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UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK—Stone tools have been made by humans and their ancestors for millions of years. For archaeologists these rocky remnants – lithic artifacts and flakes – are of key importance. Because of their high preservation potential they are among the most common findings in archaeological excavations. Worldwide, numerical dating of these lithic artifacts, especially when they occur as surface findings, remains a major challenge. Usually, stone tools cannot be dated directly, but only when they are embedded in sediment layers together with, for example, organic material. The age of such organic material can be constrained via the radiocarbon technique. If such datable organic remains are missing or if stone artifacts lack a stratified sedimentary context, but rather occur as scattered surface artefacts, numerical dating becomes very difficult or is simply impossible. “The earth’s surface is highly dynamic and erosion and redeposition of material, especially over long timescales, is common. A precise age determination of lithic artifacts that occur as surface finds has therefore hardly been possible so far. Many aspects of ancient human behavior have only been preserved as surface finds, hence cannot be dated precisely with currently available dating methods. By further developing the Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating technique, we can now, for the first time, carry out precise, and direct age measurements on lithic artifacts. In our current study we used stone artifacts from an archaeological surface site in south-central Tibet”, explains Michael Meyer, head of the Luminescence Laboratory at the Department of Geology at the University of Innsbruck and one of the main authors of the study now published in the renowned journal Science Advances. OSL dating is based on the measurement of light stored in natural minerals and is one of the most important absolute dating tools in archaeology and the earth sciences. “This dating method uses natural light signals that accumulate over time in natural dosimeters, such as quartz and feldspar grains that are important constituents of sediments, as well as rocks and lithic artifacts. These minerals can be imagined as miniaturized clocks. Each grain is a tiny clock that can be ‘read-out’ under controlled laboratory conditions. The light signal allows us to infer the age of the archaeological sediment layer or artifact. The more light, the older the sample,” says the geologist. “In this study, we have now taken a new approach and focused not on sediment grains of sand, but – for the first time – on stone artifacts themselves.”

Quarrying activities more than 5,000 years ago

Due to its extreme environmental and climatic conditions the dry highlands of Tibet are considered to be one of the last regions on earth that were occupied by humans. When exactly peopling of this remote and rather extreme environments occurred has caused a lot of scientific debate over the course of the last decade. In 2017, Michael Meyer dated the famous human foot and hand prints of Chusang in the central part of the Tibetan plateau to an age between 8,000 and 12,000 years. In the current study, Meyer and his team analyzed archaeological finds from southern Tibet in the Innsbruck OSL Laboratory: The excavation site Su-re is located immediately north of the Mount Everest-Cho Oyu massif in the so-called Tingri graben at an elevation of 4450 meters. Surface artifacts are particularly common in Tibet. To date them, the researcher used the so-called “Rock Surface Burial Dating” technique and applied it to lithic surface artifacts. This method determines the point in time when the stone artifact was discarded by humans and at least partly covered by earth. “With our luminescence method, we can look inside the stone and create a continuous age-depth profile. The inside of a rock has never been exposed to sunlight, so we have a saturated luminescence signal there and an infinite high age. However, if the rock surface is exposed to daylight for a long enough time, the signal in the top millimeters or centimeters of the rock will be erased. This happens during knapping, when the stone tool is produced, and also during the subsequent artifact use by humans. When the artifact is then discarded and at least partially buried in sediment and shielded from light, the luminescence signal in this artifact surface recharges. By measuring this depth-dependent luminescence signal in the rock surfaces, we can calculate the age of the artifact discard, taking into account the dynamics of local earth surface processes. Such an approach allows us to date stone artifacts directly, even if they occur as surface finds,” Meyer explains. The analyses on the surface artifacts from southern Tibet revealed an age between 5,200 and 5,500 years. “We assume that the artifact findings at Su-re are related to quarrying activities at this site”. Very old sites have been discovered in the central part of the Plateau, however, for southern sector of the Tibetan Plateau, Su-re is currently to oldest securely dated site.

For Michael Meyer, the analysis of these Tibetan artifacts is just the beginning: “This OSL-based method opens up new vistas in archaeological dating and holds great potential also for sites on other continents that preserve lithic artifacts in a favorable setting,” concludes the geologist.

