed pairs of marble slabs, arranged in typical book-matched fashion. ©: Cees W. Passchier

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Article Source: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz news release

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SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—Climate change may be accelerating the degradation of ancient rock paintings in Indonesia, including the oldest known hand stencil in the world which dates back to 39,900 years ago, according to a study* published in Scientific Reports.

Rock paintings made using red and mulberry-colored pigments in the limestone caves and rock shelters of Maros-Pangkep, Indonesia have been dated to between 20,000 and 45,000 years old. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the paintings have been deteriorating at an accelerated rate in recent decades, but the reasons for this have been unclear.

Jillian Huntley and colleagues investigated the potential causes of accelerated rock art degradation at 11 cave art sites in Maros-Pangkep, by analyzing flakes of rock that had begun to detach from cave surfaces. The authors found salts including calcium sulfate and sodium chloride in flakes of rock at three of the sites. These salts are known to form crystals on the rock surfaces, which cause the rocks to break apart. The authors also found high levels of sulphur, a component of several salts, at all 11 sites. The findings* may indicate that the process of salt-related rock art degradation is widespread in Maros-Pangkep.

The authors suggest that repeated changes in temperature and humidity caused by alternating periods of seasonal rainfall and drought create conditions that promote salt crystal formation and rock art degradation. They propose that these changes may be accelerated by rising global temperatures and the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events due to climate change and El Niño events. Long-term monitoring and conservation efforts are needed to protect ancient rock art in tropical regions, the authors conclude.

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Hand prints in Pettakere Cave at Leang-Leang Prehistoric Site, Maros. Cahyo, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 , Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Scientific Reports news release

*The effects of climate change on the Pleistocene rock art of Sulawesi

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY—After a long journey, a group of settlers sets foot on an otherwise empty land. A vast expanse separates them from other human beings, cutting off any possibility of outside contact. Their choices will make the difference between survival and death.

The people of Easter Island may have something to teach future Martian colonists.

Binghamton University anthropologists Carl Lipo and Robert DiNapoli explore how complex community patterns in Rapa Nui—the indigenous name for both the island and its people—helped the isolated island survive from its settlement in the 12th to 13th century until European contact. 

Their findings, “Population structure drives cultural diversity in finite populations: A hypothesis for localized community patterns on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile),” were recently published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. Co-authors also include Mark Madsen from the University of Washington’s Department of Anthropology and Terry Hunt from the University of Arizona’s Honors College and School of Anthropology.

“The cool thing about Easter Island is that it’s a great case study for what happens in absolute isolation,” said Lipo, a professor of anthropology and environmental studies and associate dean of Harpur College. “From our best understanding, once people got to the island, that was it. They weren’t going anywhere else and there wasn’t anyone else coming in.” 

Shaped like a triangle, Easter Island is small: around 15 miles long and a bit more than 7 miles wide at its thickest point. It’s also one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth, more than a thousand miles away from the closest inhabited neighbors. 

But for all its small size, Rapa Nui had multiple clans and small communities that maintained both cultural and physical separation. The archaeological evidence shows stylistic differences in the creation of artifacts in communities only 500 meters apart, for example. The inhabitants’ physical remains also show they didn’t stray far or marry away from home; this was uncovered through DNA and isotope analyses, as well as skeletal variations between communities. 

These small communities may have been a cultural bulwark against a phenomenon known as random drift, according to their research. 

The challenges of isolation

An idea that originates in genetics, random drift explores the appearance of traits in a population over time and how these traits can shift. This applies to cultural traits too, from specific words and customs to ways of making pottery. 

Some traits are passed on to future generations; others aren’t and subsequently vanish. New traits, practices or fashions emerge — pottery decoration, ways of making arrowheads, clothing styles or slang — and either persist or fade in their time, as well. 

“These things are potentially changing over time because of differences in how people are copying each other,” said DiNapoli, a postdoctoral research associate in anthropology.

While changes in aesthetics might not have a significant impact on a culture’s viability, other changes might. If a population is small and isolated enough, important technologies and survival strategies could become irrevocably lost. 

“Let’s say my dad died before he was able to teach me some important technology and he’s the only person who knew how to do it,” DiNapoli said. “That can have a negative impact in a small, isolated population, where they never will interact with another group of people who might give them those ideas back again.”

Researchers believe that’s what happened in Tasmania, where the indigenous people lost practices such as fishing practiced by neighboring populations on mainland Australia. While these lost technologies could have proved beneficial to survival, they disappeared because there weren’t enough people to pass them on and no contact with outsiders who might have reintroduced these ideas, experts believe.

There is evidence that isolation may have led to the disappearance of populations on the so-called “mystery islands” of the Pacific Ocean. The archaeological records show that previous inhabitants either abandoned these islands or otherwise went extinct right around the time that interaction with other islands dropped off. 

“One hypothesis is that as those places are becoming really isolated, then it becomes too difficult to live there, for whatever reason,” Lipo explained.

Population structure

In recent years, researchers have constructed different kinds of models to show what factors drive changes in the diversity of cultural traits over time, DiNapoli explained. One major factor is demographics: the number of people in the population exchanging ideas with one another. But the structure of that population is also important.

While it may seem counterintuitive, large populations where everyone interacts with one another can experience stronger cultural drift, DiNapoli said. 

“Whereas if you have lots of different small subpopulations, you end up keeping more diversity, because it’s sequestered in these different subgroups,” he said.

Traditional populations tend to be extremely conservative and avoid change unless there’s a good reason for it. After all, making the wrong decisions can have dire consequences.

“You really want to hold onto something that works,” Lipo said. “If you decided to take a risk, randomly plant crops somewhere else and it didn’t work out, it’s game over.”

Easter Island is often seen as a place where people made irrational decisions that led to their own demise, such as cutting down all the trees to build giant statues. That turns out not to be the case — and not just on the statue front. 

At European contact, Rapa Nui had an estimated total population of 3,000 to 4,000 individuals, divided into an unknown number of clans and communities. Most of these communities were probably the size of large families — perhaps several dozen individuals, living in a space that spans several hundred meters. 

Using computer modeling, Lipo and DiNapoli explored the impact of the island’s distinctive spatial patterns on the retention of cultural information. In their model, they located communities around ahu, or large platforms that were a center of ceremonial activities. They then configured ways these communities might potentially interact, and what affect these interactions would have on the persistence of diverse cultural traits. 

What they discovered is that the greater the number of subgroups with limited interaction, the more likely a population is to retain potentially beneficial cultural information — even when the total population is quite small.

“Based on simulation modeling, it seems that population structure is super important for driving and retaining changes in cultural diversity,” DiNapoli said. “This could potentially be a really important factor for change in human history in general.” 

Today and tomorrow

After European contact, disease scythed through the Rapa Nui people, who were also stolen away as slaves. By 1877, the island’s population plummeted to just 111 individuals.

As a result, much of the Rapa Nui’s cultural knowledge was lost, including the ability to interpret rongorongo, a system of glyphs that may have recorded information. But other traditions survive, including songs, dances, a cat’s cradle-type of string art used in oral storytelling — and the Rapa Nui language itself, which is still spoken by the islanders today.

“Certainly a lot was lost, but they had these mechanisms for valuing oral traditions and being able to pass those on,” Lipo said. “It’s an amazing survival despite incredible odds. So much has been written about the negative side, and I think we haven’t yet begun to appreciate the ingenuity of the people there.” 

Imagine another intrepid group of explorers, heading out in their ships to a new colony — 60 million miles away from Earth. On Mars, these future colonists would be profoundly isolated. They would have to solve their own problems and ensure their own survival, including the preservation of necessary knowledge and technologies.

“They become this isolated Easter Island in the middle of space,” Lipo said. “What spatial structure on Mars would you need to maintain the information maximally in that community?”

The lessons of Easter Island may help them survive.

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Easter Island: Coastal view showing monolithic moai. Ask-mediandesign, Pixabay

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Article Source: BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY news release

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY—A new study looking at the evolutionary history of the human oral microbiome shows that Neanderthals and ancient humans adapted to eating starch-rich foods as far back as 100,000 years ago, which is much earlier than previously thought.

The findings suggest such foods became important in the human diet well before the introduction of farming and even before the evolution of modern humans. And while these early humans probably didn’t realize it, the benefits of bringing the foods into their diet likely helped pave the way for the expansion of the human brain because of the glucose in starch, which is the brain’s main fuel source.

“We think we’re seeing evidence of a really ancient behavior that might have been part encephalization — or the growth of the human brain,” said Harvard Professor Christina Warinner, Ph.D. ’10. “It’s evidence of a new food source that early humans were able to tap into in the form of roots, starchy vegetables, and seeds.”