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The excavation site Su-re is located immediately north of the Mount Everest-Cho Oyu massif (on the left) in the so-called Tingri graben at an elevation of 4,450 meters. Luke Gliganic

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Fieldwork on site on the Tibetan Plateau: sampling of surface artifacts under black lightproof cover. Michael Meyer

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK news release

*L.A. Gliganic, M.C. Meyer, J.-H. May, M.S. Aldenderfer, P. Tropper: Direct dating of lithic surface artifacts using luminescence. Sci. Adv. 7, eabb3424 (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb3424

**OSL Laboratory at the Department of Geology, University of Innsbruck, Austria: https://quaternary.uibk.ac.at/Research/Current-Research/Luminescence-geochronology.aspx

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The summer exhibition ‘Temples of Malta’ at the Dutch Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (the national museum of antiquities) presents Malta’s rich prehistoric culture: a world of temples and tombs. The temples of Malta are the most ancient free-standing buildings in the world, 1,000 years older than the pyramids. In Leiden, archaeological finds from burial sites and sacred places will show how much the builders, Malta’s prehistoric farmers, were capable of achieving thousands of years ago. Their great engineering skills, their rituals, their religion, and the abrupt end of their way of life are still shrouded in a veil of mystery. The exhibition will run from 5 June until 31 October 2021. Tickets must be reserved prior to your visit at www.rmo.nl

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‘Temples of Malta’ is a survey exhibition about the culture of Malta’s prehistoric islanders from 3600 to 2500 BC, with a special emphasis on megalithic temples. A video feed from a robot camera hovering over temple models creates the illusion of visiting in person. The displays will also include parts of temple decorations, tools, decorated pottery, and jewellery. The final object in the exhibition will be one of the smallest and perhaps the most relevant to the present day: a two-centimeter-high sculpture from 3200 BC. Found at Tarxien Temples, it represents two people in a loving embrace – a timeless expression of the human need for contact and affection.

The exhibition design plays with the contrast between Malta’s colossal monuments and the small scale and intimacy of the objects found there. Large but sometimes also remarkably small, Malta’s famous ‘fat ladies’ owe that name to the lush curves of their bodies. But although these figures are usually seen as women, and sometimes even as mother goddesses, recent theories tell us they may well be men or asexual persons. The figures were found in graves and temples. Three examples will be on display in Leiden. The exhibition will explore the questions surrounding their appearance, their meaning, and their gender identity.

Temple culture

The group of Maltese islands, of which Malta and Gozo are the largest, lies just south of Sicily. They form a small country – about twice the area of Washington, DC, or slightly smaller than the Isle of Wight – but their earliest history is grand and intriguing. Malta was first settled around 5900 BC, probably by farmers from Sicily. Because of their isolation in the Mediterranean, the islands developed their own unique and fascinating culture between 3600 and 2500 BC (the Temple period). The largest and most striking remains are complex temple buildings from sites such as the UNESCO-recognized Ġgantija, Tarxien, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Ta’ Ħaġrat and Skorba, as well as underground burial sites (hypogea) carved out of rock. The largest stone is more than six meters long and weighs over twenty tonnes. Even now, little is known about the exact role of the temples or the rituals performed there. After almost 1,000 years of prosperity, the islands fell on harder times, and the temples and sculptures were deliberately damaged, broken, and burned. For a century, the islands appear to have remained uninhabited. This sudden end to the temple culture may have resulted from overpopulation and exhaustion of natural resources. Perhaps Maltese civilization was the victim of its own success.

Exhibition

Temples of Malta will run from 5 June to 31 October 2021. The exhibition will be accompanied by a booklet (Dutch and English) and a program of talks and guided tours, available both in the museum and online. Tickets must be reserved prior to your visit at www.rmo.nl.

The exhibition was made by Heritage Malta and the National Museum of Archaeology in Malta, in partnership with the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. It features objects from Malta’s national collections and museums. The exhibition is supported by the Malta Tourism Authority. The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden is supported by the BankGiro Loterij.

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Image courtesy Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.