The findings come from a seven-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday that involved the collaboration of more than 50 international scientists. Researchers reconstructed the oral microbiomes of Neanderthals, primates, and humans, including what’s believed to be the oldest oral microbiome ever sequenced — a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal.

The goal was to better understand how the oral microbiome — a community of microorganisms in our mouths that help to protect against disease and promote health — developed since little is known about its evolutionary history.

“For a long time, people have been trying to understand what a normal healthy microbiome is,” said Warinner, assistant professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Sally Starling Seaver Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “If we only have people today that we’re analyzing from completely industrialized contexts and that already have high disease burdens, is that healthy and normal? We started to ask: What are the core members of the microbiome? Which species and groups of bacteria have actually co-evolved with us the longest?”

The scientists analyzed the fossilized dental plaque of both modern humans and Neanderthals and compared them to those of humanity’s closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, as well as howler monkeys, a more distant relative.

Using newly developed tools and methods, they genetically analyzed billions of DNA fragments preserved in the fossilized plaque to reconstruct their genomes. It’s similar in theory to how archeologists painstakingly piece together ancient broken pots, but on a much larger scale.

The biggest surprise from the study was the presence of particular strains of oral bacteria that are specially adapted to break down starch. These strains, which are members of the genus Streptococcus, have a unique ability to capture starch-digesting enzymes from human saliva, which they then use to feed themselves. The genetic machinery the bacteria uses to do this is only active when starch is part of the regular diet.

Both the Neanderthals and the ancient humans scientists studied had these starch-adapted strains in their dental plaque while most of the primates had almost no streptococci that could break down starch.

“It seems to be a very human specific evolutionary trait that our Streptococcus acquired the ability to do this,” Warinner said.

The findings also push back on the idea that Neanderthals were top carnivores, given that the “brain requires glucose as a nutrient source and meat alone is not a sufficient source,” Warinner said.

Researchers said the finding makes sense because for hunter-gatherer societies around the world, starch-rich foods –underground roots, tubers (like potatoes), and forbs, as well as nuts and seeds, for example — are important and reliable nutrition sources. In fact, starch currently makes up about 60 percent of calories for humans worldwide.

“Its availability is much more predictable across the annual season for tropical hunter-gatherers,” said Richard W. Wrangham, Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and one of the paper’s co-authors. “These new data make every sense to me, reinforcing the newer view about Neanderthals that their diets were more sapien-like than once thought, [meaning] starch-rich and cooked.”

The research also identified 10 groups of bacteria that have been part of the human and primate oral microbiome for more than 40 million years and are still shared today. While these bacteria may serve important and beneficial roles, relatively little is known about them. Some don’t even have names.

Focusing on Neanderthals and today’s humans, the analysis surprisingly showed the oral microbiome of both groups were almost indistinguishable. Only when looking at individual bacterial strains could they see some differences. For example, ancient humans living in Europe before 14,000 years ago during the Ice Age shared some bacterial strains with Neanderthals that are no longer found in humans today.

The differences and similarities from the study are all part of what makes us human, Warinner said. It also touches on the power of analyzing the tiny microbes that live in the human body, she said.

“It shows that our microbiome encodes valuable information about our own evolution that sometimes gives us hints at things that otherwise leave no traces at all,” Warinner said.

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Grauer’s gorilla specimens at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium), showing typical dental calculus deposits on the teeth that are stained dark likely as a result of their herbivorous diet. Katerina Guschanski

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Article Source: HARVARD UNIVERSITY news release

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ESTONIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL—A new study in Current Biology from the Institute of Genomics of the University of Tartu, Estonia has shed light on the genetic prehistory of populations in modern day Italy through the analysis of ancient human individuals during the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age transition around 4,000 years ago. The genomic analysis of ancient samples enabled researchers from Estonia, Italy, and the UK to date the arrival of the Steppe-related ancestry component to 3,600 years ago in Central Italy, also finding changes in burial practice and kinship structure during this transition.

In the last years, the genetic history of ancient individuals has been extensively studied focusing on movements and settlements of humans in different areas of Eurasia. However, the genetic history of individuals from the Italian Peninsula during the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age transition, around 4,000 years ago, was still unexplored. Researchers from the Institute of Genomics of the University of Tartu in collaboration with universities in Italy and the UK have collected human remains from the Italian Peninsula and generated ancient genomes in the aDNA laboratory at the University of Tartu, Estonia.

“For the study, we extracted ancient DNA of 50 individuals from four archaeological sites located in Northeastern and Central Italy dated to Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age, and Bronze Age. We were able to generate the first genome-wide shotgun data of ancient Italians dated to the Bronze Age period and study the arrival of the Steppe-related ancestry component in the Italian Peninsula. This genetic component, ultimately tracing its origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a steppeland located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and very common in Central and Northern Europe. It is also presented in the Bronze Age Italian individuals which we scrutinized and suggesting that populations in the South of the Alps experienced a similar evolution,” said the lead author of the work Tina Saupe, from the Institute of Genomics.

“For the genetic analysis, we used a reference dataset including individuals from the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, and Sardinia dated from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. We decided to study the new genomes altogether with available data to have a deeper insight into the genetic changes and demography of this important transition, but also to understand its impact in the following centuries” added co-author Francesco Montinaro from the same institution and from the University of Bari, Italy. Researchers found that samples dated to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic from the Italian Peninsula are more similar to Early Neolithic farmers in Eastern Europe and Anatolian farmers than to farmers from Western Europe, which opens the possibility of different histories for the two Neolithic groups in Europe.

“Because of the geographical distribution of the archaeological sites of published and newly generated genomes, we were able to date the arrival of the Steppe-related ancestry component to at least ~4,000 years ago in Northern Italy and ~3,600 years ago in Central Italy. We did not find the component in individuals dated to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, but in individuals dated to the Early Bronze Age and increasing through time in the individuals dated to the Bronze Age,” pointed out by Luca Pagani, Associate Professor at the Institute of Genomics and University of Padova and co-senior author of this work.

“In addition, we were able to find a shift in burial practice correlated with the change of relatedness between the individuals in two of the sites, but we did not find any changes in the phenotypes of ancient Italians during the transition,” said Christiana L. Scheib, the aDNA research group leader at the Institute of Genomics and corresponding author.

“It was remarkable to see how this project developed over time and how the interpretation of the results changed once samples from Central Italy were added thanks to the collaboration with the universities of Oxford (UK), Durham (UK), Groningen (Netherlands) and Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy) “said Cristian Capelli (University of Parma), co-senior author of this study.

“These results of this study have shown that the genetic profile of ancient individuals from the Italian Peninsula changed with the movement and settlement of humans since the Neolithic. This knowledge enlightens us on our genetic origin and enables plans for further studies including a denser sampling of individuals dated to the Iron Age and Roman empire,” concluded Scheib.

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Excavation site Grotta La Sassa – Angelica Ferracci. University of Tartu

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Map – Eugenio Israel Chávez Barreto

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Article Source: ESTONIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL news release

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UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, EUGENE, Ore.—May 7, 2021—Long-running archaeological research, boosted by airborne lidar sensing and machine-learning algorithms, finds that Cambodia’s Greater Angkor region was home to 700,000-900,000 people.

The sprawling city, which thrived from the 9th to 15th centuries, has slowly revealed its forest-hidden past to archaeologists, but its total population has been a mystery.

The new estimate, made possible by a study designed at the University of Oregon, is the first for the entire 3,000-square-kilometer mix of urban and rural landscape. The findings* published May 7 in the journal Science Advances.

The finding is vital for potentially helping cities under pressure of climate change, said co-author Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney and director of the Angkor Research Program, a collaboration with Cambodia’s Authority for the Protection of the Site and Management of the Region of Angkor.

“We predominantly are living in giant low-density cities around the world that are similar to Angkor, which displayed serious vulnerability to severe climate change,” Fletcher said. “We really need to know the mechanics of how Angkor worked and what people were doing to get some idea of how referable those experiences are to the risks that we face in our future.”

With the combined data, including that from several decades of research by international and Cambodian researchers, the new study revealed population details of Angkor’s ceremonial city center, the metropolis extending outward like modern suburbia and embankments incorporating agricultural areas. Angkor was a low-density city, with its population spread out across a wide area.

An initial population estimate was for 750,000 residents in an area of 1,000-square kilometers around central Angkor, Fletcher said. In this area are stone religious temples, including Angkor Wat that attract tourists.

Beyond the stone temples of central Angkor were homes and locations of supporting structures, all made of organic materials reclaimed by the jungle, said UO archaeologist Alison K. Carter, an expert in fine-grain archaeological research who has conducted fieldwork in Cambodia since 2005.

Carter was co-lead author with Sarah Klassen, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. The two planned and designed the study while Klassen was a visiting scholar at the UO with support from the Office of International Affairs’ Global Oregon Faculty Collaboration Fund. In all, 14 long-active Angkor researchers collaborated.

Klassen brought machine-learning to the project, deploying a multilayered statistical analysis that merged data from historical archives and maps with details obtained of lidar scans of the region in a project led by co-author Damian Evans of the French Institute of Asian Studies, in 2012 and 2015.

Lidar, which is short for light detection and ranging, is done by sending laser pulses groundward from aircraft. It captures details of ground by ignoring ground clutter such as forests. The new data, Klassen said, “really transformed our understanding of the landscape.”

Lidar documented and mapped 20,000 features not seen before, adding to a previous database of 5,000 locations, said Klassen, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leiden.

“When you are on the ground in the main parts of the city center it is quite forested,” Carter said. “As you walk around you can tell there is something in the landscape around you, but you cannot see anything clearly. Lidar gave us a beautiful grid of mounds and depressions, which we think were little ponds.”

As initial lidar images were being transmitted, researchers at the Angkor field station stayed up into the early morning hours to watch, Fletcher said.

“It was absolutely fabulous,” he said. “We had earlier radar data, but the amount of new information was staggering, especially because the lidar images captured the entire region in great detail.”

The new data have been organized into different periods of Angkor’s growth, particularly in the lifetimes of kings who were most influential to infrastructure changes, said Carter, who heads the UO’s Southeast Asian Archeology Lab.

Lidar showed where houses, which had been built on mounds and elevated on posts, had stood. Researchers estimated that five people lived in each household and extrapolated that data to assess the region’s total population.

“We looked at the growth of the city of Angkor over time,” Carter said. “We found that different parts of the city grew in different ways. The way we think about population growth in cities and suburbs today is probably the same for Angkor.”

The study’s findings enhance the “comparative understanding of premodern urbanism,” said co-author Miriam T. Stark, director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“Studying Angkor’s population is important for envisioning the future’s urbanism with respect to global climate change,” Stark said. “Angkor was a tropical city that persisted through centuries of political and climatic volatility. Tracking its history and tipping point could help urban planners understand some kinds of constraints that face increasing numbers of the world’s cities.”

Klassen’s machine learning contributions initially were published in a 2018 study in PLOS ONE.

“In this new paper,” she said, “we introduced statistical learning paradigms and our archaeological case study and dataset. We then explored four classical mathematical approaches to find statistically significant predictors to date temples built in different locations in the region.”

That led to a historical model for temples built between the modern-era years of 821-1149 within an absolute average error of 49-66 years.

“This was critical for our study, because it allowed us to see how the metropolitan area developed in comparison to the civic-ceremonial centers,” Klassen said. “It also allowed us to estimate populations connected to the temples and see how those population changed over time.”

Population information paves the way for better understanding Angkor’s economics and resilience, said co-author Christophe Pottier of the French Institute of Asian Studies, who has researched the site for 30 years.

Periods of growth covered in the new study occurred between 770 and 1300.

Future research, Fletcher said, will more deeply examine the expansion of population clusters.

“What was the population of Angkor prior to this sample period? We have to get below all of the current structures with archaeology to predict and model earlier periods,” he said.

Klassen and Carter’s contributions are crucial to future research, Fletcher said.

Several of the new study’s co-authors, including Carter, Evans and Stark, and other collaborators have questioned the conception that Angkor depopulated quickly due to climate pressures in the 15th century.

“We can tell from our archaeological data that that were still people on the landscape, and there is evidence of modifications being made to temples into the 16th century,” Carter said. “Our work isn’t really designed to answer the timing question for the shift of population away from this area, but it probably happened much slower than long thought.”

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A pair of contemporary Cambodian houses: The house in the background is made from wood and modern materials. The house in the foreground was built traditionally from organic materials such as wood and thatch. An international research team has unveiled where such organic-made homes once stood in the Greater Angkor region and how many people lived in each dwelling. Photo by Alison Carter

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF OREGON news release

*https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/19/eabf8441

Several organizations funded the research, including the Rust Family Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award, the American Council of Learned Societies-Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, Australian Research Council and European Research Council.

If you liked this article, you may like the article In the Shadow of Angkor, a free premium article published in the Spring 2021 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY—In the 150 years since Charles Darwin speculated that humans originated in Africa, the number of species in the human family tree has exploded, but so has the level of dispute concerning early human evolution. Fossil apes are often at the center of the debate, with some scientists dismissing their importance to the origins of the human lineage (the “hominins”), and others conferring them starring evolutionary roles. A new review out on May 7 in the journal Science looks at the major discoveries in hominin origins since Darwin’s works and argues that fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor.

Humans diverged from apes—specifically, the chimpanzee lineage—at some point between about 9.3 million and 6.5 million years ago, towards the end of the Miocene epoch. To understand hominin origins, paleoanthropologists aim to reconstruct the physical characteristics, behavior, and environment of the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.

“When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it’s just a big mess–there’s no consensus whatsoever,” said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review. “People are working under completely different paradigms, and that’s something that I don’t see happening in other fields of science.”

There are two major approaches to resolving the human origins problem: “Top-down,” which relies on analysis of living apes, especially chimpanzees; and “bottom-up,” which puts importance on the larger tree of mostly extinct apes. For example, some scientists assume that hominins originated from a chimp-like knuckle-walking ancestor. Others argue that the human lineage originated from an ancestor more closely resembling, in some features, some of the strange Miocene apes.

In reviewing the studies surrounding these diverging approaches, Almécija and colleagues with expertise ranging from paleontology to functional morphology and phylogenetics discuss the limitations of relying exclusively on one of these opposing approaches to the hominin origins problem. “Top-down” studies sometimes ignore the reality that living apes (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and hylobatids) are just the survivors of a much larger, and now mostly extinct, group. On the other hand, studies based on the “bottom-up”approach are prone to giving individual fossil apes an important evolutionary role that fits a preexisting narrative.

“In The Descent of Man in 1871, Darwin speculated that humans originated in Africa from an ancestor different from any living species. However, he remained cautious given the scarcity of fossils at the time,” Almécija said. “One hundred fifty years later, possible hominins—approaching the time of the human-chimpanzee divergence—have been found in eastern and central Africa, and some claim even in Europe. In addition, more than 50 fossil ape genera are now documented across Africa and Eurasia. However, many of these fossils show mosaic combinations of features that do not match expectations for ancient representatives of the modern ape and human lineages. As a consequence, there is no scientific consensus on the evolutionary role played by these fossil apes.”

Overall, the researchers found that most stories of human origins are not compatible with the fossils that we have today.

“Living ape species are specialized species, relicts of a much larger group of now extinct apes. When we consider all evidence—that is, both living and fossil apes and hominins—it is clear that a human evolutionary story based on the few ape species currently alive is missing much of the bigger picture,” said study co-author Ashley Hammond, an assistant curator in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology.

Kelsey Pugh, a Museum postdoctoral fellow and study co-author adds, “The unique and sometimes unexpected features and combinations of features observed among fossil apes, which often differ from those of living apes, are necessary to untangle which features hominins inherited from our ape ancestors and which are unique to our lineage.”

Living apes alone, the authors conclude, offer insufficient evidence. “Current disparate theories regarding ape and human evolution would be much more informed if, together with early hominins and living apes, Miocene apes were also included in the equation,” says Almécija. “In other words, fossil apes are essential to reconstruct the ‘starting point’ from which humans and chimpanzees evolved.”

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The last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans represents the starting point of human and chimpanzee evolution. Fossil apes play an essential role when it comes to reconstructing the nature of our ape ancestry. Printed with permission from © Christopher M. Smith

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This study was part of a collaborative effort with colleagues from the New York Institute of Technology (Nathan Thompson) and the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont (David Alba and Salvador Moyà-Solà).

Study DOI: https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.abb4363

ABOUT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY (AMNH)

The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869 and currently celebrating its 150th anniversary, is one of the world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses more than 40 permanent exhibition halls, including those in the Rose Center for Earth and Space, as well as galleries for temporary exhibitions. The Museum’s approximately 175 scientists draw on a world-class research collection of more than 34 million artifacts and specimens, some of which are billions of years old, and on one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Museum grants the Ph.D. degree in Comparative Biology and the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree, the only such free-standing, degree-granting programs at any museum in the United States. The Museum’s website, digital videos, and apps for mobile devices bring its collections, exhibitions, and educational programs to millions around the world. Visit amnh.org for more information.