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Article Source: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden news release

‘Temples of Malta’, 5 June – 31 October 2021

Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Rapenburg 28, Leiden, www.rmo.nl, facebook.com/Oudheden

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IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY—AMES, Iowa – An unexpected discovery by an Iowa State University researcher suggests that the first humans may have arrived in North America more than 30,000 years ago – nearly 20,000 years earlier than originally thought.

Andrew Somerville, an assistant professor of anthropology in world languages and cultures, says he and his colleagues made the discovery while studying the origins of agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. As part of that work, they wanted to establish a date for the earliest human occupation of the Coxcatlan Cave in the valley, so they obtained radiocarbon dates for several rabbit and deer bones that were collected from the cave in the 1960s as part of the Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project. The dates for the bones suddenly took Somerville and his colleagues in a different direction with their work.

The date ranges for the bone samples from the base of the cave ranged from 33,448 to 28,279 years old. The results are published in the academic journal Latin American Antiquity. Somerville says even though previous studies had not dated items from the bottom of the cave, he was not expecting such old ages. The findings add to the debate over a long-standing theory that the first humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas 13,000 years ago.

“We weren’t trying to weigh in on this debate or even find really old samples. We were just trying to situate our agricultural study with a firmer timeline,” Somerville said. “We were surprised to find these really old dates at the bottom of the cave, and it means that we need to take a closer look at the artifacts recovered from those levels.”

Somerville says the findings provide researchers with a better understanding of the chronology of the region. Previous studies relied on charcoal and plant samples, but he says the bones were a better material for dating. However, questions still remain. Most importantly, is there a human link to the bottom layer of the cave where the bones were found?

To answer that question, Somerville and Matthew Hill, ISU associate professor of anthropology, plan to take a closer look at the bone samples for evidence of cut marks that indicate the bones were butchered by a stone tool or human, or thermal alternations that suggest the bones were boiled or roasted over fire. He says the possible stone tools from the early levels of the cave may also yield clues.

“Determining whether the stone artifacts were products of human manufacture or if they were just naturally chipped stones would be one way to get to the bottom of this,” Somerville said. “If we can find strong evidence that humans did in fact make and use these tools, that’s another way we can move forward.”

Year-long journey to even find the bones

Not only was this discovery unexpected, but the process of tracking down the animal bones to take samples was more than Somerville anticipated. The collection of artifacts from the 1960s Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project was distributed to different museums and labs in Mexico and the United States, and it was unclear where the animal bones were sent.

After a year of emails and cold calls, Somerville and his collaborator, Isabel Casar from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, had a potential lead for a lab in Mexico City. The lab director, Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales, agreed to give Somerville and Casar a tour to help search for the missing collection. The tour proved to be beneficial. Among the countless boxes of artifacts, they found what they were looking for.

“Having spent months trying to locate the bones, we were excited to find them tucked away on the bottom shelf in a dark corner of the lab,” Somerville said. “At the time, we felt that was a great discovery, we had no idea it would lead to this.”

Once he located the bones, Somerville got permission from the Mexican government to take small samples – about 3/4 inch in length and 1/4 inch in width – from 17 bones (eight rabbits and nine deer) for radiocarbon dating. If closer examination of the bones provides evidence of a human link, Somerville says it will change what we know about the timing and how the first people came to America.

“Pushing the arrival of humans in North America back to over 30,000 years ago would mean that humans were already in North America prior to the period of the Last Glacial Maximum, when the Ice Age was at its absolute worst,” Somerville said. “Large parts of North America would have been inhospitable to human populations. The glaciers would have completely blocked any passage over land coming from Alaska and Canada, which means people probably would have had to come to the Americas by boats down the Pacific coast.”

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One of the rabbit bones dated for the study. Andrew Somerville, Iowa State University

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Article Source: IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY news release

Isabel Casar, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Joaquín Arroyo-Cabrales, a researcher with the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, contributed to this research. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—While it is widely accepted that climate change drove the evolution of our species in Africa, the exact character of that climate change and its impacts are not well understood. Glacial-interglacial cycles strongly impact patterns of climate change in many parts of the world, and were also assumed to regulate environmental changes in Africa during the critical period of human evolution over the last ~1 million years. The ecosystem changes driven by these glacial cycles are thought to have stimulated the evolution and dispersal of early humans.