Article Source: AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY news release

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CENTER FOR GENOMIC REGULATION—The first civilizations to build monumental palaces and urban centers in Europe are more genetically homogenous than expected, according to the first study* to sequence whole genomes gathered from ancient archaeological sites around the Aegean Sea. The study has been published in the journal Cell.

Despite marked differences in burial customs, architecture, and art, the Minoan civilization in Crete, the Helladic civilization in mainland Greece and the Cycladic civilization in the Cycladic islands in the middle of the Aegean Sea, were genetically similar during the Early Bronze age (5000 years ago).

The findings are important because it suggests that critical innovations such as the development of urban centers, metal use and intensive trade made during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age were not just due to mass immigration from east of the Aegean as previously thought, but also from the cultural continuity of local Neolithic groups.

The study also finds that by the Middle Bronze Age (4000-4,600 years ago), individuals from the northern Aegean were considerably different compared to those in the Early Bronze Age. These individuals shared half their ancestry with people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a large geographic region stretching between the Danube and the Ural rivers and north of the Black Sea, and were highly similar to present-day Greeks.

The findings suggest that migration waves from herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, or populations north of the Aegean that bear Pontic-Caspian Steppe like ancestry, shaped present-day Greece. These potential migration waves all predate the appearance of the earliest documented form of Greek, supporting theories explaining the emergence of Proto-Greek and the evolution of Indo-European languages in either Anatolia or the Pontic-Caspian Steppe region.

The team took samples from well-preserved skeletal remains at archaeological sites. They sequenced six whole genomes, four from all three cultures during the Early Bronze Age and two from a Helladic culture during the Middle Bronze Age.

The researchers also sequenced the mitochondrial genomes from eleven other individuals from the Early Bronze Age. Sequencing whole genomes provided the researchers with enough data to perform demographic and statistical analyses on population histories.

Sequencing ancient genomes is a huge challenge, particularly due to the degradation of the biological material and human contamination. A research team at the CNAG-CRG, played an important role in overcoming this challenge through using machine learning.

According to Oscar Lao, Head of the Population Genomics Group at the CNAG-CRG, “Taking an advantage that the number of samples and DNA quality we found is huge for this type of study, we have developed sophisticated machine learning tools to overcome challenges such as low depth of coverage, damage, and modern human contamination, opening the door for the application of artificial intelligence to palaeogenomics data.”

“Implementation of deep learning in demographic inference based on ancient samples allowed us to reconstruct ancestral relationships between ancient populations and reliably infer the amount and timing of massive migration events that marked the cultural transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age in Aegean,” says Olga Dolgova, postdoctoral researcher in the Population Genomics Group at the CNAG-CRG.

The Bronze Age in Eurasia was marked by pivotal changes on the social, political, and economic levels, visible in the appearance of the first large urban centers and monumental palaces. The increasing economic and cultural exchange that developed during this time laid the groundwork for modern economic systems—including capitalism, long-distance political treaties, and a world trade economy.

Despite their importance for understanding the rise of European civilizations and the spread of Indo-European languages, the genetic origins of the peoples behind the Neolithic to Bronze Age transition and their contribution to the present-day Greek population remain controversial.

Future studies could investigate whole genomes between the Mesolithic and Bronze Age in the Armenian and Caucasus to help further pinpoint the origins of migration into the Aegean, and to better integrate the genomic data with the existing archaeological and linguistic evidence.

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Skeleton of one of the two individuals who lived in the middle of the Bronze Age and whose complete genome was reconstructed and sequenced by the Lausanne team. It comes from the archaeological site of Elati-Logkas, in northern Greece. Ephorate of Antiquities of Kozani, Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Greece. Courtesy of Dr Georgia Karamitrou-Mentessidi.

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Article Source: CENTER FOR GENOMIC REGULATION news release.

*The study is first-coauthored by Olga Dolgova, from the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG), part of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG). The international research efforts were led by Christina Papageorgopoulou at the Democratic University of Thrace and Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas at the University of Lausanne.

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Science Advances—Helping to illuminate the origins of ecosystem-changing behavior in humans, a new study based on a 636,000-year sedimentary record in northern Malawi suggest that fires set by humans in the Middle Stone Age influenced vegetation composition and erosion there. The findings indicate that changes in climate alone cannot explain these ecosystem shifts, and shed light on how modern humans became a globally dominant species. Modern humans have extensively and intentionally transformed ecosystems for tens of thousands of years. However, while a growing body of evidence suggests ecosystem modification behaviors were fundamental to human evolution, the origins of this behavior have remained unclear. To better understand the extent to which fires set by early hunter-gatherers may have reconfigured the landscape, Jessica Thompson and colleagues extensively dated sedimentary records from the Stone Age landscape in southern-central Africa. They found evidence for human occupation in the region dating back about 92,000 years, based on sedimentary deposits in the Chitimwe Beds at the northern end of Lake Malawi. The researchers also surveyed 147.5 linear kilometers, established 40 geological test pits, and analyzed more than 38,000 artifacts from 60 locations, finding extensive evidence for early modern human activities in northern Malawi. They also identified increased charcoal abundances beginning roughly 150,000 years ago, indicating heightened fire frequency. Fossil pollen analyses indicated vegetation disturbances beginning around the time that human occupation began, and further revealed that species richness in the region has been 43% lower over the past 85,000 years than during previous periods. Together, the data suggests that fires set by early humans meaningfully reshaped the northern Malawi landscape. “In the modern context, anthropogenic landscapes persist and have intensified following the introduction of agriculture, but they are extensions, not disconnections, of patterns established during the Pleistocene,” Thompson et al. write.

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The research team exposes ancient stone tools at the Sadala South I site near Karonga, Malawi. Jessica Thompson

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The Ngara I site near modern-day Chilumba in Karonga, Malawi. Jessica Thompson

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Excavation in progress on a slope near Vinthukutu Forest in Karonga, Malawi. Jessica Thompson

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Article Source: Science Advances is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Despite being home to the earliest signs of modern human behavior, early evidence of burials in Africa are scarce and often ambiguous. Therefore, little is known about the origin and development of mortuary practices in the continent of our species’ birth. A child buried at the mouth of the Panga ya Saidi cave site 78,000 years ago is changing that, revealing how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with the dead.

Panga ya Saidi has been an important site for human origins research since excavations began in 2010 as part of a long-term partnership between archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany) and the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi).

“As soon as we first visited Panga ya Saidi, we knew that it was special,” says Professor Nicole Boivin, principal investigator of the original project and director of the Department of Archaeology at the MPI for the Science of Human History. “The site is truly one of a kind. Repeated seasons of excavation at Panga ya Saidi have now helped to establish it as a key type site for the East African coast, with an extraordinary 78,000-year record of early human cultural, technological and symbolic activities.”

Portions of the child’s bones were first found during excavations at Panga ya Saidi in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2017 that the small pit feature containing the bones was fully exposed. About three meters below the current cave floor, the shallow, circular pit contained tightly clustered and highly decomposed bones, requiring stabilization and plastering in the field.

“At this point, we weren’t sure what we had found. The bones were just too delicate to study in the field,” says Dr. Emmanuel Ndiema of the National Museums of Kenya. “So we had a find that we were pretty excited about – but it would be a while before we understood its importance.”

Human remains discovered in the lab

Once plastered, the cast remains were brought first to the National Museum in Nairobi and later to the laboratories of the National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain, for further excavation, specialized treatment and analysis.

Two teeth, exposed during initial laboratory excavation of the sediment block, led the researchers to suspect that the remains could be human. Later work at CENIEH confirmed that the teeth belonged to a 2.5- to 3-year-old human child, who was later nicknamed ‘Mtoto,’ meaning ‘child’ in Swahili.

Over several months of painstaking excavation in CENIEH’s labs, spectacular new discoveries were made. “We started uncovering parts of the skull and face, with the intact articulation of the mandible and some un-erupted teeth in place,” explains Professor María Martinón-Torres, director at CENIEH. “The articulation of the spine and the ribs was also astonishingly preserved, even conserving the curvature of the thorax cage, suggesting that it was an undisturbed burial and that the decomposition of the body took place right in the pit where the bones were found.”

Microscopic analysis of the bones and surrounding soil confirmed that the body was rapidly covered after burial and that decomposition took place in the pit. In other words, Mtoto was intentionally buried shortly after death.

Researchers further suggested that Mtoto’s flexed body, found lying on the right side with knees drawn toward the chest, represents a tightly shrouded burial with deliberate preparation. Even more remarkable, notes Martinón-Torres, is that “the position and collapse of the head in the pit suggested that a perishable support may have been present, such as a pillow, indicating that the community may have undertaken some form of funerary rite.”

Burials in modern humans and Neanderthals

Luminescence dating securely places Mtoto’s at 78,000 years ago, making it the oldest known human burial in Africa. Later interments from Africa’s Stone Age also include young individuals – perhaps signaling special treatment of the bodies of children in this ancient period.

The human remains were found in archaeological levels with stone tools belonging to the African Middle Stone Age, a distinct type of technology that has been argued to be linked to more than one hominin species.

“The association between this child’s burial and Middle Stone Age tools has played a critical role in demonstrating that Homo sapiens was, without doubt, a definite manufacturer of these distinctive tool industries, as opposed to other hominin species,” notes Ndiema.

Though the Panga ya Saidi find represents the earliest evidence of intentional burial in Africa, burials of Neanderthals and modern humans in Eurasia range back as far as 120,000 years and include adults and high proportion of children and juveniles. The reasons for the comparative lack of early burials in Africa remain elusive, perhaps owing to differences in mortuary practices or the lack of field work in large portions of the African continent.

“The Panga ya Saidi burial shows that inhumation of the dead is a cultural practice shared by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals,” notes Professor Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute in Jena. “This find opens up questions about the origin and evolution of mortuary practices between two closely related human species, and the degree to which our behaviors and emotions differ from one another.”

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General view of the cave site of Panga ya Saidi. Note trench excavation where burial was unearthed. Mohammad Javad Shoaee

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External view of the Panga ya Saidi main block with the articulated partial skeleton (upper) and external view of the left side of Mtoto’s skull and mandible (below). Martinón-Torres, et al., 2021

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Virtual reconstruction of the Panga ya Saidi hominin remains at the site (left) and ideal reconstruction of the child’s original position at the moment of finding (right). Jorge González/Elena Santos

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news release.

See the video below for more about the research at this site:

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UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, LAWRENCE—For thousands of years during the last ice age, generations of maritime migrants paddled skin boats eastward across shallow ocean waters from Asia to present-day Alaska. They voyaged from island to island and ultimately to shore, surviving on bountiful seaweeds, fish, shellfish, birds and game harvested from coastal and nearshore biomes. Their island-rich route was possible due to a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles from one continent to the other.

A new study from the University of Kansas in partnership with universities in Bologna and Urbino, Italy, documents the newly named Bering Transitory Archipelago and then points to how, when and where the first Americans may have crossed. The authors’ stepping-stones hypothesis depends on scores of islands that emerged during the last ice age as sea level fell when ocean waters were locked in glaciers and later rose when ice sheets melted. The two-part study, just published in the open-access journal Comptes Rendus Geoscience, may answer what writer Fen Montaigne calls “one of the greatest mysteries of our time . . . when humans made the first bold journey to the Americas.”

The “stepping-stones” idea hinges on retrospective mapping of sea levels while accounting for isostacy—deformation of the Earth’s crust due to the changing depth and weight of ice and water, reaching its greatest extreme during the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,500 years ago.

“We digitally discovered a geographic feature of considerable size that had never been properly documented in scientific literature,” said principal author Jerome Dobson, professor emeritus of geography at KU. “We named it the Bering Transitory Archipelago; it existed from about 30,000 years ago through 8,000 years ago. When we saw it, we immediately thought, ‘Wow, maybe that’s how the first Americans came across.’ And, in fact, everything we’ve tested seems to bear that out—it does seem to be true.”

For more than a decade, researchers have pondered a mystery within a mystery. Mitochondrial DNA indicates that migrants were isolated somewhere for up to 15,000 years on their way over from Asia to North America. The Beringian Standstill Hypothesis arises from the fact that today Native American DNA is quite different from Asian DNA, a clear indication of genetic drift of such magnitude that it can only have happened over long periods of time in nearly complete isolation from the Asian source population. The Bering Transitory Archipelago provides a suitable refugium with internal connectivity and outward isolation.

Dobson said people crossing the Bering Sea probably didn’t have sails but could have been experienced in paddling skin boats like the kayaks and umiaks that Inuits use today.

“They probably traveled in small groups,” he said, “either from Asia or islands off the coast of Asia. Some maritime people are known to have existed 27,000 years ago on northern Japanese islands. They probably were maritime people—not just living on islands, but actually practicing maritime culture, economy and travel.”

Dobson recently received the American Geographical Society’s Cullum Geographical Medal (the same gold medal that Neil Armstrong won for flying to the moon and Rachel Carson won for writing “Silent Spring”). He named and continuously champions “aquaterra”—all lands that were exposed and inundated repeatedly during the Late Pleistocene ice ages—thus creating a zone of archeological promise scattered offshore from all coastal regions around the globe.

Recently, Dobson and co-authors Giorgio Spada of the University of Bologna and Gaia Galassi of Urbino University “Carlo Bo” applied an improved Glacial Isostatic Adjustment model to nine global choke points, meaning isthmuses and straits that have funneled transport and trade throughout history. Significant human migrations are known to have occurred across some of them, including “Beringia”—all portions of the Bering Sea that were exposed before, during and after the Last Glacial Maximum.

“These Italian ocean scientists read my ‘Aquaterra’ paper and took it upon themselves to refine the boundaries of aquaterra for the whole world at coarse resolution and for Beringia itself at fine resolution,” Dobson said. “Later we agreed to join forces and tackle those nine global choke points. At the end of that study, we suddenly spotted these islands in the Bering Sea, and that became our focus. This had an immediate potential because it could be a real game-changer in terms of all sciences understanding how migration worked in the past. We found startling results in certain other choke points and have begun analyzing them as well.”

In Beringia, the three investigators contend, this action produced a “conveyor belt” of islands that rose from the sea and fell back again, pushing bands of people eastward. “The first islands to appear were just off the coast of Siberia,” the KU researcher said. “Then islands appeared ever eastward. Most likely migrants kept expanding eastward, too, generally to islands within view and an easy paddle away.”

By 10,500 years ago, when the Bering Strait itself first appeared, almost all islands in the west had submerged. Only three islands remained, and paddling distances had increased accordingly. Thus, occupants were forced to evacuate, and they faced a clear choice: return to Asia, which they knew to be populated and may even have left due to population pressures and resource constraints, or paddle east to less known territory, perhaps less populated islands with ample resources.

To fully confirm the idea set forth in the new paper, Dobson said researchers from many fields will need to collaborate as one geographer and two ocean scientists have done here.

“We ourselves are at a stage where we definitely need underwater confirmation,” he said. “No doubt underwater archaeologists by title will prevail in that quest, but other disciplines, specialties and fields are essential. Working together plus scouring diverse literature, we presented a fundamentally new physical geography for scientists to contemplate. That should entice every relevant discipline to question conventional theory and explore new ideas regarding how, when and where people came to North America. More broadly, aquaterra can serve as a unifying theme for understanding human migrations, demic expansions, evolutionary biology, culture, settlement and endless other topics.”

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Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) reconstructions of Beringia at 30,000 BP (as early as ice history data go), 20,500 BP (Last Glacial Maximum), 10,500 BP (just before the Bering Strait opened) and 8000 BP (shortly before inundation was complete). Potential kelp habitat is highlighted in bright red at depths of 3 to 20 m, which are suitable for bull kelp wherever rocky bottom may occur. Dobson, et al.

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Article Source: University of Kansas, Lawrence news release

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Antiquity: Archaeologists have established ancient people in northwest Arabia built hundreds of large, likely ritual, structures over 7,000-years-ago. This represents the earliest known widespread tradition of monument building, predating the pyramids of Egypt or stone circles of Britain by millennia.

These ritual structures are large rectangular stone constructions that can be over 600 meters long, with a platform at each end. Named ‘mustatils’, after the Arabic word for rectangle, they have long been known about but had been the subject of very little research.

As such, a team of archaeologists from the University of Western Australia, funded by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), set out to change this. They documented hundreds of mustatils by helicopter, explored almost 40 on the ground, and excavated one as part of the largest study of these structures ever conducted.

The results of this research*, published in the journal Antiquity, reveal there were nearly twice as many mustatils in the region as previously thought.

“We documented over 1000 mustatils, covering over 200,000 km²,” said Dr Hugh Thomas, from the University of Western Australia and director of the project.