A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) this week challenges this view. Dr. Kaboth-Bahr and an international group of multidisciplinary collaborators identified ancient El Niño-like weather patterns as the drivers of major climate changes in Africa. This allowed the group to re-evaluate the existing climatic framework of human evolution.

Walking with the rain

Dr. Kaboth-Bahr and her colleagues integrated 11 climate archives from all across Africa covering the past 620 thousand years to generate a comprehensive spatial picture of when and where wet or dry conditions prevailed over the continent. “We were surprised to find a distinct climatic east-west ‘seesaw’ very akin to the pattern produced by the weather phenomena of El Niño, that today profoundly influences precipitation distribution in Africa,” explains Dr. Kaboth-Bahr, who led the study.

The authors infer that the effects of the tropical Pacific Ocean on the so-called “Walker Circulation” – a belt of convection cells along the equator that impact the rainfall and aridity of the tropics – were the prime driver of this climate seesaw. The data clearly shows that the wet and dry regions shifted between the east and west of the African continent on timescales of approximately 100,000 years, with each of the climatic shifts being accompanied by major turnovers in flora and mammal fauna.

“This alternation between dry and wet periods appeared to have governed the dispersion and evolution of vegetation as well as mammals in eastern and western Africa,” explains Dr. Kaboth-Bahr. “The resultant environmental patchwork was likely to have been a critical component of human evolution and early demography as well.”

The scientists are keen to point that although climate change was certainly not the sole factor driving early human evolution, the new study nevertheless provides a novel perspective on the tight link between environmental fluctuations and the origin of our early ancestors.

“We see many species of pan-African mammals whose distributions match the patterns we identify, and whose evolutionary history seems to articulate with the wet-dry oscillations between eastern and western Africa,” adds Dr. Eleanor Scerri, one of the co-authors and an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. “These animals preserve the signals of the environments that humans evolved in, and it seems likely that our human ancestors may have been similarly subdivided across Africa as they were subject to the same environmental pressures.”

Ecotones: the transitional regions between different ecological zones

The scientists’ work suggests that a seesaw-like pattern of rainfall alternating between eastern and western Africa probably had the effect of creating critically important ecotonal regions – the buffer zones between different ecological zones, such as grassland and forest.

“Ecotones provided diverse, resource-rich and stable environmental settings thought to have been important to early modern humans,” adds Dr. Kaboth-Bahr. “They certainly seem to have been important to other faunal communities.”

To the scientists, this suggests that Africa’s interior regions may have been critically important for fostering long-term population continuity. “We see the archaeological signatures of early members of our species all across Africa,” says Dr. Scerri, “but innovations come and go and are often re-invented, suggesting that our deep population history saw a constant saw-tooth like pattern of local population growth and collapse. Ecotonal regions may have provided areas for longer term population continuity, ensuring that the larger human population kept going, even if local populations often went extinct.”

“Re-evaluating these patterns of stasis, change and extinction through a new climatic framework will yield new insights into the deep human past,” says Dr. Kaboth Bahr. “This does not mean that people were helpless in the face of climatic changes, but shifting habitat availability would certainly have impacted patterns of demography, and ultimately the genetic exchanges that underpin human evolution.”

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The Ngorongoro on the edge of the Serengeti in Tanzania is home to abundant wildlife. Climate change, however, leads to dramatic water scarcity, vegetation changes, loss of biodiversity and recurring diseases that threaten the fragile ecosystem. Prof. Martin Trauth, University of Potsdam

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The alkaline Nakuru Lake in Kenya is rich in the cyanobacterium Spirulina platensis, the basic food of the Lesser Flamingo. However, due to increasing rainfall in the region in recent years, the bacterium and with it the flamingos are disappearing. Prof. Martin Trauth, University of Potsdam

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Today a saline mudflat, the Chew Bahir Basin in southern Ethiopia once held an extensive paleo-lake during humid phases. Scientific deep drilling from the current playa surface produced a ~620,000-year long sedimentary record providing insights into the intense shifts of eastern Africa’s highly variable hydroclimate. Annett Jungiger, University of Tübingen

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

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CNRS—Since its discovery in the 1960s, the Jebel Sahaba cemetery (Nile Valley, Sudan), 13 millennia old, was considered to be one of the oldest testimonies to prehistoric warfare. However, scientists from the CNRS and the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès1 have re-analyzed the bones preserved in the British Museum (London) and re-evaluated their archaeological context. The results, published in Scientific Reports on May 27, 2021, show that it was not a single armed conflict but rather a succession of violent episodes, probably exacerbated by climate change.

Many individuals buried at Jebel Sahaba bear injuries, half of them caused by projectiles, the points of which were found in the bones or the fill where the body was located. The interpretation as evidence of mass death due to a single armed conflict, however, remained debated until a team of anthropologists, prehistorians and geochemists undertook a new study of the thousands of bones, about a hundred associated lithic pieces and the entire burial complex (now submerged by Lake Aswan) from 2013 to 2019. 

The bones of 61 individuals were re-examined, including microscopic analysis, in order to distinguish traces of injury from damage produced after burial. About a hundred new lesions, both healed and unhealed, were identified, some with previously unrecognized lithic flakes still embedded in the bones. In addition to the 20 individuals already identified, 21 other skeletons have lesions, almost all suggestive of interpersonal violence, such as traces of projectile impact or fractures. In addition, 16 individuals have both healed and unhealed injuries, suggesting repeated episodes of violence over the course of a person’s life rather than a single conflict. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that some skeletons appear to have been disturbed by later burials. Surprisingly, men, women and children seem to have been treated indiscriminately in terms of the number and type of injuries or the projectiles direction.

These new data also reveal that the majority of lesions were produced by composite projectiles, throwing weapons (arrows or spears) composed of several sharp lithic pieces, some of which are laterally embedded. The presence of variously sharpened points, with variations in the orientation of the cutting edge, suggests that the intended purpose was to lacerate and bleed the victim.

These new results reject the hypothesis of a disaster cemetery linked to a single war. Instead, this site indicates a succession of limited raids or ambushes against these hunter-fisher-gatherers, at a time of major climatic variations (end of the last ice age and beginning of the African humid period). The concentration of archaeological sites of different cultures in such a limited area of the Nile Valley at this time suggests that this region must have been a refuge area for human populations subject to these climatic fluctuations. Competition for resources is therefore probably one of the causes of the conflicts witnessed in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery. This analysis, which changes the history of violence in prehistory, invites us to reconsider other sites from the same period.

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Archival photograph illustrating the double grave of individuals JS 20 and JS 21 with pencils indicating the position of associated lithic artifacts. © Wendorf Archive, British Museum.

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Study of human remains from Jebel Sahaba in the Department of Egypt and Sudan, British Museum (London).
Microscopic analysis of bone lesions and anthropological study by Marie-Hélène Dias-Meirinho (left) and Isabelle Crevecoeur (right). © Marie-Hélène Dias-Meirinho

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Projectile impact puncture with an embedded lithic fragment in the posterior surface of the left hip bone of individual JS 21. © Isabelle Crevecoeur/Marie-Hélène Dias-Meirinho

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Article Source: CNRS news release

*New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene based on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Marie‑Hélène Dias‑Meirinho, Antoine Zazzo, Daniel Antoine & François Bon. Scientific Reports, 27 May 2021. DOI : 10.1038/s41598-021-89386-y 

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TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP—Ancient Judeans commonly ate non-kosher fish surrounding the time that such food was prohibited in the Bible, suggests a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Tel Aviv.

This finding sheds new light on the origin of Old Testament dietary laws that are still observed by many Jews today. Among these rules is a ban on eating any species of fish which lacks scales or fins.

The study reports an analysis of ancient fish bones from 30 archaeological sites in Israel and Sinai which date to the more than 2,000-year span from the Late Bronze Age (1550-1130 BCE) until the end of the Byzantine period (640 CE).

The authors say the results call for a rethink of assumptions that long-held traditions were the basis for the food laws outlined in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

“The ban on finless and scaleless fish deviated from longstanding Judean dietary habits”, says Yonatan Adler from Ariel University.

“The Biblical writers appear to have prohibited this food despite the fact that non-kosher fish were often found on the Judean menu. There is little reason to think that an old and widespread dietary taboo lay at the root of this ban”.