The ground survey revealed that the structures were more complex than previously believed, featuring distinct entranceways, organized ‘cells’ and standing stones. Radiocarbon dates from the excavation also revealed they date to the Neolithic, around 5300-5000 BC.

“The mustatils of northwest Arabia represents the first large-scale, monumental ritual landscape anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge by more than 2500 years,” said Dr Melissa Kennedy, assistant director of the project from the University of Western Australia.

The team’s excavations also helped confirm recent assumptions that these structures were built for rituals, as they uncovered an apparent offering of cattle horns and skull parts.

Cattle was a vital part of the lives of the early pastoralists in the region who likely built these structures, and apparent ‘cattle cults’ have been found around 900 years later in southern Arabia. As such, this might reflect an early example of such a cult.

Given the consistency in the design of the mustatils, it appears these beliefs were widespread across northwest Arabia. They also appear to have driven people to organize on a large scale.

“Some of these monumental structures must have been constructed by large groups of people, suggesting that communities came together to build these features,” said Dr Kennedy.

The mustatils appear to be the result of shared beliefs across a wide area driving communities to come together and construct ritual sites, creating the oldest monumental landscape of this scale ever identified.

“The mustatil will completely change how we view Neolithic societies in Saudi Arabia and beyond,” said Dr Thomas. “The RCU’s research campaign at AlUla, with more than 100 archaeologists onsite during peak fieldwork season, is strengthened by this early success. It and future discoveries will become the intellectual foundation of the Kingdoms Institute, AlUla’s recently announced global hub for archaeological research and conservation,” said José Ignacio Gallego Revilla, the RCU’s Archaeology, Heritage Research and Conservation Executive Director.

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A group of three mustatils. AAKSA and Royal Commission for AIUIAa

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Mustatils from the Harrat Kaybar, Saudi Arabia. AAKSA and Royal Commission for AIUIAa

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Article Source: Antiquity news release

*The mustatils: cult and monumentality in Neolithic north-western Arabia – Hugh Thomas, Melissa A. Kennedy, Matthew Dalton, Jane McMahon, David Boyer & Rebecca Repper https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.51

ABOUT THE RESEARCH

The AAKSA project is a multi-disciplinary analysis focused on the hinterland of the AlUla, and Khaybar Counties. Recording and analyzing the heritage sites of these two regions through macro and micro remote sensing techniques, aerial survey/photography, and targeted ground survey and excavation. The project, run by the University of Western Australia, is part of the large-scale archaeological survey and excavation of the region recently commissioned by the Royal Commission for AlUla.

ABOUT THE ROYAL COMMISSION FOR AIULA

The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) was established by royal decree in July 2017 to preserve and develop AlUla, a region of outstanding natural and cultural significance in north-west Saudi Arabia. The Journey Through Time Masterplan, unveiled on April 7, 2021, is the RCU’s 15-year program to develop the core historical area of AlUla. It outlines a responsible, sustainable, and sensitive approach to urban and economic development that preserves the area’s natural and historic heritage, while establishing AlUla as a desirable location to live, work, and visit. The Kingdoms Institute is a flagship element of The Journey Through Time Masterplan and will be a global hub for archaeological research and conservation when it opens in 2030.

ABOUT ANTIQUITY

Antiquity is an international peer-reviewed journal of world archaeology, published six times a year and edited by Dr Rob Witcher. The journal was founded by O.G.S. Crawford in 1927 and is currently edited in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University (head:Professor Sarah Semple). The journal is published in partnership with Cambridge University Press (CUP).

Antiquity website: http://www.antiquity.ac.uk

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—Fossil pollen records from across the Amazon basin suggest that depopulation and resulting forest regrowth in Amazonia began centuries before European arrival and did not contribute to the observed decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the 17th century, according to a new study*. The results offer new insights into the human influence on Amazonian landscapes throughout history. When Europeans first arrived on the shores of South America, brutal waves of disease, warfare, slavery and genocide followed and culminated in a catastrophic loss of life that has come to be known as the “Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.” It’s estimated that 90 to 95% of the Indigenous population in Amazonia died after 1492. As a result, many occupied sites were abandoned, including untold acres of previously cultivated land, which resulted in a surge of forest regrowth throughout the Amazon basin. It’s thought that this rapid regrowth may have resulted in the marked decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration that began in the early 1600s – an anomaly also known as the Orbis spike. Mark Bush and colleagues evaluated fossil pollen records from 39 sites throughout Amazonia that record changes to forest cover over the last 2,000 years. Bush et al. found that during the Great Dying period, the number of sites where forest pollen was increasing was approximately equal to those where it was falling in abundance, “effectively rejecting the hypothesis of widespread and synchronous reforestation sufficient to cause decreases in atmospheric CO₂ levels,” they write. At many sites, land abandonment and forest regrowth began 300 – 600 years before the arrival of Europeans, the data suggest. While the authors note that the mechanisms driving land abandonment between 950 and 1500 years ago have yet to be identified, they suggest that the cascading effects of environmental change, pre-European pandemics, and/or social strife could have contributed. Nevertheless, Indigenous populations in some areas of Amazonia may have already been declining when Europeans arrived, a decline that was accelerated by the deadly impacts of European contact, write Bush et al.

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Rainforest regrowth occurred hundreds of years before European arrival. Rosinakaiser, Pixabay

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Article Source: AAAS news release

*”Widespread reforestation before European influence on Amazonia,” by M.B. Bush; M.N. Nascimento; C.M. Åkesson at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FL; M.N. Nascimento; S.Y. Maezumi; S.N. Huisman; C.N.H. McMichael at University of Amsterdam in Amsterdam, Netherlands; G.M. Cárdenes-Sandí at University of Costa Rica in San José, Costa Rica; H. Behling at University of Goettingen in Goettingen, German; A. Correa-Metrio at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in México City, México; W. Church at Columbus State University in Columbus, GA; T. Kelly at Queen Mary University of London in London, UK; F.E. Mayle at University of Reading in Berkshire, UK; C.M. Åkesson at St. Andrews University in St. Andrews, UK.

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SANTA FE INSTITUTE—The best path across the desert is rarely the straightest. For the first human inhabitants of Sahul—the super-continent that underlies modern Australia and New Guinea—camping at the next spring, stream, or rock shelter allowed them to thrive for hundreds of generations. Those who successfully traversed the landmarks made their way across the continent, spreading from their landfall in the Northwest across the continent, making their way to all corners of Australia and New Guinea.

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team* of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago. Their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, is the largest reconstruction of a network of human migration paths into a new landscape. It is also the first to apply rigorous computational analysis at the continental scale, testing 125 billion possible pathways.

“We decided it would be really interesting to look at this question of human migration because the ways that we conceptualize a landscape should be relatively steady for a hiker in the 21st century and a person who was way-finding into a new region 70,000 years ago,” says archaeologist and computational social scientist Stefani Crabtree, who led the study. Crabtree is a Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and Assistant Professor at Utah State University. “If it’s a new landscape and we don’t have a map, we’re going to want to know how to efficiently move throughout a space, where to find water, and where to camp—and we’ll orient ourselves based on high points around the lands.”

“One of the really big unanswered questions of prehistory is how Australia was populated in the distant past. Scholars have debated it for at least a hundred and fifty years,” says co-author Devin White, an archaeologist and remote sensing scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. “It is the largest and most complex project of its kind that I’d ever been asked to take on.”

To re-create the migrations across Sahul, the researchers first needed to simulate the topography of the supercontinent. They “drained” the oceans that now separate mainland Australia from New Guinea and Tasmania. Then, using hydrological and paleo-geographical data, they reconstructed inland lakes, major rivers, promontory rocks, and mountain ranges that would have attracted the gaze of a wandering human.

Next, the researchers programmed in-silico stand-ins for the human travelers. The team adapted an algorithm called “From Everywhere to Everywhere,” created by White*, to program the way-finders based on the caloric needs of a 25-year-old female carrying 10 kg of water and tools.

The researchers imbued these individuals with the realistic goal of staying alive, which could be achieved by finding water sources. Like backcountry hikers, the digital travelers were drawn to prominent landmarks like rocks and foothills, and the program exacted a caloric toll for activities such as hiking uphill within the artificial landscape.

When the researchers “landed” the way-finders at two points on the coast of the re-created continent, they began to traverse it, using landmarks to navigate in search of freshwater. The algorithms simulated a staggering 125 billion possible pathways, run on a Sandia supercomputer, and a pattern emerged: the most-frequently traveled routes carved distinct “superhighways” across the continent, forming a notable ring-shaped road around the right portion of Australia; a western road; and roads that transect the continent. A subset of these superhighways map to archaeological sites where early rock art, charcoal, shell, and quartz tools have been found.

“Australia’s not only the driest, but it’s also the flattest populated continent on Earth,” says co-author Sean Ulm, an archaeologist and Distinguished Professor at James Cook University. Ulm is also Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), whose researchers contributed to the project. “Our research shows that prominent landscape features and water sources were critical for people to navigate and survive on the continent. In many Aboriginal societies, landscape features are known to have been created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming. Every ridgeline, hill, river, beach and water source is named, storied and inscribed into the very fabric of societies, emphasizing the intimate relationship between people and place. The landscape is literally woven into peoples’ lives and their histories. It seems that these relationships between people and Country probably date back to the earliest peopling of the continent.”

The results suggest that there are fundamental rules humans follow as they move into new landscapes and that the researchers’ approach could shed light on other major migrations in human history, such as the first waves of migration out of Africa at least 120,000 years ago.

Future work, Crabtree says, could inform the search for undiscovered archaeological sites, or even apply the techniques to forecast the movements of human migration in the near future, as populations flee drowning coastlines and climate disruptions.

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Archaeological sites. Zoe Taylor (CABAH)

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Sahul, with modern coastline. Zoe Taylor (CABAH)

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The ‘superhighways’. Zoe Taylor (CABAH)

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The waterways. Zoe Taylor (CABAH)

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Article Source: Santa Fe Institute news release

*Co-authors of the study are Stefani Crabtree (Santa Fe Institute, Utah State University, CABAH) who led the project and convened its first working group at the Santa Fe Institute in 2019; Devin White (Sandia National Laboratories) who wrote the primary algorithm used; and members of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), who contributed expertise on the Australian landscape and the Aboriginal communities. CABAH members are Crabtree, Sean Ulm (James Cook University), Corey Bradshaw (Flinders University), Frédérick Saltré (Flinders University), Alan Williams (University of New South Wales); Robin Beaman (James Cook University); and Michael Bird (James Cook University), who also co-organized the 2019 working group in Santa Fe.

The Santa Fe Institute is a nonprofit research center located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Its scientists collaborate across disciplines to understand the complex systems that underlie critical questions for science and humanity. The Institute is supported by philanthropic individuals and foundations, forward-thinking partner companies, and government science agencies.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.

CABAH is an ARC Centre of Excellence that brings together expertise from diverse academic disciplines to answer fundamental questions about the natural and human history of our region, including how and when people first came to Australia.  

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WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY, PULLMAN, Wash.—Climate problems alone were not enough to end periods of ancient Pueblo development in the southwestern United States.

Drought is often blamed for the periodic disruptions of these Pueblo societies, but in a study with potential implications for the modern world, archaeologists have found evidence that slowly accumulating social tension likely played a substantial role in three dramatic upheavals in Pueblo development.

The findings, detailed in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, but when social tensions were increasing, even modest droughts could spell the end of an era of development.

“Societies that are cohesive can often find ways to overcome climate challenges,” said Tim Kohler, a Washington State University archeologist and corresponding author on the study. “But societies that are riven by internal social dynamics of any sort – which could be wealth differences, racial disparities or other divisions – are fragile because of those factors. Then climate challenges can easily become very serious.”

Archeologists have long speculated about the causes of occasional upheavals in the pre-Spanish societies created by the ancestors of contemporary Pueblo peoples. These Ancestral Pueblo communities once occupied the Four Corners area of the U.S. from 500 to 1300 where today Colorado borders Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

While these communities were often stable for many decades, they experienced several disruptive social transformations before leaving the area in the late 1200s. When more precise measurements indicated that droughts coincided with these transformations, many archeologists decided that these climate challenges were their primary cause.

In this study, Kohler collaborated with complexity scientists from Wageningen University in The Netherlands, led by Marten Scheffer, who have shown that loss of resilience in a system approaching a tipping point can be detected through subtle changes in fluctuation patterns.

“Those warning signals turn out to be strikingly universal,” said Scheffer, first author on the study. “They are based on the fact that slowing down of recovery from small perturbations signals loss of resilience.”

Other research has found signs of such “critical slowing down” in systems as diverse as the human brain, tropical rainforests and ice caps as they approach critical transitions.

“When we saw the amazingly detailed data assembled by Kohler’s team, we thought this would be the ideal case to see if our indicators might detect when societies become unstable–something quite relevant in the current social context,” Scheffer said.

The research used tree-ring analyses of wood beams used for construction, which provided a time series of estimated tree-cutting activity spanning many centuries.

“This record is like a social thermometer,” said Kohler, who is also affiliated with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “Tree cutting and construction are vital components of these societies. Any deviation from normal tells you something is going on.”

They found that weakened recovery from interruptions in construction activity preceded three major transformations of Pueblo societies. These slow-downs were different than other interruptions, which showed quick returns to normal in the following years. The archeologists also noted increased signs of violence at the same time, confirming that tension had likely increased and that societies were nearing a tipping point.

This happened at the end of the period known as the Basketmaker III, around the year 700, as well as near the ends of the periods called Pueblo I and Pueblo II, around 900 and 1140 respectively. Near the end of each period, there was also evidence of drought. The findings indicate that it was the two factors together – social fragility and drought – that spelled trouble for these societies.

Social fragility was not at play, however, at the end of the Pueblo III period in the late 1200s when Pueblo farmers left the Four Corners with most moving far south. This study supports the theory that it was a combination of drought and conflict with outside groups that spurred the Pueblo peoples to leave.

Kohler said we can still learn from what happens when climate challenges and social problems coincide.

“Today we face multiple social problems including rising wealth inequality along with deep political and racial divisions, just as climate change is no longer theoretical,” Kohler said. “If we’re not ready to face the challenges of changing climate as a cohesive society, there will be real trouble.”

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Drought is often blamed for the periodic disruptions of ancient Pueblo societies of the U.S. Southwest, but in a study with potential implications for the modern world, archaeologists found evidence that slowly accumulating social tension likely played a substantial role in three dramatic upheavals in Pueblo development. The findings show that Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, but when social tensions were increasing, even modest droughts could spell the end of an era of development. Mesa Verde National Park, MEVE 11084

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Article Source: WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY news release

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CNRS Presse—The Chauvet Cave, which lies by the entrance to the Gorges of the Ardèche, is home to the world’s oldest cave paintings, dating back 36,000 years. Their state of preservation and aesthetic qualities earned them a spot on the World Heritage List in 2014, 20 years after their discovery. The location of the cavern – surrounded by a remarkable landscape, next to the Pont d’Arc natural archway – raises the question of whether the people who executed these artworks looked and walked out upon the same landscape as today. Did they see the same natural archway? Scientists from the CNRS, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle1 now know the answer. By studying the landform of the area and making novel use of applied mathematics to date sand transported by the Ardèche River, they determined that the Pont d’Arc was formed about 124,000 years ago. This study published on April 26 in Scientific reports these past communities were therefore familiar with the same landmarks we know today: the gorge entrance, a natural archway, and a ledge leading directly to the cave entrance, which was then wide open.

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The Cirque d’Estre shapes the natural setting of the Chauvet Cave and the Pont d’Arc. The upper photograph shows the Combe d’Arc, an old meander later cutoff by the Ardèche River. © Jean-Jacques Delannoy and Stéphane Jaillet

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Reconstructing the history of the Combe d’Arc landscape. The Combe d’Arc was greatly impacted by the gradual entrenchment of the Ardèche River. © Kim Génuite

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Article Source: A CNRS news release. Elie Stecyna, CNRS press officer

Above, Top Left: View toward Chauvet showing landscape around the cave location. Thilo Parg,  Lizenz CC-BY-SA-4.0  Wikimedia Commons

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ESTONIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL—A study that appeared today on Current Biology sheds new light on the continental migrations which shaped the genetic background of all present Europeans. The research generates new ancient DNA evidence and direct dating from a fragmentary fossil mandible belonging to an individual who lived ~17,000 years ago in northeastern Italy (Riparo Tagliente, Verona). The results backdate by about 3,000 years the diffusion in Southern Europe of a genetic component linked to Eastern Europe/Western Asia previously believed to have spread westwards during later major warming shifts.

“By looking into the past of this particular individual, who was one of the first settlers of the southern Alps after the Last Glacial peak, we found evidence that the previously documented genetic replacement which changed the makeup of Southern European Hunter Gatherers started at least 17,000 years ago,” said lead author Eugenio Bortolini (University of Bologna), “much earlier than we previously thought, and in a very different scenario”.