The Old Testament was penned at different times, beginning in the centuries before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and into Hellenistic times (332-63 BCE). A set of passages repeated twice forbids the eating of certain species of fish.

The Book of Leviticus states: “Everything in the waters that does not have fins and scales is detestable to you”, and Deuteronomy decrees that ‘…whatever does not have fins and scales you shall not eat; it is unclean for you.’

In both, the references immediately follow a prohibition on ‘unclean’ pig which has received wide scholarly attention. However, the origins and early history of the seafood ban have not been explored in detail until now.

The authors in this study set out to discover when and how the fish prohibition first arose, and if it was predated by an earlier taboo practiced prior to the editing of the Old Testament passages. They also sought to establish the extent to which the rule was obeyed.

Adler’s co-author Omri Lernau from Haifa University analysed thousands of fish remains from dozens of sites in the southern Levant. At many Judean sites dating to the Iron Age (1130-586 BCE), including at the Judean capital city of Jerusalem, bone assemblages included significant proportions of non-kosher fish remains. Another key discovery was evidence of non-kosher fish consumption in Jerusalem during the Persian era (539-332 BCE).

Non-kosher fish bones were mostly absent from Judean settlements dating to the Roman era and later. The authors note that sporadic non-kosher fish remains from this later time may indicate ‘some degree of non-observance among Judeans’.

The authors now intend to analyze more fish from around this timeframe to establish when Judeans began to avoid eating scaleless fish and how strictly the prohibition was kept.

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Jerusalem, ancient and modern. EvgeniT, Pixabay

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Article Source: TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP news release

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COLUMBIA, Mo.—Passports are a tangible way of showing where one has traveled, as the stamps provide a chronological order that traces an individual’s journey across international borders. When an object’s origins are not readily apparent, a variety of sources can be relied upon to learn more, which might include labels, sales receipts, foreign translations, oral histories, GPS coordinates and itemized personal possessions.

That documentation is an example of provenance, or the origins of an object and where it has traveled throughout history. Sarah Buchanan, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri’s College of Education, is an archivist, a professional who assesses, collects and preserves various artifacts and archives them to better understand their origin and cultural heritage.

With a three-year grant, Buchanan is investigating ways to conduct provenance research more efficiently, inclusively and transparently, both on MU’s campus and abroad. In a recently published study, Buchanan collaborated with Sara Mohr, a doctoral student at Brown University who reads and translates Assyrian, to create an online bibliography and corresponding map of ancient tablets located in universities throughout the United States, including six tablets inside MU’s Ellis Library.

The tablets were written in cuneiform, the first writing system ever used by humans. It was first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 3,200 B.C.E in modern-day Iraq. Written on clay tablets, the writing system was used to document things like trade, business and religious activities at ancient temples.

“We identified cuneiform tablets at Brown University that complement the six we have here at Mizzou, and when we look at all of them together, we have a fuller, more compelling story about the societal context of their creation,” Buchanan said. “If we only look at ours, it is like reading a page of a book that is half cut out. Their combination shows how powerful digitizing these artifacts can be, as it allows us to analyze two tablets side by side online that are otherwise thousands of miles apart.”

The importance of provenance extends well beyond cuneiform tablets. Buchanan’s research also includes studying rare books and manuscripts, audio recordings, Native American and indigenous collections, artwork, photos, and videos.

“Provenance shapes the stories that are told about objects and their owners,” Buchanan said. “Artifacts and archives are a form of our history. They shed light on our cultural heritage that roots us as humans in where we have been and where we are going.”

Museums can use provenance to assess the authenticity of collections on display. In Washington, D.C., officials from the Museum of the Bible accepted donated antiquities, including alleged fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls– ancient Jewish manuscripts with significant religious ties to the Hebrew Bible and Judaism– that turned out to be fake.

After suspicions that the fragments were created recently, an investigation by independent researchers, which was funded by the museum itself, confirmed in November 2019 that all of the displayed fragments were modern forgeries.

“Unfortunate situations like this show why provenance research is so important, as there is a real accountability issue when artifacts, photographs or artwork are found to be doctored or forged,” Buchanan said. “This work will help give a wider range of artifacts a clearer provenance so that we can be sure when pieces are exhibited in museums, that they truly are what we say they are and can be attributed back to a specific time and place.”

Provenance can also help play a role in repatriation, or the return of a valued item to its place of origin. In 2018, Bowling Green State University announced that ancient mosaics housed in the university’s Wolfe Center for the Arts purchased in good faith with the belief that they were excavated from ancient Antioch had actually been looted in the 1960s from Zeugma and later sold on the black market.

After years of talks between the university and the Turkish government, the 12 mosaics were returned to Turkey, where they are now on display at the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, the largest mosaic museum in the world.

“As archivists, we are tasked with determining how, where and when these historic objects traveled across land and time,” Buchanan said. “Traditionally, institutions tend to display only items that have clear provenance. As we refine our methods of researching provenance, we will be able to narrate a greater number and variety of previously unstudied artifacts and share them with new audiences.”

Because America’s history is closely intertwined with immigration and the oppression of minority groups, provenance research can help archivists tell more complete stories—the good, the bad and the ugly—surrounding artifacts with murky history.

“Provenance can help us confront our history when it comes to topics like war, colonialism and land acknowledgments,” Buchanan said. “By uncovering a greater number of artifacts, we can properly tell more stories so that more cultures are represented, particularly the cultures of traditionally marginalized groups like Native Americans.”

Through conversations with Native American tribes, Buchanan has learned the power of collaboration and civil discourse in facilitating more inclusive storytelling.

“There is always the potential for repatriation,” Buchanan said. “However, we have also learned that several Native American tribes are open to particular artifacts remaining here at Mizzou’s Museum of Anthropology, where climate controls and procedures are in place to properly care for the artifacts.”

As a professor in the College of Education’s School of Information Science & Learning Technologies, Buchanan teaches graduate students in the archival studies emphasis of MU’s Master of Library and Information Science program.

In 2018, she supervised graduate students in the program as they inventoried and digitized audio recordings with KOPN, a community radio station in Columbia, Missouri. The recordings cover interviews with political figures such as Angela Davis, and social topics such as the feminist movement in the 1970s. The collection of recordings was recently featured by GBH, the NPR radio affiliate in Boston, and the Library of Congress in March for Women’s History Month.

“This grant will help us get tools into the hands of archivists so we can be more responsive to our communities and make our collections meaningful to their work.” Buchanan said.

As technology has advanced, the value of provenance in documenting ownership of rare items has transferred to the digital world online. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have become increasingly popular and raised more than a few eyebrows in mainstream media. They are digital tokens attached to online items such as videos, photos or artwork that document their authenticity and original ownership, a clear way to show that they have not been altered or faked.

“I am passionate about teaching the next generation of archivists,” Buchanan said. “Studying cuneiform in America is just the tip of the iceberg. The more we learn going forward, the better we can tell stories about a wide variety of items’ origin in a clear and compelling way.”

Editor’s note: “A Bibliography of Cuneiform Tablet Editions in United States Colleges and Universities through 2020” was recently published in the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Funding for the study and Buchanan’s Early Career Development grant was provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The cuneiform tablets located in Ellis Library can be viewed and read further here.

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Buchanan’s provenance research includes digitizing ancient clay tablets for public use. University of Missouri

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Article Source: University of Missouri news release

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American Association for the Advancement of Science—First published in 1871, Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” has laid the foundations for human evolutionary studies. In this Review*, Peter Richerson and colleagues show how modern research into human origins and cultural evolution reflect the ideas that first emerged in Darwin’s work 150 years ago. Richerson et al. discuss three key Darwinian insights that have been reinforced by modern science. The first is that we share many characteristics (genetic, developmental, physiological, morphological, cognitive, and psychological) with our closest relatives, the anthropoid apes. The second is that humans have a talent for high-level cooperation reinforced by morality and social norms. The third is that we have greatly expanded the social learning capacity that we see already in other primates.

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Photographic portrait of Charles Darwin. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: AAAS news release

*”Modern theories of human evolution foreshadowed by Darwin’s Descent of Man,” by P.J. Richerson at University of California, Davis in Davis, CA; S. Gavrilets at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN; F.B.M. de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

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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