The ancient genome obtained at Riparo Tagliente is in fact of particular importance, “since it supports the persistence of exchange networks and the movement of people across southern Europe immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum, well before the onset of much warmer climatic shifts,” said Luca Pagani (University of Padova and Institute of Genomics of the University of Tartu), co-first author of the work.

This individual, whose half-mandible had been found at Riparo Tagliente in 1963, shares genetic affinities with an Iberian individual who lived up to 19,000 years ago, and maternal and paternal genetic affinities with southern Italian and European individuals who lived around 14,000 years ago, suggesting that population movements may have spread these genetic variants in Southern Europe even before the occupation of Riparo Tagliente, and may have been intermittent but persisting during colder phases. “Direct dating of human fossils is once again critical to disentangle and interpret complex archaeological contexts”, adds Sahra Talamo, coauthor of the study.

The analysis of the mandible also allowed the authors to unveil some details concerning this particular settler of Riparo Tagliente: “The fragment belongs to a young male affected by cementoma, a quite rare anomaly in the development of dental tissue” adds Gregorio Oxilia, co-first author of the study, “and might shed light on the distribution of such conditions in pre-Neolithic societies”.

The research was coordinated by the University of Bologna (Italy) in close collaboration with a vast international network including the University of Padova (Italy), the Institute of Genomics of the University of Tartu (Estonia), the University of Tubingen (Germany), the University of Ferrara (Italy), the Institute of Genetics and Biophysics of the National Research Council of Italy, KU Leuven (Belgium), Institució Milà i Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council, Sequentia Biotech (Spain), University of Venice Ca’ Foscari (Italy), The “Abdus Salam” International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy), Monash University (Melbourne , Australia), University of Florence (Italy), and several professional dentist surgeons. Excavations at Riparo Tagliente which made this study possible are led and supervised by Federica Fontana and coordinated by the University of Ferrara.

“This finding opens important questions concerning the role and impact of population movements on the major cultural transitions documented by archaeologists in Southern Europe” concludes Stefano Benazzi, senior author of the study, “some of which temporally coincide with the date emerged for the individual found at Riparo Tagliente. Future research will dig more into these new hypotheses concerning the ancestry of modern Europeans”.

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Virtual model of the hemimandible Tagliente2. In the latter, the presenceo of cementoma is visible (in red). G. Oxilia

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Picture (1) of the hemimandible Tagliente2. G. Oxilia

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Article Source: Estonian Research Council news release.

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UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN—The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered some seventy years ago, are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts. But the individual people behind the scrolls have eluded scientists, because the scribes are anonymous. Now, by combining the sciences and the humanities, University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, which enables them to discover the scribes behind the scrolls. They presented their results in the journal PLOS ONE on 21 April.

The scribes who created the scrolls did not sign their work. Scholars suggested some manuscripts should be attributed to a single scribe based on handwriting. ‘They would try to find a “smoking gun” in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter which would identify a scribe’, explains Mladen Popović, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. He is also director of the university’s Qumran Institute, dedicated to studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, these identifications are somewhat subjective and often hotly debated.

Scribes

That is why Popović, in his project The Hands that Wrote the Bible which was funded by the European Research Council, teamed up with his colleague Lambert Schomaker, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Schomaker has long worked on techniques to allow computers to read handwriting, often from historical materials. He also performed studies to investigate how biomechanical traits, like the way in which someone holds a pen or stylus, would affect handwriting.

In this study, together with PhD candidate Maruf Dhali, they focused on one scroll in particular: the famous Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a) from Qumran Cave 1. The handwriting in this scroll seems near-uniform, yet it has been suggested it was made by two scribes sharing a similar writing style. So how could this be decided? Schomaker: ‘This scroll contains the letter aleph, or “a”, at least five thousand times. It is impossible to compare them all just by eye.’ Computers are well suited to analyze large datasets, like 5,000 handwritten a’s. Digital imaging makes all sorts of computer calculations possible, at the microlevel of characters, such as measuring curvature (called textural), as well as whole characters (called allographic).

Neural network

‘The human eye is amazing and presumably takes these levels into account too. This allows experts to “see” the hands of different authors, but that decision is often not reached by a transparent process,’ Popović says. ‘Furthermore, it is virtually impossible for these experts to process the large amounts of data the scrolls provide.’ That is why their results are often not conclusive.

The first hurdle was to train an algorithm to separate the text (ink) from its background (the leather or the papyrus). For this separation, or ‘binarization’, Dhali developed a state-of-the-art artificial neural network that can be trained using deep learning. This neural network keeps the original ink traces made by the scribe more than 2,000 years ago intact as they appear on the digital images. ‘This is important because the ancient ink traces relate directly to a person’s muscle movement and are person-specific’, Schomaker explains.

Similarities

Dhali performed the first analytical test of this study. His analysis of textural and allographic features showed that the 54 columns of text in the Great Isaiah Scroll fell into two different groups that were not distributed randomly through the scroll, but were clustered, with a transition around the halfway mark.

With the remark that there might be more than one writer, Dhali then handed the data to Schomaker who then recomputed the similarities between the columns, now using the patterns of letter fragments. This second analytical step confirmed the presence of two differences. Several further checks and controls were performed. According to Schomaker: ‘When we added extra noise to the data, the result didn’t change. We also succeeded in demonstrating that the second scribe shows more variation within his writing than the first, although their writing is very similar.’

Handwriting

In the third step, Popović, Dhali, and Schomaker produced a visual analysis. They created ‘heat maps’ that incorporate all the variants of a character across the scroll. Then they produced an averaged version of this character for the first 27 columns and the last 27 columns. Comparing these two average letters by eye shows that they are different. This links the computerized and statistical analysis to human interpretation of the data by approximation, because the heat maps are neither dependent nor produced from the primary and secondary analyses.

Certain aspects of the scroll and the positioning of the text led some scholars to suggest that after column 27 a new scribe had started, but this was not generally accepted. Popović: ‘Now, we can confirm this with a quantitative analysis of the handwriting as well as with robust statistical analyses. Instead of basing judgment on more-or-less impressionistic evidence, with the intelligent assistance of the computer, we can demonstrate that the separation is statistically significant.’

New window

In addition to transforming the palaeography of the scrolls – and potentially other ancient manuscript corpora – this study of the Great Isaiah Scroll opens up a totally new way to analyze the Qumran texts based on physical characteristics. Now, researchers can access the microlevel of individual scribes and carefully observe how they worked on these manuscripts.

Popović: ‘This is very exciting, because this opens a new window on the ancient world that can reveal much more intricate connections between the scribes that produced the scrolls. In this study, we found evidence for a very similar writing style shared by the two Great Isaiah Scroll scribes, which suggests a common training or origin. Our next step is to investigate other scrolls, where we may find different origins or training for the scribes.’

In this way, it will be possible to learn more about the communities that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. ‘We are now able to identify different scribes’, Popović concludes. ‘We will never know their names. But after seventy years of study, this feels as if we can finally shake hands with them through their handwriting.’

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A portion of a photographic reproduction of the Great Isaiah Scroll. Photography by Ardon Bar Hama, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Two 12×12 Kohonen maps (blue colourmaps) of full character aleph and bet from the Dead Sea Scroll collection. Each of the characters in the Kohonen maps is formed from multiple instances of similar characters (shown with a zoomed box with red lines). These maps are useful for chronological style development analysis. In the current study of writer identification, Fraglets (fragmented character shapes) were used instead of full character shapes to achieve more precise (robust) results. Maruf A. Dhali, University of Groningen

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(from left to right) Greyscale image of column 15 of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the corresponding binarized image using BiNet, and the cleaned-corrected image. From the red boxes of the last two images, one can see how the rotation and the geometric transformation is corrected to yield a better image for further processing. Reprinted from Lim TH, Alexander PS. Volume 1. In: The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library. Brill; 1995 under a CC BY license, with permission from Brill Publishers, original copyright 1995.

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An illustration of how heat maps of normalized average character shapes are generated for individual letters (in this example: aleph). Maruf A. Dhali, University of Groningen

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN news release.

Additional information:

Digital images of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the Great Isaiah Scroll were kindly provided by Brill Publishers and the Israel Antiquities Authority (the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library).

From 6-8 April 2021 an international online conference took place, Digital Palaeography and Hebrew/Aramaic Scribal Culture, organized by the University of Groningen. A link to presentations will appear soon on this page: https://www.rug.nl/ggw/news/events/2021/digital-palaeography-and-hebrew-aramaic-scribal-culture

*Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker, Artificial Intelligence Based Writer Identification Generates New Evidence for the Unknown Scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls Exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a)

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